The reason small gov't is a good thing is that it is cheaper. I'm tired of paying huge taxes, but I think that they have to go up dramatically to do anything about the debt. We have to not only balance the budget, but run some really impressive surpluses in order to do anything about the debt, but... we're going to have to shed layers and layers of gov't to get the money-bleeding down to anything close to a managable level.
Looking at most of the comments here, it appears that its about 10:1 leftist, so I imagine everyone wants to eliminate the DoD. Fine. Lets stand down the Army, keep enough AF to provide domestic cover, the Navy is absolutely essential, and the Marines are just part of the Navy, and small. Oh, we now have invaders? Just do it like the Swiss - a citizen militia - everybody carries a gun from 18 - 65. 1 weekened a month and 2 weeks during the summer? I mean, YOU want to do that? The USA would be as impregnable as Switzerland is, but do YOU want to be training for 34 days of the year? Kinda uses up all your vacation from work, doesn't it?
No, what we really need to figure out is how to abolish social security, medicare, and of course Obamacare. Those are the expensive things. We need to make it possible for people to take care of themselves, so the gov't doesn't have to do it. For the public good, a savings program by each individual would be needed, it would have to be forced on some people (a "tax" that goes to a person's personal savings account that politicians CANNOT get their hands on, that maybe they can manage themselves - people can invest in the stock market, or buy gold, or whatever) and eventually you have everyone living off their own savings.
But to do that, you have to bring back prosperity. Prosperity has gone overseas with our jobs, chased out of the country by the cost of a high tax rate plus a high labor rate. Currently, people want to pauperize the American worker to get the labor rate down, but the real answer is to zeroize the income tax rates - that is, abolish the income tax. US industry would grow wildly, provide jobs for everybody, and we'd have our prosperity back. Tax retail sales instead. See www.fairtax.com, and no, it isn't regressive - you have to understand the whole package, which you will then see that no poor person pays a penny of "Fair Tax."
Otherwise, I think there will be an economic train wreck similar to Zimbabwe, Argentina, and the Wymar Republic. THEN we will get smaller gov't without necessarily planning how it will go. We certainly won't be able to borrow $0.01, and will have to raise taxes on everyone to about 98%, OR cut the gov't to the bone.
This is nothing new, I've known what Apple has been up to for years.
My buddy, who was all happy with his gift of an Ipod a few months ago, was complaining last weekend, "Don't ever buy anything from Apple, they try to control your gear like it was their own, even after you buy it." Didn't need to tell me that, I knew, and they'll never get a dime of mine.
The distracted driving problem is so severe, that the death toll for last year alone set a new record for being the lowest since records were started - 33,000 deaths, as opposed to a few years ago when it was 40,000, and a decade or so, during the 55 mph nonsense, when it was 50,000. Yeah, it's certainly a crisis...
Talking on cell phones safely while driving is something you have to LEARN. With practice, you get good at it, and can pay attention to what you need to when you need to. Of course, you also learn what sort of roads are too dangerous to do it on at all, too. Big interstates aren't those kind. Its tiny, twisty roads that are the problem.
If they go and do this, watch me give back my simple, little, single-function cell phone, and stop paying $50 / month. I don't much need it other than driving, which is about 90% of where I use it.
Your house is built with a special alloy of Zirconium and Iridium, and designed by an architect who was a deacon in the church of worshippers of Goser, the traveler. Your place not only kills electromagnetic radiation, it is also spook central.
" We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts."
For the full story of how beneficial eliminating the US Income Tax would be, see:
Yeah, tried the train a couple years ago. In addition to an absolutely stupendous parking charge 'cuz the terminal is downtown, I got a bit turned around downtown and arrived about 45 minutes to the train leaving. Absolutely ridicuously long line for checkin, and they finally got me checked in and took my bag 20 minutes to the train leaving. Rode the thing all night, got to Chicago, and... no bag. They sent it on the next day's train, by which time I had already caught a plane back home, becuase without the bag on the day I arrived, there was no reason to be in Chicago. Had to drive back up to DC to pick up the back 2 days later. Totally busted trip. One of the officials I talked to actually suggested bringing the bag up the day before. Nope, not doing that again.
Flying for pleasure seems to be dead. Guess I'll have to keep the car running in tip-top condition, and drive to my various destinations. Virginia to LA, Virginia to Tucson, Virginia to St. Louis... its something to do after retirement. Maybe I can get a travel buddy to share expenses.
How much you gonna pay people to open those letters with "cash" in 'em? Probably, a high percentage of those letters will have so really nasty poisonous white powder in 'em.
I vote for a black ops midnight snatch of the perpetrator at Wikileaks, the body never being found. Much better derrent than any court proceeding or prison.
At last, someone who sees the world as it is. Yeah, AQ sets up in Afghanistan, constructs multiple terrorist training camps, and we lose crewmen from the Cole, 3000 people on 9/11, etc. Then the wonder why we invade? How stupid can you get?
Don't belong? Look, jerk, we were attacked. We could either sit back and wait to be attacked some more, maybe lose another 3000 people every 6 months or per year, or go after the bastards.
As for Iraq, sure, we could have kept flying air cover to keep Saddam from launching air attacks against his own people, and kept in place economic sanctions that were killing 100,000 Iraqi children per year from things like not being able to purify water because they couldn't buy chlorine, or we could go in and end all that, as well as making sure that there were no credible threats against us either. Saddam hated our guts, shot at our planes every day (ask those who flew the Northern Watch), and if he did have access to such weapons, as he claimed he did every other day or so, he sure would have deployed them against us.
As for revealing information that helps the enemy, that makes you an enemy. Should you get shot down like a dog as you deserve, I will rejoice.
No, it doesn't, not when it publishes things like tech manuals for counter-IED jammers in use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the same as handing the enemy a bazooka to use on an approaching armored personnel carrier full of US troops. They'll use that info to tune their IED radio controlled triggers outside the frequency bands that they now know can be jammed by the jammer with its tech manual online, and possibly kill you, if you're a soldier in Iraq or Afganistan, or maybe your friend / husband / wife / father / mother / son / daughter.
Doing stuff like posting secret technical deetails of defensive weapons totally negates any other good they may be doing. It is the lowest of the low of things that they could be doing online.
So what if a website decides to post the tech manuals of some counter-IED equipment that may allow an enemy to defeat it? _YOU_ are not going to be riding around Afganistan or Iraq in a vehicle that could have an EFP go tearing thru it, maybe take both your legs with it if you're lucky, or cut you clean in two if you aren't. Its someone else, or someone else's kid / husband / daugter / father / mother. YOU don't have anything to worry about. No sir, not a problem for you...
Wanna carry around a fingerprint reader or other biometric sensor with you everywhere you go, and try to interface it to the motel's public computer that won't let you install anything... or is a Mac or Linux machine for which there is no driver?
Of course you could carry around one of those keyfobs that generates a predictable password based on the time. Fellow at work has that from his contractor/employer. He forgets and leaves it at home, leaves it at his parent's place in Pennsylvania sometimes (a couple hundred miles away), etc.
You're kidding, right? There's no problem with silence in the 60's audio tech. The delays? a small speaker thru the appropriate length of garden hose gets the delay you want. Not a major sweat to do it if you calibrate the whole thing first. Probably even cheaper than you'd expect.
Advantage of the mic array is that if you record each of the mic's in real time, and apply the delays in the playback, you can listen to any point in the auditorium, and then switch to some other point, etc. You could have the full audio of team conversations, coach conversations, etc. on both sides, etc. after the fact, lay them onto the audio of rebroadcast, delayed, or otherwise replayed video. Catch the sound of the basketball player's knee exploding when he comes down on it wrong, etc... should make a few million people throw up all at once, listening to something like that...
Put a large number of small speakers in the roof, find out where you want to project your message, and delay-and-phase the audio just right so that it is heard at that spot, and only that spot.
Yeah, well, if they're that upset about radiation, maybe we don't give them television, radio, ban the 2-ways in the police, fire, and ambulance, nobody can own a cell phone or any other 2-way communications, no more wireless computer networks, wi-fi, etc. Landline phones only, no remote car door unlockers or garage door raisers... its fun to take it to an extreme... but this is already an extreme...
Its dumb as a box of rocks. All they're saying is, "We don't want ANYTHING to change, anywhere, anytime, for any reason."
OK, economists argue incessantly about the causes and cures of the Great Depression, and so if they can't agree, I doubt we're going to figure it out, either.
Yes, we're not as bad off as we were in the Great Depression _yet_, but I believe that there is a train wreck ahead in the economy unless the gov't does some extraordinary things, which is drastically cutting spending, and, I believe it is now necesssary, to pass the Fair Tax. I don't think that the nation can continue to survive the income taxes, they are nuking our industries, which are moving and have been moving out of the country since about the 1960's. We had a mighty manufacturing base, but it has mostly dissolved, and continues to do so. The stock market has been flat for the last 10 years, and in fact is quite a bit less than its high near the beginning of this decade. That, I believe, is telling, and I think that it will not be flat in the next decade, it will dramatically decline.
I think the Fair Tax is the cure for it all, and would bring our industries back, and put us in the lead in manufacturing again by a wide margin. But we're probably not going to get it passed until the country has the train wreck, and things are so bad that even the politicians are willing to do anything that is required to get the country moving again. The Fair Tax removes a lot of their power to fiddle with social engineering, and, oh yes, worm in a gratuity or 2 (or 2 million) into the tax code for their campaign contributors. IOW, the current income taxes are an instrument of corruption.
The 22% of th price of American goods is not composed of strictly the corporate tax on profits. It is also composed of the employees individual income taxes, which, while paid by employees, must be paid to them by the manufacturer so that they can pay them. It makes labor more expensive. Also included is the both the 7.65% of employee's gross earning that are paid in social security and medicare taxes, as well as the "employer-matcing" 7.65% of the employee's gross wages that the employer supposedly pays, but really doesn't, because the employer just pays the employee that much less wages to make up for that. IOW, the employee is, effectively, paying 15.3% in social security and medicare taxes.
And of course there are capital gains taxes that cost the businesses a lot of money, that would go away under the Fair Tax.
The 22% is made up of a lot of things, and the employer, the manufacturing concern, can get back about half of that if the income taxes go away. They can't get back the employee's individual income taxes, and they can't get back the employee-paid part of the social security and medicare taxes, but they can get back a lot of the rest of it.
The 22% figure comes from a study conducted by Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at, I belive, Harvard. This is mentioned in the Fair Tax entry in Wikipedia.
FDR's socialism prolonged the depression that industy could have gotten us out of, if left alone. But we passed devastating protectionist legislation called the Smoot-Hawley act, that practically shut down trade, and prevented a recovery. What got us out of the depression was the FORCED economic activity of building weaponry for WW2, a tactic that would not work now, because we don't have the industrial base any more to make it work. Its mostly moved out of the country, to Mexico, Canada, or gone overseas, or completely out of business and been replaced by foreign competition.
We're in a worse position now than we were in in the 30's, we just don't know it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason small gov't is a good thing is that it is cheaper. I'm tired of paying huge taxes, but I think that they have to go up dramatically to do anything about the debt. We have to not only balance the budget, but run some really impressive surpluses in order to do anything about the debt, but... we're going to have to shed layers and layers of gov't to get the money-bleeding down to anything close to a managable level.
Looking at most of the comments here, it appears that its about 10:1 leftist, so I imagine everyone wants to eliminate the DoD. Fine. Lets stand down the Army, keep enough AF to provide domestic cover, the Navy is absolutely essential, and the Marines are just part of the Navy, and small. Oh, we now have invaders? Just do it like the Swiss - a citizen militia - everybody carries a gun from 18 - 65. 1 weekened a month and 2 weeks during the summer? I mean, YOU want to do that? The USA would be as impregnable as Switzerland is, but do YOU want to be training for 34 days of the year? Kinda uses up all your vacation from work, doesn't it?
No, what we really need to figure out is how to abolish social security, medicare, and of course Obamacare. Those are the expensive things. We need to make it possible for people to take care of themselves, so the gov't doesn't have to do it. For the public good, a savings program by each individual would be needed, it would have to be forced on some people (a "tax" that goes to a person's personal savings account that politicians CANNOT get their hands on, that maybe they can manage themselves - people can invest in the stock market, or buy gold, or whatever) and eventually you have everyone living off their own savings.
But to do that, you have to bring back prosperity. Prosperity has gone overseas with our jobs, chased out of the country by the cost of a high tax rate plus a high labor rate. Currently, people want to pauperize the American worker to get the labor rate down, but the real answer is to zeroize the income tax rates - that is, abolish the income tax. US industry would grow wildly, provide jobs for everybody, and we'd have our prosperity back. Tax retail sales instead. See www.fairtax.com, and no, it isn't regressive - you have to understand the whole package, which you will then see that no poor person pays a penny of "Fair Tax."
Otherwise, I think there will be an economic train wreck similar to Zimbabwe, Argentina, and the Wymar Republic. THEN we will get smaller gov't without necessarily planning how it will go. We certainly won't be able to borrow $0.01, and will have to raise taxes on everyone to about 98%, OR cut the gov't to the bone.
This is nothing new, I've known what Apple has been up to for years.
My buddy, who was all happy with his gift of an Ipod a few months ago, was complaining last weekend, "Don't ever buy anything from Apple, they try to control your gear like it was their own, even after you buy it." Didn't need to tell me that, I knew, and they'll never get a dime of mine.
just like the naked body scanners.
The distracted driving problem is so severe, that the death toll for last year alone set a new record for being the lowest since records were started - 33,000 deaths, as opposed to a few years ago when it was 40,000, and a decade or so, during the 55 mph nonsense, when it was 50,000. Yeah, it's certainly a crisis...
Talking on cell phones safely while driving is something you have to LEARN. With practice, you get good at it, and can pay attention to what you need to when you need to. Of course, you also learn what sort of roads are too dangerous to do it on at all, too. Big interstates aren't those kind. Its tiny, twisty roads that are the problem.
If they go and do this, watch me give back my simple, little, single-function cell phone, and stop paying $50 / month. I don't much need it other than driving, which is about 90% of where I use it.
Your house is built with a special alloy of Zirconium and Iridium, and designed by an architect who was a deacon in the church of worshippers of Goser, the traveler. Your place not only kills electromagnetic radiation, it is also spook central.
The 1st was slavery.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html
It says:
" We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts."
For the full story of how beneficial eliminating the US Income Tax would be, see:
www.fairtax.org
The real solution? No checked bags, and everyone flies naked. That'll do it.
Yeah, tried the train a couple years ago. In addition to an absolutely stupendous parking charge 'cuz the terminal is downtown, I got a bit turned around downtown and arrived about 45 minutes to the train leaving. Absolutely ridicuously long line for checkin, and they finally got me checked in and took my bag 20 minutes to the train leaving. Rode the thing all night, got to Chicago, and... no bag. They sent it on the next day's train, by which time I had already caught a plane back home, becuase without the bag on the day I arrived, there was no reason to be in Chicago. Had to drive back up to DC to pick up the back 2 days later. Totally busted trip. One of the officials I talked to actually suggested bringing the bag up the day before. Nope, not doing that again.
Flying for pleasure seems to be dead. Guess I'll have to keep the car running in tip-top condition, and drive to my various destinations. Virginia to LA, Virginia to Tucson, Virginia to St. Louis... its something to do after retirement. Maybe I can get a travel buddy to share expenses.
So, the TSA is out to make flying a PITA. Well, at least they're finally admitting it.
How much you gonna pay people to open those letters with "cash" in 'em? Probably, a high percentage of those letters will have so really nasty poisonous white powder in 'em.
I vote for a black ops midnight snatch of the perpetrator at Wikileaks, the body never being found. Much better derrent than any court proceeding or prison.
At last, someone who sees the world as it is. Yeah, AQ sets up in Afghanistan, constructs multiple terrorist training camps, and we lose crewmen from the Cole, 3000 people on 9/11, etc. Then the wonder why we invade? How stupid can you get?
They keep it up, so will we.
Don't belong? Look, jerk, we were attacked. We could either sit back and wait to be attacked some more, maybe lose another 3000 people every 6 months or per year, or go after the bastards.
As for Iraq, sure, we could have kept flying air cover to keep Saddam from launching air attacks against his own people, and kept in place economic sanctions that were killing 100,000 Iraqi children per year from things like not being able to purify water because they couldn't buy chlorine, or we could go in and end all that, as well as making sure that there were no credible threats against us either. Saddam hated our guts, shot at our planes every day (ask those who flew the Northern Watch), and if he did have access to such weapons, as he claimed he did every other day or so, he sure would have deployed them against us.
As for revealing information that helps the enemy, that makes you an enemy. Should you get shot down like a dog as you deserve, I will rejoice.
"The fact is Wikileaks serves a good purpose."
No, it doesn't, not when it publishes things like tech manuals for counter-IED jammers in use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the same as handing the enemy a bazooka to use on an approaching armored personnel carrier full of US troops. They'll use that info to tune their IED radio controlled triggers outside the frequency bands that they now know can be jammed by the jammer with its tech manual online, and possibly kill you, if you're a soldier in Iraq or Afganistan, or maybe your friend / husband / wife / father / mother / son / daughter.
Doing stuff like posting secret technical deetails of defensive weapons totally negates any other good they may be doing. It is the lowest of the low of things that they could be doing online.
So what if a website decides to post the tech manuals of some counter-IED equipment that may allow an enemy to defeat it? _YOU_ are not going to be riding around Afganistan or Iraq in a vehicle that could have an EFP go tearing thru it, maybe take both your legs with it if you're lucky, or cut you clean in two if you aren't. Its someone else, or someone else's kid / husband / daugter / father / mother. YOU don't have anything to worry about. No sir, not a problem for you...
Wanna carry around a fingerprint reader or other biometric sensor with you everywhere you go, and try to interface it to the motel's public computer that won't let you install anything... or is a Mac or Linux machine for which there is no driver?
Of course you could carry around one of those keyfobs that generates a predictable password based on the time. Fellow at work has that from his contractor/employer. He forgets and leaves it at home, leaves it at his parent's place in Pennsylvania sometimes (a couple hundred miles away), etc.
That's why we still need to use passwords.
Only half?
MickeyMinnieDonaldDaisyHueyDeweyLouieGoofySacramento
8 characters and a capital. OK?
You're kidding, right? There's no problem with silence in the 60's audio tech. The delays? a small speaker thru the appropriate length of garden hose gets the delay you want. Not a major sweat to do it if you calibrate the whole thing first. Probably even cheaper than you'd expect.
Advantage of the mic array is that if you record each of the mic's in real time, and apply the delays in the playback, you can listen to any point in the auditorium, and then switch to some other point, etc. You could have the full audio of team conversations, coach conversations, etc. on both sides, etc. after the fact, lay them onto the audio of rebroadcast, delayed, or otherwise replayed video. Catch the sound of the basketball player's knee exploding when he comes down on it wrong, etc... should make a few million people throw up all at once, listening to something like that...
Put a large number of small speakers in the roof, find out where you want to project your message, and delay-and-phase the audio just right so that it is heard at that spot, and only that spot.
Yeah, well, if they're that upset about radiation, maybe we don't give them television, radio, ban the 2-ways in the police, fire, and ambulance, nobody can own a cell phone or any other 2-way communications, no more wireless computer networks, wi-fi, etc. Landline phones only, no remote car door unlockers or garage door raisers... its fun to take it to an extreme... but this is already an extreme...
Its dumb as a box of rocks. All they're saying is, "We don't want ANYTHING to change, anywhere, anytime, for any reason."
People I love to hate...
OK, economists argue incessantly about the causes and cures of the Great Depression, and so if they can't agree, I doubt we're going to figure it out, either.
Yes, we're not as bad off as we were in the Great Depression _yet_, but I believe that there is a train wreck ahead in the economy unless the gov't does some extraordinary things, which is drastically cutting spending, and, I believe it is now necesssary, to pass the Fair Tax. I don't think that the nation can continue to survive the income taxes, they are nuking our industries, which are moving and have been moving out of the country since about the 1960's. We had a mighty manufacturing base, but it has mostly dissolved, and continues to do so. The stock market has been flat for the last 10 years, and in fact is quite a bit less than its high near the beginning of this decade. That, I believe, is telling, and I think that it will not be flat in the next decade, it will dramatically decline.
I think the Fair Tax is the cure for it all, and would bring our industries back, and put us in the lead in manufacturing again by a wide margin. But we're probably not going to get it passed until the country has the train wreck, and things are so bad that even the politicians are willing to do anything that is required to get the country moving again. The Fair Tax removes a lot of their power to fiddle with social engineering, and, oh yes, worm in a gratuity or 2 (or 2 million) into the tax code for their campaign contributors. IOW, the current income taxes are an instrument of corruption.
The 22% of th price of American goods is not composed of strictly the corporate tax on profits. It is also composed of the employees individual income taxes, which, while paid by employees, must be paid to them by the manufacturer so that they can pay them. It makes labor more expensive. Also included is the both the 7.65% of employee's gross earning that are paid in social security and medicare taxes, as well as the "employer-matcing" 7.65% of the employee's gross wages that the employer supposedly pays, but really doesn't, because the employer just pays the employee that much less wages to make up for that. IOW, the employee is, effectively, paying 15.3% in social security and medicare taxes.
And of course there are capital gains taxes that cost the businesses a lot of money, that would go away under the Fair Tax.
The 22% is made up of a lot of things, and the employer, the manufacturing concern, can get back about half of that if the income taxes go away. They can't get back the employee's individual income taxes, and they can't get back the employee-paid part of the social security and medicare taxes, but they can get back a lot of the rest of it.
The 22% figure comes from a study conducted by Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at, I belive, Harvard. This is mentioned in the Fair Tax entry in Wikipedia.
FDR's socialism prolonged the depression that industy could have gotten us out of, if left alone. But we passed devastating protectionist legislation called the Smoot-Hawley act, that practically shut down trade, and prevented a recovery. What got us out of the depression was the FORCED economic activity of building weaponry for WW2, a tactic that would not work now, because we don't have the industrial base any more to make it work. Its mostly moved out of the country, to Mexico, Canada, or gone overseas, or completely out of business and been replaced by foreign competition.
We're in a worse position now than we were in in the 30's, we just don't know it yet.