"given that they can be cost effectively obtained elsewhere for now?"
And if it can't, and you NEED it, you better have your own sources.
We are fools if we allow China to supply us with everything, since that makes us dependent. We have no business being dependent on a communist nation for anything. We have no business being dependent on any other nation, if it can be avoided.
>What's the worst that could happen if global warming is real and we do nothing?
We have relatively happy lives for the next 100 years or so, and then the people at that time have developed the technology to fight the problem with geo-engineering because they have a prosperous economy unfettered by wild-eyed envirowackos trying to force them to live in caves and read by candlelight.
>What's the worst the could happen if global warming is not true and we do something?
We spend an estimated 50 trillion dollars for nothing, bankrupt the world, and end up living in tar-paper shacks and dying of things that could have been cured, but were not for lack of money that was shoved down a rathole trying to solve a non-problem.
someone will have invented the magic battery that will let cars drive 300 - 400 miles on a single charge and either charge the battery in 2 minutes (wiring the size of your leg to carry that sort of amperage) or there will be a scheme to be able to change discharged batteries in 2 minutes with fully charged batteries. After that, CAFE will be as much of a dinosaur as the internal combustion engine.
Yep - the MF's _were_ unreliable, that's for sure. Used to back up with 'em when I didn't have much data. Bought 100's of 'em. Several years later, few if any would accept data. Basic doornails.
Netflix Streaming != Netflix DVD. Netflix Streaming is missing MOST of my favorite movies. Here they are:
"Crocodile" Dundee, 2001: A Space Odyssey , 300, 48 Hrs, A Clockwork Orange , A Nightmare on Elm Street, Airport, Aladdin, Alien vs. Predator, Aliens, All the President's Men, American Graffiti , An American Werewolf in London, An Officer and a Gentleman, Antwone Fisher, Apocalypse Now , Apollo 13, Arthur, Avatar, Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II, Back to the Future Part III, Batman, Batman Begins, Beauty and the Beast, Beverly Hills Cop, Big, Black Hawk Down, Blazing Saddles, Bonnie and Clyde , Born Free, Braveheart, Bullitt, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , Cast Away, Cat Ballou, Catch Me If You Can, City Slickers, Cleopatra, Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Contact, Dances with Wolves, Das Boot, Deliverance , Die Another Day, Die Hard, Dirty Dancing, Dirty Harry , Doctor Zhivago, Dog Day Afternoon, Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , E. T. - The Extra-Terrestrial , Easy Rider , Enter the Dragon, Erin Brockovich, Escape From New York, Excalibur, Fail Safe, Falling Down, Fargo, Fatal Attraction, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, First Blood, Flashdance, Frailty, From Russia With Love, Full Metal Jacket, Ghost, Ghostbusters , Gladiator, GoldenEye, Goldfinger, Gorillas in the Mist, Gran Torino, Grease, Gremlins, Groundhog Day, Halloween, Hamlet, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Home Alone, How the West Was Won, Ice Age, In the Heat of the Night , Independence Day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Inglourious Basterds, Iron Man, Jarhead, Jaws, Jerry Maguire, Jurassic Park, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, King Kong, Kramer vs. Kramer, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Lawrence of Arabia , Lethal Weapon, Life is Beautiful, Live Free or Die Hard, M*A*S*H, Man on Fire, Marathon Man , Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mean Girls, Men in Black, Midnight Cowboy , Minority Report, Misery, Mission: Impossible, Monster, Mrs. Doubtfire, My Cousin Vinny, Mystic River, National Lampoon's Animal House, National Lampoon's Vacation, Network , No Country For Old Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , One Hundred and One Dalmatian, Patton, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Planet of the Apes, Platoon, Play Misty For Me , Point Break, Poltergeist, Predator, Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark , Red Eye, Return of the Jedi, Robocop, Rocky, Rocky Balboa, Romancing the Stone, Rosemary's Baby , Saturday Night Fever, Saving Private Ryan, Saw, Schindler's List , School of Rock, Scream 2, Se7en, Serpico, Sister Act, Solaris, Spartacus, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Star Trek, Star Trek - The Motion Picture, Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Wars , Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Starship Troopers, Sudden Impact , Superman The Movie, Taxi Driver , Terminator 2: Judgment Day , Terminator Salvation, The Abyss, The Aviator, The Birds , The Blind Side, The Blues Brothers, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Dark Knight, The Dirty Dozen, The Empire Strikes Back , The Exorcist , The French Connection , The Fugitive, The Godfather , The Godfather (Part II), The Godfather, Part III, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Graduate , The Great Escape, The Green Mile, The Guns of Navarone, The Hangover, The Hunt for Red October, The Hurt Locker, The Illusionist, The Incredibles, The Last Samurai, The Longest Day, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The
what you do, it'll all be lost in the next giant solar flare that gets shot at earth, or the next EMP attack. Nothing will survive in the way of computer equipment to be able to read it.
Simple. You design a connector that FITS the HDMI port, but, for some reason of measurements or maybe leaving some mechanical feature off it, does not actually constitute an HDMI connector, then you can put anything you want on the other end of the cable.
These yahoos make me sick with their attempts to keep people from backing up their CDs, DVDs, HD stuff, etc. If I want to travel with my library, I don't want to put $5000 worth of DVDs in the car, I want to put $80 worth of backed-up copies, so if it is lost or stolen, I just burn a new set. It happened to my audio CDs a few years ago when I left a Case Logic folder full of about 100 CDs of music laying on the car. Drove off, and it's somewhere along the Gunflint Trail north of Superior. Burned a new set. No problem.
WSJ says "Those people that the president has targeted" and Huffpo says "the top 10%." There's no way to know if the 2 articles are measuring the same set of people. Both articles may be right or not. The fact is, tho, that you can't 100% tax either one of them, so the study of this hypothesis is simply an exercise designed to show the futility of raising taxes on "the rich." If you did tax them at 100%, they would just stop working, as that has another name, which is slavery. If you tax 'em at 95%, lots of them will also stop working, or not work nearly so hard. If you tax them at 90%, the same thing occurs, its just a matter of degree.
What would be better is a tax system that nails so many of those that avoid taxes completely right now, which are the criminals, the illegal aliens, the bozos that send their money to Swiss bank accounts and European Securities, etc. etc. Throw in taxing tourists of which there are about 45 million a year, and you're talking some real money. This would be the Fair Tax. It is a consumption tax - a sales tax - which would let us get completely rid of the income taxes that devastate our businesses so much, and force American businessmen to either ship jobs overseas, or go out of business completely because manufacturing here is so expensive.
Wanna fix this? The best way is to grow the economy. Taxing the rich won't do it - according to the Wall Street Journal, taxing the rich at a 100% rate would still only raise $938B, while our deficit is $1,650B. Not enough.
We either have to slice everything absolutely to the bone if we want to leave medicare and social security untouched (we do...) or we have to make it so there is a LOT more money in the country so's we can tax it.
The way to do that is to pass the Fair Tax. It completely kills income taxes, which would cause a business boom of biblical proportions. We'd have investment dollars coming out our ears. Factories would be built across the land like mushrooms on a warm spring day. Pay is pretty good for electricians and milwrights and machinists and pipefitters and the like, and THAT is how we'll raise revenue... and cut expenses, such as the $100B / yr in unemployment payments and the $70B/yr in food stamps.
Without the Fair Tax, I don't see any other way we can afford our "investments", and places like Russia, that got tired of communism decades ago, will be the ones that do the research, while we move in the direction that they have fled from.
No, to fix this, the USA has to develop a business-friendly economy, with features like zero business taxes in order to bring back manufacturing in order to have jobs for people that make great welders and electricians, but don't and won't work in labs testing people's PSA levels. Getting manufacturing back, in seriously biblical proportions, is key to American prosperity. Pass the Fair Tax - no more income tax of any kind - and manufacturing will come back like a tidal wave. Then the US can lead in many areas again.
...just as soon as we can do it on a balanced budget.
Until we can do that, we're pretty much Zimbabwe, which doesn't have a space program either. The US National budget is in crisis, and threatens the very existence of the Nation itself. If the problem is not fixed very soon, we can look forward to an economic collapse that will make the suffering of the 1930's look small by comparison. The people of the 30's were largely agrarian, and most wouldn't starve. Not true today, so if there's no money to buy diesel to transport food to Krogers or Food Lion, people are going to go hungry, possibly to a termination. Since the Wall Street Journal proved that taxing "The Rich" of ALL their income would only produce $938 billion more, and the deficit is $1,650 billion, we know that taxing our way out of the crisis is not possible. We have to quit spending, and this is one of those things. Passing the Fair Tax to dramatically grow the economy would sure help, but we just can't fix it with taxes.
So, no, the gov't should get out of space and about 1000 other places that we can't afford, and get about making the country prosperous enough again to be able to afford things like this.
Here's a scifi disaster story for you: A huge solar flare wipes out every computer and electrical grid on the planet. The people foolishly have stored all their knowledge on computers, which they cannot now use to retrieve it. Therefore, nobody knows how to build most of the things that they used to build, and the society dies from the sudden vanishing of their body of human knowledge.
"You think that foreign car companies won't respond by innovating to cut their pricing yet further?"
No. If they could, they would. Now. That way, they'd capture more of the market. But the fact that they haven't indicates that they can't.
"Did you not read about the Tata Nano?"
Yeah, I did. It's a pile of c***. Read where one caught fire on the way home from the showroom. They can make go-karts all they want, but they wouldn't sell here, so it doesn't matter.
And yeah, a $35.6K SUV that used to be $40K would sell much better, and take market share away from foreign manufacturers that would get no such price break. IOW, the Fair Tax amounts to a tariff, in that it lowers domestic prices but not foriegn prices.
Jobs are created, as well as absolute zero pollution is generated during operation. It rivals nukes for that, consumes nothing that must be trucked to the site nor produces anything that must be trucked away from the site. I think it is "the answer" for long-term energy production as soon as we figure out the magic battery that can be charged up and will run things like cars, trucks, trains, etc. Trains can even have electricity delivered by overhead wires.
It takes 30 - 33 hours for the Detroit-based auto companies to build a car. Wages are about $78/hr as a cost to the company, including the benefits and pension expenses and so forth. That's about $2500 of labor in each car. But for a $40K SUV, the tax costs to the company could be around $8,800.
Now, the US auto companies are ALREADY competitive with the foreign car companies, so think how much better they would compete first if the could enslave the workforce, and take $2,500 off the price of their cars, or maybe recover even half of the $8,800 that it is costing them in taxes to build the car. $40,000 SUV becomes a $35,600 SUV with no US income tax expense? Think it would be more competitive?
If the project succeeds, the envirowackos will sue to stop it, or sue to stop the construction of the power wires that are needed to distribute the power, or some other weak excuse to attack the USA, which is their true aim. They are a bunch of commies / socialists / marxists that are bent on the destruction of the USA as a capitalist society, and conversion of it to the yoke of these leftist, enslaving ideologies.
You want to see stuff built here? Then pass the Fair Tax. 22% of the price of goods built here is composed of the income tax costs to businesses that manufacture here. About half that is recoverable if income taxes went away, as they would if the Fair Tax was passed. That one thing would revitalize this country, end the recession practically overnight, and make the USA the newest, bestest tax haven for manufacturing on the planet.
Or we can continue to "get those greedy b*****rds that are making profits, and... shoot ourselves in the foot every time. Corporate income taxes are an abomination, because corporations don't pay them. That's because the don't have any money. Corporate money looks like this:
So, try to "punish" a corporation with taxes, and customers simply pay more for goods, employees see smaller or no raises, and stockholders suffer smaller or absent dividends.
And all that means that businessmen do the right thing for their business and manufacture overseas.
I never said that they were capable of thinking ahead. They only want cheap labor. They don't necessarily care (any more... they used to) whether you have enough $$$ left over to buy the product you're manufacturing.
Like I said, the corporations get hammered either because the taxes themselves are expensive, or the measures required to avoid the taxes are almost as expensive as paying the taxes themselves. The group that supports the Fair Tax has studied the question, and noted the research of a Dr. Jorgenson, a dept. of economics head of I believe it is Harvard, that says that 22% of the price of goods produced in the USA are composed of tax costs encurred by the corporations manufacturing here. The obvious solution to this is not to manufacture here - go somewhere that doesn't have to pay US corporate taxes, or spend a lot of money to avoid paying US corporate taxes.
Figuring 22% of the price of a new SUV, that could be $8800 for a $40K SUV. I've also found in my own travels on the internet that it takes 30 - 33 person-hours for one of our car companies to build a car. And, using the car company's own statements of the cost of an hour of labor that they were saying 3 years ago when they were about to go bankrupt, of $78 / hr, then the whole of labor costs to build a car is around $2500. Lessee... eliminate corporate taxes and maybe a good chunk of that tax cost of $8800, or enslave the workers and save (only) $2500. I vote for getting rid of the corporate taxes.
As a goal, I don't believe that it is an exaggeration. The "powers that be" I believe _are_ trying to make US workers salaries as low as they can in order to compete with foreign workers. That is the goal, and if they were to achieve salaries that compete even-up with India and China, I believe that would make them happy. Its up to us to change that attitude and that goal.
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"given that they can be cost effectively obtained elsewhere for now?"
And if it can't, and you NEED it, you better have your own sources.
We are fools if we allow China to supply us with everything, since that makes us dependent. We have no business being dependent on a communist nation for anything. We have no business being dependent on any other nation, if it can be avoided.
>What's the worst that could happen if global warming is real and we do nothing?
We have relatively happy lives for the next 100 years or so, and then the people at that time have developed the technology to fight the problem with geo-engineering because they have a prosperous economy unfettered by wild-eyed envirowackos trying to force them to live in caves and read by candlelight.
>What's the worst the could happen if global warming is not true and we do something?
We spend an estimated 50 trillion dollars for nothing, bankrupt the world, and end up living in tar-paper shacks and dying of things that could have been cured, but were not for lack of money that was shoved down a rathole trying to solve a non-problem.
>Which outcome is the worst?
Spending all our wealth on a wild goose chase.
someone will have invented the magic battery that will let cars drive 300 - 400 miles on a single charge and either charge the battery in 2 minutes (wiring the size of your leg to carry that sort of amperage) or there will be a scheme to be able to change discharged batteries in 2 minutes with fully charged batteries. After that, CAFE will be as much of a dinosaur as the internal combustion engine.
with the President's other efforts to destroy America.
Yep - the MF's _were_ unreliable, that's for sure. Used to back up with 'em when I didn't have much data. Bought 100's of 'em. Several years later, few if any would accept data. Basic doornails.
Netflix Streaming != Netflix DVD. Netflix Streaming is missing MOST of my favorite movies. Here they are:
"Crocodile" Dundee, 2001: A Space Odyssey , 300, 48 Hrs, A Clockwork Orange , A Nightmare on Elm Street, Airport, Aladdin, Alien vs. Predator, Aliens, All the President's Men, American Graffiti , An American Werewolf in London, An Officer and a Gentleman, Antwone Fisher, Apocalypse Now , Apollo 13, Arthur, Avatar, Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II, Back to the Future Part III, Batman, Batman Begins, Beauty and the Beast, Beverly Hills Cop, Big, Black Hawk Down, Blazing Saddles, Bonnie and Clyde , Born Free, Braveheart, Bullitt, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , Cast Away, Cat Ballou, Catch Me If You Can, City Slickers, Cleopatra, Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Contact, Dances with Wolves, Das Boot, Deliverance , Die Another Day, Die Hard, Dirty Dancing, Dirty Harry , Doctor Zhivago, Dog Day Afternoon, Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , E. T. - The Extra-Terrestrial , Easy Rider , Enter the Dragon, Erin Brockovich, Escape From New York, Excalibur, Fail Safe, Falling Down, Fargo, Fatal Attraction, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, First Blood, Flashdance, Frailty, From Russia With Love, Full Metal Jacket, Ghost, Ghostbusters , Gladiator, GoldenEye, Goldfinger, Gorillas in the Mist, Gran Torino, Grease, Gremlins, Groundhog Day, Halloween, Hamlet, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Home Alone, How the West Was Won, Ice Age, In the Heat of the Night , Independence Day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Inglourious Basterds, Iron Man, Jarhead, Jaws, Jerry Maguire, Jurassic Park, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2, King Kong, Kramer vs. Kramer, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Lawrence of Arabia , Lethal Weapon, Life is Beautiful, Live Free or Die Hard, M*A*S*H, Man on Fire, Marathon Man , Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mean Girls, Men in Black, Midnight Cowboy , Minority Report, Misery, Mission: Impossible, Monster, Mrs. Doubtfire, My Cousin Vinny, Mystic River, National Lampoon's Animal House, National Lampoon's Vacation, Network , No Country For Old Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , One Hundred and One Dalmatian, Patton, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Planet of the Apes, Platoon, Play Misty For Me , Point Break, Poltergeist, Predator, Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark , Red Eye, Return of the Jedi, Robocop, Rocky, Rocky Balboa, Romancing the Stone, Rosemary's Baby , Saturday Night Fever, Saving Private Ryan, Saw, Schindler's List , School of Rock, Scream 2, Se7en, Serpico, Sister Act, Solaris, Spartacus, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Star Trek, Star Trek - The Motion Picture, Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Wars , Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Starship Troopers, Sudden Impact , Superman The Movie, Taxi Driver , Terminator 2: Judgment Day , Terminator Salvation, The Abyss, The Aviator, The Birds , The Blind Side, The Blues Brothers, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Dark Knight, The Dirty Dozen, The Empire Strikes Back , The Exorcist , The French Connection , The Fugitive, The Godfather , The Godfather (Part II), The Godfather, Part III, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Graduate , The Great Escape, The Green Mile, The Guns of Navarone, The Hangover, The Hunt for Red October, The Hurt Locker, The Illusionist, The Incredibles, The Last Samurai, The Longest Day, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The
what you do, it'll all be lost in the next giant solar flare that gets shot at earth, or the next EMP attack. Nothing will survive in the way of computer equipment to be able to read it.
Simple. You design a connector that FITS the HDMI port, but, for some reason of measurements or maybe leaving some mechanical feature off it, does not actually constitute an HDMI connector, then you can put anything you want on the other end of the cable.
These yahoos make me sick with their attempts to keep people from backing up their CDs, DVDs, HD stuff, etc. If I want to travel with my library, I don't want to put $5000 worth of DVDs in the car, I want to put $80 worth of backed-up copies, so if it is lost or stolen, I just burn a new set. It happened to my audio CDs a few years ago when I left a Case Logic folder full of about 100 CDs of music laying on the car. Drove off, and it's somewhere along the Gunflint Trail north of Superior. Burned a new set. No problem.
WSJ says "Those people that the president has targeted" and Huffpo says "the top 10%." There's no way to know if the 2 articles are measuring the same set of people. Both articles may be right or not. The fact is, tho, that you can't 100% tax either one of them, so the study of this hypothesis is simply an exercise designed to show the futility of raising taxes on "the rich." If you did tax them at 100%, they would just stop working, as that has another name, which is slavery. If you tax 'em at 95%, lots of them will also stop working, or not work nearly so hard. If you tax them at 90%, the same thing occurs, its just a matter of degree.
What would be better is a tax system that nails so many of those that avoid taxes completely right now, which are the criminals, the illegal aliens, the bozos that send their money to Swiss bank accounts and European Securities, etc. etc. Throw in taxing tourists of which there are about 45 million a year, and you're talking some real money. This would be the Fair Tax. It is a consumption tax - a sales tax - which would let us get completely rid of the income taxes that devastate our businesses so much, and force American businessmen to either ship jobs overseas, or go out of business completely because manufacturing here is so expensive.
Wanna fix this? The best way is to grow the economy. Taxing the rich won't do it - according to the Wall Street Journal, taxing the rich at a 100% rate would still only raise $938B, while our deficit is $1,650B. Not enough.
We either have to slice everything absolutely to the bone if we want to leave medicare and social security untouched (we do...) or we have to make it so there is a LOT more money in the country so's we can tax it.
The way to do that is to pass the Fair Tax. It completely kills income taxes, which would cause a business boom of biblical proportions. We'd have investment dollars coming out our ears. Factories would be built across the land like mushrooms on a warm spring day. Pay is pretty good for electricians and milwrights and machinists and pipefitters and the like, and THAT is how we'll raise revenue... and cut expenses, such as the $100B / yr in unemployment payments and the $70B/yr in food stamps.
Without the Fair Tax, I don't see any other way we can afford our "investments", and places like Russia, that got tired of communism decades ago, will be the ones that do the research, while we move in the direction that they have fled from.
The question is, "Should we fully fund NASA?" Nope, not while we're spending borrowed money. That's all I'm saying.
We're not going to have the $$$ to send the robots, either.
No, to fix this, the USA has to develop a business-friendly economy, with features like zero business taxes in order to bring back manufacturing in order to have jobs for people that make great welders and electricians, but don't and won't work in labs testing people's PSA levels. Getting manufacturing back, in seriously biblical proportions, is key to American prosperity. Pass the Fair Tax - no more income tax of any kind - and manufacturing will come back like a tidal wave. Then the US can lead in many areas again.
...just as soon as we can do it on a balanced budget.
Until we can do that, we're pretty much Zimbabwe, which doesn't have a space program either. The US National budget is in crisis, and threatens the very existence of the Nation itself. If the problem is not fixed very soon, we can look forward to an economic collapse that will make the suffering of the 1930's look small by comparison. The people of the 30's were largely agrarian, and most wouldn't starve. Not true today, so if there's no money to buy diesel to transport food to Krogers or Food Lion, people are going to go hungry, possibly to a termination. Since the Wall Street Journal proved that taxing "The Rich" of ALL their income would only produce $938 billion more, and the deficit is $1,650 billion, we know that taxing our way out of the crisis is not possible. We have to quit spending, and this is one of those things. Passing the Fair Tax to dramatically grow the economy would sure help, but we just can't fix it with taxes.
So, no, the gov't should get out of space and about 1000 other places that we can't afford, and get about making the country prosperous enough again to be able to afford things like this.
We do NOT want to meet them... or the Klingons, the Romulans, etc.
Naw... that's dilythium... and they're crystals anyway...
Here's a scifi disaster story for you: A huge solar flare wipes out every computer and electrical grid on the planet. The people foolishly have stored all their knowledge on computers, which they cannot now use to retrieve it. Therefore, nobody knows how to build most of the things that they used to build, and the society dies from the sudden vanishing of their body of human knowledge.
"You think that foreign car companies won't respond by innovating to cut their pricing yet further?"
No. If they could, they would. Now. That way, they'd capture more of the market. But the fact that they haven't indicates that they can't.
"Did you not read about the Tata Nano?"
Yeah, I did. It's a pile of c***. Read where one caught fire on the way home from the showroom. They can make go-karts all they want, but they wouldn't sell here, so it doesn't matter.
And yeah, a $35.6K SUV that used to be $40K would sell much better, and take market share away from foreign manufacturers that would get no such price break. IOW, the Fair Tax amounts to a tariff, in that it lowers domestic prices but not foriegn prices.
Jobs are created, as well as absolute zero pollution is generated during operation. It rivals nukes for that, consumes nothing that must be trucked to the site nor produces anything that must be trucked away from the site. I think it is "the answer" for long-term energy production as soon as we figure out the magic battery that can be charged up and will run things like cars, trucks, trains, etc. Trains can even have electricity delivered by overhead wires.
You have any numbers for actually comparison?
I do.
It takes 30 - 33 hours for the Detroit-based auto companies to build a car. Wages are about $78/hr as a cost to the company, including the benefits and pension expenses and so forth. That's about $2500 of labor in each car. But for a $40K SUV, the tax costs to the company could be around $8,800.
Now, the US auto companies are ALREADY competitive with the foreign car companies, so think how much better they would compete first if the could enslave the workforce, and take $2,500 off the price of their cars, or maybe recover even half of the $8,800 that it is costing them in taxes to build the car. $40,000 SUV becomes a $35,600 SUV with no US income tax expense? Think it would be more competitive?
If the project succeeds, the envirowackos will sue to stop it, or sue to stop the construction of the power wires that are needed to distribute the power, or some other weak excuse to attack the USA, which is their true aim. They are a bunch of commies / socialists / marxists that are bent on the destruction of the USA as a capitalist society, and conversion of it to the yoke of these leftist, enslaving ideologies.
You want to see stuff built here? Then pass the Fair Tax. 22% of the price of goods built here is composed of the income tax costs to businesses that manufacture here. About half that is recoverable if income taxes went away, as they would if the Fair Tax was passed. That one thing would revitalize this country, end the recession practically overnight, and make the USA the newest, bestest tax haven for manufacturing on the planet.
Or we can continue to "get those greedy b*****rds that are making profits, and... shoot ourselves in the foot every time. Corporate income taxes are an abomination, because corporations don't pay them. That's because the don't have any money. Corporate money looks like this:
Corporate$$$ = Customer$$$ + Employee$$$ + Stockholder$$$
So, try to "punish" a corporation with taxes, and customers simply pay more for goods, employees see smaller or no raises, and stockholders suffer smaller or absent dividends.
And all that means that businessmen do the right thing for their business and manufacture overseas.
I never said that they were capable of thinking ahead. They only want cheap labor. They don't necessarily care (any more... they used to) whether you have enough $$$ left over to buy the product you're manufacturing.
Like I said, the corporations get hammered either because the taxes themselves are expensive, or the measures required to avoid the taxes are almost as expensive as paying the taxes themselves. The group that supports the Fair Tax has studied the question, and noted the research of a Dr. Jorgenson, a dept. of economics head of I believe it is Harvard, that says that 22% of the price of goods produced in the USA are composed of tax costs encurred by the corporations manufacturing here. The obvious solution to this is not to manufacture here - go somewhere that doesn't have to pay US corporate taxes, or spend a lot of money to avoid paying US corporate taxes.
Figuring 22% of the price of a new SUV, that could be $8800 for a $40K SUV. I've also found in my own travels on the internet that it takes 30 - 33 person-hours for one of our car companies to build a car. And, using the car company's own statements of the cost of an hour of labor that they were saying 3 years ago when they were about to go bankrupt, of $78 / hr, then the whole of labor costs to build a car is around $2500. Lessee... eliminate corporate taxes and maybe a good chunk of that tax cost of $8800, or enslave the workers and save (only) $2500. I vote for getting rid of the corporate taxes.
As a goal, I don't believe that it is an exaggeration. The "powers that be" I believe _are_ trying to make US workers salaries as low as they can in order to compete with foreign workers. That is the goal, and if they were to achieve salaries that compete even-up with India and China, I believe that would make them happy. Its up to us to change that attitude and that goal.