I was talking about the curve that comes out of the bottom of France and United States, makes a sharp turn the right, then tapers downward. I see absolutely no data to support that extrapolation whatsoever. I think they just invented an imaginary datapoint of 100% taxes equals 0 revenue, and drew a curve to hit that.
Exactly how does one call that "lower taxes" then?
What do you mean? One just repeats 'Lower taxes' until the delusion that lower taxes=a stronger economy has been brainwash into your head. The rest of us, living in the real world, have to deal with the fact that 'lower taxes' are probably the last way the government can effect the economy, and monetary policy and inflation and government spending and even how taxes are structured and who is being taxed is probably a lot more important.
But if you want to think like these loons, chant 'lower taxes causes more revenue' over and over, despite that never having been observed. And then mention that government revenue increased under Reagan or Bush, without mentioning that it increases all the time and increases more under higher tax rates. (And it's entirely possibly the Reagan revenue increase was helped by Social Security taxes increasing...)
That is 19% growth. (Do not compare these numbers with numbers elsewhere in the thread, those other numbers are not in constant dollars and hence, as I stated when I posted mine, actually completely useless.)
By comparison, the revenue growth, in constant
dollars, from 1972-1980 was 24%. (And there was, if you recall, a recession during that. Of course, there was problems in the 80s also.)
I swear, I don't know who's teaching conservatives to lie with statistics, but it's really starting to piss me off.
By their logic, working a minimum wage job is better than working for $15 an hour, because you 'get paid for working a minimum wage job', and they'd happily present graphs showing that people working such jobs do, indeed, get paid, although they'd mysteriously leave off the $15 an hour guy. Hey, dumbasses...the question isn't if you get paid at all, it's if you get paid more.
Likewise, the question isn't if revenues increase, of course revenues increase. They almost always increase! The economy gets bigger, and there are more people in it! The question is 'do they increase more under a lower tax rate than they do under a higher one?'.
If you're referring to me, I didn't say anyone of the sort. For all I know, it could. Then again, for all I know, there could be a unicorn in my front yard right now.
I just pointed out how inherently dishonest it was to assert that tax cuts increase government revenue, and 'prove' that by quoting a set of numbers that prove the opposite.
Numbers that, if you'd continued them backwards in time, would demonstrate that, yes, under Bush government revenue went up, but anyone could see that under Clinton revenue went up a hell of a lot more. So you didn't continue them.
Personally, I wonder where we are along the neo-Laffer curve
You know, two people have linked to that exact Wikipedia article, and, because I know what stupidity the 'Laffer Curve' is, I did not actually go read it.
I should have. I was not aware that someone had actually done the work and demonstrated that the curve is not, in fact, a curve.
And the real mind-blowing aspect of that graph is the we have the highest tax rate yet are one of the lowest revenue producing countries, which does not, as the AEI probably intends, lead to the conclusion that we should lower taxes. As, for example, some country (possibly Australia, but that could be the other dot) has almost the same tax rate, within 2%, and six times the revenue. And Germany has an 8% lower tax rate, and less revenue. There is clearly no pattern there.
What conclusion that chart actually leads me to is the fact that while our 'average' tax rate may higher than other 'average' tax rates, what has actually happened is that we're taxing the wealthy less than other countries and the poor more. (Which, really, shows how nonsensical the 'Laffer Curve' is in the first place...pretending we have one rate of taxation.) Or possibly we have too many exception in the law. Or we're simply not collecting the taxes we are owed. Or anything but 'lowering taxes will raise revenue'.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice the imaginary line heading off to the right? Where the hell did that come from? Didn't we just determine that the graph was essentially random? How can the AEI extrapolate a line?
I see a 15% revenue growth rate, followed by a tax cut and growth rates of 3%, -2%, 10%, 10%, 4%, 11%, and 6%.
Damn, now I can't find the table I pulled by numbers from. It was an amazing site, full of all sorts of charts, but sadly I don't have a browser history and no idea where it was. Teh google has failed me.
It wasn't the same site he was using, mine had them rounded to the nearest 100 million, but the numbers that he had posted otherwise matched the ones in the table I was pulling them from.
Here they are, together:
1992: 1,091,300
1993: 1,154,500
1994: 1,258,700
1995: 1,351,900
1996: 1,453,200
1997: 1,579,400
1998: 1,721,955
1999: 1,827,645
2000: 2,025,457 (last year of the dotcom bubble)
2001: 1,991,426 (Clinton's last budget)
2002: 1,863,395 (Fresh off 9/11)
2003: 1,782,532 (Beginning of Iraq War)
2004: 1,880,279
2005: 2,153,859
2006: 2,407,254
2007: 2,568,239
Do your number magic and see if you see a pattern there. I do. Just off the top of my head, it looks like about 12% a year for Clinton, which tracks with approx 100% after 8 years.
Even if we're charitable, and assume that we shouldn't count the recession from 2003 on it looks like it's averaging about 8%. (And if we're not counting recessions we really should not count 2001 for Clinton either.)
Those numbers start in 1998 because I went back 10 years, a nice, round number, figuring it would give a representative example of the last years of Clinton's term while also showing the effects of the dotcom boom, the 2000 recession, 911, Iraq and the tax cuts. We can go all the way back to 1940 if it makes you feel better.
Ah, yes, that's what I was complaining about, where the numbers went back to, instead of what the numbers you left off actually said.
You decided to pretend what was relevent was the fact that most of Bush's numbers were higher than Clintons, when in actual fact, as every single slightly intelligent person knows, government revenue is pretty much assumed to always increase, because of inflation and economic growth, and thus every single president will have higher revenue than the previous one.
The actual numbers show that, under Clinton, revenue doubled, up by 100%. Under Bush, revenue went up by 25%. That's it. That's the whole thing, right there. That's all anyone needs to read to know how much 'cutting taxes increases government revenue'.
Now, granted, it's not actually that bad. Clinton lived under a boom, Bush dealt with a slight recession at the start, and it's entirely possible that, if Bush had another four years, the revenue increase from 2004-2012 would be the same as the Clinton years. Heck, it might even be more, demonstrating that cutting taxes does increase government revenue. I have no idea. It's very hard to objectively compare economies.
But the numbers you quoted sure as hell don't demonstrate what you seem to think they do. They, minus all knowledge of what actually happened with economy and 9/11 and pretending that all revenue change was due to Bush's tax cut, demonstrate that Bush's taxes produced one fourth the revenue growth as Clinton's taxes.
PS - Check out the Laffer Curve [wikipedia.org].
See above for what I think about 'Laffer curve' gibberish.
There has never been the slightest bit of evidence that the 'Laffer Curve' exists, or is shaped anything like a curve.
All that can be said is that, ipso facto, we will get no revenue at a zero percent tax rate, we will probably get no revenue at 100%(1) (Although this has never been tried.), and we do, in fact, get revenue at the values in between. For all anyone knows, it looks like a perfect slope up to 60%, levels off until 90%, and drops. Or maybe it zigzags because of different behaviors at different rates, as 'putting the money elsewhere that isn't taxed' reaches levels of desirability for difference levels of society.
Calling it a 'Curve' like people magically know that's what it is, and drawing imaginary lines on graphs, is very bad 'science'. It's exactly as meaningful, and probably as correct, as doing the same to land height across the US from ocean to ocean...the height is zero at each ocean, and presumably higher in the middle, but it's not a 'curve'. And, just like it depends on which latitude you decide to graph land height on, which 'tax' you're talking about changes things, as different taxes hit people in different ways and are considered differently. (2)
And even if theory is true, if it actually is a 'curve' instead of a whole host of random slopesd depending on what you're taxing and how and what society thinks about that, there's no evidence we're anywhere near the middle of it. The point of maximum revenues could be 95% taxation rate.
1) It is actually arguably that a tax rate of '100%' is meaningless, that there can be no such thing. If someone is not paid, and with a 'tax rate' of 100% they would not be paid, they would not, in fact, be 'taxed' in any meaningful sense of that word, as they would not have an income to tax. They would simply be doing volunteer work. No, the work cannot be compulsorily or required for food and housing, as that is pay and hence the tax rate would not be 100%.
2) In fact, some taxes would provably not produce less income at 100% rates of taxation...for example, capital tax. The government could tax all property and savings at 100% of its value and it'd make 10 times more than taxing it at 10%. Of course, it'd have a slight problem the next year, as no one would own anything, and thus it would make no money, regardless of what it set the rate to. But people sprouting 'Laffer curve' nonsense are usually talking about income tax.
Comparing gross numbers is so fucking idiotic I don't think anyone is dumb enough to fall for that nonsense, but nice try. Like we've had no economic growth or inflation that would make those numbers go up.
Now, why don't you come back with those numbers as a percentage of the GNP, or in constant dollars and per-capita? Oh, that's right, Bush is constantly lower.
Oh, and while you're at it, why didn't you post the exact figures you just posted, but back to 1992? Here, I'll do it for you:
1992: 1,091,300
1993: 1,154,500
1994: 1,258,700
1995: 1,351,900
1996: 1,453,200
1997: 1,579,400
That's right, when Clinton left office the government revenue had changed by 200%, while Bush changed it by...125%. (Granted, he's got another year to go. And more important, this whole chart, as I pointed out, is sheer nonsense without taking the GDP and number of people and inflation and a host of other things into account.)
But those numbers are why your chart starts in 1998...and even that's not quite enough to hide tail end of the increase from 1.7 trillion to 2.0.
But, yes, continue to pretend slashdot is made of total morons who think whoever has the highest number wins, like it's the high score on a video game, instead of people who realize that if you claim lower taxes increase government revenue, they should, in fact, actually increase revenue faster than higher taxes. Instead of the opposite, which is clearly the case as the numbers you actually quoted prove. (Despite that measuring stick being total nonsense.)
Exactly. The FISA thing disappoints me, but, OTOH, I have to accept I was sorta projecting 'He will hold Bush accountable' onto Obama, when he's really said nothing of the sort.
Of course, just because he hasn't said that, and doesn't plan on doing that...simply appointing non-Bush-cronies to investigative positions would result in some accountability.
I was hoping that Obama would sweep and empty the trash of the Bush administration onto the street in view of everyone, but, frankly, he's still a much better choice than McCain even if he's not. And I have to wonder how many people suggesting otherwise are not actually McCain supporters.
The point of the surge was to allow the government time to function, not to reduce violence.
So, if anything, the fact it reduced violence and yet the government didn't step in is worse than it not reducing violence at all. (For the theory behind the surge, that is. I'm sure Iraqis are happy to have less violence.)
Basically, the surge has demonstrated that the Iraq government is a lost cause. Before violence was reduced, we were pretending to ourselves that the government could function if it wasn't under the constant threat of violence. It apparently cannot, thus leaving us with literally no options for moving forward in Iraq.
(And, yes, the most significant reason violence decreased is al-Sadr's temporary truce, not the surge, but that actually isn't worth arguing about anymore.)
Everyone believes in UFOs, you nimrod. Anything in the sky you can't identify is a UFO.
About the only way to disbelieve in UFOs is to disbelieve that people might not know what they're seeing, that everyone has perfect knowledge of everything up there. Because otherwise it is clearly possible that people could see things in the sky they cannot identify.
Jimmy Carter does not, however, believe they are aliens. He's never suggested such, and in fact has very specifically stated he does not believe aliens have ever visited this planet. He believes it was a craft from a nearby military base.
I have no idea what you're talking about Clinton and Oswald. The only logical thing I can think of is that Clinton requested any documents from the Russians they had about the Kennedy assassination.
Which, if anything, demonstrates the opposite of what you said...that Clinton thought Oswald did it, working for the Russians. Or, alternately, he wanted to put the theory the Russians were involved to rest. Or, on the third hand, he just wanted to use the US's and Russia's new friendship to grab some documents for future historians. (There were a lot of such requests being made, in both directions, especially about pet conspiracy theories that the CIA or KGB had about their opposing organization's involvement in specific things.)
I can't imagine how you got 'He thinks Oswald didn't do it' out of that, but that's the only connection between him and Oswald I can even find.
McCain has me on one topic alone: he's pro-nuclear power.
Obama was just being quiet on the nuclear power support until he got the nomination. (And it hasn't come up since.) He's explicitly left the door open to support it in the future.
I hope that when he actually comes out in favor of them, you'll switch your support to him.
And, incidentally, I wish to hell we had learned to live with less, at least less gas, when Carter was in the White House, and stuck with it. It wouldn't have solved our problems, but it might have delayed the gas price increase for a few years, which means it wouldn't have hit during this perfect storm of economic problems.
And a cable channel playing music videos is a crazy idea.
Are the rich somehow given more police protection?
Yes, you moron, they are.
Try reporting a theft under $10,000 to the FBI, for starters. Or report your TV stolen to the local police and see how much effort they put into finding it vs. the next bank robbery.
We don't need to fucking pass FISA, FISA is already current and operation law and does not expire.
What we supposedly need to pass is the PAA, aka, 'we can spy on you with no oversight'. This is apparently incredibly important, although, like you said, not important enough that Bush wouldn't veto it without immunity.
If soldiers were wandering around throwing yellow cake uranium all over the place with their bare hands, we might have to worry.
There are plenty of things that you don't want to constantly handle or let seep into the groundwater that are not WMDs.
Uranium, in and of itself, causes heavy metal poisoning. And even depleted uranium has enough radioactivity to cause problems when ingested in almost any amount.
Trying to use depleted uranium as a weapon (That is, for the side effects of exposure instead of as a projectile.) is about as logical as trying to use mercury or lead as a weapon. Hoping the people your trying to kill die of lead poisoning is not exactly a sane battle plan, and it will lead to just as many of your soldiers doing that.
Although it had natural resources that could have purchased any weapon system the military industrial complex was able to create, Iraq's military had antiquated equipment and was unable to prove even mediocre opposition to an attacking force. Had they been able to subvert the sanctions, they would have been much better equipped to defend against an attacking force. Instead, they were burying twenty year old fighter-jets in the sand in order to conceal them in hopes that they would someday be of use.
Exactly. We had Saddam contained, militarily, and we even were keeping him away from the Kurds with our no-fly zones.
Which is why we basically had to invent a threat for invasion.
And, more to the point, as this sort of behavior is obviously a spider anyway, the obvious thing to do is simply only present the malware when an actual web browser is visiting.
I get real pissed as 'pre-computer' scanning. Antivirus email proxy scanning is the cause of approximately 75% of the 'my email is not working' problems I have to deal with, and now I'm just imagining what sort of stupid shit prefetchers are going to cause.
Look, if your product cannot stop malware from executing, it's not an antivirus. There are dozens of ways to get malware onto a system. Heck, there are even HTTP methods that are 'unprefetchable'. For example, an auto-POSTing form when you reach the page, or a javascript redirect that's pieced together.
If your product can stop malware from executing, then stop fucking around with incoming data streams and wait for it to actually try to execute.
Yeah, Venus must have had some fairly...unique event to make it rotate backwards, cause that's just flatly impossible to happen by itself. Debris further away from the sun is moving faster than debris closer, and hence when they merge they're always going to rotating in the same direction. At least on average of the billions of collisions that make the planet. So something really big must have hit the mostly-formed Venus and done something near the end.
Whether things brushed it 'the wrong way' enough to make it spin backwards, or if they hit the top or bottom of it and actually rotated it 180 degrees so its north became south, is unknown. I, like you, suspect the latter, that Venus was essentially flipped over like grabbing a spinning gyroscope and flipping it...which obviously takes a lot of force, even more than it would normally take because of gyroscopic action.
The first option is that it was bombarded with enough debris on the 'inside' and not on the 'outside'. But that's just sorta implausible, whereas the 'flip' theory just requires one really big hit.
Microsoft's website is an example of a completely useless web site. Every single subsite (Like microsoft.com/ie/) is written like a fucking advertisement and you can't find anything.
In fact, let's take a little tour and see if we can download the beta of IE8. So we start at microsoft.com/ie/, and we get redirected to IE's 'website'.
There's download at the top, and the hover mentions Internet Explorer, so let's go there. Oh, we're now in a completely different subsite, the 'downloads' subsite, so it's actually just sorta luck we had a link to here, but anyway...nope, this is only for IE7. Go out to main downloads page...nope, no link.
Let's search and see where it actually is. Searching for IE8 give us 'http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx'...which looks incredibly familiar. microsoft.com/ie/ redirected us to 'http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx', we were literally one directory away from where we wanted to be at the very start...with no fucking links.
This is because the people in charge of the ie7 'website' apparently didn't decide to link to the ie8 'website'. I picked this example randomly, just now, because I knew about microsoft.com/ie/ and that the IE8 beta was out, and I know that was a recipe for exactly the sort of nonsense I'd seen there before.
Microsoft's web site has a dozen little fiefdoms, runs by different teams, and there's no way to navigate between them or list them. It's a total mess.
I, personally, would like the GUI instructions for installing supertux in Windows. (It has a Windows version.)
Run IE, search for it or keywords, figure out which you want. Basically the same as in Linux, except with 'IE' read 'package manager'. But then, instead of clicking install, you go to their page, find the download page (Half the time hosted on a crappy ad-supported site), download it, run the installer, click half a dozen times to finish the install.
Anyone who thinks it's easier to install software in Windows is literally insane. Maybe back when Linux didn't come with any software and you had to compile it yourself, and all Windows programs were distributed on autoplay CDs, sure.
Not now, when Linux comes with a huge list of software that you can search, download, and install in two or three clicks, and to install Windows software you're reduced to surfing the net to find the installer, and then you still have to go through an install process that is 95% pointless. (You're prompting me if I want an icon on the desktop? Something that takes me a good four second to add or remove manually?)
Oh, and almost none of them automatically update themselves.
Actually, no. You don't 'need' to reboot when installing a new kernel. The computer isn't going to sit there and prompt you, or anything. Obviously it's not going to load the new kernel except at boot, but you can install a new kernel and operate for another year on the previously installed one.
This is different than a Windows machine, where Microsoft installs that want to reboot the computer will not only prompt you, but will continue to prompt you every ten minutes.
Exactly, and don't get me started on Windows Explorer. I sometimes have to do tech support, and it blows my mind how difficult it is to get people to the most fucking important program on the computer. Why there isn't a 'Browse Files' up on the XP start menu along with 'Internet' and 'Email' I have no idea.
Yes, I tried using Windows Key+E, but you'd be amazed how hard that is to explain to people. No, I can't get them to go into 'My Documents' and out from there, some people don't even have that on their start menu and then you end up in explorer window without a folder list so it's near useless.
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking about the curve that comes out of the bottom of France and United States, makes a sharp turn the right, then tapers downward. I see absolutely no data to support that extrapolation whatsoever. I think they just invented an imaginary datapoint of 100% taxes equals 0 revenue, and drew a curve to hit that.
Exactly how does one call that "lower taxes" then?
What do you mean? One just repeats 'Lower taxes' until the delusion that lower taxes=a stronger economy has been brainwash into your head. The rest of us, living in the real world, have to deal with the fact that 'lower taxes' are probably the last way the government can effect the economy, and monetary policy and inflation and government spending and even how taxes are structured and who is being taxed is probably a lot more important.
But if you want to think like these loons, chant 'lower taxes causes more revenue' over and over, despite that never having been observed. And then mention that government revenue increased under Reagan or Bush, without mentioning that it increases all the time and increases more under higher tax rates. (And it's entirely possibly the Reagan revenue increase was helped by Social Security taxes increasing...)
Tax revenue from 1981 to 1988 in constant 2000 dollars:
1981:1,077.4
1982:1,036.9
1983:961.7
1984:1,016.8
1985:1,082.6
1986:1,107.3
1987:1,196.1
1988:1,235.6
That is 19% growth. (Do not compare these numbers with numbers elsewhere in the thread, those other numbers are not in constant dollars and hence, as I stated when I posted mine, actually completely useless.)
By comparison, the revenue growth, in constant dollars, from 1972-1980 was 24%. (And there was, if you recall, a recession during that. Of course, there was problems in the 80s also.)
I swear, I don't know who's teaching conservatives to lie with statistics, but it's really starting to piss me off.
By their logic, working a minimum wage job is better than working for $15 an hour, because you 'get paid for working a minimum wage job', and they'd happily present graphs showing that people working such jobs do, indeed, get paid, although they'd mysteriously leave off the $15 an hour guy. Hey, dumbasses...the question isn't if you get paid at all, it's if you get paid more.
Likewise, the question isn't if revenues increase, of course revenues increase. They almost always increase! The economy gets bigger, and there are more people in it! The question is 'do they increase more under a lower tax rate than they do under a higher one?'.
If you're referring to me, I didn't say anyone of the sort. For all I know, it could. Then again, for all I know, there could be a unicorn in my front yard right now.
I just pointed out how inherently dishonest it was to assert that tax cuts increase government revenue, and 'prove' that by quoting a set of numbers that prove the opposite.
Numbers that, if you'd continued them backwards in time, would demonstrate that, yes, under Bush government revenue went up, but anyone could see that under Clinton revenue went up a hell of a lot more. So you didn't continue them.
Personally, I wonder where we are along the neo-Laffer curve
You know, two people have linked to that exact Wikipedia article, and, because I know what stupidity the 'Laffer Curve' is, I did not actually go read it.
I should have. I was not aware that someone had actually done the work and demonstrated that the curve is not, in fact, a curve.
And the real mind-blowing aspect of that graph is the we have the highest tax rate yet are one of the lowest revenue producing countries, which does not, as the AEI probably intends, lead to the conclusion that we should lower taxes. As, for example, some country (possibly Australia, but that could be the other dot) has almost the same tax rate, within 2%, and six times the revenue. And Germany has an 8% lower tax rate, and less revenue. There is clearly no pattern there.
What conclusion that chart actually leads me to is the fact that while our 'average' tax rate may higher than other 'average' tax rates, what has actually happened is that we're taxing the wealthy less than other countries and the poor more. (Which, really, shows how nonsensical the 'Laffer Curve' is in the first place...pretending we have one rate of taxation.) Or possibly we have too many exception in the law. Or we're simply not collecting the taxes we are owed. Or anything but 'lowering taxes will raise revenue'.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice the imaginary line heading off to the right? Where the hell did that come from? Didn't we just determine that the graph was essentially random? How can the AEI extrapolate a line?
I see a 15% revenue growth rate, followed by a tax cut and growth rates of 3%, -2%, 10%, 10%, 4%, 11%, and 6%.
Damn, now I can't find the table I pulled by numbers from. It was an amazing site, full of all sorts of charts, but sadly I don't have a browser history and no idea where it was. Teh google has failed me.
It wasn't the same site he was using, mine had them rounded to the nearest 100 million, but the numbers that he had posted otherwise matched the ones in the table I was pulling them from.
Here they are, together:
1992: 1,091,300
1993: 1,154,500
1994: 1,258,700
1995: 1,351,900
1996: 1,453,200
1997: 1,579,400
1998: 1,721,955
1999: 1,827,645
2000: 2,025,457 (last year of the dotcom bubble)
2001: 1,991,426 (Clinton's last budget)
2002: 1,863,395 (Fresh off 9/11)
2003: 1,782,532 (Beginning of Iraq War)
2004: 1,880,279
2005: 2,153,859
2006: 2,407,254
2007: 2,568,239
Do your number magic and see if you see a pattern there. I do. Just off the top of my head, it looks like about 12% a year for Clinton, which tracks with approx 100% after 8 years.
Even if we're charitable, and assume that we shouldn't count the recession from 2003 on it looks like it's averaging about 8%. (And if we're not counting recessions we really should not count 2001 for Clinton either.)
Those numbers start in 1998 because I went back 10 years, a nice, round number, figuring it would give a representative example of the last years of Clinton's term while also showing the effects of the dotcom boom, the 2000 recession, 911, Iraq and the tax cuts. We can go all the way back to 1940 if it makes you feel better.
Ah, yes, that's what I was complaining about, where the numbers went back to, instead of what the numbers you left off actually said.
You decided to pretend what was relevent was the fact that most of Bush's numbers were higher than Clintons, when in actual fact, as every single slightly intelligent person knows, government revenue is pretty much assumed to always increase, because of inflation and economic growth, and thus every single president will have higher revenue than the previous one.
The actual numbers show that, under Clinton, revenue doubled, up by 100%. Under Bush, revenue went up by 25%. That's it. That's the whole thing, right there. That's all anyone needs to read to know how much 'cutting taxes increases government revenue'.
Now, granted, it's not actually that bad. Clinton lived under a boom, Bush dealt with a slight recession at the start, and it's entirely possible that, if Bush had another four years, the revenue increase from 2004-2012 would be the same as the Clinton years. Heck, it might even be more, demonstrating that cutting taxes does increase government revenue. I have no idea. It's very hard to objectively compare economies.
But the numbers you quoted sure as hell don't demonstrate what you seem to think they do. They, minus all knowledge of what actually happened with economy and 9/11 and pretending that all revenue change was due to Bush's tax cut, demonstrate that Bush's taxes produced one fourth the revenue growth as Clinton's taxes.
PS - Check out the Laffer Curve [wikipedia.org].
See above for what I think about 'Laffer curve' gibberish.
There has never been the slightest bit of evidence that the 'Laffer Curve' exists, or is shaped anything like a curve.
All that can be said is that, ipso facto, we will get no revenue at a zero percent tax rate, we will probably get no revenue at 100%(1) (Although this has never been tried.), and we do, in fact, get revenue at the values in between. For all anyone knows, it looks like a perfect slope up to 60%, levels off until 90%, and drops. Or maybe it zigzags because of different behaviors at different rates, as 'putting the money elsewhere that isn't taxed' reaches levels of desirability for difference levels of society.
Calling it a 'Curve' like people magically know that's what it is, and drawing imaginary lines on graphs, is very bad 'science'. It's exactly as meaningful, and probably as correct, as doing the same to land height across the US from ocean to ocean...the height is zero at each ocean, and presumably higher in the middle, but it's not a 'curve'. And, just like it depends on which latitude you decide to graph land height on, which 'tax' you're talking about changes things, as different taxes hit people in different ways and are considered differently. (2)
And even if theory is true, if it actually is a 'curve' instead of a whole host of random slopesd depending on what you're taxing and how and what society thinks about that, there's no evidence we're anywhere near the middle of it. The point of maximum revenues could be 95% taxation rate.
1) It is actually arguably that a tax rate of '100%' is meaningless, that there can be no such thing. If someone is not paid, and with a 'tax rate' of 100% they would not be paid, they would not, in fact, be 'taxed' in any meaningful sense of that word, as they would not have an income to tax. They would simply be doing volunteer work. No, the work cannot be compulsorily or required for food and housing, as that is pay and hence the tax rate would not be 100%.
2) In fact, some taxes would provably not produce less income at 100% rates of taxation...for example, capital tax. The government could tax all property and savings at 100% of its value and it'd make 10 times more than taxing it at 10%. Of course, it'd have a slight problem the next year, as no one would own anything, and thus it would make no money, regardless of what it set the rate to. But people sprouting 'Laffer curve' nonsense are usually talking about income tax.
Comparing gross numbers is so fucking idiotic I don't think anyone is dumb enough to fall for that nonsense, but nice try. Like we've had no economic growth or inflation that would make those numbers go up.
Now, why don't you come back with those numbers as a percentage of the GNP, or in constant dollars and per-capita? Oh, that's right, Bush is constantly lower.
Oh, and while you're at it, why didn't you post the exact figures you just posted, but back to 1992? Here, I'll do it for you:
1992: 1,091,300
1993: 1,154,500
1994: 1,258,700
1995: 1,351,900
1996: 1,453,200
1997: 1,579,400
That's right, when Clinton left office the government revenue had changed by 200%, while Bush changed it by...125%. (Granted, he's got another year to go. And more important, this whole chart, as I pointed out, is sheer nonsense without taking the GDP and number of people and inflation and a host of other things into account.)
But those numbers are why your chart starts in 1998...and even that's not quite enough to hide tail end of the increase from 1.7 trillion to 2.0.
But, yes, continue to pretend slashdot is made of total morons who think whoever has the highest number wins, like it's the high score on a video game, instead of people who realize that if you claim lower taxes increase government revenue, they should, in fact, actually increase revenue faster than higher taxes. Instead of the opposite, which is clearly the case as the numbers you actually quoted prove. (Despite that measuring stick being total nonsense.)
Exactly. The FISA thing disappoints me, but, OTOH, I have to accept I was sorta projecting 'He will hold Bush accountable' onto Obama, when he's really said nothing of the sort.
Of course, just because he hasn't said that, and doesn't plan on doing that...simply appointing non-Bush-cronies to investigative positions would result in some accountability.
I was hoping that Obama would sweep and empty the trash of the Bush administration onto the street in view of everyone, but, frankly, he's still a much better choice than McCain even if he's not. And I have to wonder how many people suggesting otherwise are not actually McCain supporters.
Correct.
The point of the surge was to allow the government time to function, not to reduce violence.
So, if anything, the fact it reduced violence and yet the government didn't step in is worse than it not reducing violence at all. (For the theory behind the surge, that is. I'm sure Iraqis are happy to have less violence.)
Basically, the surge has demonstrated that the Iraq government is a lost cause. Before violence was reduced, we were pretending to ourselves that the government could function if it wasn't under the constant threat of violence. It apparently cannot, thus leaving us with literally no options for moving forward in Iraq.
(And, yes, the most significant reason violence decreased is al-Sadr's temporary truce, not the surge, but that actually isn't worth arguing about anymore.)
Obama is the same breed as Clinton.
Which makes him infinitely better than someone who's the same breed as Bush.
Everyone believes in UFOs, you nimrod. Anything in the sky you can't identify is a UFO.
About the only way to disbelieve in UFOs is to disbelieve that people might not know what they're seeing, that everyone has perfect knowledge of everything up there. Because otherwise it is clearly possible that people could see things in the sky they cannot identify.
Jimmy Carter does not, however, believe they are aliens. He's never suggested such, and in fact has very specifically stated he does not believe aliens have ever visited this planet. He believes it was a craft from a nearby military base.
I have no idea what you're talking about Clinton and Oswald. The only logical thing I can think of is that Clinton requested any documents from the Russians they had about the Kennedy assassination.
Which, if anything, demonstrates the opposite of what you said...that Clinton thought Oswald did it, working for the Russians. Or, alternately, he wanted to put the theory the Russians were involved to rest. Or, on the third hand, he just wanted to use the US's and Russia's new friendship to grab some documents for future historians. (There were a lot of such requests being made, in both directions, especially about pet conspiracy theories that the CIA or KGB had about their opposing organization's involvement in specific things.)
I can't imagine how you got 'He thinks Oswald didn't do it' out of that, but that's the only connection between him and Oswald I can even find.
McCain has me on one topic alone: he's pro-nuclear power.
Obama was just being quiet on the nuclear power support until he got the nomination. (And it hasn't come up since.) He's explicitly left the door open to support it in the future.
I hope that when he actually comes out in favor of them, you'll switch your support to him.
And, incidentally, I wish to hell we had learned to live with less, at least less gas, when Carter was in the White House, and stuck with it. It wouldn't have solved our problems, but it might have delayed the gas price increase for a few years, which means it wouldn't have hit during this perfect storm of economic problems.
And a cable channel playing music videos is a crazy idea.
And everyone else is pretty sure you're stupid.
Funny how that works when you believe something there's no evidence for, and has never been any evidence of.
Are the rich somehow given more police protection?
Yes, you moron, they are.
Try reporting a theft under $10,000 to the FBI, for starters. Or report your TV stolen to the local police and see how much effort they put into finding it vs. the next bank robbery.
We don't need to fucking pass FISA, FISA is already current and operation law and does not expire.
What we supposedly need to pass is the PAA, aka, 'we can spy on you with no oversight'. This is apparently incredibly important, although, like you said, not important enough that Bush wouldn't veto it without immunity.
If soldiers were wandering around throwing yellow cake uranium all over the place with their bare hands, we might have to worry.
There are plenty of things that you don't want to constantly handle or let seep into the groundwater that are not WMDs.
Uranium, in and of itself, causes heavy metal poisoning. And even depleted uranium has enough radioactivity to cause problems when ingested in almost any amount.
Trying to use depleted uranium as a weapon (That is, for the side effects of exposure instead of as a projectile.) is about as logical as trying to use mercury or lead as a weapon. Hoping the people your trying to kill die of lead poisoning is not exactly a sane battle plan, and it will lead to just as many of your soldiers doing that.
Exactly. We had Saddam contained, militarily, and we even were keeping him away from the Kurds with our no-fly zones.
Which is why we basically had to invent a threat for invasion.
And, more to the point, as this sort of behavior is obviously a spider anyway, the obvious thing to do is simply only present the malware when an actual web browser is visiting.
I get real pissed as 'pre-computer' scanning. Antivirus email proxy scanning is the cause of approximately 75% of the 'my email is not working' problems I have to deal with, and now I'm just imagining what sort of stupid shit prefetchers are going to cause.
Look, if your product cannot stop malware from executing, it's not an antivirus. There are dozens of ways to get malware onto a system. Heck, there are even HTTP methods that are 'unprefetchable'. For example, an auto-POSTing form when you reach the page, or a javascript redirect that's pieced together.
If your product can stop malware from executing, then stop fucking around with incoming data streams and wait for it to actually try to execute.
Yeah, Venus must have had some fairly...unique event to make it rotate backwards, cause that's just flatly impossible to happen by itself. Debris further away from the sun is moving faster than debris closer, and hence when they merge they're always going to rotating in the same direction. At least on average of the billions of collisions that make the planet. So something really big must have hit the mostly-formed Venus and done something near the end.
Whether things brushed it 'the wrong way' enough to make it spin backwards, or if they hit the top or bottom of it and actually rotated it 180 degrees so its north became south, is unknown. I, like you, suspect the latter, that Venus was essentially flipped over like grabbing a spinning gyroscope and flipping it...which obviously takes a lot of force, even more than it would normally take because of gyroscopic action.
The first option is that it was bombarded with enough debris on the 'inside' and not on the 'outside'. But that's just sorta implausible, whereas the 'flip' theory just requires one really big hit.
Assuming it's there, and assuming they can find it, yes.
Microsoft's website is an example of a completely useless web site. Every single subsite (Like microsoft.com/ie/) is written like a fucking advertisement and you can't find anything.
In fact, let's take a little tour and see if we can download the beta of IE8. So we start at microsoft.com/ie/, and we get redirected to IE's 'website'.
There's download at the top, and the hover mentions Internet Explorer, so let's go there. Oh, we're now in a completely different subsite, the 'downloads' subsite, so it's actually just sorta luck we had a link to here, but anyway...nope, this is only for IE7. Go out to main downloads page...nope, no link.
Let's search and see where it actually is. Searching for IE8 give us 'http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx'...which looks incredibly familiar. microsoft.com/ie/ redirected us to 'http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx', we were literally one directory away from where we wanted to be at the very start...with no fucking links.
This is because the people in charge of the ie7 'website' apparently didn't decide to link to the ie8 'website'. I picked this example randomly, just now, because I knew about microsoft.com/ie/ and that the IE8 beta was out, and I know that was a recipe for exactly the sort of nonsense I'd seen there before.
Microsoft's web site has a dozen little fiefdoms, runs by different teams, and there's no way to navigate between them or list them. It's a total mess.
I, personally, would like the GUI instructions for installing supertux in Windows. (It has a Windows version.)
Run IE, search for it or keywords, figure out which you want. Basically the same as in Linux, except with 'IE' read 'package manager'. But then, instead of clicking install, you go to their page, find the download page (Half the time hosted on a crappy ad-supported site), download it, run the installer, click half a dozen times to finish the install.
Anyone who thinks it's easier to install software in Windows is literally insane. Maybe back when Linux didn't come with any software and you had to compile it yourself, and all Windows programs were distributed on autoplay CDs, sure.
Not now, when Linux comes with a huge list of software that you can search, download, and install in two or three clicks, and to install Windows software you're reduced to surfing the net to find the installer, and then you still have to go through an install process that is 95% pointless. (You're prompting me if I want an icon on the desktop? Something that takes me a good four second to add or remove manually?)
Oh, and almost none of them automatically update themselves.
Actually, no. You don't 'need' to reboot when installing a new kernel. The computer isn't going to sit there and prompt you, or anything. Obviously it's not going to load the new kernel except at boot, but you can install a new kernel and operate for another year on the previously installed one.
This is different than a Windows machine, where Microsoft installs that want to reboot the computer will not only prompt you, but will continue to prompt you every ten minutes.
Exactly, and don't get me started on Windows Explorer. I sometimes have to do tech support, and it blows my mind how difficult it is to get people to the most fucking important program on the computer. Why there isn't a 'Browse Files' up on the XP start menu along with 'Internet' and 'Email' I have no idea.
Yes, I tried using Windows Key+E, but you'd be amazed how hard that is to explain to people. No, I can't get them to go into 'My Documents' and out from there, some people don't even have that on their start menu and then you end up in explorer window without a folder list so it's near useless.