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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.
Isn't it a pay cut?
"..but after three months of trying the group's leader..."
What was he charged with?
He opposes the inheritance tax, like his dad, and he gives his money to decent charities. He ain't a politician in more that the corporate sense. He isn't competent to rule a country, although M$ earns more money than most countries.
No way he'd win, it would cost too much to bribe him.
He is a massively multi-billionaire. What billionaire would not oppose the inheritance tax?
Some form of inheritance tax is required because not having just encourages hoarding of capital, which is bad for the national economy in the long term.
-Microsoft shareholders.
-Antivirus companies
-Computer techs/Best Buy and pimped warranties.
-Indian outsourcers.
-Foreign charities.
This was a pure publicity stunt for Adams. He just picked a well-known person and made a big fuss to get his name into the headlines again. Gates is the perfect person for watercooler talk, since everybody knows him and has something (good or bad) to say about Microsoft. There was no chance this would ever lead anywhere, and now that they see that they won't get more publicity out of it, they're doing one last stunt (We give up! Too bad! We tried so hard!) and let it die with a bang.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
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?
This seems to be the problem...
Server: Apache Webserver
X-Pingback: http://www.billgatesforpresident.net/xmlrpc.php
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4
Why would Bill support anything with this kind of response header?
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.
You're giving up on Mr. Gates's presidential aspirations.
Cancel or Allow?
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?
Dogbert is a much better and, in the long run, safer choice. The sooner we elect him the less severe our penalties for waiting will be.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
You don't have to pay ANY estate tax unless you have over $2,000,000. That is far too high. Every other form of income is taxed without a two million dollar deduction. Why is the estate tax so limited? Think of how few people have over two million saved. Yet so many people who this tax will never effect want it eliminated entirely. I say reduce the deduction to $200,000 or less.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...and there is much rejoicing.
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
Adams could just switch his support to Steve Jobs. Jobs could run on a platform to:
1) Change the name of the US to 'iCountry'.
2) Ban Thanksgiving
3) Replace ballistic missile defense with a national reality distortion field.
[Insert pithy quote here]
.... That is truly defective by design.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
When Chinese president Hu Jintao came to the U.S. for a state visit last year, he visited Bill Gates before going on to visit GWB.
Mr Hu goes to Washington (after he's seen Bill Gates and the Boeing factory)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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?)
Would Gates declare war on Linux-loving nations?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The FairTax proposal addresses most of your objections.
Everyone gets a monthly prebate covering the tax on spending up to the poverty level. This eliminates taxes altogether for the truly poor, and makes the tax effectively progressive.
True, there's a limit to how hard you can punish success and productivity with such a tax, but the overall effect on the economy and, dare I say it, fairness, more than makes up for that.
Website: http://www.fairtax.org/
Summary: : http://www.fairtax.org/fairtax/thumbnail.htm
It seems that you're trying to invade Iran. I can help you with that...
Bill gates is a "Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire." Which in turn makes him ineligible for presidency. Don't take my word for it. I simply trust my history professor.
Seriously, you want an evil genius as president?
Not only he is unbelievably rich and powerful, but he is responsible for nearly every kind of almost-but-not-quite criminal corporate misconduct in the book and then inventing some. He recklessly and shamelessly exploits everyone and everything he can to benefit himself and the company he sees as an extention of himself.
And you want to give him, in addition to everything he already has, the position of commander of the armed forces.
You gotta be kidding.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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."
That line from Microsoft's past would fit right in at Gitmo...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
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.