...are already computerized. The old '98 Jeep has a "check engine" light that has been on for about 6 years that says the oxygen sensor is out, but that was replaced 3 times and the light still keeps coming back on. Obviously, its the frappin' engine computer. No, I'm not replacing a computer, prolly $1200 - dunno, haven't looked - when I can just ignore the frappin' light.
The other car has had numerous failures connected to the computer, from the bad brake light switch that caused a "check engine" light that also disables the cruise control, and other failures that have also disabled the cruise control. The car has a "hill holder" function to prevent rollback and a stability control function that prevents skids which neither work because a "steering wheel angle sensor" is "throwing codes" and disabling those 2 functions. It doesn't disable the cruise control, so I can ignore it, although two warning lights on the dash are on permanently now, because I'm not spending $700 to have the steering column totally torn apart to replace that sensor (that may be a bad computer anyway, just like the Jeep), when I know how to do both of those functions all by myself anyway.
Self-driving car? They better have 3 computers in a "voting" arrangement and prohibit maintenance to them by anyone not having a college electrical engineering degree. These things may kill more than they save if you get Billy-Bob under the hood and stripping wires and putting them back together with black plastic electrical tape which will weather and fall off and then that wire shorts...
I don't think you've read and understood the Fair Tax. No poor person pays even a penny of Fair Tax. I'm right in the middle of the middle class, and would save $2K a year with the Fair Tax. Your taxes would probably be lower too.
No, the income tax doesn't really hurt the top guys all that much, they can take care of themselves. But, it _does_ hurt the businesses. The businesses are forced to raise the prices for their goods and services to pay the taxes on their operations, and they _don't_ get that money by diminishing in any way the salaries of the top guys.
The DO raise the prices of their products, and the DO lower the pay of their workers, and they DO reduce the payout of the dividends on their stocks. The money that the public would have saved and the money the employees would have earned and the dividends that the investors would have enjoyed instead is stolen by the US Gov't.
I say stolen because it is taken by force by people to whom it does not belong. I've come to the conclusion, after a lifetime of attempting to rationalize it, that income taxes are purely and simply stealing. I can find no good reason to excuse the gov't from that charge. The gov't doesn't have the right to everyone's property. It has the power to take it, but not the right. No kidding, I always used to wonder about that as soon as I heard about it in grade school, "What gives them the right?" Well, they don't have the right, simply the power.
You should take a much closer look at the Fair Tax. The FT is the only tax so far proposed that is truly progressive. The income taxes aren't - Warren Buffet ends up paying 14%, and his secretary pays, what was it, 18%? What's progressive about that? The payroll taxes supporting social security and Medicare cease being collected at the point that the person makes about $118K, but are collected from the 1st dollar that a poor person makes. A poor person that makes $12K / yr ends up sending 15.3% of that to Washington, DC.
In contrast, the FT "prebates" each citizen with the amount of $$$ that they would need to pay the FT on poverty level spending. That is, if one is single, and the poverty level is $12K, that person would receive 23% of $12,000 each year to pay the FT on all the things he would buy up to the poverty level. So, that person will get $2,760 each year, divided up into 12 equal monthly payments. It doesn't matter whether that person is a single person that is as rich as Bill Gates, or your favorite street person panhandling on a street corner, he will get that prebate.
Due to the prebate, no person effectively pays the Fair Tax. When he buys something, he reaches into the pocket with the money he earned or panhandled or whatever, and pays the price of the item he's buying, and then reaches into the pocket that has the money he received from the gov't as a prebate and pays the Fair Tax. That pocket will continue to provide money to pay the Fair Tax all the way up until he spends his last dollar that is at the poverty level for the month. Then, the prebate runs out and the person has to start paying the Fair Tax on remaining items he buys for the month, until his next prebate check comes the following month. Of course, if he's making poverty level wages, he is not capable of spending more than the poverty level, and so NEVER pays the Fair Tax himself.
And I took a look at the Flat Tax once upon a time and discovered that while it purports to give a break to people for the first $X dollars they make, which I think was somewhere around $18K, it DOES NOT repeal the payroll taxes. Therefore it charges its 17% flat tax rate to _AND_ the 15.3% payroll taxes to the person starting at $18K (or whatever the exemption is, I forget) and so the middle class pays 32.3% tax to the gov't, while the payroll tax stops taxing the rich at around $118K, so the rich making much, much higher than $118K end up being taxed very close to 17% Flat Tax for their entire earnings. Poor: 15.3% Middle Class: 32.3% Rich: 17% plus a fraction. Progressive? Nope. Only the Fair Tax is progressive.
And there are side benefits to the Fair Tax such as not having to spend $13B on the IRS, since the states collect the monies, and we can even go green by not cutting
I pay $194/month as a retiree for former-employer-subsidized healthcare. I would expect that to go to about $1500 / month from a private company on the open market. Do I want my retirement reduced to deciding to pay the electric bill or affording my medicine due to the O'care high-deductibles? Nope. Leave this the hell alone, so I can have a good retirement.
Want to really help the American people? Pass the Fair Tax, which would put everyone back to work and they could then buy their own healthcare without the gov't getting involved in paying for it.
Germany's payroll tax for healthcare purposes is 41%. Look it up. Want to be paying 41% of everything you make, from the 1st dollar up to the last, because of healthcare?
Duh, EVERYTHING costs more in the USA. That's why lotsa people buy stuff overseas. Our high cost of living is legendary. So why are U surprised when healthcare is $2X.
Single payer would get gov't involved, which is ALWAYS guaranteed to cost more or deliver less or deliver it waaaaay slower. The US Gov't cannot do FAST, CHEAP, and GOOD all at once. They just can't. The US military is FAST and GOOD, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. The US Post Office is Cheap and Good, but not necessarily fast, at least not at the cheap price.
Yes, its a bogeyman, and totally false as a reason for our uncompetitiveness. The real reason is US income taxes. They make manufacturing here too expensive. Repeal the income taxes, and go back to work, and have your non-college-educated friends and relatives go back to work, in factories, building things that were formerally built in China, India, Korea, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, etc.
Ah, the oft-repeated lie of the high US labor costs.
Labor costs in the US are NOT high, because 1 US laborer does the work of may foreign laborers. Is the US laborer a superman? Yes, when he's stepping up to operate a machine that does the actual work.
Ever seen a picture of the FoxConn factory? Did you see 1000's of tables where PEOPLE stand and put together iPhones by hand? Yes you did. What would that factory look like in the USA? It would look like 50 guys / gals and 400 machines spitting out iPhones much faster than all those Chinese workers, with less scrap.
So, why isn't the iPhone built here? It ain't the expensive labor, ITS THE DAMNED TAXES!!!! US Income taxes account for about 22% of the selling price of anything built in this country.
Want to fix this, and bring these jobs back from China? Pass the Fair Tax, which abolishes the income taxes, all of them, and... go back to work, and have your friends without college degrees go back to work, as 100's of 1,000's of factories spring up across the USA and build things for domestic and export consumption, all without the burden of the US income taxes. The Fair Tax does not tax business, so US goods would drop an estimated 11% - 18% in price. That's all we need, folks, to take over the manufacturing world over the entire planet. Just get rid of the damned income taxes, and prosper.
Of course its logical. Income cannot be avoided, you need it to live. When they take a portion of it, that is theft. It is your money, not theirs. Taking money that does not belong to you is theft, and that is what the gov't does.
In contrast, a tax on things you buy can be avoided by not buying those things. The Fair Tax completes that thought by furnishing each citizen with a "prebate" that rebates in advance the amount of money a person would spend to live at the poverty level. If you're single and making $12K / yr, and $12K / yr is the poverty level for single people with no dependents, then you can make your $12K tax free and spend it tax free, because the gov't is sending you enough $$$ to pay for the tax on everything you spend. In effect, you only play tax on things that you do not have to buy - IOW, luxuries.
Once again, your 2nd sentence is an argument against all taxes in general, while I'm only advocating the abolition of INCOME taxes. We can tax something besides income, and do quite well as a nation.
"Buying" an election? You mean when politicians propose to do what people want them to do is buying an election? I thought that was how it was supposed to work.
Texas has no State income taxes, and has one of the best economies in the USA. That's where the whole country should be coming from, stopping taxing our tools of industry, our corporations, out of existence or overseas. That will result in jobs for everyone.
OBTW, WHAT progressive taxation system? The poor pay 15.3% in payroll taxes from the 1st dollar they make all the way up thru their $12,000 / yr income, and the rich stop paying that tax at around $118K. Then, if they can arrange most of their income in capital-gains taxed things, they end up at LESS THAN the poor person pays overall, percentage-wise. OTOH, with the Fair Tax, that simply taxes consumption, poor people pay exactly $0, while everyone else's taxes go down EXCEPT for the tax cheats, the illegal immigrants, the foreign tourists, who all pay more.
Every time a politician wants to help the economy, they find a way to lower taxes, so _they_ know it works even if you don't.
No, don't abolish all taxes, just abolish all income taxes.
Lowering the taxes in 2000 did help the economy, although it was hard to tell after we were attacked in 2001 and had to spend huge amounts of money to ensure it didn't happen again (We had to kick the sh** out of our enemies.) Eliminating Federal income taxes _would_ supercharge the economy, as all those jobs that left our shores for overseas would come back. Hell, they LEFT to get out from under the US corporate taxes, and NO, it was not because of cheap foreign labor, that was a (another) lie (gasp) by American politicians to distract us from the fact that the income taxes are what is killing our economy. JFK knew it and said it, but the A-holes that just want to grow gov't to give themselves more power want you to believe otherwise.
Oh, you didn't hear of any planned terrorist attacks after 9-11? Well, Mr. Deep Thinker, do you suppose that it didn't happen because Pvt. Smith and Pvt. Johnson were OVER THERE blowing the sh** out of UBL's training camps and various minions?
As for abolishing the IRS, there are OTHER things to tax besides income. We did it before 1913, and can do it again. It would result in an economic boom of Biblical proportions. The mast great leap forward was from 1865 - 1900, known as the gilded age, when the economy expanded by 400%. Then in 1913 we made the 2nd biggest mistake in US History, right behind slavery, by passing the 16th Amendment authorizing Federal income taxes. We've not advanced in like fashion since.
Theft is wrong, and never justified. Income taxes are theft. Property taxes are arguably theft, although most things that are property taxed are not really necessary to own, as you can rent and avoid property taxes of the land, and you can simply not drive and avoid the property taxes on cars, and so forth.
Fix this one big injustice / sin of theft from the people by repealing the 16th Amendment and abolishing the Federal income taxes. These taxes were described by JFK as:
"The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.” John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963 "
Not only is abolishing the income taxes the right and moral thing to do, it would supercharge the economy.
Whine about the recent wars all you want, but WE WERE ATTACKED, damnit. Wanna sit around and knit after that? If you do, you have to realize that there were many more attacks coming from the same folks that brought us the 1st one, and many 1000's more would have died without our military traveling to the mideast and settling their hash right there. Each new attack would have been a wonder in stealth and ingenuity, and we'd marvel at how stupid we were not to have seen in coming, but we'd have maybe 3,000 more dead, or 30,000 more dead, or maybe even 300,000 more dead if they laid hands on some of the more hideous WMD that we went to the Mideast to preclude coming here. How would 2 tons of Anthrax distributed along the entire east coast on the wind from a launch on the Blue Ridge Parkway grab you? 300,000 dead might be a low number. It was determined that a single anthrax spore that took to the wind in DC traveled to Baltimore and killed an elederly woman during the attack by that nut-job using weaponized anthrax from one of our defense labs. The stuff is absolutely, stunningly deadly.
Instead of whining about our military, which makes a large part of the world safe for freedom instead of enslavement, why not instead do something useful, and support Repeal16 which would repeal the 16th Amendment and thus abolish the IRS, freeing up its 13 Billion dollar budget request for next year. Think we might be able to fund a telescope with a part of that? Save 300,000 trees too, that wouldn't be used for printing IRS forms. No, really, it takes 300,000 trees to print those forms. And the resulting economic boom from abolishing the most harmful source of economic sabotage ever devised by man short of an all-out war would fund the rest of everything else we decide is a good idea for a long time to come.
Scaring the shit out of the Soviets was a worthy task, and ultimately resulted in the transition of much of the Soviet block from the monstrous form of Communism as propagated by the Soviet Union to freedom. Now, with Mr. weak-knees Barack Obama in office, the Russians are going about recapturing the recently free nations, and reconstituting the Soviet Union while BHO guts our military. Sure, we're probably fairly safe, but the free world around us is paying the price. Feel good about that as you go to sleep tonight if you can.
I guess you missed it above. I said "Excede", which is a satellite internet provider that has the speed of cable and ain't cable and _is_ available even when the cable is not.
Now, it _isn't_ cheap, for that you might have to go to your hated cable or maybe phone company, but it is available and its only major drawback is latency that would keep you from playing FPS games, but not something like poker or chess. But you can do movies for sure. You'd have to be in some remote parts of Alaska where the Excede satellite does not shine in order to not have this available, barring the local quirks like apartments and homeowner's associations hating your antenna, but you can move, and its your own fault for moving into one of those Nazi-run places in the 1st place.
I have a little company called Metrocast, which must be the absolute best cable company on the planet. If there's an outage, they are on the scene within the hour, and never does the TV, internet, or phone I get from them go down for long. I wouldn't think of putting up an antenna myself, my cable is much too feature-rich.
First, oppose laws and homeowners associations and landlords and zoning that don't provide the ability to put up a TV antenna, and I mean a big one so's you can get TV signals from different cities. Then, put one up. No monthly charges ever again, and you can fix anything that goes wrong with it all by yourself. Get your movies over the innernetz and by mail via Netflix, and no, you don't NEED to watch Game of Thrones live as soon as it is aired. You can get the internet via a new satellite company called Excede, the only drawback to that being that it isn't responsive enough to do gaming over the internet. But you can download a whale of a lot of info. Problem solved - no more cable.
Yeah, but the envirowackos always choose to be against whatever it is someone is trying to do. They have no plan.
Yeah, I did account for the electric motor of the electric car being 90% efficient, and the battery charging being 90% efficient. What I didn't account for is the 7% loss of the electric power grid, on average.
OK, Wikipedia says 18% to 20% efficiency for average IC engine, so we'd be reducing the requirement by, say, 20 / 35 =.57, but need to increase by 7% due to my leaving out the power grid loss, so that's.61 times the aforementioned 108 nukes which would be 65.88 or to round up, 66 new nukes the size of our largest.
Whatever the number, 108, 66, or 10, it doesn't matter, because they're never going to get built. We will run electric cars / trucks / trains / boats on natural gas, coal, and whatever "renewable" sources are able to be built, and it _will_ mostly pollute, and release CO2.
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...are already computerized. The old '98 Jeep has a "check engine" light that has been on for about 6 years that says the oxygen sensor is out, but that was replaced 3 times and the light still keeps coming back on. Obviously, its the frappin' engine computer. No, I'm not replacing a computer, prolly $1200 - dunno, haven't looked - when I can just ignore the frappin' light.
The other car has had numerous failures connected to the computer, from the bad brake light switch that caused a "check engine" light that also disables the cruise control, and other failures that have also disabled the cruise control. The car has a "hill holder" function to prevent rollback and a stability control function that prevents skids which neither work because a "steering wheel angle sensor" is "throwing codes" and disabling those 2 functions. It doesn't disable the cruise control, so I can ignore it, although two warning lights on the dash are on permanently now, because I'm not spending $700 to have the steering column totally torn apart to replace that sensor (that may be a bad computer anyway, just like the Jeep), when I know how to do both of those functions all by myself anyway.
Self-driving car? They better have 3 computers in a "voting" arrangement and prohibit maintenance to them by anyone not having a college electrical engineering degree. These things may kill more than they save if you get Billy-Bob under the hood and stripping wires and putting them back together with black plastic electrical tape which will weather and fall off and then that wire shorts...
I don't think you've read and understood the Fair Tax. No poor person pays even a penny of Fair Tax. I'm right in the middle of the middle class, and would save $2K a year with the Fair Tax. Your taxes would probably be lower too.
41%. See it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... It also supports their Social Security as well as the healthcare. Pretty steep.
No, the income tax doesn't really hurt the top guys all that much, they can take care of themselves. But, it _does_ hurt the businesses. The businesses are forced to raise the prices for their goods and services to pay the taxes on their operations, and they _don't_ get that money by diminishing in any way the salaries of the top guys.
The DO raise the prices of their products, and the DO lower the pay of their workers, and they DO reduce the payout of the dividends on their stocks. The money that the public would have saved and the money the employees would have earned and the dividends that the investors would have enjoyed instead is stolen by the US Gov't.
I say stolen because it is taken by force by people to whom it does not belong. I've come to the conclusion, after a lifetime of attempting to rationalize it, that income taxes are purely and simply stealing. I can find no good reason to excuse the gov't from that charge. The gov't doesn't have the right to everyone's property. It has the power to take it, but not the right. No kidding, I always used to wonder about that as soon as I heard about it in grade school, "What gives them the right?" Well, they don't have the right, simply the power.
You should take a much closer look at the Fair Tax. The FT is the only tax so far proposed that is truly progressive. The income taxes aren't - Warren Buffet ends up paying 14%, and his secretary pays, what was it, 18%? What's progressive about that? The payroll taxes supporting social security and Medicare cease being collected at the point that the person makes about $118K, but are collected from the 1st dollar that a poor person makes. A poor person that makes $12K / yr ends up sending 15.3% of that to Washington, DC.
In contrast, the FT "prebates" each citizen with the amount of $$$ that they would need to pay the FT on poverty level spending. That is, if one is single, and the poverty level is $12K, that person would receive 23% of $12,000 each year to pay the FT on all the things he would buy up to the poverty level. So, that person will get $2,760 each year, divided up into 12 equal monthly payments. It doesn't matter whether that person is a single person that is as rich as Bill Gates, or your favorite street person panhandling on a street corner, he will get that prebate.
Due to the prebate, no person effectively pays the Fair Tax. When he buys something, he reaches into the pocket with the money he earned or panhandled or whatever, and pays the price of the item he's buying, and then reaches into the pocket that has the money he received from the gov't as a prebate and pays the Fair Tax. That pocket will continue to provide money to pay the Fair Tax all the way up until he spends his last dollar that is at the poverty level for the month. Then, the prebate runs out and the person has to start paying the Fair Tax on remaining items he buys for the month, until his next prebate check comes the following month. Of course, if he's making poverty level wages, he is not capable of spending more than the poverty level, and so NEVER pays the Fair Tax himself.
And I took a look at the Flat Tax once upon a time and discovered that while it purports to give a break to people for the first $X dollars they make, which I think was somewhere around $18K, it DOES NOT repeal the payroll taxes. Therefore it charges its 17% flat tax rate to _AND_ the 15.3% payroll taxes to the person starting at $18K (or whatever the exemption is, I forget) and so the middle class pays 32.3% tax to the gov't, while the payroll tax stops taxing the rich at around $118K, so the rich making much, much higher than $118K end up being taxed very close to 17% Flat Tax for their entire earnings. Poor: 15.3% Middle Class: 32.3% Rich: 17% plus a fraction. Progressive? Nope. Only the Fair Tax is progressive.
And there are side benefits to the Fair Tax such as not having to spend $13B on the IRS, since the states collect the monies, and we can even go green by not cutting
I pay $194/month as a retiree for former-employer-subsidized healthcare. I would expect that to go to about $1500 / month from a private company on the open market. Do I want my retirement reduced to deciding to pay the electric bill or affording my medicine due to the O'care high-deductibles? Nope. Leave this the hell alone, so I can have a good retirement.
Want to really help the American people? Pass the Fair Tax, which would put everyone back to work and they could then buy their own healthcare without the gov't getting involved in paying for it.
Germany's payroll tax for healthcare purposes is 41%. Look it up. Want to be paying 41% of everything you make, from the 1st dollar up to the last, because of healthcare?
Duh, EVERYTHING costs more in the USA. That's why lotsa people buy stuff overseas. Our high cost of living is legendary. So why are U surprised when healthcare is $2X.
Single payer would get gov't involved, which is ALWAYS guaranteed to cost more or deliver less or deliver it waaaaay slower. The US Gov't cannot do FAST, CHEAP, and GOOD all at once. They just can't. The US military is FAST and GOOD, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. The US Post Office is Cheap and Good, but not necessarily fast, at least not at the cheap price.
Yes, its a bogeyman, and totally false as a reason for our uncompetitiveness. The real reason is US income taxes. They make manufacturing here too expensive. Repeal the income taxes, and go back to work, and have your non-college-educated friends and relatives go back to work, in factories, building things that were formerally built in China, India, Korea, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, etc.
Ah, the oft-repeated lie of the high US labor costs.
Labor costs in the US are NOT high, because 1 US laborer does the work of may foreign laborers. Is the US laborer a superman? Yes, when he's stepping up to operate a machine that does the actual work.
Ever seen a picture of the FoxConn factory? Did you see 1000's of tables where PEOPLE stand and put together iPhones by hand? Yes you did. What would that factory look like in the USA? It would look like 50 guys / gals and 400 machines spitting out iPhones much faster than all those Chinese workers, with less scrap.
So, why isn't the iPhone built here? It ain't the expensive labor, ITS THE DAMNED TAXES!!!! US Income taxes account for about 22% of the selling price of anything built in this country.
Want to fix this, and bring these jobs back from China? Pass the Fair Tax, which abolishes the income taxes, all of them, and... go back to work, and have your friends without college degrees go back to work, as 100's of 1,000's of factories spring up across the USA and build things for domestic and export consumption, all without the burden of the US income taxes. The Fair Tax does not tax business, so US goods would drop an estimated 11% - 18% in price. That's all we need, folks, to take over the manufacturing world over the entire planet. Just get rid of the damned income taxes, and prosper.
Had someone stuck this nuclear waste in an Egyptian pyramid, it would still be there, 3000 years later. So, why can't we do as well now?
And yet... there would be no further tax on the interest of the pile of $$$ that they saved up. 6 of 1, half dozen of the other...
Of course its logical. Income cannot be avoided, you need it to live. When they take a portion of it, that is theft. It is your money, not theirs. Taking money that does not belong to you is theft, and that is what the gov't does.
In contrast, a tax on things you buy can be avoided by not buying those things. The Fair Tax completes that thought by furnishing each citizen with a "prebate" that rebates in advance the amount of money a person would spend to live at the poverty level. If you're single and making $12K / yr, and $12K / yr is the poverty level for single people with no dependents, then you can make your $12K tax free and spend it tax free, because the gov't is sending you enough $$$ to pay for the tax on everything you spend. In effect, you only play tax on things that you do not have to buy - IOW, luxuries.
Once again, your 2nd sentence is an argument against all taxes in general, while I'm only advocating the abolition of INCOME taxes. We can tax something besides income, and do quite well as a nation.
I argue to abolish the income taxes and you act like I said we should abolish all taxes. Why is that?
"Buying" an election? You mean when politicians propose to do what people want them to do is buying an election? I thought that was how it was supposed to work.
Texas has no State income taxes, and has one of the best economies in the USA. That's where the whole country should be coming from, stopping taxing our tools of industry, our corporations, out of existence or overseas. That will result in jobs for everyone.
OBTW, WHAT progressive taxation system? The poor pay 15.3% in payroll taxes from the 1st dollar they make all the way up thru their $12,000 / yr income, and the rich stop paying that tax at around $118K. Then, if they can arrange most of their income in capital-gains taxed things, they end up at LESS THAN the poor person pays overall, percentage-wise. OTOH, with the Fair Tax, that simply taxes consumption, poor people pay exactly $0, while everyone else's taxes go down EXCEPT for the tax cheats, the illegal immigrants, the foreign tourists, who all pay more.
You argue against abolishing all taxes when I propose only to abolish INCOME taxes, which are theft and therefore immoral. Why is that?
Every time a politician wants to help the economy, they find a way to lower taxes, so _they_ know it works even if you don't.
No, don't abolish all taxes, just abolish all income taxes.
Lowering the taxes in 2000 did help the economy, although it was hard to tell after we were attacked in 2001 and had to spend huge amounts of money to ensure it didn't happen again (We had to kick the sh** out of our enemies.) Eliminating Federal income taxes _would_ supercharge the economy, as all those jobs that left our shores for overseas would come back. Hell, they LEFT to get out from under the US corporate taxes, and NO, it was not because of cheap foreign labor, that was a (another) lie (gasp) by American politicians to distract us from the fact that the income taxes are what is killing our economy. JFK knew it and said it, but the A-holes that just want to grow gov't to give themselves more power want you to believe otherwise.
Oh, you didn't hear of any planned terrorist attacks after 9-11? Well, Mr. Deep Thinker, do you suppose that it didn't happen because Pvt. Smith and Pvt. Johnson were OVER THERE blowing the sh** out of UBL's training camps and various minions?
As for abolishing the IRS, there are OTHER things to tax besides income. We did it before 1913, and can do it again. It would result in an economic boom of Biblical proportions. The mast great leap forward was from 1865 - 1900, known as the gilded age, when the economy expanded by 400%. Then in 1913 we made the 2nd biggest mistake in US History, right behind slavery, by passing the 16th Amendment authorizing Federal income taxes. We've not advanced in like fashion since.
Theft is wrong, and never justified. Income taxes are theft. Property taxes are arguably theft, although most things that are property taxed are not really necessary to own, as you can rent and avoid property taxes of the land, and you can simply not drive and avoid the property taxes on cars, and so forth.
Fix this one big injustice / sin of theft from the people by repealing the 16th Amendment and abolishing the Federal income taxes. These taxes were described by JFK as:
"The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.” John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963 "
Not only is abolishing the income taxes the right and moral thing to do, it would supercharge the economy.
Keep voting democrat, and our scientific capability decline will be further assured.
Whine about the recent wars all you want, but WE WERE ATTACKED, damnit. Wanna sit around and knit after that? If you do, you have to realize that there were many more attacks coming from the same folks that brought us the 1st one, and many 1000's more would have died without our military traveling to the mideast and settling their hash right there. Each new attack would have been a wonder in stealth and ingenuity, and we'd marvel at how stupid we were not to have seen in coming, but we'd have maybe 3,000 more dead, or 30,000 more dead, or maybe even 300,000 more dead if they laid hands on some of the more hideous WMD that we went to the Mideast to preclude coming here. How would 2 tons of Anthrax distributed along the entire east coast on the wind from a launch on the Blue Ridge Parkway grab you? 300,000 dead might be a low number. It was determined that a single anthrax spore that took to the wind in DC traveled to Baltimore and killed an elederly woman during the attack by that nut-job using weaponized anthrax from one of our defense labs. The stuff is absolutely, stunningly deadly.
Instead of whining about our military, which makes a large part of the world safe for freedom instead of enslavement, why not instead do something useful, and support Repeal16 which would repeal the 16th Amendment and thus abolish the IRS, freeing up its 13 Billion dollar budget request for next year. Think we might be able to fund a telescope with a part of that? Save 300,000 trees too, that wouldn't be used for printing IRS forms. No, really, it takes 300,000 trees to print those forms. And the resulting economic boom from abolishing the most harmful source of economic sabotage ever devised by man short of an all-out war would fund the rest of everything else we decide is a good idea for a long time to come.
Scaring the shit out of the Soviets was a worthy task, and ultimately resulted in the transition of much of the Soviet block from the monstrous form of Communism as propagated by the Soviet Union to freedom. Now, with Mr. weak-knees Barack Obama in office, the Russians are going about recapturing the recently free nations, and reconstituting the Soviet Union while BHO guts our military. Sure, we're probably fairly safe, but the free world around us is paying the price. Feel good about that as you go to sleep tonight if you can.
I guess you missed it above. I said "Excede", which is a satellite internet provider that has the speed of cable and ain't cable and _is_ available even when the cable is not.
http://www.exede-sales.com/
Now, it _isn't_ cheap, for that you might have to go to your hated cable or maybe phone company, but it is available and its only major drawback is latency that would keep you from playing FPS games, but not something like poker or chess. But you can do movies for sure. You'd have to be in some remote parts of Alaska where the Excede satellite does not shine in order to not have this available, barring the local quirks like apartments and homeowner's associations hating your antenna, but you can move, and its your own fault for moving into one of those Nazi-run places in the 1st place.
I have a little company called Metrocast, which must be the absolute best cable company on the planet. If there's an outage, they are on the scene within the hour, and never does the TV, internet, or phone I get from them go down for long. I wouldn't think of putting up an antenna myself, my cable is much too feature-rich.
First, oppose laws and homeowners associations and landlords and zoning that don't provide the ability to put up a TV antenna, and I mean a big one so's you can get TV signals from different cities. Then, put one up. No monthly charges ever again, and you can fix anything that goes wrong with it all by yourself. Get your movies over the innernetz and by mail via Netflix, and no, you don't NEED to watch Game of Thrones live as soon as it is aired. You can get the internet via a new satellite company called Excede, the only drawback to that being that it isn't responsive enough to do gaming over the internet. But you can download a whale of a lot of info. Problem solved - no more cable.
Yeah, but the envirowackos always choose to be against whatever it is someone is trying to do. They have no plan.
Yeah, I did account for the electric motor of the electric car being 90% efficient, and the battery charging being 90% efficient. What I didn't account for is the 7% loss of the electric power grid, on average.
OK, Wikipedia says 18% to 20% efficiency for average IC engine, so we'd be reducing the requirement by, say, 20 / 35 = .57, but need to increase by 7% due to my leaving out the power grid loss, so that's .61 times the aforementioned 108 nukes which would be 65.88 or to round up, 66 new nukes the size of our largest.
Whatever the number, 108, 66, or 10, it doesn't matter, because they're never going to get built. We will run electric cars / trucks / trains / boats on natural gas, coal, and whatever "renewable" sources are able to be built, and it _will_ mostly pollute, and release CO2.