Slashdot Mirror

You don't see Boeing announcing the manufacture of the new 787 in Maine or Georgia

.

No, you don't, because they already announced that they will be running a second production line in South Carolina.

You are just going to create a pursuer/evader problem with this brain-dead "tax the rich" panacea.

What makes someone rich? Pick a number. During the last US election cycle the number of what constitutes rich varied in values (the ones that came to mind were 40k, 250k, 1mil and 5mil). Anyone who is near or at the limit of being thrown into a higher tax bracket because of an idea like yours is going to do the most natural response: Keep themselves just shy of that limit. The reason "tax the rich" doesn't work is because it creates incentives for people becoming underachievers.

Around 2005 Amazon was on a hiring blitz trying to hire people. They are also doing it again with another 1900 jobs.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2014412815_amazon06.html

What matters to most people is that there are jobs available and they don't suck. Should we give tax breaks to people who create jobs (especially 6 figure salaries), tax revenue and wealth? I think so.

1) They pay annual business taxes.
2) They pay their employees who have taxes taken out of their salaries.
3) The employees pay taxes on the products they buy.

If your state wants taxes, and you are a lawful taxpayer, you declare it on your annual return. Why should a private company shoulder the work for the state to act as their tax collector aside to their roll as a tax contributor?

How much do you want to punish them? How badly do you want to bring them down to your level?

I feel strongly that your philosophy and those who agree with you wrongly demonizes the rich (maybe out of spite, or jealousy) and attempts to mete out vigilante justice through taxation.

FYI, this is not a conspiracy theory unless you've been hiding under a rock.

Several states are testing plans to tax mileage as more people move to green or high mileage vehicles. They have become dependent on gas tax like they did on tobacco tax. When people change their habits, suddenly the government finds itself cash strapped.

And of course this isn't going to replace the gas tax...

Protected? What about the poor guy that was "lying on his family-room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises" because his neighbor was sending kiddie porn and using his open WiFi to do it.

http://o.seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2014867387_wifi25.html

The EFF doesn't know what it's talking about here.

Here's a thought: AT&T should upgrade their network.

Jebus, does nobody around here actually research anything before they post on it?

It turns out that AT&T has spent and is spending many billions of dollars on spectrum and equipment and backhaul for upgrading their network. So is Verizon. So is Sprint.

All the big cellular carriers in the US spend tens of billions of dollars every year on their network. I know everybody on Slashdot prefers to imagine them as Uncle Scrooge McDuck on his money lake or something, and but for whatever reason you choose to hate them (there are many) lack of network upgrade investments is not one.

I've often wondered why the TSA's "Behavioral Detection" crap can't detect thieves like Brown, Burton, Simmons, Defelis, Noukeo, Burley, German, Persad, Webb, Pepper, and Arato, or actual sex offenders like Sean Shanahan and Charles Henry Bennett, or complete suicidal whackjobs like Diego Gonzales who was an actual TSA BDO. Shouldn't his fellow BDOs have noticed... I don't know... something wrong?

Do any of these "Do Not Track" buttons in browsers actually do anything useful, like disable third-party cookies

If I understand correctly, the only one that does the feature right is IE (see also here). IE allows blacklisting of tracker sites; the lists can be built and distributed by external groups, like consumer organizations. To access the sites in the list, you have to type its address in the address box explicitly, otherwise IE9 will just not go to any of the tracking sites at all. All other browsers still follow links to tracking sites, but ask them nicely to please please not track them. With IE9 the trackers don't even get the opportunity to dump cookies on your machine or log your IP address.

You have a unique negative outlook on this. OK, maybe not so unique.

See here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014751898_shuttledecision13m.html

The trainer/simulator is one of a kind. People will be allowed to walk through it. The real Shuttles will be on view, but not allowed to be touched. I'll grant that people want to see the real thing, which is why the Museum of Flight wanted one. They didn't get one, but that's no reason to be negative or unhappy about what they DID get.

The border patrol can't come into your house without a warrant just because you're within 100 miles of the Mexican border.

These things happen incrementally, not all at once. Right now, people who have not actually crossed a border are being accosted by Border Patrol agents. Similarly, one US citizen who had already passed the standard inspection at the Mexican border was stopped and searched against his will at a second, ad-hoc checkpoint further inland, apparently without even the slightest pretense of probable cause.

These incidents are happening because people like you aren't watching, or just don't give a shit. If and when it gets to the point where they do come into your house within the 100-mile border zone without a warrant, it will be because they thought they could get away with it because no one lifted a finger to stop them before. That may be OK for you, but please don't project your ignorance of history and indifference to the present on the rest of us.

Those parts are increasingly coming from China. Wake up!

If the summary is correct then no, this only comes into play if an overseas company has violated copyright. Actually it isn't correct, but you have to bounce on to Seattle Times to find out that it doesn't just affect overseas companies.

The success of the Egyptian uprising was not guaranteed until the military eventually sided with the protesters.

This is like arguing that because the Myanmar army was able to squash peaceful protests that obviously a majority is supporting the junta.

An absurd stance.

The end of Zune is not problem here - glad I stuck with my "Play For Sure" music player ... oh wait.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2004074417_playsforsure15.html

This does happen in the case of tangible assets such as oil, so I guess the fact we don't do the same for intellectual property is a tacit admission of some distinction between them vs other types of property.

I see it more as a tacit admission that we don't want to fuck with China. Given that they could basically tank our economy simply by refusing to buy our bonds, we probably don't want to do anything too aggressive towards them right now. Granted, we could do what you suggested to other countries and leave China alone, but then China would start lookin' at us all shifty-eyed, fearing that they would be next...

The absurdity of claiming $2.3B in any copyright suit aside...

It would be hilarious if we reneged on our foreign debts by using RIAA math to value the IP "stolen" from the US in the trillions, and seize foreign capital as "compensation."

This does happen in the case of tangible assets such as oil, so I guess the fact we don't do the same for intellectual property is a tacit admission of some distinction between them vs other types of property.

Hilarious? If China didn't hold the upper hand so completely perhaps. Currently though, all China has to do is put all it's US gov bonds on the market at once to plunge the USA into a depression like it's never seen before. It won't do that however as long as the US is buying Chinese products - protecting China's export economy. That's the only reason China has kept the US going.

With the power that China currently has over the US though, it was nice of them to even send a letter. I don't think that the USA is in any position to be threatening anything.

It would be hilarious if we reneged on our foreign debts by using RIAA math to value the IP "stolen" from the US in the trillions, and seize foreign capital as "compensation."

This does happen in the case of tangible assets such as oil, so I guess the fact we don't do the same for intellectual property is a tacit admission of some distinction between them vs other types of property.

Did they just wait around for Murdoch's The Daily experiment for this? Is this just round two of wait-for-third-parties-to-develop-apps-and-then-hold-them-ransom like with eBooks? What's next?

If I were a mobile app developer I'd be asking myself right now if it's a smart idea to try to plan a viable business plan around iOS right now. Any good will you build by bringing people to iOS with your app is totally overlooked by Apple while any customers "they bring" to you runs a hefty 30% Apple tax.

I think it's highway robbery but I'm okay with it because I didn't buy into that bullshit. I bought into Android and instead of lording my decision over everybody I'm just going to remind everyone that the long run has been predicted by many industries. Apple and Blackberry will remain as niche players but it's going to be an Android future. So go ahead and hold publisher's -- who already hemorrhage cash -- feet to the fire. It's just going to hasten your fall.

Apple sits atop a crumbling marketshare (Schmidt claims 300,000 activations a day) and their response is to turn the screws on the third parties that set them apart from the competition? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me ...

Actually the penalty for that is less than a beating.

It is charged as interfering with a flight crew and does not carry much of a penalty.

Catching the culprits is difficult, unless someone happens to see who did it, its just not likely to happen. By the time you mobilize resources they just put it in their pocket and walk away.

Perhaps if you could give us a list of all that "violence coming from the left" in the US that is somehow being cleverly concealed by all the media of the world (must be some kind of a leftist conspiracy involving all those pinko-commie corporate CEOs!) it would help your points to attain some modicum of credibility. Unless your post was meant to be some very subtle satire, that is.

• It was not the fear of conservative violence that caused Ann Coulter's speech to be cancelled this week.
• It was a liberal who bit the finger off a man who disagreed with him on healthcare.
• It was Obama-loving Amy Bishop who took a gun to work and murdered co-workers.
• Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building after writing an anti-conservative manifesto.
• It was liberals who destroyed AM radio towers outside of Seattle.
• It's liberals who burn down Hummer dealerships.
• It was progressive SEIU union thugs who beat a black conservative man who spoke his mind.
• It's doubtful that a conservative fired shots into a GOP campaign headquarters.
• In fact, Democrats have no monopoly on having their offices vandalized.
• Don't forget it was Obama's friend Bill Ayers who used terrorism as a tool for political change. SDS is still radical, with arrests in 2007 and the storming of the CATO Institute in July 2008.
• It was a liberal who was sentenced to two years for bringing bombs and riot shields to the Republican National Convention in 2008.
• It was a liberal who threatened to kill a government informant who infiltrated her Austin-based group that planned to bomb the RNC.
• It was liberals who assaulted police in Berkeley.
• It was liberals who intimidated and threw rocks through the windows of researchers.
• The two Black Panthers who stood outside polls intimidating people with nightsticks were probably not right-wingers.
• Every time the G20 gets together, it's not conservatives who destroy property and cause chaos.

I could literally go on and on, but let's try to have some perspective here. Violence is a product of the fringe, on either side, and it's sickening to try to use it for political advantage. Those who commit violence in the name of politics deserve political change no more than they deserve leniency in sentencing. Violence furthers no cause. The only call to action that violence has ever moti

What you're talking about is domestic violence and yes it is a very big deal. It's up to you to decide where exactly the line is that you're not willing to cross, but that is domestic violence and you don't have to tolerate it.

Women get a free pass to engage in that sort of behavior in the US, in fact just yesterday there was an article on it in our local paper.Male victims get lost in domestic-abuse data

I think it's time we had a rating agency for search engines. Something like what Moody's does (or at least is supposed to do) ...

Yeah, like that's worked out really well.

uh, hate to break it to ya, but ballmer selling 87 million in shares is not necessarily a good sign for the company given current losses.

My point in including the final link is that destruction of video evidence critical to a major incident investigation DOES happen and as long as we are all learning lessons here from a failure mode report, that's a very timely and important one to add. Concern about "gee, it would be too tough to see on TV and against America's best interest" is totally misplaced IMHO. The guy that took the Ft. Hood video stood up and fought back with the only weapon he had, a cellphone that could record the truth about what really happened for whoever eventually would be assigned to sort through that mess. He volunteered in an instant to become a combat reporter and that makes him a hero, period. Being ordered to destroy evidence of a criminal act was not a lawful order and should have been respectfully refused and the dispuute carried up through the chain of command. Allowing evidence of military criminal actions to be supressed from the oversight of the civilian public is not a good idea.

The point of the final link is that destruction of video evidence critical to an mahor incident investigation DOES happen and as long as we are all learning lessons here from a failure mode report, that's a very timely and important one to add. Concern about "gee, it would be too tough to see on TV and against America's best interest" is totally misplaced IMHO. The guy that took the Ft. Hood video stood up and fought back with the only weapon he had, a cellphone that could record the truth about what really happened for whoever eventually would be assigned to sort through that mess. He volunteered in an instant to become a combat reporter and that makes him a hero, period. Being ordered to destroy evidence of a criminal act was not a lawful order and should have been respectfully refused and the dispuute carried up through the chain of command. Allowing evidence of military criminal actions to be supressed from the oversight of the civilian public is not a good idea.

You are conflating the stimulus bill with TARP. Last I read, somewhat over half of the stimulus has been spent. Recovery.gov (the official tracking site for the stimulus) says 91% has been made available. So you can go with my vague recollection of something I read "a while back", or go with the Fed's 91%. None of the money has been or is ever intended to be returned.

The TARP money as well as the GM/Chrysler bailout money was intended to be at least partially recoverable. According to these guys the TARP is winding down and will end up netting a loss of $100 billion. If you believe the completely unbiased and disinterested reporting here the net of all of the bailouts and TARP will eventually be a $30 billion loss for taxpayers. (of course that estimate excludes the $30 billion confiscated from GM's creditors and the loss of all shareholder equity and any other externalized costs).

Well, some people prefer that their food be raised as humanely as possible. I realize some people couldn't care less, but some people actually do give two shits about things besides themselves.

p.s. I eat meat and am not a member of PETA

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2012772042_costco01.html

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_697505.html

Other oil? Not so sure. Russians have always been operating a policy of "use 1, save 1". They have a considerable state reserve, so does USA in Alaska.

Estimates say there are 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska. The US consumes about 20 million barrels per day. So all the oil up there will only be good for about 500 days or one and a half year. The point is that the oil will run out whether the Alaskan oil fields are exploited or not. Delaying the inevitable with, at best, 1.5 years is hardly worth the effort.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012705610_zeppelin24m.html

The zeppelin is now in view, and you can ride in it.

Maybe he just realized how much he has given away.

As I said, no legal obstacle. Really. I live in Oregon. Mostly public nudity here is used as an attention driver for some sort of political demonstration. No cop problems. Not even any public outrage problems. There are some odd circumstances where people feel obliged to criminalize public nudity in particular locations in particular cities, but really, we just do not seem to be inclined to get around to making a big thing out of this.

It happens that if you are severely depressed, for some reason, an identifying symptom is standing in your window and exposing yourself to little kids. I have read of it happening in this state and people do not like it, but it is not like it is illegal.

Hmm, I used to live in a small town in Washington. Some nude drunk was wandering up and down the middle of main street in the middle of the night. The local cops wanted to arrest him but could not. Nudity was not illegal and there was no motor vehicle involved.

I have not noticed any big collapses of the local social fabric.

A cite is sometime useful: try this

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009294723_webnudeman03m.html

Kind of an overview

Sony hasn't sued anyone because they made a controller for their console with out their explicit permission. Unlike another console maker we all know.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20020819&slug=duicanada19e

Maybe if we jumped through all the hoops, but we know when we're not welcome.

Next they'll be complaining that the stages in strip clubs should be handicapped accessible... Oh, wait.

I looked at the three websites linked above, and they didn't really seem that bad to me. The author of the blog doesn't say if he can read Japanese or not, and it should not be assumed that he can for the fact that he wrote the blog entry in the first place. I think that probably makes a difference. Just looking at the language itself makes it seem more complicated than it might be.

Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun or it's English page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper websites I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.

You're exaggerating. As far as I know not a single shot has been fired anywhere on earth because of a picture. There was even a draw-prophet-Mohammed-day a while ago to show those fools that us Western people like to sometimes insult others... so loads of pictures were drawn and posted online and not one bomb went off anywhere.

excuse me... but a madman armed with an axe and knife breaking into your house intent on killing you for having drawn a cartoon is not something to ignore... see here

At least the shrimp have an easier time of committing suicide, because the ocean sound near Seattle is turning acidic ...

Mind you, most of the crustaceans here are clams, but we do have giant sea creatures.

at $68,000,000 a day in tax revenue I don't think they have much to worry about when it comes to cost of oil.

Tthat's approximately 9M barrels a day * 42 gallons in a barrel * $.18 a gallon gas tax.

Here are some links (provided to you via Arts and Letters Daily):

The Associated Press
Sci Am
Discover
James Randy
Roger Kimball

The Man's last essay. It's titeled Oprah Winfrey: Bright (but Gullible) Billionaire.

no actual movement to decriminalize drugs

Just as you said, "You lack of exposure does not constitute a lack of interest." From the "American Journal of Economics and Sociology", Legalize Drugs Now!. Let's see how many others there are...

1. LEAP - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition - Cops Say Legalize Drugs
2. What if we legalized all drugs?
3. Tom Tancredo Says: Legalize Drugs!
4. Commentary: Legalize drugs to stop violence
5. Legalize drugs -- all of them
6. Is Now The Time To Legalize Drugs?
7. Why we should legalize drugs

Those are just the first page of results of legalize drugs. There are about another 245,000 results.

The people want it. That you don't talk to the types of people voting for such things doesn't change the fact they do.

Many of the people don't want it. That you don't talk to the types of people voting for such things doesn't change the fact they don't. And as a matter of fact I have talked to some who want to keep drugs illegal, my sister is one. I've also talked with people who want to bring back Prohibition, they say it will work this tyme. But everyone I know I know where their position is who lives in the real world and not a fantasy want at least some drugs legal. About the only drugs some don't want legal are so called hard drugs like opiates. They don't always know the facts though, for instance it's said an addiction to opiates is nearly if not impossible to break, however as the Rat Park experiment showed given the right environment even those addictions can be broken.

Fight against him? They encouraged him.

Liked J Edgar Hoover? That's a big laugh. Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, didn't like him. The only reason he kept his position as director of the FBI is because of his extensive collection of private files. They were all afraid he'd blackmail them. As for most people, they didn't know about him or about the files he collected on public figures.

Falcon

Just as sure as you make your home more efficient and use less electricity, they will raise the rates to protect the revenue stream. We already see that with gas. More fuel efficient vehicles use less gas, which means less gas tax which means less money for roads, which means a different tax to make up for it.

And before some numb nuts asks for a Citation

I have a Master's degree in computer science; my master's thesis was on the modeling of seawater.

Another example of the modified salem hypothesis.

But beyond that, I actually do my own research, and know how to eliminate crackpot theories better than Al Gore, who uncritically reported several false stories in an Inconvenient Truth.

Let me guess, the crackpot theories you've eliminated happen to be the ones that my previous comment showed are accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists who actually study these topics for a living?

Note that my article starts with the sentence "... this explains why some people who watch a documentary that exaggerates the science end up imitating that smug politician's alarmism."

Later in the article, during my conversation with Jane Q. Public: "... the thought of that smug, pompous politician accepting a Nobel prize for exaggerating the science makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon just to get the image out of my head.

So I've already listed several points that Al Gore got wrong in his silly little movie. I'm also amused by nonscientists who think Al Gore is relevant. He's not a scientist. He's a smug, pompous, washed up politician. If you seriously want to learn about the science behind abrupt climate change, stick to peer-reviewed journal articles and stay away from politicians like Al Gore.

You don't see much nuclear power in Japan, in large part due to stories like these:

(July 2007)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003793900_quake18.html
(September 1999)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/461446.stm
(July 1999)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/393216.stm

Probably not the best idea to rely on nuclear power in a very active seismic area.

All right, I see tasering, beating, and kicking, but where's the execution? And by execution, I mean on-the-spot, declared-guilty-under-law-and-shot-in-the-head kind, not the "the cop got acquitted in court after a year by a jury of civilians" kind.

Ok--here's an example from the first page of that site: A man operating a motor vehicle is tased while the vehicle is in gear, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. The police naturally go into "OMFG HE'S TRYING TO KILL US" mode and shoot him 7 times in the back...

Story

That's murder.

They are starting a huge (500-acre) development near SeaTac... and they haven't been idle all these years: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011460764_segale28.html

That's the problem, I'm not from a major European country. I'm Norwegian. Norway took the correct measures to stave off any negative effects (according to the OECD). Jobs, banks and housing markets remained stable. We have 2.6% unemployment.

While there might be more to the story than simply having regulated our banking industry we did very well during this recession. It doesn't hurt that we're the world's 3rd largest exporter of oil, or that we have no national debt, and put our oil revenue in a huge sovereign fund invested abroad. We base our welfare state on taxes, not on oil revenue.

Part of the reason our banks were already regulated was the fact that during the 1980s Norway had its own bank crisis and housing market crash. The government had to take control of the collapsed banks and rebuild them. Since then our banks have been strictly regulated and the housing market stable.

The UK was badly hit by the recession obviously, but Germany has been out of recession for a long time now. Germany is the major nation in Europe. I believe France technically came out of recession too. Spain, Portugal and Greece are not large countries. I doubt you can find a European country that experienced the recession on the scale of the US.

I can provide a source too if you like: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009217763_norway14.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011643386_apeuvolcanojetsdamaged.html

They're NOT pulling people aside because they're nonwhite. This has never been done.

It's been done. It seems like you've never talked to a non-white about what it's like to fly in the US. citation more etc etc

If you let white wheel-chaired grannies through without screening, where do you think terrorist will hides stuff? And don't tell me you trust all white wheel-chaired grannies, please.

Movie review

Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum, flying in the crashed enemy saucer, which is piloted by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, gets inside the mother ship and uses his laptop computer to put a virus into the aliens' main computer system. He can do this because the aliens, like every other life form in the galaxy, have basically no choice but to use the "Windows 95" operating system; in fact the whole reason why they have attacked the Earth is to destroy Bill Gates.

Or, they could be honest and raise the money though an old-fashioned income tax, or sales tax.

Washington state doesn't have a state income tax. As a side-effect of this, every other thing you can imagine is taxed as highly as the state government thinks they can manage. (Except car licensing... that used to be hundreds of dollars per year, but an initiative slashed that to a flat $30 per year. But that was years ago... I just re-licensed a car and paid about $120 so I guess it is ratcheting back up to where it was.)

In Washington, a state income tax is very nearly a "political third rail" issue. You can't get elected governor here without piously promising that an income tax would be your absolute last emergency resort. Our current governor and the one before here both started talking about a state income tax shortly after being elected, though.

This month, our state legislature seriously debated a proposal to enact a state income tax, only on "the rich", and with a sales-tax reduction as a bribe to make the rest of the voters happy. This was not a popular idea; I think most people view this as the camel's nose entering the tent. (Certainly that's how I view it... once we have the income tax, every year the definition of who is "rich" will be revised downward.) That idea is dead for now.

As for sales tax:

The sales tax is already 9.5% in the Seattle area; of that, 6.5% goes to the state. (Numbers from here.) I suspect that nobody quite dares yet to hit the threshold of 10% sales tax or higher. Double digits? That might get some headlines.

But surprise surprise, the state legislature is seriously debating a proposal to add 0.2% to the state sales tax rate, at least temporarily. This would bring sales tax new me to 9.7%.

But I'm sure they'd rather hide the tax burden from the people who are ultimately paying it. Gotta love the government.

They'd certainly rather find creative ways to hike taxes than ever to cut spending. It's a down economy, everyone is hurting, tax revenues have fallen, but they can't possibly cut spending. I wonder how long this can last.

steveha

Or, they could be honest and raise the money though an old-fashioned income tax, or sales tax.

Washington state doesn't have a state income tax. As a side-effect of this, every other thing you can imagine is taxed as highly as the state government thinks they can manage. (Except car licensing... that used to be hundreds of dollars per year, but an initiative slashed that to a flat $30 per year. But that was years ago... I just re-licensed a car and paid about $120 so I guess it is ratcheting back up to where it was.)

In Washington, a state income tax is very nearly a "political third rail" issue. You can't get elected governor here without piously promising that an income tax would be your absolute last emergency resort. Our current governor and the one before here both started talking about a state income tax shortly after being elected, though.

This month, our state legislature seriously debated a proposal to enact a state income tax, only on "the rich", and with a sales-tax reduction as a bribe to make the rest of the voters happy. This was not a popular idea; I think most people view this as the camel's nose entering the tent. (Certainly that's how I view it... once we have the income tax, every year the definition of who is "rich" will be revised downward.) That idea is dead for now.

As for sales tax:

The sales tax is already 9.5% in the Seattle area; of that, 6.5% goes to the state. (Numbers from here.) I suspect that nobody quite dares yet to hit the threshold of 10% sales tax or higher. Double digits? That might get some headlines.

But surprise surprise, the state legislature is seriously debating a proposal to add 0.2% to the state sales tax rate, at least temporarily. This would bring sales tax new me to 9.7%.

But I'm sure they'd rather hide the tax burden from the people who are ultimately paying it. Gotta love the government.

They'd certainly rather find creative ways to hike taxes than ever to cut spending. It's a down economy, everyone is hurting, tax revenues have fallen, but they can't possibly cut spending. I wonder how long this can last.

steveha