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'Gates for President' Group Gives Up
netbuzz writes "Dilbert creator Scott Adams had done his best to make this fantasy (or nightmare, depending on your point of view) a viable notion, but after three months of trying the group's leader has acknowledged that it's unlikely Gates will give up his current gig. They've tossed in the towel." Here is our original coverage of this ill-conceived plan.
According to wikipedia, the President's salary traditionally serves as the cap for all government employees, and is currently near half a million dollars. That said, most everyone who runs for President is already independently wealthy, so I don't think pay is a major concern.
A more appropriate question -- given who we are talking about -- would perhaps be, "isn't it a power cut?"
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Spot on. The country would be in much better shape if we had more business people in politics and less politicians who are, by and large, mostly lawyers and career politicians. I'm not saying Gates is the right man for the job, but I do think we need more people with real business acumen in politics (not Neo-Cons with Ivy-league MBA's) before anything is really going to change.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Seriously, a consumption task is a pretty horrible idea.
This was brought up a couple days ago, so I'll copy and paste from my previous post on this subject:
Forgoing the income tax for a sales tax is a pretty bad idea.
First, the income tax is progressive. This would be impossible to achieve with sales tax. The only people that would benefit from a "flat" tax (sales or income) are those at the highest tax brackets. In order to replace the income lost from dropping taxes on the top 5%, taxes would have to be raised on the bottom 50%.
Second, a sales tax puts a disproportionate burden on the lowest income families. Those with low incomes--even up to $50k/yr for a single man--spend a very large proportion of their income. The lower your income, the higher percentage of it is spent. People making minimum wage are spending 100% of their pay checks.
Those making $1MM a year, on the other hand, may spend only a small fraction of their income.
And you can say that you would simply not charge sales tax on the things that poor people are spending their money on -- food, shelter and utilities -- but doing so would drastically reduce tax receipts. It would be impossible to exempt those things and the suggestion that it is possible is just used by proponents to try to sell their plan.
Furthermore, this is about Google. Corporations pay a pitifully small percentage of taxes in America. The percentage of taxes paid by corporations has dropped dramatically since the 1950's. Your notion that double taxation is a serious problem is just plain wrong. The tax code currently incentivizes businesses to invest in capital expenditures, R&D, etc.
In summary, the only people that want a sales tax are those that don't understand it's implications and those that could pay less taxes by shifting the tax burden more on the lower & middle classes.
The notion that there is tax injustice because the top minority of Americans pays the majority of taxes is absurd. The people at the top of the food chain reap the highest rewards of our society. Without our national infrastructure, they wouldn't be able to make and horde millions or billions of dollars. They SHOULD pay a tax burden that more closely resembles their share of the US pie, not necessarily their share of the US Population.
The man who single handedly built the middle class in this country in 100 days was one of the wealthiest presidents we've ever had.
Suggesting that anyone independently wealthy that reached the white house would use it to feather his own nest is just a gross oversimplification.
Gates: I'm not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I'm a huge believer in. There's a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very very positive impact.
Hey may author a funny comic strip, and more power to him. But his recent forays into defending Intelligent Design on his blog, as well as other poorly thought out posts, has left me wondering just who is he to throw around the epithet "dolt"? Dude should look in the mirror.
Bill Gates would make a terrible President of the United States. Do we really need another Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge?
.... That is truly defective by design.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
$2,000,000 is easily surpassed if you run a small family business. You die, and to pay the taxes your wife/kids have to sell the business you spent all your life building. The death tax isn't just on the cash on hand. It's on everything, property value, inventory, stocks, bonds, etc. It's an evil tax that hasn't been completely repealed because people like you are naive enough to believe only the very rich benefit from it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
While it's true that Gates is lobbying for these changes, the statement that the net effect would be "a reduction in our standard of living" and "fewer good paying jobs for US citizens" is probably still debatable.
In the short-term, I absolutely agree. But it's the long-term view where I'm less certain. Sometimes, a change for the better involves some short-term pain. Are we *really* offshoring jobs that better our collective "standard of living", or are we just dumping a slew of jobs that are ultimately "dead ends" for our citizens anyway?
When it comes to such jobs as computer "help desk" positions, it doesn't really seem like they've done many of us any favors. Just because you could read off of scripts and speak the "company policy" to incoming callers doesn't mean you've really learned any new and useful skills that apply to an upward career move in the industry.
The main reason to keep help-desk jobs here in the U.S. is so your *customers* feel better talking to someone who has no language barrier. A thick accent, making a call-center worker tough to understand, is the last thing you want to struggle with when you're already irate because your software just crashed and lost all your data, etc. It's up to businesses to decide if that's really "added value" enough to justify paying more to use local talent for it or not.
Software development, like it or not, is a similar situation. If you're really working on something *original* or *creative*, you should still be able to get someone to back your project financially, or at least go freelance with it and reap the rewards after it's completed. The type of programming jobs they're offshoring tend to be related to code maintenance and development of in-house applications that won't ever amount to much in the "grand scheme" of things. (If the app is only used by ONE company, nobody else really cares much about how nice it is, right?)
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Look at what you have now. compare. Do you want austin powers #2 running things or doctor evil himself. Gates is borderline evil and unethical but compitent and successful. Cheney/Bush is openly evil and incompitent. choose the lesser evil or choose cthulu.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Gates is borderline evil and unethical but compitent and successful. Cheney/Bush is openly evil and incompitent. choose the lesser evil or choose cthulu.
:)
So who exactly are you endorsing? Hitler was evil and competent and I'm assuming he would be an undesirable candidate. Chaney/Bush only have a few tens of thousands of people in detention camps. So are you saying a competent Gates would nab millions and so be more evil, or are you saying the "borderline evil" means he would just put a video camera in every bedroom and bathroom and so be marginally better than Chaney/Bush?
I choose cthulu in either case.
BTW In the last 12 elections I've only once chosen a candidate that won, and I regretted that vote. It was very much a lesser of two uber-villains Senate election. I doubt cthulu has much of a chance.