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Paul Ryan's Record On Science and Government
sciencehabit writes "U.S. Representatives Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) don't have much in common when it comes to politics. Kucinich is a very liberal Democrat who's leaving Congress this January after being defeated in a primary election by a more moderate colleague. Ryan is a conservative leader and now the Republican Party's presumptive candidate for vice president. A dozen years ago, however, the two men found one thing they could agree on—killing the National Ignition Facility, a multibillion dollar laser fusion project at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The article goes on to explore other impacts Ryan could have on science as VP."
...and it's one of the most impressive scientific endeavors we've undertaken.
Yes, one of it's missions is "stockpile stewardship" -- maintaining the integrity of the United States nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing, via simulations and tests.
But it also has a goal of initiating "ignition": a sustained ("sustained" being relative, here) fusion reaction which produces more power than was put in.
Even if there is no immediate practical application, understanding various aspects of fusion, and the science it takes to get there, is critical to our energy future.
In short, like many military and national security projects, this is a truly dual-use.
The NIF just made history by firing its 192 beams to deliver more than 500 terawatts and 1.85 megajoules of energy to its target -- more than 1000 times the power the United States uses at any particular instant, and more than 100 times the power of any other laser.
We do need science like NIF, and I'm still pained by the US decision to kill the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), what was to be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world -- significantly more so than the LHC -- after 14 miles of tunnels were dug and over $2 billion spent.
I hope this article wasn't unintentionally accurate when it called the SSC the "high water mark of American science"...(must see photos by the way).
We NEED big science.
Unless the Senate is split 50/50 no effect.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Rather than dredging up the distant past for skeletons that are scary, why not look for positive things more recent? Not that slashdot has ever claimed to be neutral in its journalism (hah), but this is a bit leaning in a biased article. How about discussing all the technology that the Obama camp has killed, at least to balance it out?
tora
I also toured it a few years back. I still watch out for news from them, as they charge up the super ooper awesome laser and get ready to make a mini sun amongst the vineyards there.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The decision maker on the administration side will be Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, not their vice president.
The article acknowledges that the LINL project still suffers from some of the fiscal management problems which Ryan objected to, which were some of the same problems the SSC suffered from as well. I guess we are to conclude that wasting taxpayer money on bureaucratic snafus is necessary for the advancement of science.
this isnt that crazy.
As a nerd I this seems like the best way to spend a trillion dollars but its hardly the craziest thing this guy has said.
he only lost after his district got redrawn when they realized gerrymandering was the only way to get rid of him. if you don't like the representative the people keep electing just redraw the lines so they can't vote for him anymore! bogus democracy.
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money. Every. Single. One. Are we to conclude that we should just shutdown all government because it isn't 100% efficient with its cash flow? Given the potential for huge scientific advances, the interest such projects can invoke in our children, and the relatively paltry amount of spending in comparison to other government agencies and departments, like DARPA and the DoD, we can easily justify absorbing the budget overflow.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
We NEED big science.
And we need health care...
and welfare...
and food stamps...
and national defense...
and the space program is really important...
and drug rehabilitation programs...
and the FDA...
and the EPA...
and without the NEA our kids won't learn about art and learning about art has been shown a correlation with higher math and science scores...
and we need to protect our borders...
and did I mention healthcare??
Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all. Cutting waste will help but it won't enough. Some programs that are good and useful need to be shrunk or eliminated too. Doing so is of course unpopular. Whether or not this particular program was the best one to cut, I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Whether the national ignition facility is good or bad, it represented the basic and applied science that is critical to a countries infrastructure. It high risk, expensive, but it does provide science. While cancer research is important, I am not sure how much actual science is developed with the US government $5 bilion a year.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The VP is generally considered a waste product. You don't pick your VP to match your views you pick your VP to fill in the blanks in your own personality. Romney is generally a centrist so he needs a fairly right wing VP. Romney being a Mormon needs a more "Christian" VP although I am surprised he didn't pick a protestant. Also you pick a VP from a swing state. Wisconsin could go either way and has an OK number of electoral collage votes. But at the same time you can't make it look like you have picked a token VP that is unbelievable. Obama has the black vote locked up so a black VP would be a waste and might actually lose Romney some white vote. The same with women voters. A token woman would doubtfully unlock many votes and again might have lost votes that he otherwise owns. The key for both candidates is to get out the existing vote and that is who you are picking the VP for. When I say lose votes I mean that they stay home not that they vote for the other guy.
Where I worry is that Romney's wealth is built upon going into companies that aren't performing well and unlocking hidden wealth. Often this came by doing short term things like cutting R&D. The wealth would be "unlocked" and they would sell the company and make a pile of money. They did other interesting short term things like loading these companies up with debt. This all was great for them when they could cut and run but a country is the opposite. When you look at a policy now you need to think about the implications a century from now.
If defense were to be cut in half and schools spending doubled the implications on defense would be immediate. But the benefits from the school increases might be 20 years down the road. But it would be glorious 20 years from now.
I am a Canadian but it looks like the US suffers from the common malady of all democracies. Somehow we end up with choices that are all crap. In my life I have had the option of voting for one politician who turned out to be good. Somehow we need to be able to weed out these guys earlier in the process. Or maybe eliminate the party system?
How can we have any hope that these guys(most world politicians) will spend wisely on science when they won't even listen to the majority of the population who want the war on drugs to end. Not a peep on an issue that is destroying the culture and economy of the US. This goes way past the issue of who some guy picked to be his spare.
I try and follow progress on fusion power reactors and thought this was a great idea and they were far ahead of what is being built in France. That is until I found out WHY they were doing this project. It has no intention of ever becoming a general electrical power source. They are only working on this as a more reliable and easier method to ignite a hydrogen fusion bomb. There is exactly 0 interest in generating electricity with this method at this lab.
Now they may develop a technology that someone else could use to generate power, and they have greatly scaled up the power of lasers. But any attempt to pretend this will replace anything as an energy source is purely fiction.
Plus I saw a job available there once, plutonium manger, previous experience required. lol
Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all.
What're you, poor or middle class?
All sardonic social commentary aside, tax rates, at least on the wealthiest of Americans (that's not you nor I, BTW), is the lowest it's been in over half a century.
Not to say the government of today isn't chock-full of waste and bloat, just pointing out facts.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
History shows that the inventors of new technology rarely gain an edge over other countries. If they do it's only temporary. It is better to let the other country (or company) waste millions on R&D and then you just copy what they did.
We did that with the industrial revolution (invented by the UK, copied by everyone else), the rocket-propelled missile (invented by Germany; copied by us), the jet plane (invented by Germany; copied by us), the steam train (invented by the UK; copied by us), et cetera.
We have invented some things on our own but almost all those inventions were done by hobbyists spending their own money, not the government or taxpayer's money. I can think of very few examples where the U.S. Government invented something that had lasting value. So I say: Let somebody else waste billions on R&D and we'll just copy the end result. Example: The Japanese invented HDTV. We copied their idea for cheap.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Politifact is useless. You won't believe me so I won't even cite, Google it yourself.
The important numbers are the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top income earners vs their share of total income. Go look it up and compare it to Europe. Anyone who even utters the phrase 'fair share' must first go see that number for themselves and THEN define exactly how much more they think they can extract before they say 'fuck it' and go somewhere else. I want a percentage. Define it.
Democrat delenda est
It's not designed to act as an energy source.
Neither is ITER.
There is no pretending going on here; its purpose is BOTH to support the US nuclear stockpile AND to understand fusion like we never have before. Sort of like how very similar rockets can deliver a nuclear warhead halfway around the world, or launch a space telescope into orbit.
Fusion could be the most powerful means to reduce carbon emissions, if we weren't a bunch of stupid shortsighted idiots as a species we'd be putting a huge amount of money into fusion power research instead of wars and bailouts for our stupid broken economic systems.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Slashdot is teh lib'rul!!!1!
Two plus two is five! Grass is purple!
God bless the Republican party! GOD BLESS THE NEW TRUTH!
Politifact is useless. You won't believe me so I won't even cite, Google it yourself.
This, then
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
High taxes? Where?
Plus I saw a job available there once, plutonium manger, previous experience required. lol
What? Your take is that a 'plutonium manager' should just get on-the-job training?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm from Kucinich's district, and I'm hardly surprised he worked with Paul Ryan. For instance, he worked a lot with Ron Paul trying to cut back military spending and Iraq War funding, because the two of them arrived to the same conclusion for completely different reasons.
For the most part, it's been a record of futility, though: His own party's leadership hates him because he doesn't toe the party line on issues like health care (he once kicked Nancy Pelosi out of his office when she tried to force his hand). And of course John Boehner and friends hate him for being a Democrat. So none of his bills or resolutions make it anywhere unless he has support from other backbenchers, hence the strange bedfellows.
I am officially gone from
Tang.
I rest my case.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You should read up on the NIH then. We've invented a lot of things of value.
How low does the tax rate for the top .1% have to be? I want a percentage. Define it.
Dude, it doesn't matter what facts you offer, he has his opinions and that is all that matters.
If he says the Bear Tax is the highest in history, then it is, so live with it and attack the immigrants.
You may think taxes are low, but the U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the world.
You might be able to raise taxes even more on just the working class, but you'd not come within spitting distance of even eliminating the DEFICIT, much less actual debt.
The only serious way out involves LOTS of cuts, everywhere. If you pretend otherwise you are simply ignorant or on a mission to doom us all. Sure some taxes will be raised also, but it's foolish to pretend taxing will get you all the pretty baubles of government rule you have grown accustomed to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money. Every. Single. One. Are we to conclude that we should just shutdown all government
Are we NOT to conclude that we should shut down wasteful programs, that we should just carry on?
Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?
Wasting money in one program means the eventual starvation of programs that do NOT waste money. If no-one is willing to stand up to boondoggles like the bridge to nowhere, the whole government will collapse and how does that help anyone?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are we NOT to conclude that we should shut down wasteful programs, that we should just carry on?
The answer to waste in a program isn't always to shut down the program. Sometimes you should get rid of the waste within the program.
When one has a Presidential candidate who waffles, flip-flops and simply doesn't state his policy goals like...
Obama?
That sentence certainly describes Obama more than it does Romney. Gitmo, support for drone strikes, economic stimulus, etc. etc. etc.
Romney has a clearly laid out plan for what he wants to do. You may not like the plan, but he has one.
Meanwhile Obama and Democrats in general have failed to produce a budget for THREE FUCKING YEARS. How can you vote for that kind of nonsense?
At this point we just need someone that will pick a direction and go there. Right now it seems far more likely Romney will do so than Obama, especially based on past history. Romney inherited a badly run Olympics and made it work; Obama inherited a bad economy and made it worse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The important numbers are the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top income earners vs their share of total income.
Why? When you're worth $20 billion and only paying 15% capital gains on the $10 million you do report, of course it's a huge number, but it's not like it's hurting you the same as the 25% income tax (that I must pay) hurts me.
Look at Romney. Doesn't pay taxes at all for ten years, then pays 15% for a couple years after he decides he might run for president. Meanwhile I'm giving over a third of everything I have to the government.
I have no sympathy for the absurdly rich. I don't care what their total dollar count is. I care about them paying their fair share, because the rules just don't apply to them.
Ziggitz is right. While we all love to grouse about government waste, government is not really all that unique. The stereotypical hyper-efficient corporation is a myth - most of us know of stunning wastes of money at our own employer. And our vaunted household finances, while smaller in magnitude, probably include some waste too.
Every human endeavor has waste, and if scrutinized under a microscope, something that somebody could interpret as corruption is nearly everywhere too.
We're not always angels, and we're not always robots. But let's not let that stop us from doing what good we can.
r.e "the VP has what power?"
It matters.
Really.
To put it terms you might relate to, try thinking of it as a Disaster Recovery planning exercise.
That is a good resource but it doesn't show the comparison with Europe I was wanting to point out. That we are already far more progressive in our tax policy than countries with outright socialists in charge. In other words, we are almost certainly maxed out and probably way on the bad side of the Laffer Curve. Raising more revenue via taxation isn't an option. The rich are already taxed beyond the line where you get revenue for raising rates and if you even talk about raising rates on the already beleagered middle class you will have a revolt.
The bottom half are already getting more from the State than they pay in all taxes combined. They pay more Federal Income tax and usually no State Income tax. They do pay some FICA and sales taxes but get the Earned Income Tax Credit and almost always a few government handouts which cancels those out and usually leaves them in the black. And changing that would be instant political suicide in the current environment.
Democrat delenda est
Name one government or corporate program that doesn't waste any money. There is a big difference between mismanagement and wasting small amounts of resources. You're right in that projects like the bridge to nowhere should be stopped. The problem from people I know involved in government projects is that companies will bid low to get a contract and then make up their money in change orders. This is the same whether it is an IT project, a construction job, or a defense contract.
Defense contractors are so good at it that they build factories everywhere imposing enormous inefficiency transporting goods needlessly. If the government tries to reign in this project then thousands of jobs are lost across many districts impacting a large number of representatives. So there is no incentive to fix the inefficiency to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars but we can instead tackle waste in small places to the tune of tens of millions. Makes a lot of sense doesn't it?
The MicroWave oven also came from NASA.
So just to be clear, you believe 13% is too high a tax rate for Romney level wealth?
Are you fucking insane?
I would recommend a Macro Economics 101 class or equivalent. that might get you started in being able to hold discussions like this.
> How low does the tax rate for the top .1% have to be. I want a percentage.
Ten percent. For everybody with absolutely no deductions, classes of income (capital gains, unearned, etc) credits (refundable or none) or anything. Everybody has skin in the game and nobody is voting to tax 'the other guy.' If I had to make a compromise to get a bill actually passed into law I'd settle for 5% on all income to the poverty line, 10% everything to a million and 15% on anything over. But everybody pays something, we don't set social policy throuth the tax code and we don't need to spend billion on compliance, recordkeeping, enforcement and such.
Democrat delenda est
High taxes? The U.S. has the lowest taxes in the industrialized world, and the shit services to show for it.
The same is also true of every Business project as well. The idea that a project can be ran without wasting money is ridiculous. Evidently these people are supposed to have future vision to know how things will change and what paths wont work in advance.
If you think Ryan is some sort of deficit hawk looking out for the nation's debt and deficit, you haven't seen his voting record over the last ten years.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
You won't believe me so I won't even cite.
This is perhaps the most cowardly comment ever made on Slashdot.
The important numbers are the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top income earners vs their share of total income.
How about the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top wealth holders vs their share of said wealth?
Oh god, you're a flat taxer too.
So while we save "billion" on record keeping etc, where are we going to make up all this lost income? Because that would be a HUGE tax break to me, so I can't really imagine the budget would be even vaguely balanced on the whole.
I'm somehow suspecting the answer is "fuck the poor, let them die", but I'm curious if you have an alternative.
What's with the irrelevant anecdotes in the first paragraphs of articles these days? The article is about Ryan, not Kucinich. Mention of Kucinich seems to be entirely gratuitous.
The same is also true of every Business project as well. The idea that a project can be ran without wasting money is ridiculous. Evidently these people are supposed to have future vision to know how things will change and what paths wont work in advance.
Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. The same is not true for Government programs. If you don't pay your taxes, sooner or later men with guns will come arrest you. Nice try at a strawman though.
Kucinich was the rep for Ohio's 10th district since '97 but the Teapublicans gerrymandered his district out of existence and forcing him to either retire or face off against Marcy Kaptur in her own, now larger, district.
Kaptur is a Democratic powerhouse, was offered the chance to be VP to Ross Perot, and has always gotten between 55%-75% in her 16 terms, finishing below 60% only 4 times.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
All of those programs you listed are the difference between Western civilization and some 3rd world shit hole. There are plenty of low tax shit holes that will be happy to have you, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
And what high taxes? Romney paid 13% for the last ten years. 13% sounds pretty reasonable to me!
[spoiler]Taxes are the lowest they've been in a generation, that's why there is a huge deficit.[/spoiler]
It is obvious that one can create an ultimate energy source by putting together piles of money until the gravity collapses the whole thing and starts a nuclear reaction. It is just not the most optimal way. I guess the good vice presidential candidate thought so as well.
well, i can think of LOTS of 'projects' that could've saved the trillions of dollars, in absolute, 100% waste. The B1 bomber. The B2 bomber. The stealth bomber. The F22. The F35. The war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan. Shall I go on?
Thanks for the heritage foundation's line. Your arbitrary number is arbitrary. Never takes into account GDP, wealth distribution, or any other number of factors. The problem with your argument is that the wealthy choosing not pay their taxes isn't social engineering which is just catchphrase bingo bullshit. It's a criminal act. They've managed to fund media and candidates that have made it harder to audit them in order to avoid paying their fair share.
The issue is that the tax code isn't specific enough or complex enough to deal with the vagaries of corporations. For the vast majority of Americans only a handful of credits and forms apply. For corporations it's thousands but they barely cover reinvestment, instead they offer generic tax credits and breaks. A more focused code designed to curtail excess funds and force reinvestment is the best answer but it's the one no right-winger wants because of their poor grasp on economics and their leadership growing fat off of the current tax system.
I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout
- I am really sorry to burst your bubble then, but Ryan is not doing anything to cut spending, he is growing spending.
Ryan's budget is not touching anything, Romney and Ryan will not touch SS or Medicare or military spending or the debt in any way shape or form.
Ryan's budget is only about cuts to the proposed increases and they only are supposed to kick in 10 years in the future, that's because it doesn't cut anything from the current recipients of the welfare schemes that are SS and Medicare. Those are welfare, there are no assets, nothing is owned by the gov't, only bonds, IOUs, from gov't to gov't itself. This means that whether there is or there isn't a so called 'fund' the way to finance the Medicare and SS is via bond sales. Ryan assumes that USA can sell bonds far into the future, he is making rosy assumptions about the interest rates, he doesn't take into account the fact that the interest rates will go up, there is no where for them to go but up. This is the same as it was with the housing bubble, there was nowhere to go for the housing prices but down, same here.
Ryan is not a conservative, I would call him a socialist based on his budget, because he is not willing to cut anything, but I don't think he is actually a socialist anyway. He is a politician and that says it all, there is nothing else to say.
You can't handle the truth.
You can't individually decide to stop paying taxes to government programs, but you can vote to do so or shut them down. The same is not true of businesses.
If you can't convince other voters to shut down a given government program, then either canning it is not a good idea, or your fellow voters are stupid.
Either way, AC was accurately pointing out an impossible standard that is often used to argue against programs that people oppose for reasons unrelated to efficiency. There was no strawman brought up.
> but it's not like it's hurting you
You are right. It doesn't hurt the rich at all, like everything it rolls downhill and hurts US. Higher tax rates force the rich to switch from asset appreciation and economic growth to wealth preservation and tax avoidance.
Democrat delenda est
1. We do things that get the economy humming again. More economic activity means...
STOP TRYING TO WRECK MY ENVIRONMENT
We don't need any of your dirty bizzniss. Send it to China so it's not in the environment or near any children. I'm fine living with my parents and you should be too so the environment won't get ruined by people trying to prosper. Unemployment should be 80% and climbing or the environment will but RUINED.
As far as the deficit goes we just need to get the rich. The Republicans let them keep it all and pay nothing and we need to take it back!
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I've worked in private industry and for government and let me tell you the difference from what I've seen.
In business if you put out a quote for a project you can shop around and use other companies reputation and try to come to a decision.If there is is something vague they will call you and try to figure it out. They will sometimes let little changes go. But sometimes they won't. Let's say you pick a company and they nickel and dime you on changes. You finish that project and decide never to use them again if you though you got screwed.
In government it's the opposite. The lowest bidder get's the job as long as they have the capabilities to do it. If there are two ways to interpret something they intentionally pick the wrong way and deliver it so that they can get paid to make the changes. They are legally right. And next time there is a job they are right back in line and you can't bar them from bidding. A companies reputation for screwing over the government doesn't prevent them from winning the bid. What this does is cause the government to waste even more time and effort to make "perfect" requirements. But as any of us know when you are building something from scratch your requirements are going to evolve.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?
Give it a rest with this tired "other people's money" line. You're not fooling anybody but yourself.
And I've never been in an organization, public or private, that didn't waste *some* money/time/other resources. It's nearly impossible not to.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
The guy equating taxes to theft by gunpoint is claiming strawman. That's rich.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money
The same can largely be said of the private sector as well.
Perhaps if government wasn't required to only take into account bid price when putting out a contract, and was able to take other factors into account, like any business out there, there wouldn't be so much waste like this.
The only truth about the 'lowest taxes' would be if you only talked about this scam called 'carried interest'. Now that is a true scam.
As to the rest of that statement, today the US corporate tax rates are highest in the world (used to be Japan, not anymore). Personal tax rates are high as well, but that's not the problem, the problem is that nothing can be written off against the taxes. After the WWII in USA the top marginal tax rates used to be stupidly high, 94% or something like that. The actual taxes collected don't go above 18 or 19%, those silly marginal taxes were irrelevant, nobody paid them, that's because people could write off everything from as expenses and there were all sorts of schemes invented how to avoid paying those taxes.
Of-course the real boom in US economy was happening when there were no income or corporate or payroll taxes, but that's a separate issue. Today in USA there are people who are actually paying the highest taxes that were ever paid in USA by anybody, and those are the people that get hit whenever the tax rates go up.
People who don't pay taxes, don't pay them regardless of the rates. Be it the bottom 51% or the top 0.01% or whatever. There is a percentage of people that actually are squeezed from both sides, they are not on top of the food chain, and so they can't avoid paying taxes but they are making very good money relative to the rest of the economy, and so they are the ones who end up being milked for everything.
Consider that somebody who has very little to write off, and who is making say 10 million a year. If that person pays that money to himself in salary, then here is the break down if he lives for example in Connecticut.
3.5 million goes to the federal gov't as income tax.
600,000 goes to the State as income tax.
290,000 goes to the Mediare.
With the SS tax it's 4.4 million, 44%.
Now, if this person dies, the federal gov't wants 35% on the estate above million, the State wants 12%.
If you add up just these taxes alone, not taking into the account the liquidation of business at firesale prices, let's pretend that the business could be sold at a fair market value (fat chance), then the amount of taxes that the gov't collects is anywhere between 80% and 90%.
That's retarded, that's why people move their businesses out, and that is not even the full picture. I am not going to give examples, but gov't regulations don't help but actually hurt businesses, prevent them from hiring and cause them to shut down departments or sometimes the whole thing.
--
There is often a talk about the companies being managed by people who are not actually in that business professionally, they are seagull managers, not caring about the business. Well, that is partially a consequence of the death tax, the kids of the businessmen end up liquidating the business, rather than continuing it, and even if they are brought up in that business and understand how it works and how to run it, the system is now set up to force them to liquidate and just to burn the rest of the money, rather than having them continue that business.
--
Also it looks like you are of an opinion that taxes on the top earners can pay for all of those things that gov't is doing and wants to do, well that's just not going to happen. The real money is in the middle, as Willie Sutton said: "that's where the money is".
To run all this, once the economy crashes because nobody wants to lend you the money anymore, you'll have to tax the middle class. You want those programs, you'll have to pay for them.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, he is.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business
And the same is said of government. You are free to leave the country and go find another.
but it's clear from our high taxes
By "high taxes", you mean among the lowest in the civilized world, and lowest in history of this country, right? Because you clearly don't know what high taxes actually are.
I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout.
Except that by "hard decisions", you mean that he's willing to cut programs that he doesn't like, or is ideologically opposed to. I haven't heard him willing to cut the military down to the levels that are needed.
Politifact is useless. You won't believe me so I won't even cite, Google it yourself.
Translation: "I've been caught with my pants down in a baldfaced lie, but I don't want to admit it. So I'm going to not bother to back up my position."
The important numbers are the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top income earners vs their share of total income.
Who says these are the important numbers? I certainly don't think so.
Anyone who even utters the phrase 'fair share' must first go see that number for themselves and THEN define exactly how much more they think they can extract before they say 'fuck it' and go somewhere else.
Mitt Romney's 13% sure as fuck is not a "fair share", considering most people with a far lower amount of income pay more than this.
That we are already far more progressive in our tax policy than countries with outright socialists in charge. In other words, we are almost certainly maxed out and probably way on the bad side of the Laffer Curve.
You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
The bottom half are already getting more from the State than they pay in all taxes combined.
That's not saying much when you take into account the fact that they don't have shit to start with. You make it sound like the bottom half is driving around in Rolls Royces.
Ten percent. For everybody with absolutely no deductions, classes of income (capital gains, unearned, etc) credits (refundable or none) or anything.
Ahh, so you're a Regressive. Glad to have that cleared up.
Because anyone with half a brain can realize that "flat" taxes are inherently regressive, and shift most of the tax burden to the poor and middle class. 10% from someone making $10,000/year is felt far, far more than 10% from someone making $100k/year, and that is felt more than 10% from someone making $1MM/year.
Not to mention the fact that the 10% would not actually bring in enough revenue.
The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
No. This is inherently Regressive, and has absolutely nothing to do with "Constitutionality".
It doesn't hurt the rich at all, like everything it rolls downhill and hurts US
A rich person paying their fair share in taxes does NOT hurt "us". It helps us.
Higher tax rates force the rich to switch from asset appreciation and economic growth to wealth preservation and tax avoidance.
And they magically decide to pay taxes when they're lower?
That's because you are benefitting from government services. If you don't like being asked to pay for it, stop receiving those services.
Or do you support being a thief for yourself?
If you're simply not happy with what you get, you do have the right to petition for change.
Just remember, nobody voted to give you or anybody else ultimate consent. If you want that, arrange it through legal means.
Or do you want to be a violent anarcho-libertarian?
Amusing, the word is hostage, which is what you want to do to us, hold us hostage to your whims.
Ryan, a Catholic who opposes abortion except in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, has also supported legislation that would define human life as beginning at the moment a human egg is fertilized
sorry, dude, but you lose. you are just plain WRONG. your view is absurd and forces women to make choices that you believe 'your god' wants. guess what: not everyone believes in your god!
let the individual decide. its the only moral way, when the population is split on such a topic. no one's forcing your family or friends to have abortions. but by the same token, you have zero rights to other womens' bodies. their body, THEIR CHOICE.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Maybe not, but I can't imagine that the number of plutonium managers with experience is very large.
I see the same stuff in business though. Anytime consultants are brought in I see it again and again. I saw it big time when dealing with IBM and even bigger when dealing with Oracle. This problem is not unique to government but it definitely happens a lot more and to large excess which is unfortunate, tragic, and completely unnecessary.
Of course parent I was replying to was trying to say this problem was unique to government implying that government only wastes money and that's simply untrue. I look at hundreds of low-income housing projects just in Arizona and even though the projects come in over budget they do a great deal in helping people get back on their feet after prolonged periods of unemployment. I look at the alternatives and feel like I have to conclude that it was worth it. Hordes of homeless have a tendency to cause a whole host of other problems and I suspect when you add up all the other costs that you at least break even.
There definitely needs to be more accountability in regards to government contracts. My impression is that there simply isn't enough personell available to oversee all the projects that are in motion. Of course this is just because I have friends that work in government so it's mostly hearsey as to the true causes of the bloated spending.
I would love to see a GA database that includes a company's history. If they are always over budget then that should definitely be considered when accepting a low bid from them.
We don't have "high taxes", not compared to what they were prior to 1981, and not compared to most developed countries in the world. Certainly, no one wants to pay more taxes, but if you look at what we've paid historically, and what other developed countries are paying, there is no way you can conclude we're paying "high taxes".
What we need is a discussion about what services govt should and shouldn't be providing, how much those will cost, then set taxes at a level to pay for those services and balance the budget.
And as for the military, why is the US military spending greater than the next 25 countries combined? Who are we protecting against? Oh, that's right, we're fighting foreign wars, funding insurrections, and trying to the the world police. It's no wonder 1/2 the world hates us. We do need a military, and a strong one, but seriously, more than the next 25 countries combined? Stop trying to be the world police, get out of the foreign wars and stop getting in every other country's business, and cut the military budget in half (maybe even less).
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
The problem with that idea is that you are now dependent on other nations to do your R&D for you. What happens when they take the same position?
Sure, they do important work. But it makes perfect sense to demand that they be accountable for the way they spend money. On this I have to agree with Paul Ryan, even though I consider him brainless on most issues.
Factors like, say, how much the non-lowest-bidder was willing to contribute to the selection committee's re-election campaigns?
Of course, the selection committee will say the contributions had nothing to do with picking that vendor - they looked at the company's skills and track record, and decided that, all things considered, this really is the best overall value even if it's not the lowest bid.
Plus how much government waste is because the corporate world has learned to "feed from the trough" and has bought enough influence keep the gravy train coming.
There are so many heartfelt AND serious calls to stop government interference in business, but while there are many calls to stop business interference in government, it's quite clear that The Golden Rule really doesn't call for it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Flat tax isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be a consumption tax, not an income tax, and it needs to exempt things that are necessary to life, like utilities, rent, unprepared food, health care, and public transit. It would, necessarily, need to be a high enough rate, because it's only covering luxuries, and as such, it'd never pass... most people wouldn't be willing to pay a 30-40% sales tax* on luxuries/imports (not for resale), even when considering that it'd mean no income tax and a *lot* more disposible income for everybody.
* - and no, I haven't done the numbers to figure out what the sales tax would have to be... it'd need to be enough to be able to cover costs, but low enough to not stifle the economy... it may not be workable at all, but it's worth looking into as a possibility.
Every large corporation wastes money. The free market isn't any more efficient, it's 10% less efficient, by defintion, as under that number, there is no profit, and profit is required.
Learn to love Alaska
We NEED big science.
And we need health care... and welfare... and food stamps... and national defense... and the space program is really important... and drug rehabilitation programs... and the FDA... and the EPA... and without the NEA our kids won't learn about art and learning about art has been shown a correlation with higher math and science scores... and we need to protect our borders... and did I mention healthcare?? Nearly everything our government does is important to someone but it's clear from our high taxes and massive deficit that we just can't afford it all. Cutting waste will help but it won't enough. Some programs that are good and useful need to be shrunk or eliminated too. Doing so is of course unpopular. Whether or not this particular program was the best one to cut, I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout.
Yep we do need all that, and I can think of three things that we don't need. We don't need to spend more than the rest of the planet combined on our military, we don't need a massively expensive police/surveillance state, and we don't need to have almost trivially small tax rates for the richest people. Imagine that! We could get rid of a handful of things we don't need and be able to pay for the things we do need!
-- QED
Corporations love outsourcing and consultants. The only thing outsouced is risk, and only because the shareholders can't figure out who made the fiscally poor decision to string them up. Every consultant recommends more consulting. "Core business" is the mantra of the inefficient and inflexible.
Learn to love Alaska
Our "high taxes"? The same ones that are lower than they've been in generations?
Our deficit? Why don't you tell us where that deficit is coming from? The fact is, if you cut out the recession (lowers tax receipts, increased spending on unemployment, etc.), rolled back the Bush tax cuts, and ended the wars, there would be NO DEFICIT. Zip. Zero. Check the CBO numbers.
The whole idea that "rampant government spending" is some kind of problem budget-wise is a huge non sequitur and strawman. If you genuinely believe that government shouldn't be playing the role it does - fine, I disagree with you, but there are legitimate philosophical arguments you can have there. The idea that our deficit is caused by some kind of crazy government spending though, is not legitimate. It is completely untrue.
It is astounding to me that people can get away with claiming government spending is a problem when in fifteen years, the Bush tax cuts will be responsible for fifty percent of the total US debt.
using "National Ignition Facility" to start fire under bureaucrats collective posteriors
to cleanup waste within program. That I would call civilian use.
Can they reach DC from LINL?
You think that might have anything to do with the massive rise in income inequality the US has experienced in the past 50 years? Richer rich people and more poor people?
Maybe your numbers are misleading and Politifact is (more-or-less, it does have real problems) right.
We can do everything on your list, and do it well, for about half what we are paying now. The problem is that the military industrial complex won't let us be 10% more isolationist. We have to invade everyone every time there's an issue. We need our military to be four times the size it is now, or Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon won't make their quarterly profits. Why do you hate retirees? They would be the biggest losers in the short term if we were to cit appropriately. But then, they are the ones that voted us into this mess.
Learn to love Alaska
i can think of LOTS of 'projects' that could've saved the trillions of dollars, in absolute, 100% waste. ... The B2 bomber. The stealth
bomber.
Aren't those two just different names for exactly the same plane?
Or like above, factors like if the company has historically been able to deliver the contract in the first place.
Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. The same is not true for Government programs. If you don't pay your taxes, sooner or later men with guns will come arrest you. Nice try at a strawman though.
That's the price you pay for living on a country with a government. Not coincidentally, everyplace with a decent standard of living has a very expensive government.
YOU need big science. You need it to maintain your comfortable middle class life style in the face of increased demands for resources. Paul Ryan, OTOH, has no use for it. This is what scares me about the really, really rich. Yeah, I know Paul's just a lackey for guys like Willard Romney, but the principle is the same.
The trouble with allowing anyone to amass as much of society's wealth (aka "The Good Stuff") is that when you're that high up the Totem pole you can't imagine anything better. How can you be expected to lead us all to a better world if you can't understand the concept?
Oh, and as for why guys like ole Willy Romney are responsible for my well being; I never said they were. Leading the rest of us to the promise land is the justification I hear for why they're allowed to be so rich. I think the Capitalists call it "Leadership". The CEO leads, we follow to prosperity. The last 10 years of tax cuts for them have worked great, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No it's not clear and we DON'T have high taxes. They're the lowest percent of GDP they have been for decades.
Try not paying your taxes sometime. You'll be held at gunpoint quick enough, unless you're a Democrat in Obama's government.
But you can't. Like I said these contractors did things by the book. They aren't doing anything illegal. It's just that in a business relationship sometimes you let things slide because both sides want the project to succeed so everyone can make a profit and can work together in the future. To government contractors it doesn't matter if a project is successful. As long as they follow the legality of the contract requirements they can make as much money as they can get away with. It's not like the government is going to run out of money.
Here is an example. We needed a test bed that you could mount a 150kh mass. Then accelerate it at 30m/s^2 for 4m and bring it to a stop in another 4m. It had to do this in the horizontal and in the vertical +z direction. Pretty simple request for proposal. A local company got the bid. They built it and we went to the acceptance test. It could do it horizontally but it didn't have the power to reach 30m/s^2 in the +z. We told them they needed to fix it. They said it met the requirement because you have to take into account that just sitting still it was resisting 9.8m/s^2 of acceleration from gravity. We said BS. We took it to the lawyers and they said since it was a small business contract they were going to side with the company. I then resigned the part that held the test mass to remove enough mass to get back the capabilities we needed. We did those mods on the tax pays dime.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Every branch of government and every government funded project wastes money. Every. Single. One. Are we to conclude that we should just shutdown all government because it isn't 100% efficient with its cash flow?
How about shutting down programs that are 10% efficient with their cash flow? That's pretty much where I see big science in the US (and a lot of defense spending as well). One loses an order of magnitude just from the approach. Maybe it can be made much more efficient. But if so, I'd like to see that demonstrated first.
The lowest bidder that could claim to do the job always got the work anywhere I worked, except when there was nepotism involved (*cough*Paul Ryan*Cough).
Oh, come off it! Businesses and Gov't both screw up and get screwed. It's part of buying goods and services. The gov't stands out from private enterprise only because whenever society needs something done and it's too expensive to get anyone to pay for it we have the gov't do it. So the numbers are bigger and the loses are too.
Like cars? Like Roads? Guess what, a highway system was too expensive for private industry to bother with. Too much investment, there were better places to make short term gains. Same is true for drugs. You didn't think those companies actually PAID for their research, did you? Lately they can't even get the US gov't to pay for it (deficit cuts you see), and it's all done in Europe. They the drug Co's move it, do a little bit of testing, and release a product. Privatize the profits and socialize the loses. Capitalism at it's finest.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not only that, the private sector has far, far higher salaries especially as you go up the food chain. You can argue about whether that is waste or not, but it adds cost.
I've worked at a national lab and worked and consulted for a few Fortune 50 corporations, and while there is no apples to apples comparison, you get a hell of a bang for the buck at the labs. Frankly, I think some corps are lucky the labs are not competing in the market. Every time I visited one major diversified international corp based in MN, half the department was perpetually either checking their 401Ks, shooting the breeze, or in Cheeto-synchronous orbit around the vending machines. The only people worth anything were the dept manager, her second in command, and two student interns who were working their collective asses off. The labs had a few useless turds, sure, but mostly at the technician level, and not among the PEs and PhDs.
Give it a rest with this tired "other people's money" line. You're not fooling anybody but yourself.
What do you think taxes are?
You are not misdirecting anyone reading Slashdot, as much as you want to.
And I've never been in an organization, public or private, that didn't waste *some* money/time/other resources. It's nearly impossible not to.
Nor have I. The difference is that a company cannot waste what money they have forever, or they cease to get money.
A publicly funded project can keep going on indefinitely regardless of stupidity or lack of results.
There is FAR less accountability and oversight in a public project.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
3.5 million goes to the federal gov't as income tax.
600,000 goes to the State as income tax.
290,000 goes to the Mediare.
Medicare is 1.45%. 1.45% of 3.5 M is about $50,000. Given the massive errors in that one number, all your other numbers are suspect, as well as your premises and delusion, I mean conclusion.
Learn to love Alaska
The programs would not have been proposed to begin with if there wasn't some problem that needed to be solved.
And THAT is why you fail.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> And they magically decide to pay taxes when they're lower?
Yes. Do a simple thought experiment. Imagine progressives get what they claim to want and start taxing investment income at the normal rate for wages. If you live in a high tax location like NYC that puts you well over 50%. So. Consider you have ten million dollars in a sack. You have already set aside the tax liability on it so you have your sack of ten million dollars and you are just sitting there looking lovingly at it, sipping some fine wine and perhaps stroking a white cat and cackling evilly. What so do with it....
1. Put in the bank. And get less than inflation. I.e. pay the bankers to hold your wealth as they inflate its value away.
2. Buy some cool rich people stuff with it. You will lose a little to sales tax but hey, you get fast cars, hookers and blow!
3. Buy yourself some tax free munis. Say you get five percent. Assuming the government you invested in isn't in CA your principle is probably safe and you will score a half million every year tax free. Loop back to this list to decide what to do with the money every year.
4. Buy some stocks. They better return ten percent plus a premium for the risk of the very volitile stock market because thegovernment will be taking half.
5. Start a business. Similar to buying stock, it better make at least ten percent annually on your investment plus a premium for the risk and another premium for the time you will have to put into overseeing it.
The lower the taxes on investments are the more attractive investing is and the less attractive parking the money or pissing it away on titties and cocaine get. We WANT rich people to pick the last two options. If the taxes are fairly low the rewards are attractive enough they will invest. BUt every time you raise em a single point a few more otherwise economically sound business opportunities tip into not profitable and a few more people get 'rightsized'.
Democrat delenda est
The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
No, because that shifts a greater proportion of the burden on those at the lower echelons. It needs to average out, which would mean that they'd need to set a higher base rate than they could if they were to exempt lower income tiers and gradually introduce the full tax rate as your income rises.
There's a reason that there's a poverty line, and a tax exempt income level... it's because you need a certain minimum amount of money to be able to survive. If the person who's barely making that money has to pay income tax, then they will not be able to eke out a living. It may interest you to know that working full time, 40hr/week, at minimum wage is below the poverty line in much of the US.
Oregon has the highest minimum wage in the US, at $8.80/hr (surprised the hell out of me, I would have thought it was New York). Assuming you work 40hr/week, and don't take any time off, working the full 52 weeks, it's $18,304/year before taxes. Compare that to Minnesota where the minimum is $5.25/hr, and it's only $10,920/year before taxes. The national poverty line in the US is $11,170/year, and it tends to be more in northern states because of the colder weather (you eat more calories in the winter, and you spend more on heating, while not getting a reprieve from cooling in the summer). Try Oklahoma, where they can legally pay you $2/hr if the employer makes less than $100,000/year, let alone the states which have no minimum wage at all. Even the federal minimum of $7.25/hr is only $15k/year before taxes.
Why should somebody who's not even making enough to stay above the poverty line (Minnesota) pay the same tax rate as I do, when I make more than 6x as much? While I appreciate your desire for equality, 10% of $11,000 is $1,100, leaving him with less than $10,000 to spend on rent, food, transit, clothes, etc., where I'd still have $60,000 left over after taxes. Given that the average rent in Minneapolis is over $1,000/mo for a 1br, that's hardly fair. And that's assuming that the government could even make ends meet with only a 10% income tax... I doubt that would even cover the military budget, let alone the rest of the stuff the government is responsible for.
> Mitt Romney's 13% sure as fuck is not a "fair share",
Sure it is. It is mostly from investments. I.e. it is money that has already been subjected to the corporate tax rate. And see my post above on why you don't want to tax investment income too high. Of course I don't want to tax ANY income too high.
Democrat delenda est
That's easy to fix, in principle. Simply do a full cost-benefits analysis on all large expenditures, and then start cutting programs, beginning with those that bring the least benefit for the cost. The numbers will help justify the cuts to those who disagree with the cuts. There are some roles of government that cannot be cut, so the goal for those should be to find the most cost effective way to fulfill them.
This is what a true fiscal conservative would do. Unfortunately, that's an animal that doesn't appear to exist in government. Republicans focus on benefits and ignore costs of their own programs, and do the opposite for programs from other origins. Democrats do exactly the same. Libertarians and Tea Partyists are no better because they ignore the benefits and focus on the costs of all programs. This appears to be the entire reason for the existence of political parties: to focus on realities you agree with and ignore those you disagree with.
So the first thing we must do is make independents more electable. Switching from plurality voting to a preferential system is a good start, and then improving education of economics and finance up through high school will help expose candidates who are financially inept.
Which of course is why the major political parties will do their best keep it from happening, and why we will continue to have budget problems for the near future.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Paying taxes is an obligation of a citizen, and has been for somewhere between six and ten thousand years. Don't like it, move to Somalia.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Only if you pay absolutely no attention to facts at all.
No supporting links I see. You deny Obama has said he would do many things he has not done?
No he fucking hasn't. He's said, "Obama sucks" and "I'm going to repeal the ACA". That's it. He has NOT put forth any kind of plan whatsoever.
You astroturfers need to get your story straight, as another of your fellows have posted a link rebutting the plan you claim he does not have... FAIL.
The Republicans in Congress are just as guilty.
They tried to pass numerous budgets, which Democrats rejected.
False, and false. You cannot say Romney has any kind of direction, especially given the proven inconsistencies between him now and him even a few years ago.
He has a direction forced on him by the Tea Party, hence the Ryan pick. That propels him in a know direction. I'm not saying he is not feckless, I'm just saying he is now pointed somewhere he has to go.
Not so for Obama.
Quit with the uncited lies. It's getting annoying.
Says the main without a link, and at least one know baldfaced lie. Why should anyone believe a word of what you say hereafter?
I'll let you have the last response, since it's annoying to respond to liars who will say anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Level taxes might be good, bu only if ALL income was taxed. That means that that any time a person received money, a certain % of it would go to taxes. There would be no difference between a paycheck, corporate income or capital gains. Since there would be a much larger base of taxable transactions, the percentage could be very low, much lower then current income taxes.
You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you? It may interest you to know that with the incredibly high unemployment in the US right now, and the rampant foreclosures and bankruptcy in the working class, the NYSE is trading at record highs, and corporate income is higher than it was 5 years ago...
You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.
The Laffer Curve argument is basically a fraud. You can make the argument that government should always have low taxes, but you can't make it on that basis and have a leg to stand on.
I am officially gone from
(same person here, again hitting the posting limit on the other account)
You don't know what you are talking about, it's called FICA.
Quote:
The employer is also liable for 6.2% Social Security and 1.45% Medicare taxes,[10] making the total Social Security tax 12.4% of wages, and the total Medicare tax 2.9%. (Self-employed people are responsible for the entire FICA percentage of 15.3% (= 12.4% + 2.9%), since they are in a sense both the employer and the employed; however, see the section on self-employed people for more details.)
The 2.9 is paid on all the money, not on 35%. What, you don't like numbers?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Using your own example each would pay $1000, $10,000, $100,000 respectively.
Progressive means that the rich pay more... Did you notice, even with a flat tax, the rich pay more. That makes a flat tax progressive. I guess it's not progressive enough for you.
Why do you think it is right for someone with a higher income to carry you as a burden. What is wrong with you? Why can't you take care of yourself? Why do you expect government to take care of you? Why do you vote for government to STEAL money from the successful to put into your pocket?
Scum like you is why there is a $16 Trillion deficit. That money is STOLEN from future generations, from people who aren't even old enough to vote. You're a big man... Stealing from children!
YOU MAKE ME SICK!!
The Laffer curve is a tool of an immoral government.
Do you really want to live in the country that MAXIMIZES tax revenue at your expense?
Besides which, you start off by saying that nobody has any idea which side of the curve we are on, but then immediately declare that "odds are" that we are on the low side!
You end off by declaring that our poor "don't have shit." Tell that to the 600 million people in India that actually dont have shit, you myopic jackass.
"His name was James Damore."
Our taxes are not high. In fact they are lower right now than they have been any time since 1950.
This is one of the reasons for our high deficit.
Lest we forget 12 years ago the government was actually spending less than it took in. In fact investors were getting worried because the US was not issuing Treasury notes.
the rocket-propelled missile (invented by Germany; copied by us).
No Robert Goddard, a American developed modern rocketry, just the US military was not interested at the time, but the Germans learned of his work and copied his work on liquid fuelled designs to build their rockets.
How about the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top wealth holders vs their share of said wealth?
Why are you talking about wealth when you should be talking about income? You can only confiscate wealth once. The budget shortfalls are annual.. next year there is another one.
"His name was James Damore."
The government is not required to only decide based on bid price. They are allowed to select whomever, but they must submit a justification for doing so that will be officially recorded with the government accounting office.
10% from someone making $10,000/year is felt far, far more than 10% from someone making $100k/year
Sure, because how it "feels" should be an important factor to consider.
"His name was James Damore."
> You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you?
To quote the great man himself, "Notice they don't call it Reaganomics anymore."
> the NYSE is trading at record highs
Not record. But still high. Care to guess why? Inflation is one. We are told there isn't any but people with money know better. Second, everyone in the world is boned right now but the US is boned less. So everyone is still dumping their money here, bidding up prices.
And notice corporate income is up but dividends aren't really doing much. They are mostly just sitting on it. Do you wonder why? Could it be because the rewards on investing it (either external or in internal capital expansion) is low and unreliable and the risks are ginormous. Uncertainty causes economic stagnation which breeds instability which is another word for uncertainty, and the circle turns. Add in the uncertainty from a government that has by word and deed shown itself to be an enemy and well, look around and you see the result.
Democrat delenda est
I'd planned on saying the only companies I've worked at that were more efficient than academic research labs were small start ups. I then realized the small start ups were less efficient than the labs I know too.
Anything big wastes money by the boatload. Avoid bigness unless absolutely necessary. In science, we usually avoid bigness whenever possible, just ain't always possible. In the corporate world, they try achieving bigness though stock value destroying mergers simply to justify a higher salary for the CEO.
If the U.S. doesn't do the science, someone else will. And someone else will reap the rewards. American PhD who wish to actually *do* science are already moving to places like China. America is done.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
No-one is talking about confiscating wealth.
I'm talking about wealth because wealth, past a certain quantity of it (that which we call capital) is a reliable way of generating more wealth essentially in perpetuity. In other words, a guy working a day job may have decent income today and none whatsoever tomorrow; either way, when he has it, he has to work for it. A guy who has, say, $100 million - regardless of where he got them from - can use that to sustain himself indefinitely without the amount ever going down. At the same time, while having an easier ride, he is also, ironically, much more reliant on the government - his ability to earn income from his wealth is 100% reliant on the ability of government to enforce society's recognition of said wealth (since it's an abstract concept, not something that he self-evidently owns - like a car you drive or the house you dwell in). Why shouldn't we tax him more accordingly?
I'm talking about wealth because wealth, past a certain quantity of it (that which we call capital) is a reliable way of generating more wealth essentially in perpetuity.
Thats called income, dumbass.
Now let me ask you again. Why are you talking about wealth when you should be talking about income?
"His name was James Damore."
corporation makes widget. Cost is $50. They need to make $10 per widget. So you think they'll price it at $60, right? Wrong. Because their tax burden works out to about $12/widget, and so they're going to price it at $72/widget. Now, they make the 10$ they need, they can pay for widget manufacture (which includes paying taxes for their workers), and they can pay "corporate taxes." All their money comes from widget purchase: hence all their TAX money comes from widget purchase as well. That means you.
The fact is, the consumer pays 100% of that tax. Not the corporation. So when you pay $X for a loaf of bread -- or anything else -- you, not the corporation, are paying the "corporate tax."
With money, I might add, that is left over after you ALSO paid your "income" tax. Unless you're in a 0 tax bracket, but even then, you're paying the hidden income taxes for everyone.
Any income tax ends up directly on the shoulders of the lowest consumer. ANY. Gonna buy plumbing services? Your $100 worth of work has to cover the work done, the materials used, enough margin (profit) so the plumber can live AND pay taxes ... out of what PLUMBING CUSTOMERS paid him.
And again, generally, you pay the plumber with money you've ALREADY paid taxes on -- your own income taxes.
Think about it. It's obvious the government is scamming most of your money away. That's what it is -- a huge scam.
For what it's worth, these are the numbers from 2011 IRS data:
Category..........Top 0.1%....1%....5%...10%..25%..50%..Bot 50%
Income Req'd $........1.4M..344K..155K..112K..66K..32K..N/A
Income Share %...........8....17....32....43...66...87...13
Effective tax rate.%....24....24....20....18...15...12....2
Income tax share.%......17....37....59....70...87...98....2
I don't think many people realize these are the actual shares of income, tax, and real tax rates paid...
It is never easy to select the "best" vendor for a job. If you are lucky, you can pick a vendor that will do the job within your allotted contingency. Tracking vendors on the basis of past change-orders is unfair without a very large balance of projects, as the cause for the change becomes an issue. (Absolute % over award amount is meaningless; you need relative comparisons for every other bidder.)
Flat tax isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be a consumption tax, not an income tax, and it needs to exempt things that are necessary to life,
... that would be exactly what the Rich would love. They already own so many things, including luxuries, that it would then become impossible for anyone to ever reach their level of wealth again.
And is property a luxury? Imposing a sudden 30-40% on it would literally stagnate the real estate market for many many years. To buy a $150k house, you would need ($150k + 33% = $200k). $50k of that would be consumption tax? You would need an $80k down payment to even get a bank to loan you the remaining $120k and then you would end up with only $30k of equity.
And if you move to consumption tax, the Rich will just form a company that leases or rents them whatever luxury they want and avoid paying the tax. Hell, most manufacturers would probably institute their own leasing/renting options. What are you going to do, tax the manufacturer for making a product? Oh, you want to tax the lease terms? Company creates membership, leases multi-million dollar jets for $1, only available to members. Membership requires a $50 million safety deposit.
The stereotypical hyper-efficient corporation is a myth - most of us know of stunning wastes of money at our own employer.
Can you say "Six Sigma"?
No, that's called the ability to generate income, dumbass.
Now let me ask you again. Why are you talking about momentary income when you should be talking about long-term ability to produce income?
Umm.... the phrase "vote with your dollars"?
I'm somehow suspecting the answer is "fuck the poor, let them die", but I'm curious if you have an alternative.
You narcissistic moron, what makes you think the poor need you to take care of them? What gives you the right to force other people to take care of the "poor"?
What is "poor"? I think poor means that you are too poor to buy food. Well, here in the US, the "poor" are OBESE! They have cars, cell phones, televisions, cable tv and lots to eat. Have you ever stopped to think maybe the government is doing a little TOO MUCH for these "poor" people.
Get a clue, these people are dependent on the government which only serves to keep them dependent on the government. A nice pliable electorate.
> Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers [berkeley.edu] and found
> that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%.
Figures. Idiots. Long before you get to rates anywhere that high tax avoidance becomes far more profitable than income generation. Think about it and that doesn't even pass the most basic smell test. Lets put some round numbers in and see what happens in the real world.
Assume your top rate of 70% kicks in at a half million of income and you were making a mill a year when the socialists took over. As soon as you get done with your accountants you will renegotiate your taxable income down to the half million mark and that other half million will go elsewhere. Shelters, indirect things you won't exactly control but will gain indirect benefits from, the details will depend on your lawyers, accountants and lobbyists but the point is you can now lose 70% to overhead, graft, ineffeciency, paying that swarm of lawyers and accountants, etc. and still be ahead of the game. Meanwhile the gravel in the gears of society introduced by the overhead lower total GDP. Guess who gets hurt? See Europe.
Democrat delenda est
You talk about how things ought to be "grounded in logic", and then later on you're all "All you liberals are the same..." and the kicker - "So far Romney (tempered as he will be by Ryan) is the only reasonable choice for president, if you do not want the government to collapse."
You're nuts, dude, just a right-wing gasbag.
Your number aren't totally accurate given the $5.25 is for companies making less then 500k a year and it's $6.15 is they make less then $635k a year and that's only for companies exempt from the federal min wage of $7.25 and only 3.1% of the population in Minnesota makes $6.55 or less and that doesn't include tips and such
http://www.dli.mn.gov/RS/PDF/09minwage.pdf
Perhaps you would be happier in the Liberatarian Paradise of Somalia.
Kucinich is a very liberal Democrat who's leaving Congress this January after being defeated in a primary election by a more moderate colleague.
Clarification. The Republican's pushed hard to have districts restructured. In the process they conveniently killed off Kucinich's district. What remained was absorbed into a bordering district, held by longtime incumbent Marcy Kaptur... a much more moderate Democrat.
Kucinich had faithfully served his district for almost a decade. He didn't lose by anything I would call a democratic process. He was thrown to the wolves by a system out to get people just like him. I realize most people at the national level see him as a "joke candidate" due to some bogus questions asked of him during his presidential campaign. Those of us in Ohio however know that he has a lot of great ideas, and certainly stands out amongst most of his peers in that regard.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Flat rate income tax is not the answer, most of those 60k pages are already dedicated to defining "income". Someone who "earns" a bazillion dollars a year is using up a far larger percentage of the infrastructure we all paid for than just one man. Nobody makes anything without the tacit support of the society they find themselves in, take away that support and bazillion dollar jobs will disappear. Also I don't understand why you would want to support a tax system that is clearly detrimental to your own self-interest, as you demonstrated in your post rich people don't do that.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Back in college I worked at a restaraunt. The dishwasher there was a nice guy, and a good worker. Not a rocket scientist. He'd been working there a very long time. He'd been turning down raises for a decade, not because he wanted less money, but because it would put him above some arbitrary line that allowed him to have low rent housing. That's the kind of sillyness that 'step' based systems encourage, whether they be in assistance programs or part of the tax code.
One thing that never seems to get much mention is that you can have a "simple" progressive tax. I think people very much like the idea of a flat tax because it seems simple and fair. I also think the "skin in the game" argument has merit. There is no reason we can't do something reasonable like say 5% of income at the bottom, XX% at the top, and a nice smooth line between those two whose equation calculates your taxes. Screw deductions. You pay on your real income. No loop holes, the super rich don't get off, everyone has stake (and a reason to pay attention to gov't efficienty), and it's simple. If people can't afford to pay 5% in taxes, then jack the mimimum wage to a reasonable level. The money comes from somewhere anyway, paid to the government or paid to workers. The mechanisms for the payments are very important even of the dollars in your pocket remains the same.
It seems absurd to me that with capital gains you are taxed less than someone who actually had to earn that money. It seems equally absurd that 50% of americans don't pay any taxes at all, and a good chunk of those actually get money back.
When you have to depend on the goverment just to make ends meet, that is a very, very bad thing. And that is what 50%+ of us do.
The government won't be taking half in your scenario*.
They would be taking half of the profit.
Just like they take half the profit from people's labor income in your scenario.
It's a capital gains tax - If you bought a stock for $1 and sold it immediately for the same price you would owe $0, not $0.50.
That's the deal workers get; it seems only fair for capitalists to get it too. Bracketed rates on capital gains income would make a lot of sense, too.
* Won't argue about rates right now, but as a sole proprietor in NYC taking the extra 7.5% SSI hit my effective rate was never above 40%.
Have you ever tried making a budget with income below the poverty line? It's fairly enlightening. Any cut hurts, even just 5%. The GP didn't mean "feel" in a pseudo-psychological viewpoint, but in a "how much money do I have left" viewpoint. The guy making 100k/year, if getting higher taxes, will hold off on the 2012 TV and keep the 2010 one, or he'll take a smaller car next time, or he'll do 3-week vacations every two years instead of every year. The guy making 20k/year can't cut shit. He's already tight between the rent, food, transportation, hygiene, school/business and perhaps the occasional entertainment.
If you can't realize that living off 90k instead of 100k is much easier than living off 18k instead of 20k, you haven't put much thought into it.
> You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you?
Ass. It's not in question, as testified to by the fact that most of us don't live in caves or thatched huts anymore. As usual, context (and applicability thereto) is everything, and while making sweeping assertions about complex systems might get you ideological brownie points, it illuminates nothing.
Much of the American working class has, in large part, become obsolete and permanently redundant, at least in their old roles. The only solution for them is to create something new. Trickle-down is a phenomenon, not a guarantee.
You know, sadly enough.......just because he does P90X....he's pretty much now qualified as the MOST fit person for the job of running the US.......well, after Romney gets done with his term I guess....but hell, wish he was going for #1 spot...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The consumption tax only makes sense for those who are working.
My wife and I worked very hard during our lives and saved a lot of money. Much of that money we paid upwards of 50% in income taxes (federal, state and local). We didn't get a pension with our jobs and our retirement fund is precisely the amount of money we have in savings.
Now that we've paid tax on all of our income and saved our money you're suggesting that we now pay a consumption tax that's large enough to cover all that would be lost with the elimination of an income tax. We are not a fixed income retirement couple - we are a zero income retirement couple living off of our savings. The only income we get is dividend and interest income - with effective interest rates currently at or below zero.
We need a fundamental tax overhaul:
If there's an income tax then everyone who has income should pay it.
If there's a property tax then everyone with property should pay it.
If there's a sales tax then everyone who buys something should pay it.
I believe that much of the mess we're in is because we stopped treating taxes as a source of income and started treating taxes as a method of societal control with incentives and punishments. Eliminate deductions, go to a flat rate on income and a flat rate on property taxes.
The town in which I used to live, San Carlos, CA, implemented a parcel fee (an addition to the property tax). New taxes in California require a 2/3rds vote to pass. The town exempted anyone over 65 from paying the tax but still allowed them to vote for it. People talk about Proposition 13 destroying the property tax base in California because it freezes the assessed value of a house at the purchase price and sets the base property tax rate at that value. In the twelve years I owned that house in California my property tax bill went up over 50% because of the additional parcel fees. Pretty much each one was created by one special interest group going up against others. With the parcel fee I described above they didn't have enough renters (non-property owners) to vote for it so they exempted an age group in order to get it passed.
We've gone down a very dangerous path of pitting one group against another - vote for someone else to be taxed and vote for benefits for me.
Very true, but it's usually much more efficient to entirely shut down a program, and restart it from scratch. (It really shouldn't be, but it is.) The problem is in identifying and firing problem bureaucrats, and nobody is willing to do that. Instead, they slap them on the wrist, or transfer them around. Nothing ever changes.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
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Now apply this logic to every country and you'll see why it doesn't work this way.
Knowledge shouldn't be segregated by national borders. I'm not American or European, but I am still proud of what NASA and the LHC have achieved. It's not about any single country, but advancement of our race as a whole. Every country should take part.
Consider that somebody who has very little to write off, and who is making say 10 million a year. If that person pays that money to himself in salary, then here is the break down if he lives for example in Connecticut.
Why would you pay yourself? Why not just keep the money? You mean someone with a $10M a year business paying themselves, right?
What, single person business has no deductions? A high end whore? Is this Duece Bigalow's taxes? Or is it an artificial strawman?
A business is good if it can safely make 10% in profit. That means that $10M income to be taxed is off a $100M income, with 90% deductions. You're already under 10% taxes that way. SS taxes are capped at about the first $100k, so about $6k in taxes. Or are you in favor or removing the limits on SS taxable wages? No, you say? It's all a BS strawman? Oh, never mind then, carry on. Be sure to demand a birth certificate from your "foe", but not the tax plan or budget of your candidate of choice.
Ah. The old JNCP (Justification for Non-Competitive Procurement). My nemesis. You can try to use it but in my experience as a low level engineer the only time it gets approved is when there really are no other vendors that can do what you want. If you try to say use this machine shop or circuit board maker because they do a good job you won't get it approve.
Again just my experience.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Good point. Had forgotten about that.
Oh, come off it! Businesses and Gov't both screw up and get screwed. It's part of buying goods and services. The gov't stands out from private enterprise only because whenever society needs something done and it's too expensive to get anyone to pay for it we have the gov't do it.
That's one important difference, but it's not the "only" one.
The other really big difference is in revenue. Business ultimately must entice people to give them money. If they can't make ends meet, upper management must find a way to increase efficiency or they will go under. Government, on the other hand, chooses who will pay, and how much. If they can't make ends meet, they have the additional choice to unilaterally "increase revenue" (taxes). Businesses can't do that (usually, unless there aught to be an anti-trust case).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You look at Kucinich, who's own party establishment disliked him. Politically, he is outside the myopic American political paradigm with the likes of MLK, Ghandi. He knows it too. Not only that, he has more guts than all the elected officials combined. I remember when as mayor he had a contract taken out on his life for taking on organized crime. I've seen him walk around his city and people totally unprompted will just come up and hug him - no photo op, totally legit.
Even if you disagree with him, you know he can listen, learn and is still incorruptible. It is sad people like him can't be elected to higher office because our culture can't think critically - it continues to be high school elections where popular vapid self-absorbed people get elected to farcical positions of power so students can feel like they are taking part in something other than a college application item for the winner. In my school, we had a candidate who said it like it was at a much more mature level than most the adults could but she was suspended for speaking the truth (no foul languages or slander but simply upsetting the principal got her off the ballot. Same thing happens today on a larger scale...)
This is the typical "job creation" myth the Republicans like to sell. In reality though, it's demand that drives investment... it doesn't matter how much you invest if you have no customers buying your product. If the rich people spend their money on hookers and blow, that money still gets recirculated. Similarly, if they pay higher taxes, when the government spends the money it gets recirculated. Of course, some money is recirculated more than others... money spent on fighters and high-end yachts get recirculated less often than money spent on lower-ticket, more-used items.
2nd law of thermonomics
It seems equally absurd that 50% of americans don't pay any taxes at all, and a good chunk of those actually get money back.
You probably mean "income tax" and even then that's one of those technically true but misleading facts.
When you include payroll tax, that number goes down to 18.1%. Technically payroll tax is not income tax - only because it is taken out before the money is "yours," otherwise it is the same thing - it wouldn't be paid if you weren't earning an income.
Then when you rule out the retired, the number drops down below 8%.
What's left? 7% who have incomes less than $20K/yr and 1% of who-knows-what.
Include in those other taxes like property taxes (auto and real-estate, which renters indirectly pay) and sales taxes and it is much closer to the truth to say that 0% of the population pays no taxes.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If you can't convince other voters to shut down a given government program, then either canning it is not a good idea, or your fellow voters are stupid.
Uhm, yes... they are? When haven't they been?
And most of the time you can't vote down a given project, you can only vote out an incumbent. The new guy that replaces him won't shut down the project either, so, what have you bought?
(Yeah, I know, we should vote incumbents out frequently so that they might learn, but see point (1) about stupid voters.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
No, there are two important numbers. They are; the percentage of GDP that the federal government has historically collected in taxes (it has been around 18-19% for most of the last 50 years), and the percentage of GDP that the federal government is spending (it is currently around 25%). If by comparing those two numbers you are unable to understand that the problem in this country is that the federal government spends too much money, not that it does not tax enough, there is no hope for you.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It looks like you apply labels to ideas and ditch them based on that.
Also, you have to take into account that the rich are actually paying much more in absolute numbers, and getting the same or less public service.
I am not actually defending a flat tax, but simply asking people to acknowledge the facts.
It is a no-win situation. There are reasons revolutions periodically happen, and every new regime falls eventually into the same pattern as the previous overthrown regime.
Those at the top who don't even need to make any income at all, instead sitting on a pile of cash that the median American would need ten-thousand years to burn through. There can be no assets taxation, however, as that would cause people to hide their assets - and in fact spousal asset transferral prior to white-collar crime trials has become endemic where I live.
America's decline is not welcome. I sit in Australia, helpless and unhappy, as the model we aspired to and adopted as America's lapdog, crumbles into a feudal dystopia, or if I may be inflammatory, a "New Slave" model. We fell for the lofty words. We thought "Yes We Can" as well, and our hearts soared when we saw you try.
But you couldn't and you didn't because under the New Slave model, the new landlords are enormously rich and the wealth continues to drain from the poor and the working class, from whom the wealth is produced.
In the old days the slaves were not paid, did not have a vote, and were not free to do as they wished outside of work hours. But like livestock their food and their health was taken care of by their owners.
Now, however, their owners do not have responsibility to take care of such things, and the freed slaves must take care of those things out of their wages - sometimes not enough to do so. Without enough for basic sustenance, what freedom do you have outside of work hours anyway?
The America of Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" trilogy is not a very long bow to draw if you'll pardon the analogy.
Currently the federal government is spending around 25% of GDP. Historically, the federal government has never collected much above 19% of GDP in revenue. Tell me how you are going to cover that gap?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Who cares if trickle-down economics works or not. IT'S MY EFFING MONEY! It's mine, I spent *my* time earning it, and I want to keep what's mine.
Problem is, one man's waste is another man's paycheck...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I believe this would generate a huge black market of untaxed goods. I currently live in Argentina, and people just smuggle all personal luxury items in, one way or another. The only people who are affected are those trying to do things legally; it becomes cost-prohibitive for businesses, as the black market competition shuts everything down. If your country has a 30-40% tax on luxuries and imports, everyone will just buy them *outside* your country.
Yeah, some people believe that parents should have the right to kill their children if those children are too much of a burden, so why should parents who consider their children too much of a burden be forced to allow them to live?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
MOD PARENT THROUGH THE ROOF.
Thank you very much. The current tax system gets bullshit like this:http://earlyretirementextreme.com/marginal-earnings-when-working-is-no-longer-worth-it.html
The poster in question is an odd example (hates buying things, doesn't keep much in the bank). The poster in question would rather invest ALL of his money (something like 300-500K), and work for himself (no taxes) than work for others and pay the 30% tax that we have (SS+medicaid+tax rate). His argument is that he gets to be below the poverty line (no taxes), and directly see the benefit of his work (100% rather than 70%).
The current tax system is set up to encourage LESS WORK and MORE INVESTING. This is dumb.
It exists in the DoD, all contractors are rated yearly in a process called CPARs (I think it is Contractor Performance Assesment Review). The basic idea is that each contractor is rated and then all future contracts, this rating is considered. They have formulas that take into account cost, CPAR, and other methods (I don't think that this is the best way to do this). The CPARs are a very big deal to large contractors, because a bad rating will harm all future contracts. I feel like smaller companies care less because they can simply just become a new company.
JNCPs stopped last FY. Catch up.
All of us, no matter where we were from, need big science
Unfortunately, all of us, no matter in which country we are staying, are facing the exactly same problem - namely, the POLITICIANS
The POLITICIANS are a unique subgroup of humanoids. Their braincell function differently from those of others
They do not, and would never be able to, recognize SCIENCE, even if it hit them in their face
And they do not, and would never be able to, acknowledge the contribution of SCIENCE to the civilization of human beings
Therefore, I humbly propose some kind souls, with lots and lots of mullah, to fund a new big science research, to study the brain cells of the POLITICIANS
For the sake of humankind, this type of research is urgently needed, before human civilization collapses under the combined idiocy of the millions of POLITICIANS, big and small, local, national, or international, worldwide
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So waste and outright fraud on the taxpayer is OK because 1, it's an important project; and 2, everybody does it.
The guy equating taxes to theft by gunpoint is claiming strawman. That's rich.
--Jeremy
-- Jesus was a liberal
Jesus didn't seize all my bank accounts and make it illegal for me to conduct transactions about $10,000 privately. I believe you are the rich one from advocating taking other people's money. Maybe you could restore my property rights (since I have none because they are continually re-taxed) and I might believe the government is actually by and for the people.
Actually, this is not true. As evident by recent actions, living in other countries, e.g., New Zealand, still exposes you to the laws of the USA.
Since you wish to be so free and loose with your assertions; I wonder, can Brian Terry's parents get their son resurrected and move somewhere else so they don't have to sacrifice their son for the Obama Administration to arm foreign drug cartels with semi-automatic AK-style weapons. But your ilk is sucking that teat so much you see no problem with killing Federal Agents in order to cover up incompetence.
If the Executive Branch continues to arm drug cartels and official give up federal land to their incursions, we are most definitely in another country already.
Yes, but in this country, if you disagree enough we tank your home and burn you alive (and your children) to really fucking get the point across. Ah civilization!
Wish I had points! ***** Thank you.
Somehow Obama spends 2.9 million dollars a job on the bailout but you think accounting for all taxes in American only cost 1 billion dollars. Right.
In the example you gave, you mentioned 3.5 Million in salary, no deductions. So they would be paying 1.45% of 3,500,000. If their employer also pays 1.45%, that's irrelevant. And what's 1.45% of $3,500,000? That's about $50,000, as I said, not $290,000. You are wrong. Not even close. And arguing with people that you are right, when your own post proves you wrong (even if you used the incorrect 2.9%, you are still off by about a factor of 3.
Learn to love Alaska
You betcha. Alcoholic/drug using father and the whole bit. You can always change your circumstance. Democrats only want you to change it by owning you. I didn't improve my life by being jealous of others and busting my ass to take their money. Neither should you.
The US has some of the lowest taxes in the OECD. It is in no way a high-taxing country, even in the context of its relatively minimal publicly-funded services.
And this is a great example of why economics is not simple math. You do realize that your train of logic is precisely why 401k plans were created, right? And you do realize that 401k plans are precisely why the stock market is flooded with money, right? And you do realize that this flood of money doesn't translate into new business opportunities or economic growth so much as instability, a large amount of paper worth in stocks, and a general degeneration of the stock market?
Why? Because the stock market isn't for speculation but for investment. The idea isn't too far from real estate: that you buy a property that is inherently immune from inflation concerns and with a combination of continual maintenance/improvement (along with good luck/consideration of the future) will be sellable at a profit many years in the future. Of course if there's a sudden flood of money into real estate because it's a "money maker" then you just have a bubble. And trying to push more money into the bubble doesn't really do anything productive. After all, businesses have to actually be created/invested with the money or you just cause the rival good (be it stocks or real estate) to have ever higher prices in a bidding war that turns into little more than a game of chicken.
And as for business, well, 50% of new businesses fail (ie, close or bankrupt) in the first 5 years and a net operating loss can be used to counter future years of tax liabilities on their individual income tax returns (ie, if you own a company with a net loss of $3,000 (which means the company made no profit and hence pays no income tax), you can potentially deduct $3,000 from your personal income tax liability). Ie, the major problem/concern is the risk of starting a business, not taxes. Why? Because the market is already pretty saturated in meeting peoples demands as a point--that's the inherent truth of the convergence of supply and demand--and it's really hard to create demand or realize a new supply. There isn't much the government can do to fix that issue, expect possibly work to insure that potential customers have more disposable income, do basic/applied research to develop new supplies, or help in brainwashing people into needless consumption; but, those customers aren't likely to be rich people because, as you note, rich people are precisely the ones starting business or plunking them into stocks, not "wasting" it on hookers and blow.
In short, valuation (like price elasticity) is rarely a linear function let alone a gently sloping one indefinitely, even if it is decently linear on smaller scales within the scope of expectation. Once you try to engineer vast amounts of people to do something economic, you inherently warp the very formula you were using; it's no different than recommend that *everyone* take the less trodden trail without consideration that such will precisely cause the less trodden trail to plummet in quality to a massively used trail. The example, btw, shows not that you can't create formulas but merely that you have to include the proper considerations of what recommendations and social engineering will do. And I really don't think you've done that.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
We've invented "some" things? Too funny.
Ahh, so you're a Regressive. Glad to have that cleared up.
Ah, so you poison the well (and falsely, as well). Happy to have helped cleared that up.
Remember, you can't look dignified when your having fun! Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive
And unfortunately the people who are most dogmatic about preventing the waste of money actually cause the most waste of money.
Want to stop the DoD waste of money, just slash their budgets in half. Then if they come within 10% of their budget slash it by another 10%. Repeat.
Right now they have the mentality, spend all you get, or lose it from next years. So they always find a way to spend it, and justify it.
I wish I had a mod point for you, though I hope you won't need my mod point.
The fourth thing we don't need (which holds the other three together) is the "revolving door" between giant industrial corporations and government. It's too bad we don't have a separation of corporations and state, in the "... make no law establishing preference for a specific corporate entity or sector" sense.
I don't mean to say corporations (large special-purpose pools of private capital) shouldn't exist. On the contrary, they have been and could continue to be useful to society, aka the "public good". The heads of that corporation simply have no business being able to influence a democracy more than any random group of people with the same number of employees (and supporters) that corporation might happen to have. Undue influence is anathema to a democracy. I don't understand why this issue is not discussed more. It's hardly the only issue we face, but it's high on the list. Paul Ryan certainly isn't discussing it. Obama's pretty much silent too. Gee, I wonder why? It's not simple corruption. It's the way the system works.
No, it is actually proportional, with implications that the author might be willing to consider something slightly progressive. Really, these definitions are not that hard.
Remember, you can't look dignified when your having fun! Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive
Coincidentally, the CBO analysis of the Ryan plan shows a shutdown of the entire government within a decade except defense, medicare, and social security.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3708
Does that seem sane, smart, wise?
What is with this insistance on keeping a defense budget over the total of the next 20 nations combined? Could we perhaps get by on a defense budget over the total of the next 10 nations combined and leave a little money for the SEC, the agencies that prevent massive chemical spills, those who fund the national high way system, perhaps a small space program, etc?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Lol.
Companies waste BILLIONs of dollars on completely stupid shit which makes no sense.
Then they "fire" the CEO who pushed it- giving them hundreds of millions in "go away" money.
Then they lay off regular workers to pay for it. As soon as the company recovers, they do it again.
Anywhere you have concentration of power- you will find waste. The higher concentration of power- the higher the amount of waste.
2 million dollar parties with young people in togas.
2 year, $1.6 million layoff packages for top executives. (not for them, the 1 week per year- if you are lucky- 2 weeks flat if you are unluck retirement plans for regular workers).
company cars
"conferences" in hawaii, las vegas, and every other party spot in the world.
younger sex partners promoted unjustly who end up costing the companies millions of dollars anyway when things blow up.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's incorrect.
The poor pay over 12% of their income in state and local taxes while the wealthy pay .03%.
Taxes on the wealthy have dropped continuously since reagan.
Deficits have increased.
And the real income of the middle income and lower has dropped.
The poor you are talking about is mostly
a) poor people with children.
b) poor seniors.
It otherwise doesn't really apply. Poor, childless singles pay close to 10% of their income in federal income taxes.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If you had a perfectly safe non-invasive method that could remove the fetus from the mother (eg. a teleporter) to another willing person and it survives safe and healthy, then your argument would have some parallel.
Pretty much the only place you can get tax free munis with 5% is harrisburg and california.
It's more like 2.9% to 3.3% for tax free munis.
You would best balance with some good 6.3% taxable corporate bonds mixed in with 3.3% tax free munis.
However, if you live out of state and make over $7,000 income from tax free munis, you will pay state income tax.
Taxing investment income will not be "starting" but "resuming". It was cut. To 15%. It didn't work-- deficits are higher, there is less investment in america, not more.
Lower taxes no longer works- the money is invested overseas where the real wage slave labor is these days.
Not saying there is a good solution. And ignoring the looming singularity of $15k to $19k robots replacing humans.
But it will not be catastrophe if rates on investment income RETURN to their previous levels.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But why should I pay a higher percentage? I worked for my money, I went on the line and sacraficed and gambled it all to create my company and I am smarter and more effecient and creative than you are, and I won, I succeeded in life, I made something of worth, and I have been rewarded by wealth. Why should I pay more? because I'm better than you I should lose more? It's my money, it does not matter whether I can "survive more easily than you on 90 or 80% of my total income", it is all my money, all of it, 100%, and I should not pay more than you. You're the failure not me, you should be penelized. Had this been an evolutionary, and honorable approach, you'd be wiped out because you are unfit. Why should I support the failures of our world? failures like you?
Run an evolutionary algortihm, and set up the fitness function where the more fit agents are penelized for their creativity, inginuity and fitness. See with what kind of agents the population will become populated after a few generations. You will note that the fitness goes down instead of up. We cannot and should not reward failure.
Your rates are way too low to pay for the current government.
You need 25% of everything over the poverty line combined with 10% cuts to close the gap.
And then those at the poverty line would still be paying over 12% of their income in state and local taxes, licenses, fees, and excise taxes. Plus more property taxes hidden in their rent.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But you can't scare everyone into agreeing with you with universal health care alone. You'd have to arm the nurses.
The government gives you the property rights. Without the government, you'd have some other group of thugs with guns making sure that people don't just come and take your property. The government was here first, they got all the property, and you have to pay for it. Deal with it or move somewhere else, or do what you'd have to do in your anarcho-capitalist paradise and fight for it.
You anarcho-capitalists are laughable. You're like whiny children who are made that they can't do whatever they want with no concern for how everything fits together and no concern for human solidarity and organization. You live in a fantasy-world of just-so stories for how self-organization and the free market will magically optimize every problem, when we know that that is patently not true in the general case and in a lot of specific cases.
Do you not know anything about history? I'd take any western nation over the states of old. Really, if I don't pay my taxes, for example, it's a long process before I can even end up in jail, let alone killed. And you know why? Because we have rights built into our system and there have been court cases and laws that both allow for the government to take taxes, but also limit its ability to force you to pay over any given time period and the nature in which they force you to do so. That's not something you'd get in your anarcho-capitalist "paradise".
So yes, any group of people has the capability to be mean to other people. It's not unique to government. That's a silly strawman that I keep seeing pop up time and time again. The government is just another organization whose existence and power exists only inasmuch as the people that compose it and are stakeholders in it continue to give it that power. The same is true with any other organization, large or small. This applies to the anarcho-capitalist system as well (perhaps even more, since there's no government sapping the power of the variety of societal organizations, thus preventing them from being threats to the people).
You'll make a great Fox News propagandist. You have the dishonesty part down really well.
That's not a poisoning of the well. That's determining that someone espouses a position that is value-incompatible with someone else's.
You guys can't just find vague similarities between argument patterns and call them fallacies. That's plain wrong. For example, many people call all personal attacks ad hominems, even though most aren't. A true ad hominem is an argument in which the target is declared wrong *because* of some personal fault, rather than because of the nature of the argument. That is, saying "you're wrong and you're an idiot" is different from saying "you're wrong because you're an idiot".
And I don't want to use more than X MB/s of my internet connection, because if I need to, it bumps me up into a higher rate. Anything wrong with that? No.
This guy probably was facing a situation where he could get bumped out of low-rent housing (which he could afford) and then thrust into a world he couldn't afford. Your solution would only worsen that. At least the low-rent system allows people to have *some* place where they can get by. And when/if he gets a better job, he'd be able to make enough to afford not living in the low-rent situation.
Ryan's goal is to cut the deficit. So why is it a crime to want to spend less on everything? Dudes, we're out of money. He knows it, he recognizes it, he's down on all spending. Pick any pet project, he's down on the spending for it.
"Of-course the real boom in US economy was happening when there were no income or corporate or payroll taxes, but that's a separate issue. "
It is a separate issue and really has nothing or little to do with taxes and everything to do with the fact that vast new markets were opening up, combined with a population boom full of hungry people who could work (due to the lack of need of highly skilled labor).
Sure we'll do C.L.A.S.S. (Consuming Lunch and Simple Socializing) after we do L.U.N.C.H. (Lego Utilization for Negating Crisis Hierarchies).
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I completely agree with your statement that we need big science. I think the idea of NIF is great and the use of a national lab to host such a facility is great, but...
Scientists have become more adept at marketing and the sociology of government funding. You see the material you linked as glowing examples of scientific achievement. As a scientist familiar with fusion, I see a collection of half truths and misleading statements. They don't need to worry about me. With their size and mission they live or die by broad political and military support.
Too bad most of our money went to the war effort in Iraq, which I don't remember many Americans thinking that was really important. Kudos to the political party who keeps telling us that they're the fiscally responsible one, yet used executive power to start the Iraq conflict that ramped up governmental expenditures exponentially while simultaneously and irresponsibly lowering governmental revenue by giving tax breaks. I'm all for lowering taxes, but not when we are ramping up spending for a war. I do love how the war expenditures and lack of fiscal responsibility of the previous administration is being glossed over and all of a sudden all our debt problems come from social spending.
BTW Paul Ryan voted YES to declaring war in Iraq and voted YES to making the Bush tax count permanent. He also voted yes for an emergency $78 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact his entire voting record has been to increase defense spending which benefits his campaign contributors, while cutting taxes at the worst time possible. So how exactly is Ryan a fiscal conservative? Why do we have the urgent need to end or severely cut social programs (in his words "end Medicare are we know it") yet is constantly pushing more money to be sent to the military industrial complex?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The same can largely be said of the private sector as well.
But not said without error. The difference is that the private sector has to provide something of value at some point or eventually they run out of money.
Well, while 13% seems low, he paid more in real dollar taxes last year than you ever will in your life. Yep, get it straight, he paid for more roads, bridges, police, hospitals, than your envious ass ever will. He is rich, but he pays his taxes and he is not under any investigation for not paying them so he is within the law up to this point, and your argument affects Biden and Obama, and Hillary too. And last I checked Nancy Pelosi is also worth about 250 million. So get off the rich high horse because it isn't going to work.
In other words: Facts be damned, I reject reality and replace it with my own!
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It's very hard to measure the efficiency of theoretical science. In rare cases, a discovery can revolutionize the world. In some instances, discoveries can create new products. In others, there may be no practical value to the discovery, merely a stepping stone to something greater or merely a better grasp of the universe. Many things fail to produce any benefit except for knowing what probably doesn't work. All of these things are advancements, but there is a huge amount of variability.
Well, duh, that is why money was wasted paying twice for the same thing !
In the example you gave, you mentioned 3.5 Million in salary, no deductions. So they would be paying 1.45% of 3,500,000.
- so now I see what they mean, when they talk about the weird consequences of this non-education.
I "mention" what?
I said 10,000,000 dollars in yearly salary that the person would pay himself, which means that 3,5million is the federal income tax.
FICA is paid on 100% of earnings, not on 35% of it.
The person who pays himself a salary is a self employed individual, I am talking about a business owner, so he pays both, employee and employer portion, thus 2.9%, not 1.45%.
You are a disgrace.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
The government gives you the property rights. Without the government, you'd have some other group of thugs with guns making sure that people don't just come and take your property.
No, the government enforces your rights (or they should), it doesn't give them to you. Unless you want to claim that your right to life is also a gracious gift from the state as well, since without the government enforcing it you'd need some other group of thugs with guns to make sure that people didn't just come and kill you.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yet private sector corporations are often the ones the government turns to in order to implement a government project. The government doesn't build airplanes, Boeing actually does. Many of the cost overruns in government projects are actually due to the private corporation going over-budget, not due to the government itself.
Perhaps something can be done to have the government actually build factories in order to build planes? It would seem better that the public workforce actually produce public goods. The contracting out of these kinds of projects actually seems as one of the sources of waste - just as in a company you pay more for subcontracting out than doing in house. Why doesn't the government just in-house their projects? It would seem to provide more stability, accountability and security.
It's very hard to measure the efficiency of theoretical science.
Of course. But it's like the newspaper. One can't know the accuracy of stories about which one has no independent knowledge. But when you see a newspaper consistently get wrong stories about which you or your associates do have independent knowledge, then that's a solid indication that they aren't getting anything right.
Well, that's the case with US research funding. My experience has been that there are vast inefficiencies in the areas where I have some direct experience, here, theoretical physics and aerospace technology development. Further, there are times when one can see private and public projects operating side by side, for example, the Human Genome Project. Again, vast inefficiencies in the publicly funded science appear.
In others, there may be no practical value to the discovery, merely a stepping stone to something greater or merely a better grasp of the universe.
Why doesn't that have practical value? I tire of arguments that supposedly suppose basic research by claiming that research is too useless for privately funded organizations to attempt, but not too useless for publicly funded organizations to attempt. It is a fundamentally unscientific attitude.
This is where bosses and management are actually worth good money when do there job. It's on selecting outside venders, getting a share of the profit means they want to find a reasonable priced vendor. But they also need to be in it for the long-haul and understand getting the job done the correctly the first time is more cost effect and gives the company better a reputation. So they can balance this important factors to get a good vendor.
> No, the government enforces your rights (or they should)
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
> Unless you want to claim that your right to life is also a gracious gift from the state as well
Some governments don't even pretend...
I seriously doubt you're as ignorant as you sound. Please refrain from putting popular fantasy forward as "the correct" way to frame a discussion. It's not constructive.
Not coincidentally, everyplace with a decent standard of living has a very expensive government.
That's like saying, "Every place with pond scum has water."
DATABASE WOW WOW
How do Nordic countries afford to have all those amenities and MUCH more (like free higher education for all), without having major problems?
That's right: by taxing the rich.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's not other people's money. They paid the taxes, now it no longer belongs to them. Get it through your thick Glenn Beck-fed skull.
The summary is very biased. You people don't seem to understand that not wanting the Federal Government to be involved with X is not the same thing as not understanding the value of X, disliking X, or being opposed to X's existence!
Government is a monopoly on violence - nothing more. Furthermore, the U.S. Federal Government is an alliance of 50 already-overgrown governments created to keep the redcoats out. It isn't an all-knowing authority on science, art, philosophy, finance, or anything else.
(Signed: Alex Libman's sockpuppet.)
If we "need big science", then go raise the money from people who contribute voluntarily and do it yourself. Funding science projects is not a valid purpose of government.
So, by your logic, anyone who didn't run away from the plantation was just a volunteer agreeing to the social contract?
Nice stumping for slavery, Massa.
You haven't cited anything to support this.
Isn't it obvious?
The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
Odds are, you're totally off base. This country is saturated with taxes. Hint: most of the time, they're not called "taxes."
The only realistic way of doing it is to end contracting and start doing it all internally as much as possible. Everyone might joke and laugh about lazy government workers but the reality is once bits start getting privatised the corruption sets in. Lobbyists, to contractors, no bid contracts and, blatant corrupt acceptance of every bloated cost change.
Paul Ryan on science, easy as an Ayn Rand Objectvist, show the money trail and how Paul Ryan, will personally benefit by it and you why he took any particular science issue on, why he publicly changed his mind and be able to guess, depending upon where the big money is going and how the votes are balancing out, all of his future public science opinions.
Face Paul Ryan is a empty public commercial for absolutely anything lobbyists will pay to put in his mouth, it's the Ayn Rand objectivist way, be true only to your own personal benefit, anything else is false, sacrifice everyone and anything to feed your own ego.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If you actually read the paper, you'd have seen that they specifically include tax avoidance in their calculations.
I am officially gone from
And that, in a nutshell, is the whole fallacy of the "small government" retards. Instead of your proposal - intelligently optimizing - they go for the nuclear solution. From orbit. No matter if that leaves us with a completely deregulated robber baron economy dropping the whole middle class into wage slavery - but hey, that's the holy market. Small gubbermint, yeah!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Have you ever tried making a budget with income below the poverty line? It's fairly enlightening. Any cut hurts, even just 5%. The GP didn't mean "feel" in a pseudo-psychological viewpoint, but in a "how much money do I have left" viewpoint. The guy making 100k/year, if getting higher taxes, will hold off on the 2012 TV and keep the 2010 one, or he'll take a smaller car next time, or he'll do 3-week vacations every two years instead of every year. The guy making 20k/year can't cut shit. He's already tight between the rent, food, transportation, hygiene, school/business and perhaps the occasional entertainment.
The 100k guy in your example is textbook definition of poor. He spends the majority of his money on useless bullshit. I happen to be living on around 20k income right now (now self employed after having been paid well into the six figures in prior jobs) and it's tight but you know what, my situation is improving because I'm spending my money wisely, i.e. investing it in assets (i.e. my business), not blowing it on crap like your clueless 100k wage slave.
LOL at each and every one of your examples:
1) 2010 TV vs 2012. I don't even own a TV! The last one I did own was a 1989 model RCA cabinet TV I found in a house I moved into. I left it in my last place because I simply didn't need it. I download the shows I want to watch for free off bittorrent, and do without the commercials and brainwashing, thanks.
2) "take a smaller car next time" i.e. he's one of those stupid asses who's always trading in for a new car every so often, or worse yet leasing. The dealership and the banks love this guy. He's making them rich, and himself poor.
3) Taking less vacations. Yet another example illustrating how your 100k guy just doesn't fucking get it. He's spending his entire life running on the hampster wheel, making everyone else rich while ensuring he stays poor. If only he were to focus his efforts into making himself rich by buying assets and investing in profitable businesses, thus increasing his passive income, he could work less.....worry less.....and vacation more. In fact if he does things right, his entire life will feel like a vacation.
I'm only making 20k/year right now.....but I only work ~ 2 hours a day, spending the rest of the time doing what I want, mostly reading and learning. By a year from now I will have at least doubled my income and be on track to tripling and quadrupling sales. I will continue to reinvest and continue to grow my business. I am developing routines which will enable me to hire others and gradually build a system which produces millions of dollars worth of product reliably and consistently.....all without such utterly ridiculous notions as working 20+ hour days and going without sleep for weeks on end.
Any 20k/year earner could do what I'm doing. Instead they're "trying to keep up with the Joneses" i.e. the 100k wage slave: spending every dime they earn, wasting most of it, and spinning their wheels.
Retirement won't be kind to either of them.
Interesting. I haven't heard about it. What is the new sole source procedure? I am not a purchasing person so I haven't run into this yet.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I think most federal agencies do this. Like I said the problem is they are legal issues and many times the contractor can do just enough to meet your requirements.
Did you ever write requirements? My experience in private industry was wet would sit down with potential vendors and contractors and discuss the project. They would ask questions to get a better idea of what we wanted and this would improve the requirements from having different groups with different views looking at it. They would make the requirements better because it was in their interest.
These meetings were also like an interview so we could get an idea of what they were like.
In the government I can't do this. I have to be very careful talking to vendors because if I give specific information out before I release a request for proposal I could get in trouble. I understand why it's done that way.
I'm spending tax dollars so it is only fair that any company that can do the work should be allowed to bid and not just the few I know. But is requires lots of time to develop good requirements and it's not very efficient.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
One interesting corollary to the fact you can't get rid of all waste in any program (government or otherwise) is that if you under-fund a program that kernel of waste becomes a larger fraction of the overall budget.
I've seen both scenarios: programs which are so underfunded they focus entirely on surviving instead of producing results, and programs so over-funded the challenge is to get all the cash dumped in their laps spent so as to avoid funding cuts next year.
In other words: any program has an *optimal* funding level with respect to efficiency. Above or below that level financial efficiency drops. Typically that level is *lean* -- that forces administrators to make tough choices and forgo things that would clearly be useful because they just aren't cost effective.
Now what I've never seen is a program that got more efficient via funding cuts. The reason is that government programs are divided into two groups: sacred cows that are wildly overfunded, and programs that are underfunded to pay for those sacred cows. The greatest sacred cow in the US budget is defense. Everyone's for a strong defense, and most people if given a choice would opt for a *stronger* defense, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal, *because when it comes to defense we use spending to keep score*. In other words, we use spending levels as a proxy for strength; if we spend more for defense this year, we assume we have a stronger defense; if we spend less, we assume our defense must be weaker.
In fact, "sacred cows" can be detected by this simple test: is *spending* the measure of accomplishment? We can see this in the recent attack on President Obama for "cutting Medicare", a "cut" *which involved no benefit reductions*. Medicare is a sacred cow, so the spending level is what matters politically, not what the program accomplishes.
If we measure "smaller government" by "lower Federal expenditures" (admittedly a simplistic measure), then as long as we have sacred cows government will never get much smaller. Look at the text of the article, in which we learn that the core of Mr. Ryan's plan for reducing the size of government focuses on "discretionary non-defense spending", a spending category which currently amounts to *a mere 15% of the Federal Budget*. If that category was zeroed out (including nearly all science), spending would not drop very much, but that's not Ryan's plan. His plan is to slow the growth of discretionary non-defense spending *over the next decade*. In other words his plan for smaller government is to spend more money on sacred cows and softening the tax blow by cutting relatively minor expenditures like scientific research.
I'll say this for Ryan: he is (or rather *was*) willing to take on the Medicare sacred cow. But he's not willing to take on the defense sacred cow. In that he is not unusual. There are plenty of politicians who are willing to take on *some* sacred cows, but none are willing to take on *all* of them. And as long as there are *any* sacred cows, spending won't ever decrease. Occasionally a coalition is able to kill a single sacred cow, but never has that resulted in federal spending decreasing. It results in money going to other sacred cows, sometimes with a tax rate cut and borrowing increase to produce the *illusion* of smaller government.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on.
Not true. It is actually not rocket science to work this one out. The last few times we cut taxes (Bush Jr., stimulus tax cuts with Obama) revenues went down, and the last few times we raised taxes (Bush Sr, Clinton) total receipts went up.
Now if you look at the Laffer Curve there is only one place when this can happen: if you are on the wrong side of the curve.
The bottom half doesn't get the earned income tax credit -- only the extremely poor (or those with lots of kids) get that. Most of the bottom half pays federal income tax as well. Individuals making $15K/yr are most definitely paying federal income tax, for example, and are not getting the EIC.
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Well, it just so happens that every reasonable flat tax proposal has not been a perfectly flat tax. For instance, the Herman Cain fellow that ran for Repub. nomination had flat tax plans that had a poverty cutoff. Any money made above and beyond that level was taxed. Also known as "progressive" taxation. Our current income tax system is the same way.
If you want to complain about regressive taxes, complain about FISA taxes. Only the poor and lower-middle brackets pay the full ~13%.
Any contractor can be given a 'Cause letter' that basically states they are getting terminated due to failure on the contractors part. This can and will have a huge negative affect on future contracts that the contrator bids on. It is up to government officials to ensure contractors are doing their jobs.
Have you ever tried making a budget with income below the poverty line?
Yes. What point were you trying to make given that my answer is 'yes?'
The guy making 20K/year already pays a much lower rate than the guy making 100K/year as it is, yet still you complain, proving that trying to justify the general case with extreme examples is fallacious. We are already using the solution you recommend, but here you are still complaining about it.
The stupid solution is the simple arithmetic solution. Maximize todays tax revenue by fucking with tax rates without regard for future tax revenue.
The smart solution is the differential calculus solution. Maximize future tax revenue without any regard for todays tax revenue.
How exactly do you think people become rich enough to never have to work again? Do you think its by maximizing todays income, or by maximizing tomorrows?
If we maximize GDP growth then it wont be long before a flat 1% tax rate on all transactions (= $150 billion today) would cover all the services that we currently provide. We could provide even more services. Have far more extensive safety nets. Have a greater infrastructure than is even dreamed about today.
Jealousy is the result of people too stupid to think about their future. Jealousy is present-tense idiocy. People caught up in instant gratification make stupid decisions and propose stupid solutions.
"His name was James Damore."
Why are you talking about momentary income when you should be talking about long-term ability to produce income?
I'm not. I'm talking about income, period.
No matter how you slice it, you can only take someones wealth away once. So you've paid for this years budget shortfall. What about next years?
Do you really think that confiscating wealth is a solution to anything? Every time you mention wealth you are being completely stupid. Taxing wealth is fucking stupid. Let me repeat that. Taxing wealth is a fucking stupid idea. Even a 5th grader knows that. Stop being stupid.
"His name was James Damore."
The fact that most people actually WANT a government able to do something instead of a libertarian warlord-dominated hellhole leads - by means of democratic structures - to what we have. You can decry that as stupid, but that only shows your position regarding democracy.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
For those who've been denied the thrill of the experience, Six Sigma is Scientology for corporations...
gov't can't do that in a democracy, only in a dictatorship. Businesses can and will OTOH can use Monopoly tactics to raise revenue, use laws to put competitors out of business, etc.
The trouble is you're comparing the best of business (freemarket competition resulting in better and cheaper products) to the worst of gov't (fascist dictatorships oppressing their people) and expecting us all to swallow it. Nice try though.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I see you're trying to save money by omitting the hyphen from the MDS designators. Which is invalid; their correct designators are B-1, B-2, F-22 and F-35.
I am pretty sure Jesus (if he existed at all) didn't instruct you to shirk all your responsibilities to society and to be a freeloader. As he said on the mount "Fuck you, I got mine", right?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
And this is happening where, except very rarely by accident and continuously in your delusion of being a superior man not owing anything to society?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Proof that your talking out of your basement and out of your ass, as most of you rightwingers do. Have you ever seen the inner workings of a multinational corp?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
They are only working on this as a more reliable and easier method to ignite a hydrogen fusion bomb.
That's incorrect. Because of the nuclear test ban treaties, you cannot detonate test bombs anymore. Testing bombs is all computer simulated. NIF is built to validate the results of these code runs.
The answer to waste in a program isn't always to shut down the program. Sometimes you should get rid of the waste within the program.
If you remove waste, it will return in another form. If you create incentive to reduce waste, it will stay gone. Private industry already has that incentive. Can it really be created withing government programs? The precedent is mixed.
Of course politifacts is useless when you made up your own batshit crazy pseudoreality already.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
"and it's one of the most impressive scientific endeavours we've undertaken [llnl.gov]."
Only if one defines "impressive" as "large", which you continue to argue throughout.
I would argue that the determination of the electron mass ratio, Alain Aspect's demonstration of Bell's Inequalities, and Sabine's study of sunspots are all far more relevant, elegant, impressive and useful.
"We NEED big science"
Why? After the 1980s, big science has been relatively useless, at least outside astronomy which isn't that big. Fermi spent a decade improving the measure of the top quark mass, which costs a couple hundred million and told us exactly nothing.
Sorry, big science is dead.
Sorry but I don't really see your post as making any sense and think you've just listened to people looking for an excuse to remove an existing group and put their own cronies into a new sinecure with no troublesome old hands to make waves.
If you want to actually get to a more concrete goal than bums on seats it makes more sense to learn from mistakes than to ignore them and repeat them with a different group of people (ie. starting from scratch).
I saw such pointless behaviour as you suggest with a new CEO that decided everything was wrong and proceeded to neuter an effective electricity generation and transmission system and turn it into divided warring fiefdoms, then moved on to another country to be responsible for a five week power outage of their national capital (he'd sacked the staff that could have fixed it long before the second cable failed let alone in less than that five weeks). Just throwing everything that works away and starting again with well connected clueless newbies a slow motion train crash in action.
In the case of the ignition facility, it's got a fair bit of international press and is something the USA should be proud of instead of being demonised as a source of waste.
We could get rid of a handful of things we don't need and be able to pay for the things we do need!
You believe this because you haven't looked at the numbers. Cutting the military will help for a while, but eventually other expenses will become too much. Look at this graph. If you had actually looked at the numbers, you would have known this. Next time look at the numbers, or you'll look like an idiot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think science would gain overall if projects like NIF were scrapped, half that money is saved, and the other half invested in education and "small science". Unfortunately, even Ryan probably wouldn't have the clout to pull that off.
Considering that the largest private body involved in that was a charity in the UK it is a very odd comparison to make and it would be hard to make any valid conclusions about US public versus US private research from it. With that the case, why exactly are you putting it up as an example? If you are pushing an agenda why not use something real as an example instead of a fallacy?
You forgot all those silicon valley advances, like that chip invented by that Hungarian guy :)
Just like the light bulb there were a lot of people working on that stuff all over the world at the same time once a few things were published that led to the breakthrough. The Russian program descended directly from a pioneer there (same problem with it being ignored until the 1940s), and there were others in other countries. Of course Germany put a lot of resources into their rockets and that shaped everything since. Each V1 was probably worth a hundred tanks in effort and each V2 a few U-boats so it's probably just was well for the allies that they did.
It was a popular war for just long enough to be voted in for a second term. That's what the "mission accomplished" banner and using the navy in a political PR exercise was for. The specially tailored clown suit designed to look like a flight suit only more so was an especially depressing touch.
... are three things: budget reform, tax reform, and entitlement reform.
President Obama has shown no interest in reform of any kind; I guess he must be viewed as a reactionary, interested only in keeping and amassing power.
It is no wonder that he views Paul Ryan as a mortal threat to this power.
As for cuts in non-discretionary domestic spending, that is what you get when entitlements grow uncontrollably and absorb an ever increasing share of GDP.
The article mentioned federal spending on "General Science, Space, and Technology", line 250 in the budget documents. I looked for it in the Historical Tables and it appears that the Obama administration has kept this spending flat since 2009 and expects no increases through FY 2017. Assuming that there will be inflation, this means Obama plans cuts in real spending for science.
If you oppose these spending cuts for scientific research, then you should vote for a candidate who is interested in cutting entitlement spending. Then there may actually be resources available for basic science, for space exploration, and other technology research. You really must vote for the team of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
Oh, look, it is S.Petry. Half of the time spouting christianity in his post history, half of the time advocating to fuck the poor in the ass with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat, just as Jesus commanded from the mount. Less than nothing.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The problem is in identifying and firing problem bureaucrats, and nobody is willing to do that. Instead, they slap them on the wrist, or transfer them around.
[citation needed]
Do you have any examples that you can cite where the news media discussed a report from somebody the US government (like the GAO or whatever) that made this statement?
The problem is in identifying and firing problem bureaucrats, and nobody is willing to do that. Instead, they slap them on the wrist, or transfer them around.
[citation needed]
You know this how?
I'm glad Ryan has the guts to make the hard decisions that need to be made and deal with the political fallout.
Yeah! I'm glad he's shredding the budget for nearly every aspect of U.S. government to make more room for increases in military spending, for which the U.S. already accounts for over (according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org]) 40% of the entire world's military spending, as well as 4.97 times the amount of China, the world's #2 biggest military spender. The world may pass us by in scientific knowledge, innovation and technology, but by golly we got our guns!
All sardonic social commentary aside, tax rates, at least on the wealthiest of Americans (that's not you nor I, BTW), is the lowest it's been in over half a century.
Yet those rich pay the vast majority of income taxes, well more than their share of the total income. How much is enough?
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The 10% number is absurd, and would not fund the bare necessities of maintaining a 1st world country. Also, a "flat tax" is never actually a flat tax - there are no serious proposals that impose the same burden (regressive) on everyone.
The only modern flat tax proposals I'm aware of (since Dick Armey 30 years ago) consist of 2 numbers: A threshold, and a rate. The threshold is the amount of income that is not taxed (let's say the first $40k of income), and the rate is the percentage at which the remainder of income is taxed (let's say 30%). These numbers are juggled to obtain whatever income the government needs to function, and my numbers are for illustration purposes only.
So a person earning $35k will pay $0 in taxes. A person earning $100k will pay 30% of $60k, or $18k. A person earning $6mil would pay $1.8mil (-rounding).
Typically, no deductions allowed, although that puts many government employees out of work, upsets many taxpayers, and is politically unlikely. But the point is that the basic premise is not regressive; the degree of progressivity has to do entirely with the balance between the 2 numbers.
10% was good enough for God, it should be good enough for the US Government.
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Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.
We had those top marginal tax rates in the past - remember when Kennedy cut down from th 90% marginal tax rate? Of course, back then the Federal Government was taking in about half the dollars per capita, in constant dollars - there were a LOT more exemptions. The actual effective tax rate was considerably lower (in 1955-1963, the Federal Government received roughly $3100 per US citizen in 2009 dollars, compared to the $6600 it received in 2009). Marginal tax rates were much higher, but the effective tax rate was lower because of the exemptions.
As far as the single year of 2001 - there was a little thing called 9/11, and the tail end of the dot-com bubble that caused revenues to drop considerably. Check revenues in 2002 and 2003...
But let's go back to those hey-day years of the Clinton Administration. Look at the revenues the Federal Government had in 1999 - and compare it to the revenues today. About the same. Literally, the Federal Government is making as much money today as it did back in those glory days when all the talk was about the budget surplus. The difference? Spending was VASTLY lower than it is today. The Federal Government has exploded in size in the last 12 years, way beyond inflation, population growth, or any other metric than naked desire for power and control.
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That's incorrect.
The poor pay over 12% of their income in state and local taxes while the wealthy pay .03%.
The wealthy pay, on average, 24% of their income in Federal income taxes while the poor pay less than 2%.
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Oh god, you're a flat taxer too.
So while we save "billion" on record keeping etc, where are we going to make up all this lost income? Because that would be a HUGE tax break to me, so I can't really imagine the budget would be even vaguely balanced on the whole.
I'm somehow suspecting the answer is "fuck the poor, let them die", but I'm curious if you have an alternative.
It's not such a tax hit as you think. The AGI in 2009 (after all those deductions) was $7.8 trillion nation-wide. Ten percent of that would be $780 billion. Actual taxes paid were $865 billion - about an $85 billion difference. Chump-change in the face of $1.4 trillion deficits.
Eliminate a single deduction - mortgage interest - and you'd easily have an AGI above $9 trillion, meaning that flat 10% would actually collect MORE taxes. No hole blown in the budget.
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Ten percent. For everybody with absolutely no deductions, classes of income (capital gains, unearned, etc) credits (refundable or none) or anything.
Not to mention the fact that the 10% would not actually bring in enough revenue.
Actually it would. Right now, based upon AGI - meaning WITH those deductions - a flat 10% would be nearly revenue-neutral ($85 billion difference between actual collected and the theoretical 10% of AGI). Eliminate the deductions and we'd definitely have more income tax revenue than we do currently.
But why go with a flat rate? How about everybody pay their fair share? Like when you go out for pizza with 3 friends - you have a $30 bill, you split it 4 ways. Let's take the $3.8 trillion budget and split it 310 million ways and give every one a $12,260 bill for their share of the Federal Government. We all benefit from roads, and the FDA, and space programs and the military. So let's go REALLY flat and equitable and equal shares - every one gets to pony up a $1000 check a month to the Feds.
Or is that not fair?
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Not only every single government-run program and facility, but every single *private* enterprise I've been involved with over a 25 year career has had a great or lessor degree of waste.
Waste is a byproduct of human activity, be it building something, planning something or running something. I get so sick of people only harping on government waste as it implies that private companies do not experience the same foibles, mistakes and waste.
Yep. I work for one now, the second one I've worked for. And I've seen the inner workings of a few government organization. That's why I have the opinions I have on the relative efficiency of the two.
I, of course, refer to Celera Corporation and its "shotgun method" which radically sped up the Human Genome Project.
Your rates are way too low to pay for the current government.
You need 25% of everything over the poverty line combined with 10% cuts to close the gap.
And then those at the poverty line would still be paying over 12% of their income in state and local taxes, licenses, fees, and excise taxes. Plus more property taxes hidden in their rent.
In 1957, the Federal Government made, in constant dollars, about $2800 per capita. In 2010 it was about $6200 - more than double. Why did I choose 1957? It was the last year we actually had a real surplus, we paid down the debt. In 1957, our Federal Government received less than HALF of what it does now, per capita and in constant dollars, and it actually had a real (not just budget) surplus. And this is when we were building those freeways, not just maintaining them...
The problem is NOT that we don't have enough revenue - it's that the Federal Government has exploded in size and scope. Spending is the problem, not tax revenues.
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Perhaps you have a vested interest in government spending on big science?
The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
What we have in the US is drastically different, unfair, and unconstitutional. There are 60,000 plus pages of tax laws to back my statement.
Fully agree.
We currently have a middle class paying upwards of 40% in taxes (FICA/Fed/State/City). We have the top 1% of wealth paying 10-17%, and that's only on the income they claim to make in the US.
Wrong. There are always a few exceptions to the rule, but the top 1% pay about 24% in income tax alone. And the average is just under $1 million in AGI, so they are paying an effective FICA/SSI rate around 1.7%. And I don't know how it is in your state, but here in CA (and other states I've lived) there is NO exemption above a certain income point, and usually a progressive tax rate applied as well.
It's a myth the rich don't pay an equivalent tax rate - they actually do. The top 1% (of which, interestingly, President Obama was firmly within back in 2008 when he ran on his populist campaign) pay, on average, a much higher total tax rate than the middle class.
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The tax should be even at all levels of income, period end of statement. That is the Constitutional answer, as well as the most logical and "Fair". If I pay 13%, then some person making a bazillion dollars a year should pay 13%. If that person pays 10%, I pay 10%.
No. This is inherently Regressive, and has absolutely nothing to do with "Constitutionality".
So when you go out to dinner with friends, do you split the bill based upon income? Or do you just divide X number of ways - that "regressive" way?
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Actually Washington is the highest at $9.04 per hour.
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Are you in management then? Or where does this delusion about the supposed efficiency of private bureaucracies come from?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Look at Romney. Doesn't pay taxes at all for ten years, then pays 15% for a couple years after he decides he might run for president. Meanwhile I'm giving over a third of everything I have to the government.
Source? Other than Reid's "invisible friend"? I can guarantee anyone with any position of wealth who hasn't paid taxes in the last 10 years would have significant issues with the IRS and they would be quite open and public...
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I cannot say for certain what point the GP was trying to make, but I believe he is pointing out that all government programs will be wasteful because of the way in which are government operates, not because Lawrence Livermore or DARPA or anyone else employs bad managers and engineers. The fact that every government organization is singled out as wasteful on a frequent basis supports this. If all of these organizations are wasteful, doesn't that support the assertion that the problem is the government itself? And since all of these organization are being managed by political appointees and having their policies dictated by politicians, who should we blame for the waste?
That's only true if you stop the bar at 1 million... past there the rate drops. By 10 million income, it's down to 22%. At the top it's 17.5%. At Romney's level it's apparently 13%.
Your link doesn't agree with this one:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/key-elements/poor/households.cfm
I am talking about the total tax load.
-6% Federal + 6% Social Security + 12% state and local taxes (a high % of other taxes from cigarette, booze, gasoline, cellphone, automobile license, fishing license taxes which are fixed amounts.)
vs .8% social security + .03% state and local taxes ( a tiny % of other taxes from cigarette, booze, gasoline, cellphone, automobile license, fishing license taxes which are fixed amounts.)
18.5% on the top 1% +
compare the total tax load for both groups.
12% for the poor.
19.6% for the top 1%.
And it's lower for the top .1%.
You can't take more money from the poor. State and local taxes have already put them below the poverty line. There would be no point in working if you took out income taxes from them and the result would be civil unrest and violence with coresponding increased incarceration costs ($31,000 to warehouse a prisoner vs $18,000 a year for Welfare-- it's literally cheaper to give them money than force them to turn to crime).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You don't seriously believe trickle-down economics actually work, do you?
Of course it does, but also of course there are other factors like government regulation.
It may interest you to know that with the incredibly high unemployment in the US right now, and the rampant foreclosures and bankruptcy in the working class, the NYSE is trading at record highs, and corporate income is higher than it was 5 years ago...
The only reason the stock market has tracked higher is the interventionist policy of the Fed. It is also true that those policies have (so far) avoided real backlash from the public over retirement accounts being decimated.
However, the interest-free loans of billions of dollars to fat-cat bankers from the corrupt 0bama administration is one of the factors that will see him booted from office with extreme prejudice come November. He is more of a flunky of Wall Street than any president in memory.
What we need are policies limiting government spending while encouraging economic growth. That is what the R & R ticket offers, and is the opposite of what 0 is pushing.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Sufficient economic growth will result in increased total revenues, even at reduced tax rates.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
If you think there's no waste in private industry, I suggest spending a few years at a Fortune 50. Or a startup, for that matter -- everywhere I've been has focused on optimizing for one thing and failed at optimizing others, with an end result of massive waste. Whether it's spending massive man-hours to reimplement the wheel in-house because we're unwilling to spend any actual cash (startups!), disregarding opportunity costs (and man-hours) in hopeless pursuit of big contracts that never pan out (different startups!), pursuing false economies by optimizing for an individual department's budget rather than the profitability of the company as a whole (enterprise!), preferring to buy a "platform" that needs just as much customization to convert to the desired product as that product would cost to build in the first place (different enterprise!), but... well.
I've never seen any kind of a business run in a truly efficient manner. Profitably, yes, but good enough to satisfy those who would call any waste justification for a shutdown? Never.
It's both.
We've been cutting taxes since Reagan and we started a policy of "guns AND butter" under reagan. We lost the true conservatives.
The closest we have today want to cut taxes- cut all social spending- but for some crazy reason, keep paying more for defense than the next 20 to 25 countries COMBINED.
Cut defense and government by 10%. Then restore the tax rates at the start of the bush presidency.
GDP growth will do the rest.
but it doesn't look like our current republicans and democrats are going to do this and those with money control the media to keep us from forming a third party that would do it.
Looks pretty hopeless for now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
ryan probably objects to it not being built in his home state.
Maybe not, but I can't imagine that the number of plutonium managers with experience is very large.
True - plutonium does NOT like to be managed.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
Politifact is useless. You won't believe me so I won't even cite, Google it yourself.
The important numbers are the percentage of the budget shouldered by the top income earners vs their share of total income. Go look it up and compare it to Europe. Anyone who even utters the phrase 'fair share' must first go see that number for themselves and THEN define exactly how much more they think they can extract before they say 'fuck it' and go somewhere else. I want a percentage. Define it.
That seems like a very misleading statistic to use without also considering income inequality. If the rich consist of fewer people making more money than in Europe, then you would expect more of their money (proportionally) to be taxed in the highest tax bracket. Looking at just the numbers you suggest, income inequality is indistinguishable from progressive taxes with high tax rates on the highest tax bracket. You are looking at the numbers and claiming the latter is the problem while the people you are arguing against are looking at the exact same numbers and saying the former is the problem. You need more data to actually make a conclusion... and the fact that taxes are higher in Europe lends credence to the idea that taxes are in fact not too high in the US.
It's observation (of things that really happened or as the case may be didn't happen) as I said before.
For example, I currently work in Yellowstone National Park, a US park for a private company owned by a multinational. They approach construction projects differently than the National Park Service (the NPS is part of the Department of the Interior) does.
For example, my company completed a significant renovation of the Old Faithful Inn (the famous hotel that overlooks Old Faithful geyser) on schedule, opening the place a week later in the season than it usually opens. Similarly, they're working on Canyon Lodge (a complex that is right by the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone) and look ready to complete the work on the Lodge itself and parking area by the end of the season. While one can reasonably argue that these construction projects should have been done some time ago, it's noteworthy that my company has strong incentives to make sure any construction work that they pay for, gets done as soon as possible. That's because they lose money, if those projects run over.
So what happens to NPS construction projects? A typical example is road work from Madison Junction to Norris Geyser Basin. They were to build a new bridge and route traffic around a notorious chokepoint at a place called Gibbons Falls (the road at that point is cut into the side of the cliff and is narrow without a shoulder). They screwed around for about 6-7 years and then, when the Obama stimulus kicked in around 2009 and 2010, they redid the plan (putting a new bridge in at Gibbons Falls, shortening the stretch that original was to go around Gibbons Falls, and widening the road in the process). They're now repeating that drawn out process with some road damage near the southeast entrance caused by a landslide last year.
My understanding is that the NPS takes in 50-100 million dollars every year from park revenue. That revenue goes into the federal government's general fund and is allotted as Congress sees fit. Not much goes back to the park beyond paying the NPS staff and some infrastructure cost (such as running their fire/ranger departments and health clinics), and what is left over tends to be squandered on half-assed projects.
So there's an example where private enterprise trounced public sector.
"Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?"
Then we just shutdown and let the Chinese and the Russians take over? It's not as if they are going to make the kind of mistake that you and other conservatives who use this ridiculous argument suggest. Taxes, my friend, are the price of civilization get used to it and just pay your fair share and stop trying to protect the Mitt Romney's of the world from paying their's (and no 13% is not a fair share and certainly 0.82% as they propose to pay under the Ryan/Romney/Republican plan is even less so).
The problem is that human's aren't perfect and people are going to make lots of mistakes. If we shut down every activity in which human's made mistakes because "someday we will run out of other people's money", humans would still be living in caves, which lately seems to be where republicans want to take us these days. They are determined to destroy science in this country since it competes with their religion and their goal of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
The Germans, both before and after the war, including von Braun, claimed that their work would not have been possible without Robert Goddard's work in the 1920's and 1930's that was published.
Everyone kept trying to use solid type propellants, it was Goddard who realized liquid was better, and his early work to find the best chemical mix for liquid rocket propellants is still more or less the one used today for many rocket applications. The idea of using liquid O2 engines was his, he originally used gasoline as it was available easily at the time as the main fuel source.
No one else, other then one who claimed AFTER Goddard published his work tried liquid fueled rockets, and he claimed to have done it decades before but without any sort of publication, and the fact he waited till after Goddard published to make the claim, most people consider him full of sh*t.
The V-1 was a jet engine, not a rocket. But the V2, used a ethonol (easier for the Germans to obtain as they needed all the gasoline and diesel for their military vehicles) as a primary fuel source, but the liquid oxygen was directly copied from Goddard's work. von Bruan, copied Goddard's work directly for the initial Aggregate rocket series, of which the V2 is version 4 (German designation in the war was A4 not V2, as that was the allied designation).
Just about everyone in space exploration and Rocketry gives Goddard the credit for where we are today, the only people who don't, are the laymen who have no idea what the history of rocketry has been like the last few hundred years since the Chinese started it.
The fact is that in science, if you don't make any mistakes, you don't learn anything new. That's the price of science.
If one could funnel all the waste generated trying to "shut down the waste" into science, it would be well funded into perpetuity. There are no straight lines to scientific discovery and pretend the process should be streamlined to "avoid the waste" would permanently put an end to science. "Waste" has to be considered in relative terms, since by definition one doesn't know what the out come of experiments is going to be. If one had knowledge in advance to avoid "waste, there would be no point to conducting the experiments. When things don't according to plan, it generates "waste", yet if scientists were forced to stop conducting experiments because they might result in "waste", all scientific progress would stop.
"waste like this."
You really have to be specific when you are talking about science projects, since what is regarded as "waste" may well result directly from the consequences of an experiment. One simply has to be prepared for "some waste" as it's unavoidable and inherent in the scientific enterprise.
" incredibly expensive train"
trains certainly are a lot more expensive than cars in large part because the actual "cost" of cars, such as in traffic deaths, pollution, etc are subsidized without those doing the subsidization being readily identifiable and those creating these costs being seldom, if ever, held accountable. Likewise, once built, even if it only goes say 1.5 times faster than current trains, it will result in huge saving, if more and more riders and more trains can be added to the track.
Do you have any idea of how much less gasoline would have to be consumed if everyone who commutes on I5 could instead take a train? Do you have any idea of how much less carbon dioxide would have to be produced to produce all the cars that are used over the life of a train? Have you driven I5 lately? It's bumper to bumper for 500 miles between SF and LA. Just think of what it's going to be like in 20 years by the time the high speed rail lines are finally finished. It's not as if the Europeans, Japanese, and now Chinese haven't already beaten us to this realization that without trains to move large numbers of people, their countries are at a competitive disadvantage as cars are just a lot more inefficient.
"The difference is that the private sector has to provide something of value at some point or eventually they run out of money."
The problem with your argument is that the "something of value" doesn't have to be to society, just to those who are stuffing the profits into their pockets. So eventually all the money winds up in an extremely few hands and we destroy the economy as the republicans are trying to do now, whereas governnent, in contrast, by definition, has to take everyone's welfare into account, not just the few who own everything.
" then that's a solid indication that they aren't getting anything right."
This argument is bogus, since it assumes that there is some way to tell what "getting it right" is in science. Yes, there are many benefits, but most often those are purely tangential to the questions initially or primarily involved in the research.
Your use of the Human Genome Project is a perfect example of just hjow bogus your argument is. Human Genome Sciences was first, but only because it had the government project's results openly available to them constantly, whereas the the private results were never shared until they were published. Further, the government funded effort was much broader in scope and of far more value to science.
As for the "efficiency" of Human Genome Sciences? The CEO Craig Ventnor crashed the stock and took a gigantic golden handshake on the way out the door and left shareholders high and dry. I'm too painfully aware as I was a major stockholder. The company was recently sold for pennies on the dollar. So much for your "efficiency" argument.
"Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. "
No in a capitalist system, you can just starve to death instead. Again, another bogus argument, You seem so in enraptured by your own ideology it squeezes out any opportunity for you to actually think about the nature of the human condition. I guess that's the real enchantment with right-wing ideology, no hard thinking required.
"That's like saying, "Every place with pond scum has water.""
If you can't tell the difference between the US and Somalia, where they barely have a government, then you belong in that pond.
Government is not the problem. It's people who think government is the problem that are the problem. If you don't like your government, do everyone a favor and LEAVE!
"Jesus didn't seize all my bank accounts"
Obviously, neither Jesus nor the government has managed to seize any one of Romney's bank accounts, even the more than 20 overseas accounts, which he uses to avoid paying taxes.
The right wing is voting for a candidate who launders his money because by their ideology money laundering is equivalent to "freedom". It seems apparent that their rhetoric has gotten out ahead of their ideology to the point their ideology makes even less sense by the day.
"No, the government enforces your rights (or they should), it doesn't give them to you. "
Just a moment ago you were whining over the fact that the heavy hand of government was taxing you. Now, you are insisting that the heavy hand of government "enforce your rights", which I presume they should do for you because you didn't want to pay your taxes.
Without a government the entire concept of rights is meaningless, since then its just a question of the strongest get all the rights and everyone else gets none.
You really need to move to Somalia. They have very little government there.
And so how did Mitt Romney get away with paying only 13%? No wonder he doesn't want to release his taxes. He's doing paying 24% less tax than the rest of those in the top 0.1%. Must be unwilling to reveal trade secrets, I guess.
You would think that with all his tax avoidance Mitt Romney would have generated a few more jobs in the US, but alas it seems he prefers to employ Chinese.
"Lower taxes no longer works- the money is invested overseas where the real wage slave labor is these days."
Exactly. A minimum of 35Trillion dollars is being hidden away in overseas accounts like Mitt Romney's and then used to hire Chinese workers rather than US workers. Then right wing ideology demands that we do more to make it even easier for businesses to offshore jobs. It's reached the point of insanity.
Reid's "invisible friend" actually works for Bain and prepared Romney's taxes.
"Do you really want to live in the country that MAXIMIZES tax revenue at your expense?"
I do already. I shop at Wal Mart and AT&T provides me phone service. Without a government to stop them "immoral" corporations would take every penny I have and leave me destitute.
Then explain to me how Mitt Romney only pays 13%.
"How exactly do you think people become rich enough to never have to work again?"
Like MItt Romney, they inherit it.
" it is money that has already been subjected to the corporate tax rate."
So the essence of your argument is that its fair because Romney has his corporation pay his taxes for him.
That this is bogus is seen in the fact that that Bain Corporation then turns around and deducts that very same money off the taxes it pays as a corporation so that in essence, the rest of us get stuck with paying the bills and guys like Mitt Romney only have to pay 13%.
Pretty good scheme you've got going there. No wonder Romeny's offshore Roth IRA accounts hold over a hundred million dollars, while its legal only to contribute $2,600 per year into an IRA. With the type of accounting you are doing, its understandable why Romney won't release his returns.
Ok, sure - look, I never said that the public sector is necessarily always better. That's of course not true. It's not true the other way round, either. Can't really tell you any details, since it's an ongoing deal, but one of my clients is a German-based corp, making all things electric - you may connect the dots from there. Bureaucracy like you haven't seen before is all I can tell you.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
???
Who kicked your puppy?
I'm having trouble telling if you're knee-jerking, or trolling.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Trains, in general are one thing, and worth debating. This train is an unbelievably wasteful debacle, and they've only barely begun. To be profitable, gasoline will need to go to $40/gallon. (Their own ridership estimates require this, meaning it's a low-balled estimate.) And it won't go 1.5x faster than current trains. It's not likely to outpace the freeway for most of it's length.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Yes, but when government wastes cash it wastes money taken from taxpayers at gunpoint (resist paying your taxes and at some point somebody will point a gun at you). When the a business in the private sector wastes cash, it's wasting the cash of people who chose to invest in it and if it wastes too much it's supposed to go out of business. The fact that George W Bush and Barack Obama have both violated this rule by throwing tax payer money at the losers does not violate the rule, rather it just means both men need to be thrown aside by the people and never have either of their reputations restored. When politicians bail-out bad businesses they make them whole after failures and therefore give them an unfair leg up on their wiser and better competitors with resulting mediocrity; it's very hard for honest businesses to compete using sound practices when corrupt businesses can use unprofitable methods and then get bailed out.
So the yield multiplier is going to have to be pretty big before this becomes profitable.
That's nice... but you are apparently ignoring what that same set of CBO analysts said about the future with Obama's plans... the computer models for the economy fail in 2037 with no way for the economy to continue and no level of taxation works (raising the rates to the levels that would be required to fund all Obama's plans suppresses economic activity so much that revenue to the government falls-off before the gap between incoming tax dollars and outgoing expenditures gets anywhere near closing... in fact at that point you not only render the federal budget impossible, but the resulting economic damage of the required high tax rates kills revenue to the states as well and they fail)
Simply put, Obama is spending over one TRILLION dollars more per year than he takes in and that's NOW before ObamaCare kicks-in and drives the annual budgets hundreds of billions deeper into the red. We are currently spending about 200 billion per year just in interest payments on our debts with historically low interest rates... if the rates go up even 1 point (a virtual certainty) this will get really messy. Big, highly-visible programs like Space shuttle program only cost the US around 3 billion per year, so just imagine how much big science (fusion, superconducting supercollider, moonbase, etc) we could be buying per year if we were not spending 200 billion annually on interest payments. People always focus on military hardware or the space program for budget cuts and "taxing the rich" for revenue, but while there are a few fabulously rich people there are not enough so taking all they have would only fund things for days and those military and science hardware items are not themselves all that expensive... the real costs are in payments to people (social security, medicaid, medicare, state, local, federal employees and retirees (this is even a large part of the pentagon budget) ) and the real money is in the middle class (because while they don't feel rich, there are just so darn many of them)
You're apparently just to young or too ignorant of history to know that the people of the US used to have an excellent standard of living relative to the rest of the world with a very small government and very low taxes on the individuals. There is simply no reason why (particularly with all the technology we have now) the US needs a government even as large as we had under Eisenhower or JFK in order for people to have a great standard of living... unless you live in your mom's basement and you define a high standard of living as "food, shelter, college, healthcare, and retirement funded by the government robbing you neighbor for you" instead of you actually being a productive citizen who provides for himself and his family, saves for retirement, and chips-in with some charity while regulating his own behavior so that the government need not spend any of his neighbor's money arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating him.
Does waste really happen more in government or does the fact that government has to be more publicly open about its failures than private enterprise just leave the perception that it does?
Wrong
The income tax is a relatively new thing in the US, as is the FICA tax.
The Federal government used to be paid for by tariffs on imports. Any business that employed Americans making things in America from raw materials harvested in America did not pay the import tariffs (this encouraged industry and employment) and any bunch of investors who built a business on a model of importing products built with cheap foreign labor in places with no environmental laws found themselves making less money because they paid big tariffs. Additionally, it meant that as foreign entanglements grew (related to import of goods) revenue (from the tariffs) to the federal government grew and the feds had more resources to fund a bigger military and state department.
Sadly, the investor class bought-off both the Republican and Democrat establishments in D.C. and convinced both parties to support "free trade" (translation: get rid of those nasty tariffs so wall street can get super-rich exporting American jobs) and, since the government must be funded, you have to take money from the very middle class workers whose jobs have been exposed to cheap foreign competition, and the small business operators who cannot afford to outsource.
This in-turn leads to the creation of programs like social security, for example, which take money from the middle class (promising them a nice retirement) but which actually just shift the money paid-in into the general fund every year (to pay for the stuff the tariffs used to fund) and which seem to work for a few decades while the initial batch of retirees is small and cheap but the workforce paying-in is massive. When the massive pile of workers get to their retirement age however, and all that's in the "lock box" is a pile of I-O-U's to be paid by future generations, you have a big financial problem (this is called a "funding shortfall" or an "unfunded liability" and is many trillions of dollars in the US today)
Note that Obama is not going after Warren Buffet or Bill Gates with his tax hike proposals... he keeps demanding taxes go up on INCOME starting at 250K (small businesses that file as individuals) rather than on the ASSETS of the super rich (people with assets of a couple million or more for example) since he remembers that in 2008 he was elected using more money from wall street bankers/investors (who love that "free trade" but get no benefit from small business or middle class workers) than any other politician in US History.
Jesus said "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." If you lived by His example you would give up your worldly possessions and dedicate your life to helping the less fortunate among us
You have been manipulated, probably with a big assist from a sub-standard public school education provided by unionized school teachers (who by virtue of their union political ties, have become a virtual arm of the Democratic party)
When Obama, Reid and Pelosi yell "tax the rich" you fall into the trap of seeing somebody with huge assets and you think "yeah, they deserve to be TAXED higher and the Democrats will go get their money for me and the causes I like" BUT the Democrats are not proposing to tax those highly-visible assets; they are demanding higher taxes on INCOME which will take money from small businesses while not touching the super-rich; You local baker or butcher, or diner etc cannot afford to hire lots of lawyers and accountants to hide his income and he cannot afford to tie his money up in long-term investments (he needs liquidity to be able to manage his day-to-day expenses) but the super-rich just laugh when you raise tax rates on income. The super-rich like Buffet and Gates and the Kennedys and Rockefellers just move their incomes into tax-free investment instruments or move them offshore (by funding offshore business activity and deferring the taxes) and wait for political and economic changes. They have enough money that they can decide when and how much to pull from their tax shelters and in-effect decide how much to pay and when to pay it.
The "rich" are not generally dumber than you are (and the proof is that they are rich) so you must surely realize that they have no intention of supporting politicians who will tax them excessively. There are reasons why so many of the fabulously wealthy from wall street, Hollywood, sports, etc (even Stewart and Colbert) are such big supporters of the "tax-the-rich!" Democrats (and it's not all about sex and drugs)...
The joke's on you ;-)
The reason the "top income earners" are shouldering a higher share of the budget is because the gap between them and the middle class has widened over the last 30+ years. If the income was spread more evenly as it was when the top marginal rate was over 50% then the middle class would pay more taxes and more than make up for the drop in income of the top earners. There's no point in taxing low income people if you have to turn around and give them food stamps and subsidize their housing.
Tax avoidance often means you invest more in your business and employees, in effect spreading the wealth.
Are your numbers inflation adjusted?
Somehow I doubt you started from zero if you had a six figure job before you dropped to $20K.
You apparently do not understand the meaning of the word "regressive"
A flat tax rate cannot possibly be regressive. (although you are correct that a poor person will "feel" a flat tax more than a rich person will but by that very same argument you should be saying that ALLexpenses are "regressive". I guess McDonalds is being evil and "regressive" if they charge a middle class guy the same for a BigMac as they charge a rich guy for one (since the rich guy will not notice the cost and the middle class guy will).
It's incredibly sad to see just how much of the evil Karl Marx has seeped into the brains of the current generation of Americans.
Wanting something does not make it a "right".
Inequality of income is not inequality of justice.
The "general welfare" has nothing to do with individual welfare.
The government is neither your parent nor your owner, though it will certainly enslave you if you beg it to be your parent.
Having the government take from you neighbor on your behalf does not mean that your neighbor has not been robbed, nor does it mean your hands are "clean". You are still a thief, albeit by proxy, and you have accepted stolen property.
The 10% mentioned by the earlier poster would bring in more than enough money in a non-welfare-state; in a welfare state, no amount of taxation will ultimately be enough./p?
In 1957, the Federal Government made, in constant dollars, about $2800 per capita [usgovernmentrevenue.com]. In 2010 it was about $6200
According to several inflation calculators I Googled $2800 in 1957 is equivalent to $21,728 in 2010 in inflation adjusted dollars, 3.5 times your $6200.
No it shouldn't...
Feelings are neither rational nor consistent (and they are certainly not "just", as-in "justice"). If we were to go to a tax system based upon "feelings" then I could decide that I do not "feel" you are paying your "fair share" of taxes no matter how much you are paying. I can "feel" you are guilty of a crime even if you have committed no crime. I can "feel" that you owe me everything you have, and I can even feel things retroactively...
Maybe Donald Trump is particularly sensitive about his money and maybe he feels the loss of a dollar far more than you do... If he complains more loudly about the pain of parting with a dollar than you do (and I bet he can even afford to hire a whole bunch of people to follow him around wailing loudly about that pain (LOL)) then should we raise your taxes so we can give your money to Trump?????
I prefer a rational basis for government (and policies that treat each citizen exactly the same) over a government that is always attempting to manipulate people based upon the irrational emotions of other people./p
Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business
And the same is said of government. You are free to leave the country and go find another.
There is a finite amount of space on Earth. Unless you actually 100% support amnesty and free borders in your own country, then you are a hypocrite for suggesting that people leave to another country.
Actually, we are free to leave to other states within the US. So if only these wasteful programs were done at a state level, then we could actually leave and go somewhere better. Damn, if only the people who created our country had intended for most programs to be done at a state level and leave individuals with the freedom to live where they please...
Oh wait, they did intent that. So you are the one screwing things up. Quit trying to pass everything at the Federal level. It takes away our freedom to leave your dumb ideas behind.
Yep we do need all that, and I can think of three things that we don't need. We don't need to spend more than the rest of the planet combined on our military
Yes... we do.
(1) in the US we prefer to use high-tech rather than massive numbers and high-tech is expensive. The Chinese, for example, have far more soldiers than we have, but most Americans do not concern themselves with that because we have the technology to more than make-up for the numerical difference. During the cold war, the Soviets generally had more of everything than we had (except aircraft carriers) but again we made up for the difference with expensive high-tech.
(2) Because the US prefers the high-tech approach, we keep having to spend more on newer and newer stuff both because others gradually get more tech and because we have an un-ending series of jerks who hand our tech and our secrets to our enemies... which then drives the need to spend more to keep an advantage...
(3) Because we long-ago decided that we would rather help our allies defend themselves (and should deterrence fail, start the defense and eventual push-back on their soil both to preserve our civilians and to preserve as much of our allies as possible) Unfortunately our allies in Europe in particular took advantage of this and effectively disarmed (so they rely on our defenses and they have more money to spend on their welfare states). Perhaps we should abandon our treaties with them and leave them to fend for themselves... but our politicians have not been willing to do that.
(4)We have high resource costs and high labor costs and we pay our all-volunteer forces better. Every Ton of steel we produce costs far more than a ton of steel costs China or Russia. Our shipbuilders earn FAR more per hour than shipbuilders in Russia or China as they convert tons of steel into a warship. We then spend far more money putting high tech aboard that ship and then we pay our sailors far more per year than the Russians or the Chinese.
We could reduce this a great deal while still defending ourselves if we re-instituted the draft, removed environmental rules from manufacturers, and de-unionized our workforce.... but then something tells me that the people who always complain that we spend too much on defense would be the first to complain... particularly on the day they get their draft notices in the mail...
Keep in mind that the EU and Germany in particular has strong protectionist policies in place via the use of complex standards that create such bureaucracy. For example, The ISO 9000 family of standards (which is a set of standards for documenting business processes and quality management systems) never made sense to me (since one can have terrible processes as long as they're documented properly), until I realized that it served as a simple means for filtering out foreign companies that were in areas too marginal to support those standards.
If you manufacture for the EU area, then it's a straightforward cost to implement them. But if you're a foreign exporter looking to enter Europe, then ISO 9000 standards become a significant and costly obstacle, especially, if you're mostly in markets where your competitors would drive you out of business should you implement these standards.
So you're keeping out the small Chinese businesses and whatever, with quality management system and other bureaucracy-enhancing schemes. It also has the advantage of employing people to chase after the paperwork.
The bureaucracy you see is IMHO imposed by government and standards bodies. And those governments and standards bodies have to follow their own rules. I imagine they have pretty dense bureaucracy as well.
whereas governnent, in contrast, by definition, has to take everyone's welfare into account
I see the fundamental flaw in your thinking. Government doesn't have to do that. For example, government routinely does things with high opportunity cost (such as tax productive workers and employers and dump the money into pathetic destinations such as unjustifiable subsidies, pointless entitlements, or corrupt and over budget big projects). How is the voter going to notice what they don't know they're missing?
As for the "efficiency" of Human Genome Sciences? The CEO Craig Ventnor crashed the stock and took a gigantic golden handshake on the way out the door and left shareholders high and dry. I'm too painfully aware as I was a major stockholder. The company was recently sold for pennies on the dollar. So much for your "efficiency" argument.
Uh huh. I didn't say everyone would be efficient. Bankruptcy and losing your money is what happens when you get too inefficient or don't deliver enough value for your cost, and that happens quite a bit.
Keep telling yourself that, buddy. Everybody who disagrees must be younger and more ignorant than you are.
1. What President created the US interstate system?
2. What President nationalized the National Guard and sent troops to enforce the desegregation of schools in Little Rock Arkansas?
3. What was the top income tax rate between 1953 and 1960?
4. What was the poverty rate in 1960?
5. Is conservative policy on social spending correlated with an increase or a decrease in poverty rates?
6. Are there LARGER or SMALLER percentage of the population above the retirement age now as opposed to 1963?
7. Get the fuck off my lawn! Answers: 1. Eisenhower; 2. Eisenhower; 3. 91-92%; 4. 22%; 5. increase; 6. Much larger; 7. Get the fuck off my lawn!
Yes - constant dollars.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Please see the definition for the word "average".
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I don't think you quite understand what constant dollars are - it's a value that is adjusted for inflation, so that X dollars in some previous year represents Y dollars in a later year. Please check out what it means. We've doubled the revenue per capitta in constant dollars, and gone from a real surplus to a massive deficit.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Source - other than Reid's claim?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That simply does not compute.
So he can finish tearing our social safety net down and turn us into a third-world shithole?
No thanks. I'd rather a non-sociopath be in the White House.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
how about we audit the finances and goals of each project every 2-5 years and remove some of the waste, and unneeded projects?
Wouldn't the fair tax solve these tax issues. The fair tax sends everyone a prebate check for taxes they will pay on what is considered the essentials. This prevents the tax from being a burden on the low income brackets. Then you charge a sales tax on all goods sold. This will remove all other taxes that would normally come out of peoples checks ect. The when you make your purchases (a.k.a. consumption) your are taxed. I also will fix issues such as problems with captial gains ect because you don't tax people for making money rather for spending. Simple
Sounds roughly what I recall was the difference between the overhead rate we used to have as a state-university research/engineering organization (~15%) versus what private companies were claiming (25%+). (We didn't have a CEO pulling down a huge salary so there was significant savings there.) You can't get down to 0% but guys like Ryan would love for you to believe that the free market would be able to attain that unrealistic goal.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
trains certainly are a lot more expensive than cars in large part because the actual "cost" of cars, such as in traffic deaths, pollution, etc are subsidized without those doing the subsidization being readily identifiable and those creating these costs being seldom, if ever, held accountable. Likewise, once built, even if it only goes say 1.5 times faster than current trains, it will result in huge saving, if more and more riders and more trains can be added to the track.
Do you have any idea of how much less gasoline would have to be consumed if everyone who commutes on I5 could instead take a train? Do you have any idea of how much less carbon dioxide would have to be produced to produce all the cars that are used over the life of a train? Have you driven I5 lately? It's bumper to bumper for 500 miles between SF and LA. Just think of what it's going to be like in 20 years by the time the high speed rail lines are finally finished. It's not as if the Europeans, Japanese, and now Chinese haven't already beaten us to this realization that without trains to move large numbers of people, their countries are at a competitive disadvantage as cars are just a lot more inefficient.
I always felt it was bad and didn't vote for it because it was ridiculously expensive and I knew it would get far more expensive than advertised, I always felt that the ridership estimates were wildly optimistic, and California can't afford spending billions and billions on another transit system people won't use. And this was when it was pitched to the public in a ballot measure for 45 billion dollars with a completion date of 2020. Now that the ballot measure has been passed, it's up to $98 billion now with no end in sight, and a completion date of 2032. Yes, this magical rail project won't even connect the two end-points for another 20 years.
There was a Guardian article not long ago about the high-speed rail project. The most damning quote, a recent poll showed: "almost three fifths would oppose the bullet train and halt public borrowing if given another chance to vote. Almost seven in 10 said that, if the train ever does run between Los Angeles and San Francisco, they would "never or hardly ever" use it. Not a single person said they would use it more than once a week, and only 33 per cent said they would prefer the bullet train over a one hour plane journey or seven hour drive. The cost of a ticket, estimated at $123 each way, also put many off."
And worst of all:
"After an outcry $30 billion was shaved off that estimate, but only by reducing the speed of the trains and using sections of existing slow track."
Great! So we have all the disadvantages of what is already the worst transit system in the state, and perhaps the country (Amtrak) and without the high-speed benefits. Where the hell is that 98 billion dollars going? What on earth could possibly justify such an extraordinary price tag?
And I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with the retarded requirement on government that they always go with the lowest bidder. Right?
Yes, but when government wastes cash it wastes money taken from taxpayers at gunpoint
No, it doesn't. Taxes are not theft, no matter how much your delusions tell you it is.
(resist paying your taxes and at some point somebody will point a gun at you)
Commit murder or rape, and the same thing will happen. Why? Because you broke the laws you agreed to follow when you continued living in the country. You agreed to follow tax laws too.
Actually, this is not true
No, it's quite true. Your one off extraordinary examples do not change this.
There is a finite amount of space on Earth. Unless you actually 100% support amnesty and free borders in your own country, then you are a hypocrite for suggesting that people leave to another country.
No, I'm not. It is not my problem if they are unable to leave.
Oh wait, they did intent that. So you are the one screwing things up. Quit trying to pass everything at the Federal level. It takes away our freedom to leave your dumb ideas behind.
You mean like the "freedom" to own slaves? The "freedom" to deny people a fundamental human right? The "freedom" to force people into separate educational facilities based on the color of their skin?
Yeah, the ability to move did wonders for the people affected by those policies.
No, it is nowhere near a "fair share". Most of the money I get paid in income has been taxed at one point or another. Does that mean it shouldn't be taxed anymore?
Figures. Idiots.
Ahh yes. The old Conservative argument that any evidence that is offered contrary to my argument is clearly made up.
This said despite the fact that you have nothing to refute him.
Long before you get to rates anywhere that high tax avoidance becomes far more profitable than income generation
And tell me, why would someone magically start paying their taxes because rates came down? They've already started the avoidance.
How about instead of making up stories, you actually provide data to back up your assertions.
But let's go back to those hey-day years of the Clinton Administration. Look at the revenues the Federal Government had in 1999 - and compare it to the revenues today. About the same. Literally, the Federal Government is making as much money today as it did back in those glory days when all the talk was about the budget surplus. The difference? Spending was VASTLY lower than it is today. The Federal Government has exploded in size in the last 12 years, way beyond inflation, population growth, or any other metric than naked desire for power and control.
I'm sure the population being higher has nothing to do with that either.
The Laffer curve is a tool of an immoral government.
1). No it's not.
2). I didn't bring up the Laffer curve. Some anti-tax nut did. I merely pointed out that his argument was completely flawed because no one knows exactly what part of the curve we're on.
Do you really want to live in the country that MAXIMIZES tax revenue at your expense?
I'd like to live in a civilized nation which is able to provide services for it's citizens, like Universal Health Care. Further, you have everyone bitching and moaning about the deficit, yet absolutely refuse to take one of the fundamental steps toward closing it. Approaching the problem from BOTH SIDES (increasing revenue AND cutting spending) is the best way to go about the solution. Of course, that assumes you're actually looking for a solution, and not just politicizing things so you can get rid of programs which you don't like, or prevent you from exploiting people for money.
Besides which, you start off by saying that nobody has any idea which side of the curve we are on, but then immediately declare that "odds are" that we are on the low side!
I made a guess, yes, but one that is backed up by more economists. His position doesn't have anyone backing it up.
You end off by declaring that our poor "don't have shit." Tell that to the 600 million people in India that actually dont have shit, you myopic jackass.
Why the fuck would I compare a world superpower to a developing nation, you intellectually dishonest jackass? If I'm going to make a comparison on how well off our poor are, I'm going to do it with developed countries. You know, countries that are industrialized, and should be able to take care of their poor. Not a nation that is just starting off on the path to industrialization, and still has a long way to go.
But of course, if you had an actual argument to make, as opposed to an emotional appeal, you wouldn't have gone down this line.
Yes, it should, when that "how it feels" directly corresponds to someone's ability to pay rent and buy food.
Yeah, no. That comment adds nothing to the discussion.
I worked for my money
And the person making $20k didn't? Yet you want to raise their taxes.
I went on the line and sacraficed and gambled it all to create my company
Ahhh, so you didn't "work for your money". You got other people to do the work.
I don't give a shit if you "created a company" or not. Why is that income any different than the income of the person who got paid to do the actual work?
The guy making 20K/year already pays a much lower rate than the guy making 100K/year as it is
Right now they do. Yet, you're trying to make them pay more.
The smart solution is the differential calculus solution. Maximize future tax revenue without any regard for todays tax revenue.
That's a pretty stupid solution too, as we still need tax revenue today.
How exactly do you think people become rich enough to never have to work again?
Don't care, because that's completely fucking irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Jealousy is the result of people too stupid to think about their future.
Another completely irrelevant comment.
No, that's an awful solution. First off, how high do you think that sales tax would have to be? Just about every estimate given says that, if it's supposed to replace today's levels of revenue, it'd have to be on the order of 30%. Are you honestly going to sit here and say that those levels of sales tax would not be inherently regressive on the poor?
The word "feel" was not meant in an emotional context, dumbass. It was meant in the context that someone making $20k is going to be affected a lot more by the missing $2k than someone making $200k is going to be affected by the missing $20k.
Who do you think is going to be hurt more by their tax bill? A guy making $6 million, paying $1.8 million in taxes, or a guy making $60k, paying $6k in taxes?
Or is that not fair?
It very clearly is not. $1000 is nothing to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. However, $1000 would absolutely destroy a poor person.
Of course, this is assuming you're looking at taxes from a humanitarian perspective, and not just in a "fuck the poor" perspective.
A flat tax rate cannot possibly be regressive.
A flat tax is the very definition of regressive, as it affects the poor far more than it affects the rich.
although you are correct that a poor person will "feel" a flat tax more than a rich person
Thus making it regressive.
Wanting something does not make it a "right".
Never said it did. However, you might want to tell most of the people on Wall Street that.
Having the government take from you neighbor
Nobody is "taking" anything. My neighbor fully agreed to pay taxes by living here, just like they agreed to follow the other laws.
Further, the idea that someone would be far better without taxes is absurd, as just about all of the amenities we have in a first world country came that way through taxes, and most importantly, coming together as a nation to make these things happen. The Interstate Highway System, for example. Do you honestly think that such a thing would have been possible if the government didn't do it? Or that it would be anywhere near as efficient and popular as it is now? If so, then I want you to move to a country where they do not have such things, and prove your point by making it there. I want you to start with nothing, and move to the middle of Africa, and prove your point by rising your way into the Fortune 500.
What's that? You don't want to? You don't think you can do it?
You are still a thief,
No, I am not.
That's the kind of sillyness that 'step' based systems encourage, whether they be in assistance programs or part of the tax code.
Or from people who never actually think about what they're doing. The housing thing might be legitimate, depending on if the raise would have covered the increase in rent he would have to pay. However, for tax brackets and our current system, it is absolutely false, and if he were doing it for tax reasons, he'd be a complete fucking idiot.
I think people very much like the idea of a flat tax because it seems simple and fair.
Until you actually look at it. And most of the people who propose the "flat tax" tend to put in a bunch of exceptions to try and make it not regressive, making it more complex and negating most of the savings they claim implementing one would do.
There is no reason we can't do something reasonable like say 5% of income at the bottom, XX% at the top, and a nice smooth line between those two whose equation calculates your taxes. Screw deductions.
Someone around the poverty line who has kids likely couldn't afford your 5%. And you might say, "Well, they shouldn't be having kids!" and you might have a point. But the fact of the matter is, those kids are there, and they still need to be taken care of.
It seems equally absurd that 50% of americans don't pay any taxes at all
Not so much when you actually look into that claim. The claim is that they don't pay INCOME TAX, and that's because they don't have shit for income (or they are rich piles of shit like the ex-LA Dodgers owners, the McCourts, who had it revealed during their divorce proceedings that they didn't pay anything in taxes). They most certainly pay taxes, just like everyone else. Sales tax? Yup. Gas tax? Oh you better believe it. Vehicle registration tax? Yes.
When you have to depend on the goverment just to make ends meet, that is a very, very bad thing. And that is what 50%+ of us do
1). Your premise here is 100% false.
2). What's the alternative? Throwing these people out in the gutter to starve? We'll send them to where you live. I'm sure the increase in crime won't bother you.
Yes. Do a simple thought experiment.
Provide some actual data backing up your position first. Guesses are nice and all, but I'd prefer government be run on data and facts.
If you live in a high tax location like NYC that puts you well over 50%
50% of PROFIT. Not of the total proceeds. It's a huge fucking difference, and you ignoring this makes your entire comment invalid.
So you agree with me, then. That capital gains taxes should not be at a special rate, but rather the same income rate.
I'll agree it can be quite hard to select a vendor. But with current rules, even if you've worked with a vendor before, and they've proven they can't do the work for what they actually propose, you are still required to go with them if they are the lowest bidder.
Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?
You layoff thousands of workers, maybe sell off a couple of profitable divisions, to temporarily drive up the stock price. Then take your golden parachute and jump to another company before the stockholders realize they've been suckered.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
It's not detrimental to anyone's interest if it's "Fair", quite the opposite is true if it's not. Jobs don't disappear with a fair tax, that is a fallacy that has been pushed out since Reagon. As true as it was then, it's still true now. Trickle down economics does not work, it never has worked, and never will work under our system of Government and Economic system.
I'm sure you probably believe the fallacy, but please investigate. Economists that make a living being economists mostly agree that it does not work, and has not worked. When the country started to go to massive shit financially is the same time Reagon pushed "trickle down", and it's been getting progressively worse. The middle class has nearly vanished from the US. Look at where the US ranks in wealth distribution world wide (151?) and where we are with poverty (more poor children in the US than in any other industrial nation). We have no funding for infrastructure which is why we have thousands of civil engineers yelling "We are falling apart!". Investigate yourself, don't take my word for it or believe a fallacy that someone has been telling you. Look at the US and the shape we are in!
Fixing the tax system won't fix all of our woes mind you, but hell it's going to take a whole lot of changes to make us healthy again. The same-ole same-ole sure is not making it better.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You betcha. Alcoholic/drug using father and the whole bit. You can always change your circumstance. Democrats only want you to change it by owning you. I didn't improve my life by being jealous of others and busting my ass to take their money. Neither should you.
Oooh, I see now. Poor people are poor because they deserve to be poor. They all made terrible life choices that made them poor.
Of course, even if you clean up your act, it's unbelievably difficult to escape the poverty cycle, as opposed to someone who was born into wealth.
well, i can think of LOTS of 'projects' that could've saved the trillions of dollars, in absolute, 100% waste.
The B1 bomber. The B2 bomber. The stealth bomber. The F22. The F35. The war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan.
Shall I go on?
Except that those were at least doing something that the government is specifically authorized to do by the Constitution, as opposed to the vast majority of the federal budget. (Yes, oddly, the entire DoD is considered "discretionary spending", as opposed to mandatory spending on effectively off-budget entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which cannot be cut...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I think it's the degree of waste that's important here, and I know of no corporation that measures up to the government in that respect. Hell, I certainly don't know of any corporations that allow their divisions to engage in "Use it or lose it" budgeting for cost estimating. Or the usual "hire lowest bidder that claims they can do the job, pay out for shitty job that doesn't get it done, restart bidding process, hire same company". It takes a uniquely wasteful mind to pull off that kind of inefficiency.
So at what point does it become theft then? If the government decided one day to take 100% of your income, would you still defend it as "the price you pay"? Or does it suddenly become something else? And more important, where do you draw that line? I believe the "theft" argument, although hyperbolic, is a fair one. If the government is taking way more than they need to meet the necessities of society (particularly when it comes to their enumerated Constitutional tasks), I would certainly cry foul.
You must be dealing with a different species, because I assure you human being are not magically altruistic once they step into political roles. Politicians care about advancing and keeping their career the same way corporate tools do -- I assure you that our welfare is not the first thing on their minds. You think Obamacare was forced through because they actually thought it was good legislation? Or was it because failing to pass it would have been disastrous for Obama's chances of re-election? Nearly 70% of the country disapproved of the bill that was passed. Hell, Congress has a 10% approval rating -- and you still think they have our best interests at heart? It's a huge error in judgment to assume that government is going to "be more kind to us" simply because "they're the government". Every empire in the history of the world has devolved into tyrants consolidating power at the top, using the government (and its military) to further their own ends. Ever ask yourself -- "how many poor politicians have I seen in the news?" Even among the Democrats? Not many...this I assure you.
"It matters not -- He is your king" - Braveheart
Fantastic empirical study you did there. Try facts next time.
That's easy -- loopholes. Fix the loopholes rather than dicking with the rates and this problem goes away. Instead they want to jack taxes on a bunch of people who are nowhere near Romney's level (250k+) just to "stick it to them".
Mighty convenient view of "compromise" after spending about a trillion dollars per year in new spending for the past 3 years. Are we allowed to drop taxes to 0% and then "compromise" back up to the level they're currently at as well?
Did you check to see what we're spending on social spending compared to the next 20 to 25 countries combined? Hint: not many countries have a trillion dollars a year to throw around on mandatory spending.
Because it carries risk? And enormous time investments? And asset commitment? And quite often unique differentiation from competition? Have you ever even written or attempted a successful business plan or are you just talking out of your ass?
Define "fair" -- the top 20% already pay 80% of taxes.
Yeah, because this increasing slope isn't a big indicator of runaway spending or anything: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1990_2017USr_13s1li111mcn_F0t I guess you won't recognize the spending until we go truly hyperbolic, huh?
The Bush Tax Cuts expired in 2010 via sunset provisions. Now they're the Obama tax cuts. And regardless, they didn't appear to have that big an effect on total revenue: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_chart_1990_2017USr_13s1li111mcn_F0t
The short-term dip in early 2000-2002 was erased by 2007. The revenue drop in 2009-2010 was caused by the recession, not the Bush tax cuts. Merely undoing them does not guarantee a revenue spike.
So you are asserting that for-profit corporations do not take into account the cost of capital and investor returns?
And if you want a cite of efficient government, look at Social Security and the IRS. For the amount of money processed, the IRS is much much cheaper than commercial accounting companies. The rules they operate under are insane, but they don't make them, that's professional politicians. The same is true of Social Security. No other mutual find approaches the effeciency of it. It's about 1/5 to 1/10 the price of a similar portfolio from a commercial mutual fund company. Most government programs are more efficient. They are only not efficient when politics are directly involved in the process (SS gets horrible returns because it's required to "invest" in T-bills). Look at schools for that. The Republicans hate children, except when served for dinner. So they "support" schools with NCLB and more unfunded mandates that take administrative time and reduce classroom time for children. After 50+ years of a targeted attack on public schools, we have more money spent on administration than classroom time. That's a Republican success story, they just haven't convinced the voters that it's inefficient enough to shut down. We could do twice as good with 10% the money, if we just eliminated the stupid regulations around schools imposed by Republicans. The Republicans want the biggest possible government (same as the Democrats).
Learn to love Alaska
Okay- so I already proposed 100 billion in social spending cuts to.
What do you want?
How much is a fair amount to spend on social spending in your book?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I didn't want a cite, I wanted an empirical study -- you claimed that aggregate efficiency numbers were higher on average in government vs in the free market. You can't simply cherry pick examples to attempt to prove this. Hell, the obvious counter example is the defense sector in the government, which I assure you is terribly inefficient. It's also not the total picture. "Wasting money" isn't simply a matter of "efficiency". As you mention yourself, money is being "wasted" in social security T-bill investments (vs higher yielding alternatives). The resulting sum of money there being wasted (in comparison to what corporations are doing with their money) is far greater than a simple measure of efficiency.
In my book? In my book, the proper amount to spend is whatever your state wishes to spend. There's no reason social programs should be a federal issue. That being said, if I had to compromise at the federal level, I'd reform rather than simply picking an arbitrary spending cut number. Add means-testing to both social security and medicare. Put a hard cap on end-of-life spending for Medicare (harsh, but needed). Start transitioning out of social security and into something more sensible (like forced retirement accounts, invested in lifecycle funds). Whereever the dollars fall, they fall -- either way, it'll result in some level of cost savings. If the savings are not enough, we look for other ways to cut. But at the end of the day, entitlements should be our focus, rather than the red herring of defense spending everyone harps about.
Hell, the obvious counter example is the defense sector in the government, which I assure you is terribly inefficient.
The defense sector is incredibly efficient. However, it doesn't have a civilian analogue. The point of "defense" is to move money from the government to contractors in a manner that doesn't cause a revolt from the people taxed for corporate profit. For that goal, it's about as efficient as possible.
As you mention yourself, money is being "wasted" in social security T-bill investments (vs higher yielding alternatives). The resulting sum of money there being wasted (in comparison to what corporations are doing with their money) is far greater than a simple measure of efficiency.
There's a difference between inefficient and stupid. Congress mandates idiocy. That idiocy is efficiently executed by SS, investing in T-bills not as an inefficient investment, but as a regulated item they have no choice over. The governemnt is the will of the people, and the people are then, by definition, stupid.
Learn to love Alaska
Thanks,
It looks like we have some points of agreement.
I agree with means testing for social security and medicare.
I also agree with the hard cap. It's just realistic. We probably have some kind of hard cap already- it's just hidden by paperwork. You can't spend 10 million bucks (or even 500,000 bucks) on every single medicare patient to give them an extra 90 days of life (or even an extra year of life).
I continue to disagree with you on defense spending. It's ridiculously, absurdly high.
I'll have to think on the state issue-- because people are very mobile over their lifetime and already they move to the most "retiree" friendly state. I.e., high income tax but low sales and property taxes unless they have a really high income- in which case it's a low income tax state. And of course over their life time many people have to move repeatedly just to find jobs. Plus states can fall on hard times just as their retirees reach retirement age. Several are talking about not paying promised retirement benefits.
Hence- federal solutions.
There's some argument for making forced retirement accounts like you suggest- just because then unreasonable promises won't be made.
Anyway-- thanks again for a direct answer. That's rare out on the intertubes. :-)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
lol, that's a terrible goal. For me, the "goal" of defense is to provide security for our nation in the best manner possible, bang for buck. That means that things like poor planning/vision that leads to expensive planes we don't need (Raptor) or money given to the lowest incompetent bidder (just to have them fuck up and require somebody else to re-attempt the job) is NOT a glowing model of efficiency.
How do you figure? It's stupidity that breeds inefficiency.
As I posted in another thread, we've actually been reducing defense spending for the past 60 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Defense_Spending_-_percent_to_Outlays.png
20% of the budget is historically quite low, particularly for a primary constitutional function of the federal government.
The fallacy in thinking it's too high is by comparing it to other countries. All of our budgetary items are "higher than multiple countries combined" because we just have an assload of money/GDP. Whereas I also believe there's some fat to be trimmed from defense still, there really is not that much more slack left (at least not enough to significantly alter the debt). If you're okay with reducing our "global police" presence (Ron Paul style), we could trim a bit more -- but as long as we want to maintain a worldwide military presence in all major sectors of the world, it's going to be an expensive undertaking.
I believe that's an artifact of the current centralized way of doing things. Basically you have a bunch of productive states and a bunch of freeloader states. They get away with this because the productive states effectively subsidize the freeloaders via the federal benefits system. It certainly does not seem like the most efficient way to run a country, to me at least.
Actually, one of the large reason many states are falling on hard times is because the federal government is giving them less money: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/us/02states.html?_r=1
They came to rely on that expected federal income. Then, once it was taken away, they were left with an expensive program and no funding. Reducing that reliance from the start would have given the states far more budgetary control over their situations.
The people at the bottom can't afford that extra 5% that you're proposing. They have nothing left after the basic necessities of life. An additional income tax could literally kill them.
They'd have to actually get a salary increase to offset this new cost, and the people who propose flat taxes tend to be the same people who howl in outrage if an increase to the minimum wage is proposed.
lol, that's a terrible goal. For me, the "goal" of defense is to provide security for our nation in the best manner possible, bang for buck.
Then your issue is not with the efficiency of the government program of Defense, but with your elected representatives directing the program of Defense.
I've had a number of people in the last few days complain about me not distinguishing properly between US "government" and US "the country", but everyone else does it as well. People complain about the efficiency of "governemnt programs" when those programs are some of the most efficient programs of their kind, it's just that the elected government requires the "goal" of the program to not match what the population expects. That doesn't mean they aren't efficient. It means they are efficiently doing the wrong thing.
That means that things like poor planning/vision that leads to expensive planes we don't need (Raptor) or money given to the lowest incompetent bidder (just to have them fuck up and require somebody else to re-attempt the job) is NOT a glowing model of efficiency.
The military doesn't have any control over that. Congress earmarks the money. The military efficiently moves the money from the treasury to the profits of Raytheon, Lockheed or whoever. Done. Efficient. Your problem is not that the government programs are inefficient, but that they are too efficient in carrying out Congress's requirements (which aren't inefficient, but are stupid and counterproductive).
The US military isn't given a budget, and has to work within it. They are given directives and funding. There's a difference. They carry out the directives efficiently and still have stupid spend. The military does not have the ability to close its own bases. Nor do they order their planes themselves.
Learn to love Alaska
A flat tax less than 25% would result in deficit spending even with significant cuts to government services and the military.
If you are going to use sales taxes, you need to tax the things rich people buy as well, financial instruments like stocks and bonds.