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Are you talking income or money in the bank? In terms of income, 40k doesn't get all that far even in middle America. 250k is certainly plenty of money for people to live without sacrificing anything (unless they've got 10 kids or something). 1 million is enough to live very well, even in New York City. 5 million is a ridiculous amount.

The point isn't the value, its the lack of consensus on what value it ("rich") is. It's a moving target and one day depending on whose definition gets used, it can and will effect you directly.

You don't really understand how tax brackets work, do you?

I do, but you clearly cannot see the forest for the trees.

Either way, thanks to financial games and tax loopholes, a lot of companies get away with paying very, very low taxes (unfortunately it's usually the biggest ones that pay the lowest rates).

Thanks for the refresher. I have 2 LLCs.

There's no federal sales tax on general goods (there's a gas tax, some excise taxes, and a few other specific taxes) and some states and localities don't have sales taxes.

There are 5 states without sales tax. However, the majority of states do, but its still not all tax-free. For example NH has a %9 prepared food tax. Any which way an individual turns it is likely they are going to contribute to the government in some form or another.

What? No, I mean seriously, this doesn't make sense in context.

Of course it does. In MA, people who have made out of state purchases are required to declare on their state taxes.
Use Tax Due on Out-of-State Purchases Worksheet

The burden of paying the tax is not on the company, but on the individual making the purchase.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of Use Tax?

Corporations pay taxes on profits (in theory, if they're not abusing loopholes). Is that hard to understand? Or are you complaining about them needing to collect sales taxes? I can certainly agree that sales taxes are needlessly complicated.

There's nothing complicated about them. We just do not agree on who should take the burden. If you are an internet retailer without a physical presence in some states, should you be adhering to the whims of the state rules of all 50 (plus the small number of US territories), and violating the Commerce Clause.

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

Why do people keep repeating the "taxes are punishment for doing good!" meme?
Excessive taxation is not good. I am not making any judgment of whether or not being rich is good either. We should all be treated equally under the law and taxation is no exception.

The government is providing services. Those services need to be paid for. Income for the bottom 90% has barely grown in the last 40 years, despite rapidly increasing costs of education and medicine, yet somehow the top 1% has tripled. The top 1% has a third of the net worth in the country. The top 10% has 3/4. The top 1% makes 20% of the income. The next 19% make 40%. The next 80% make the rest.

On one extreme some people wanted limited government. On the other extreme people want a welfare state. Since you want to talk about what has happened in the last 40 years, I'll throw out the key pieces, but include a little bit before as well.

1966 - Dept. of Transportation
1967 - Dept. of Energy
1979 - Dept. of Education
1987 - Veteran Affairs
1990 - EPA
2002 - Homeland Security
and now we are looking for some new organizations being created out of the healthcare bill.

The rate of expansion of these government services is skyrocketing. Government is trying to provide more services than the economy and tax base can susta

My mistake on the meters to feet - conversion error. Going to sea takes thousands of dollars per day (estimate is around $25,000 to $35,000 per day to operate a modern oceanographic research vessel), so we don't have the frequency of repeat measurements for all areas of the world's oceans that we would like. And it takes going to sea in order to get the most accurate measurements because satellites cannot see through the water in order to give us the accuracy that we need (hence we use acoustics at sea). We only have about 5-10% of the global seafloor mapped to the highest resolutions that we'd like so, yes, new "holes" can indeed be found. New discoveries are still being made. We do have standards in terms of how these measurements are made as related to the speed of sound in water according to its salinity and temperature. So we should be able to map the same areas with different devices and get close to the same measurements of depth. For a nice overview of basic principles, you might enjoy http://1.usa.gov/jtUT7v or http://ocean.tamu.edu/Quarterdeck/1998/3/sager-1.html

Wikileaks mocked this Pentagon Press Secretary tweet this morning:

https://twitter.com/#!/PentagonPresSec/status/62531762345091072

Thx to Wikileaks we spent Easter weekend dealing w/NYT & other news orgs publishing leaked classified GTMO docs http://1.usa.gov/fWbGED

So how long before both the RIAA and MPAA be granted as an official agency of the US Federal Gov. How soon after would there be yearly random anti-piracy audits of businesses and peoples homes? Better yet, how soon will we be taxed to subsidize those agencies regardless if you buy their shit or not?

What's another one added to the list? http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/Federal/All_Agencies/index.shtml

Firefighting, Roads, Water: this is all debatable and not at all clear cut as you suggest. The reasons to have those specific things run by the government have all to do with practical considerations and not principles. I agree that in some cases it is desirable to have government run things but only as a last resort, i.e when it is either impossible or hopelessly impractical for private businesses to do so and only when having those services is of crucial importance. If a way can be found to have roads, utilities, firefighters run privately while still providing the same or better level of service, I think it should be done.

Pollution: it is pretty clear that the government does have a role in regulating pollution to some extent, but the devil is in the detail.

Safety: I can't find it online now but there was a great article (I think by Alan Greenspan, back in his libertarian days) about how health and safety regulation can reduce health and safety just as well as it can improve it. In a nutshell, the incentive of businesses to compete on their safety record is reduced and the incentive to barely meet the minimum government standards, which are typically written up by the industry itself - who else has the knowledge and incentive (and lobbying money) to write them - is increased.

In any case, those are all minor issues that don't really affect the debate. Ok, I'll let you have those and the disabled benefits and helping the orphans and having a minimal safety net for the hungry etc and still we are talking about a government that is far less than half the size of the one we have now so I'll be happy with that. But please justify every one of these 100s of government agencies http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/Federal/All_Agencies/index.shtml with their employees on average earning more than the equivalent market rate in the private sector, every one of these 100s of government spending programs http://funding-programs.idilogic.aidpage.com/ , 70% of the federal budget that is taken up by entitlements, the insane amount of intrusion into peoples lives by silly regulation that could fill up a football stadium, the fact that nobody in fact can count many laws we have, never mind have any realistic chance of obeying them all, with several tens of thousands of pages of new laws passed each year etc etc. Libertarians are not anarchists. We have a government that is out of control and we need to rein it in, not eliminate it altogether.

http://go.usa.gov/ It limits the URLs being shortened to just those ending in .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu and thus helps prevent you from getting rick-rolled or worse -unless someone puts the questionable content on the .gov website its self, which in that case they wouldn't need the URL shortening step to hide their intent in the first place. Unfortunately it also only accepts registration from the same .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu domains, so it doesn't do me much good, but it may help someone else out.

Contact your representative. Ask them to clearly and concisely state their stance on ACTA. If it doesn't comply with your views. Vote. That. Fucker. Out. Tell your friends.

Keep doing it. If enough people continually push the douschers out of office, perhaps they will get the message. Send them welcoming letters. Make them feel the recession (thats supposedly over). In reality, businesses swept off all the excess cream and just went with lower quality, cheaper wages, and cut benefits, and offshoring and now they're profiting again! Yay! No more recession!

Or we can do nothing. Be apathetic, and let our rights continually be trampled on by these asshats. Can we bring some semblence of intellectual curiosity and creative initiative back to America, or piss it away?

If you at least vote, you have some say in the complaining process. And if you have never voted, perhaps now is the time to start. I know I will.

Sorry, I didn't realize who I was arguing with, otherwise I would never have started. But ok, let me reply even though your post doesn't deserve it.

Yes. The Teabaggers out in the streets and on TV will never pay any taxes if they can avoid them.

Can you provide some evidence for that? If there is a policy behind the Tea Party movement, it is described in the Contract linked in my signature. The 10 points were voted on by over 1/2 million Tea Party members and supporters. Where does it says that we should have no government, no regulation or no taxes? The point of the Tea Party movement is that our government is now bloated out of all proportion and that it should be cut back to the duties that the constitution intended it to perform. So, yes we should have laws, we should have law enforcement and we should have military and those should be paid for by taxes. We should not NOT have vast and expensive entitlement and welfare programs which make up more than 70% of the budget. We should NOT have 100s of government agencies and their spending programs most of which are nothing but a waste of time and our money on an enormous scale.

By the way, just for future reference, name calling does absolutely nothing to further your arguments. It only makes you appear childish. Arguing is about trying to convince the other person in the validity of your position, not about trying to win a contest of who can offend the other person more.

Lets just form a congressional sub-committee to look at the problem to eventually raise taxes, legislate new regulations.

We can have Obama put one of his cronies in as "eWaste Czar", and make some sort of teleprompter speech about how he's personally saving the world.

I'd say put the EPA in charge, but I'm sure some other agencies will get its panties in a wad and want to get a piece of the action.

Because that is the real solution isn't it?

... However the USPS is not a govt agency, govt funded maybe but not direct govt.

Interesting that on USA.gov where they list all the government agencies they list the postal service. http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/Federal/All_Agencies/P.shtml

Also my two BIL's that work for the post office are in the government retirement plan and don't get social security.

so since the world can access http://usa.gov/ that means the US is in charge of the world.

It's sarcasm I know the reason the us is in charge of the world is due to superior military presence, and a desire to kick ya'lls ass.

I hope you are being sarcastic in your praise of the government. Yes of course they should fight to get more out of our tax dollars but we are talking about a few million here, when the federal government

- loses $25 billion (Yep, lost as in nobody knows what happened to it. Yep, $25 billion)- google "Unreconciled Transactions Affecting the Change in Net Position" section in the Treasury Dept financial report
- wastes $60 billion annually on Medicare fraud. Just wait until Obamacare kicks in.
- spends at least $90 billion on programs that are "ineffective, marginally adequate, or operating under a flawed purpose" (partial audit by the white house)

..etc etc this is just the first 3 examples I found on google with easily linkable references. Here's some more.

Even assuming that ALL of the hundreds of government agencies and spending programs are necessary, there are 100s of billions wasted annually just through inefficiency and carelessness with which those programs are managed.

A lot of the reason people don't care is because they don't think they can do anything about it. The GP is too cynical to think that any effort will make a difference; it's only one step further to not bothering to care.

But you can do something. You can call your representatives and pressure them to oppose this legislation. In the same way that voters say to the apathetic, "You cannot complain if you didn't vote," the active public can say, "You cannot complain if you did not express your opinion to the people charged with representing you." It is very easy to get their contact information, and a matter of under fifteen minutes to call both senators and your congressman.

Do that first and you can complain. Convince other people to do the same and you can get enough influence to make your representatives pay attention to your collective viewpoint. This is how the system is supposed to work. There is much talk of the failure of the public, but there is too little effort currently being put into making things right. You all talk about how stupid people are but naturally you are thinking of people in general and not yourself or most of your friends. So why aren't you making yourselves heard and spreading the word?

It seems there are multiple circumstances where the photos may be protectable:

Caveats

        * Other persons may have rights either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
        * Not all work that appears on US Government Websites is considered to be a US Government work. Check with the content curator to see whether the work is a US Government Work. Works prepared for the United States Government by independent contractors may be protected by copyright, which may be owned by the independent contractor or by the United States Government.
        * The United States Government Work designation is distinct from designations that apply to works of US state and local governments. Works of state and local governments may be protected by copyright.
        * Copyright laws differ internationally. While a United States Government work is not protectable under United States copyright laws, the work may be protected under the copyright laws of other jurisdictions when used in other jurisdictions. Outside of the United States, the United States Government may assert copyright in United States Government works.

(from: http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml)

I wonder if any of those caveats apply here.

Note that plenty of OTHER PEOPLE have made a big deal about it, but surely you don't claim that Obama should have denied their free speech, do you?

Of course not. There are very limited reasons where the government can curtail the speech of citizens and that certainly wouldn't qualify

There seems to be a lot of assumption that Obama wants to clamp down on people / companies using these images to prevent using them to make it appear that Obama has endorsed something. Firstly, that does not really fall under copyright laws, that would fall under fraud. Secondly, some time spent searching the net yields no clear cases of this having happened, except for the one mentioned in the summary. For those of you that suggest this is the reason, please provide sources. I do not believe that this is a rampant problem.

Also, as someone else has stated the Whitehouse has three conflicting messages on the use of photos

1. Creative Commons: http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright
2. Statement on Flickr photo stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/4331402906/
3. USA.gov copyright policy: http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml

Numbers 1 and 2 would seem to be in conflict with number 3, which I believe is the proper way.

you can sift through this in regards to US privacy laws

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Laws.shtml

I don't want to lol

Hey all,

Just remember, saying you're all for it on an internet forum doesn't actually do anything... Write your elected officials in support of S.1714, the "Open College Textbook Act of 2009". Here are some links, just in case you're THAT lazy....

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
http://takeaction.lwv.org/lwv/dbq/officials/

Remember to get the senate AND the house.

-T

I have no idea whether the US regulations are available online...

1: go to http://www.usa.gov/
2: type in "US Code"
3: Hey, look, the HOUSE has the US Code online! http://uscode.house.gov/

Most states have a similar index. And THESE are what are the actual laws, not the bills passed to amend them.

If this upsets you, then stop just whining on slashdot. No one here can do a damn thing about it.

Go to http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml and contact everyone who represents you and get something done.

There is NO BETTER TIME THAN NOW to get changes to the way medicine is monetized in America.

I would LOVE to buy those cars here in the US. Thing is, they're not available here. My plan is to wait until they are, so if Toyota wants to sell me a car, they better offer a diesel one.

Go here:

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

or here:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/officials/

Write up a letter, and send it to your:

*-> President
*-> 2 Senators
*-> 1 Representative in Congress ("House")
*-> Governor
*-> 1-3 State Legislators

Tell them that you want a diesel car, and that they should be legal to sell in all 50 states.

Toyota is NOT ignoring the market. The market is just too expensive, confusing, and arbitrary for them to bother with just yet.

This is only a minor accomplishment! Time Warner is still metering customers in Beaumont, and AT&T is still metering customers in Beaumont and Reno.

Continue to take aggressive action by contacting your elected officials immediately.

a) Raise their prices considerably on all their "unlimited" plans--sucks for the light users, who are basically subsidizing the heavy users who want to stream HD video and movies

b) Covertly start throttling back heavy users--sucks for everyone, since no one even knows how much they're being throttled and there is no option of paying a premium to escape it

c) Set download caps--sucks compared to the "free ride" heavy users are getting now, but at least it's out in the open with no throttling bullshit (and light users don't get penalized).

d) Everything stays priced the same as now, without throttling or download caps

Want to see what the future will be like with the proposed capping system? Step right up folks, and take a look at Australia's largest ISP. You get to pick from unbeatable offers such as US$28.85 for 200MB, and US$93.86/month for 60GB! Want more than 60GB? No problem. For the low cost of just US$110.94 per additional gigabyte, you can download to your heart's content! Oh, what was that? You want to watch online video? Don't worry. As part of this attractive offer, you will also have exclusive unmetered access to our partner network of music, movies, sports, games, and more! Getting excited yet? Seriously though fellas, those were not typos and this is not a joke.

Out of every Slashdot article I have seen in the past year, no single controversy has posed anywhere near this of a threat to rights online or free and open source software; and we've got an almost inconceivable "+5, Insightful" first post that effectively sympathizes with the offenders. At least take a moment to research before rushing to Time Warner's defense. Believe you me, if they are given an inch on this one, they (and all U.S. ISPs) will take a mile.

"Why does this really matter? ISPs in other countries are doing it, and businesses should be allowed to maximize their profit," you might say. Well, for starters, internet access has become a vital lifeline that is second-to-none. It has superseded all other forms of communication and media. Restrictive bandwidth policies do nothing more than perpetuate the digital divide by putting financial strain on the people who are already on the brink. This means that when Johnny's parents have home (telephone, or) cable service with a major U.S. company that offers package deals, they will likely opt to conservatively use one of the most inexpensive service plans. At this point, experimenting with things as simple as Ubuntu and Folding@Home become impractical or impossible for Johnny, unless he really wants to go out on a limb by asking for permission.

As of 2008, 5 ISPs control 56% of the U.S. market share. This means that half of the country will be coerced into using the unmetered media networks offered by their provider. What happened to the vision of net neutrality?

Here's the bottom line: if Japan and South Korea can figure out a way to provide blazing speeds at a low cost, then so can the United States.

P.S. For those opposed to the proposals, please contact your elected officials, or request that it be done on your behalf.

It directly reflects how the government works, what else would you expect?

A decade behind the population, complicated as hell, and you are worse off for interacting with it. If anyone asks you: "how does the government work?" simply point them to that site.

Same with:
http://www.usa.gov/
http://canada.gc.ca/

Huh...

Usually in posts like this someone puts up a link to write your elected representatives. I haven't seen one yet (although I might have missed it). Just in case....

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Bitch about it, it's the American Way. :D

-Tony

Disclaimer: This is slightly offtopic

Nice to see a change in the way they're developing web pages pages (at least at a cursory glance). View source of www.usa.gov vs change.gov. Looks like he's at least getting some decent web developers behind him...I guess that's a good start.

Although this bill is popular among both Republicans and Democrats, it is not a done deal. If you are concerned about this, please contact your Senator and Congressperson.

Let us not forget about a bigger bully invading a sovereign nation and murdering tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

I could not agree more. However, when we let elected officals pander to these conglomerates it only gets worse... If you don't like it, write a letter to your state's Senators, Representatives, and most importantly... VOTE.

We would just bomb them