Way to ignore the process by which people come to earn money in the first place and just to focus on spending it as if it appeared in their wallet by magic. Btw, what kind of god are you to decide that all I need is to pay for "rent and food and utilities" and that means I'm "ok" and everything else above that is yours to take away by force and dispose of however you see fit (you being the government in this case)?
It's not arbitrary when someone spends 60% of their income on basic food and apartment rental and they pay at a far lower tax rate than someone who is very rich who is very far from need.
It is arbitrary in the sense of how do you decide what somebody needs. By what standard you decide that paying for food and apartment is all that a human being "needs" and anything more than that is luxury that is a fair game for the government to take away. The fairness comes into play on the other side, on the side of producing wealth, not on the side of spending it. Say person A and person B get paid the same hourly rate. Person A works twice as many hours as person B. How is it fair that he should be taxed at a higher rate than person B? He worked twice as much, produced twice as much, why shouldn't he receive twice as much money?
The hard/huge break distinction is based on the idea that income necessary for a decent quality of life is different than income amounting to luxury, and that it is more important to weigh government services against the first than against both of them together. Tax policy has long had this as an explicit assumption.
That's what's happening now, but don't call it fair. Once the government starts implementing special rules for one (economic or otherwise) group and different rules for another (as opposed to having the same rules for every individual citizen) because of its arbitrary decisions on who "needs" what more or less, the result is those groups fighting over how to tweak those rules in their own favor and at the expense of others (see who dominates the political process in USA today: pressure groups, lobbies etc), which I think is the common root of just about all the problems of government. I would argue that it should not be within the power of the government (yes, constitutionally in case of the federal gov. but I would say the same thing about the states) to decide that person A's quality of life is not so great so it will tax person B more heavily to make up for it.
How is paying the same percentage of one's income hard on one person and gives a "huge break" to another? By the way a low flat rate and abolishing all the deductions and so on would generate about the same tax revenue without the ridiculously complex and heavily abused system we have now, with much reduced IRS powers which currently I would say are unconstitutional and just in tax preparation expenses save (according to this wikipedia article, can't vouch for correctness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_preparation) $250-$300 billion each year.
Effectively discrediting all opposition to the government was the plan all along, wasn't it
I wouldn't say that the tea partiers are being discredited effectively. Polls show that about 35% of Americans either strongly or moderately support the Tea Party movement (that's 105 million people). Only 16% are strongly or moderately opposed. It shows in recent primaries as well. Just because on/. for some reason any post remotely supporting conservative views is immediately modded down doesn't really mean anything, it is the/. that is odd here.
As for abolishing the IRS, you can't do that. Who will collect the taxes? What we need is a simplified flat tax system (as per the contract: http://www.thecontract.org/the-contract-from-america/ ) like they have in just about all of the eastern European countries and they've been growing steadily (not that that's the only factor of course).
Let's see, you are in favor of transforming private companies (private property) by force into "in practice, semi-autonomous, self-budgeting, revenue-sharing government branches" as a "transition period" to "reach ultimate goal of socialism" (all quotes from your previous post). Doesn't sound very centrist to me.
I don't have time to fully reply (Lakers game is about to start) but let me just state briefly that whether you realize it or not what you are describing above is called fascism (which unlike socialism does not involve state ownership of industry, but it can be defined as system where all powerful state controls the privately owned industry directly).
There is no way in the world that the economic policies of USA can be called laissez faire but lets say they are slightly closer to that than economies in many other countries. Please provide some reference for your claim that capital gets invested until certain point and then stops getting invested. I have never heard any such thing before and it doesn't sound plausible. How is it that the USA had become the engine of worlds innovation in just about any field you can imagine (take computer technology, medicine, biotech etc etc) during the last 20-30 years, far outpacing Europe in new inventions and especially entrepreneurship (just take growth of various computer companies from nothing to multi-billion dollar corporations). Take progress of medical science. All that happened with huge amounts of capital investment.
If you think that the recent financial crisis proves anything take a look at this chart
It is but a blip that will correct itself in no time. While you are looking at it, also notice the stagnation in the 60s and 70s when socialist craze was at it's peak and vastly increased rate of the growth of the economy since return to capitalism occurred from Reagan years and on. I'd also recommend youtube clips of one of the architects of that growth Milton Friedman, he's been educating and converting socialists far better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Milton+Friedman
There are degrees of proof (no, I'm not talking about alcohol) we are willing to accept. If the same requirement of proof people for some reason expect from an atheist is applied to everyday life, life would be pretty much impossible. Go outside? Are you crazy!? I cannot PROVE that an invisible tiger is not waiting in my driveway. Of course I'll keep trying to get rich by holding up a baseball glove in my backyard waiting for a gold nugget to land into it. Sure, it didn't happen in the last 50 years but that doesn't PROVE that it won't happen the very next second. etc etc. The religion (btw which one? - the presence of 100s of mutually exclusive belief systems at least does prove that all but one are wrong) is really just as crazy as that and the fact that you can't prove it doesn't make it any less so.
Wow, so we are dealing with a real old school firebrand socialist here. How cute, I thought you guys went extinct back in the 80s. Your fantasy has only one problem, it does not correspond in any way to reality. Corporate taxes in those countries are not very high, in fact they are lower than in the USA:
The problem with heavy taxes on corporate profits is that pretty soon there will be no more profits to raid, no more investment in new business, no more innovation. Where do you think corporate profits go exactly? To pay for shareholders yachts? Tiny portion perhaps, but vast majority gets reinvested. You know, the "capital" in capitalism. Your ideological leaders actually know better than you, they know not to kill the golden goose of capitalism because there would be no more money for your precious welfare programs. That's why it is the individual income that is heavily taxed in those countries not corporate profits:
Socialism is defined by the state ownership of industry. What part of that you don't understand? If the dictionary definition is not enough for you then I don't know how else to define it for you. The words have meaning you know, that's how we understand what people are saying, you can't arbitrarily redefine them to mean whatever you want them to mean. There is most definitely NO STATE OWNERSHIP OF INDUSTRY in any the countries you mention, on the contrary the entire industry is privately owned and exists in the system of free market competition. The productive part of those economies is entirely capitalistic, i.e. the opposite of socialist. So you can't take success of capitalist countries and attribute their success to socialism. The fact that they decide to tax the productive part of their population heavily to subsidies the unproductive is something they can AFFORD to do due to the prosperity that capitalism provides. There is no possibility of taxing the rich to subsidize the poor in truly socialist countries because everybody is poor.
Btw let me quote you from the first link you provided, under Sweden/Economy entry "Sweden's industry is overwhelmingly in private control;... publicly owned enterprises were always of minor importance." Same for the others.
Just to clarify in case it is not obvious enough what I meant: in every case so far known where the government had assumed the ownership of the means of production and managed them centrally (i.e socialism - as per the definition above) it has failed to consistently feed the population, never mind provide them with any sort of life remotely comparable to that in the capitalist societies. Not to mention that in every such case the government has had to use force (not strong enough word, terror would be more appropriate) in order to stay in power.
That is what socialism is. It's in the first sentence of your wikipedia entry! "Socialism is a political philosophy that encompasses various theories of economic organization based on either public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources." If you want to talk about something completely different and call it "socialism" sorry but that's not ok, you need to find a new word. Those of you who think socialism is what they have in Sweden or whatever (amazingly many idiots out there) please read the dictionary definition above. What they have in some European countries is partly free market capitalism (VERY different thing from socialism) with a variety of the elements of welfare state thrown in (which only deals with the distribution of wealth not the production). Even that is failing, mainly because of the welfare part.
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods 2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state 3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
Don't you know that plants have been using the Sun's energy for millions of years, no wonder there is nothing left! The solution is simple: burn the forests.
You could turn that around and say the Republicans are at least split between the social conservatives who couldn't give a rat's ass about the free market as long as they get their way on loony issues like gay marriage and abortion, and fiscal conservative/libertarian camp who do. On the Dems side there is nobody to check endless expansion of government power, on the Reps side at least there are a few who will give it a try.
Wow how naive can you be? Obama came to power with an agenda to implement certain things that left had wanted to do for years and finally got their chance (no 1 being the healthcare bill). That's the change he was talking about. According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Also, what is it about a multi-billion company that cant find an advertising agency that can make one decent commercial for them? Seems like every single ad by Microsoft is somewhere between bad and embarrassingly bad.
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
Nobody cares until somebody has a reason to care. Say your future employer, or your insurance company, or your opponent's lawyers in a future lawsuit, or your spouse in divorce proceedings, or any malicious person who is trying to find any damaging information about you etc etc. To take it to the extreme, are you really comfortable with the idea of every detail of your life being recorded and permanently stored and made accessible to anybody who wants it, for any purpose, just because nobody has any interest to look at it right now?
I still think it's worth going an extra mile to please our politically correct and feminist colleagues. After all it's not like it takes much effort and it does help create a happier and more harmonious workplace. That's why I prefer using the term bitch-hours. I hope it catches on.
Well take slashdot. It is owned by a for-profit publicly traded corporation. True we don't give our names and addresses but many of do give our personal readily identifiable email address and of course IP and probably 1000s of us can be identified if somebody choose to do so and linked to quite detailed overview of our political and other opinions - valuable data for advertisers, political parties, potential employers and who knows who else. This data will still be there years from now and who knows what can happen with it, the financial incentive is certainly there to sell it. Now, I tend to trust slashdot (famous last words?) but I am just trying to illustrate how difficult it is to truly guard your online privacy unless you are a kind of person who only ever communicates through encrypted messages or something like that.
I agree, if online privacy was really as important to the majority of people as it is to some/. posters there would be companies advertising "guaranteed" privacy the same way they advertise lower prices or whatever other advantage they claim over their competitors. The reason companies don't care is that their customers don't care. Those of us who do just need to be more careful about who we do business with but IMHO it's a losing battle as long as the public awareness of the importance of privacy is nonexistent.
Anti any corporation? How about Geeknet Incorporated that owns slashdot? By the way, it is naive to see the world as government v. corporations. Corporations wouldn't have the power they have if it wasn't for the government. It is the government that gives them their (IMHO) excessive legal protection and it is the government that allows itself to be manipulated by the corporate money which has enormous impact on most legislation. I don't have a problem with a corporation that obtains its profits honestly by providing good products or whatever it is that it does. I do have a problem with corporations that profit from government favors. I think the semi-legitimate anger as exists among many/. posters is quite naively directed solely towards the corporations and what they mistakenly see as a failure of the fee market (which we don't have) rather than the way I see it which is government corruption.
As far as I know to send a copyright abuse notice you need to provide your full name, address etc and the details of the copyrighted work and some evidence. You can't just anonymously send an email and that's it. I guess you could fake all that but it would be a bit more elaborate than you make it sound
Slashdot Mirror
Way to ignore the process by which people come to earn money in the first place and just to focus on spending it as if it appeared in their wallet by magic. Btw, what kind of god are you to decide that all I need is to pay for "rent and food and utilities" and that means I'm "ok" and everything else above that is yours to take away by force and dispose of however you see fit (you being the government in this case)?
It's not arbitrary when someone spends 60% of their income on basic food and apartment rental and they pay at a far lower tax rate than someone who is very rich who is very far from need.
It is arbitrary in the sense of how do you decide what somebody needs. By what standard you decide that paying for food and apartment is all that a human being "needs" and anything more than that is luxury that is a fair game for the government to take away. The fairness comes into play on the other side, on the side of producing wealth, not on the side of spending it. Say person A and person B get paid the same hourly rate. Person A works twice as many hours as person B. How is it fair that he should be taxed at a higher rate than person B? He worked twice as much, produced twice as much, why shouldn't he receive twice as much money?
The hard/huge break distinction is based on the idea that income necessary for a decent quality of life is different than income amounting to luxury, and that it is more important to weigh government services against the first than against both of them together. Tax policy has long had this as an explicit assumption.
That's what's happening now, but don't call it fair. Once the government starts implementing special rules for one (economic or otherwise) group and different rules for another (as opposed to having the same rules for every individual citizen) because of its arbitrary decisions on who "needs" what more or less, the result is those groups fighting over how to tweak those rules in their own favor and at the expense of others (see who dominates the political process in USA today: pressure groups, lobbies etc), which I think is the common root of just about all the problems of government. I would argue that it should not be within the power of the government (yes, constitutionally in case of the federal gov. but I would say the same thing about the states) to decide that person A's quality of life is not so great so it will tax person B more heavily to make up for it.
How is paying the same percentage of one's income hard on one person and gives a "huge break" to another? By the way a low flat rate and abolishing all the deductions and so on would generate about the same tax revenue without the ridiculously complex and heavily abused system we have now, with much reduced IRS powers which currently I would say are unconstitutional and just in tax preparation expenses save (according to this wikipedia article, can't vouch for correctness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_preparation) $250-$300 billion each year.
Effectively discrediting all opposition to the government was the plan all along, wasn't it
/. for some reason any post remotely supporting conservative views is immediately modded down doesn't really mean anything, it is the /. that is odd here.
I wouldn't say that the tea partiers are being discredited effectively. Polls show that about 35% of Americans either strongly or moderately support the Tea Party movement (that's 105 million people). Only 16% are strongly or moderately opposed. It shows in recent primaries as well. Just because on
As for abolishing the IRS, you can't do that. Who will collect the taxes? What we need is a simplified flat tax system (as per the contract: http://www.thecontract.org/the-contract-from-america/ ) like they have in just about all of the eastern European countries and they've been growing steadily (not that that's the only factor of course).
Let's see, you are in favor of transforming private companies (private property) by force into "in practice, semi-autonomous, self-budgeting, revenue-sharing government branches" as a "transition period" to "reach ultimate goal of socialism" (all quotes from your previous post). Doesn't sound very centrist to me.
I don't have time to fully reply (Lakers game is about to start) but let me just state briefly that whether you realize it or not what you are describing above is called fascism (which unlike socialism does not involve state ownership of industry, but it can be defined as system where all powerful state controls the privately owned industry directly).
There is no way in the world that the economic policies of USA can be called laissez faire but lets say they are slightly closer to that than economies in many other countries. Please provide some reference for your claim that capital gets invested until certain point and then stops getting invested. I have never heard any such thing before and it doesn't sound plausible. How is it that the USA had become the engine of worlds innovation in just about any field you can imagine (take computer technology, medicine, biotech etc etc) during the last 20-30 years, far outpacing Europe in new inventions and especially entrepreneurship (just take growth of various computer companies from nothing to multi-billion dollar corporations). Take progress of medical science. All that happened with huge amounts of capital investment.
If you think that the recent financial crisis proves anything take a look at this chart
It is but a blip that will correct itself in no time. While you are looking at it, also notice the stagnation in the 60s and 70s when socialist craze was at it's peak and vastly increased rate of the growth of the economy since return to capitalism occurred from Reagan years and on. I'd also recommend youtube clips of one of the architects of that growth Milton Friedman, he's been educating and converting socialists far better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Milton+Friedman
There are degrees of proof (no, I'm not talking about alcohol) we are willing to accept. If the same requirement of proof people for some reason expect from an atheist is applied to everyday life, life would be pretty much impossible. Go outside? Are you crazy!? I cannot PROVE that an invisible tiger is not waiting in my driveway. Of course I'll keep trying to get rich by holding up a baseball glove in my backyard waiting for a gold nugget to land into it. Sure, it didn't happen in the last 50 years but that doesn't PROVE that it won't happen the very next second. etc etc. The religion (btw which one? - the presence of 100s of mutually exclusive belief systems at least does prove that all but one are wrong) is really just as crazy as that and the fact that you can't prove it doesn't make it any less so.
Wow, so we are dealing with a real old school firebrand socialist here. How cute, I thought you guys went extinct back in the 80s. Your fantasy has only one problem, it does not correspond in any way to reality. Corporate taxes in those countries are not very high, in fact they are lower than in the USA:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/22917.html
http://alhambrainvestments.com/blog/2009/01/29/corporate-tax-rates-by-country-oecd/
The problem with heavy taxes on corporate profits is that pretty soon there will be no more profits to raid, no more investment in new business, no more innovation. Where do you think corporate profits go exactly? To pay for shareholders yachts? Tiny portion perhaps, but vast majority gets reinvested. You know, the "capital" in capitalism. Your ideological leaders actually know better than you, they know not to kill the golden goose of capitalism because there would be no more money for your precious welfare programs. That's why it is the individual income that is heavily taxed in those countries not corporate profits:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg/800px-Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg.png
But keep dreaming, comrade.
Socialism is defined by the state ownership of industry. What part of that you don't understand? If the dictionary definition is not enough for you then I don't know how else to define it for you. The words have meaning you know, that's how we understand what people are saying, you can't arbitrarily redefine them to mean whatever you want them to mean. There is most definitely NO STATE OWNERSHIP OF INDUSTRY in any the countries you mention, on the contrary the entire industry is privately owned and exists in the system of free market competition. The productive part of those economies is entirely capitalistic, i.e. the opposite of socialist. So you can't take success of capitalist countries and attribute their success to socialism. The fact that they decide to tax the productive part of their population heavily to subsidies the unproductive is something they can AFFORD to do due to the prosperity that capitalism provides. There is no possibility of taxing the rich to subsidize the poor in truly socialist countries because everybody is poor.
I just replied to you here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1669122&cid=32390956
... publicly owned enterprises were always of minor importance." Same for the others.
Btw let me quote you from the first link you provided, under Sweden/Economy entry "Sweden's industry is overwhelmingly in private control;
Just to clarify in case it is not obvious enough what I meant: in every case so far known where the government had assumed the ownership of the means of production and managed them centrally (i.e socialism - as per the definition above) it has failed to consistently feed the population, never mind provide them with any sort of life remotely comparable to that in the capitalist societies. Not to mention that in every such case the government has had to use force (not strong enough word, terror would be more appropriate) in order to stay in power.
That is what socialism is. It's in the first sentence of your wikipedia entry! "Socialism is a political philosophy that encompasses various theories of economic organization based on either public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources." If you want to talk about something completely different and call it "socialism" sorry but that's not ok, you need to find a new word. Those of you who think socialism is what they have in Sweden or whatever (amazingly many idiots out there) please read the dictionary definition above. What they have in some European countries is partly free market capitalism (VERY different thing from socialism) with a variety of the elements of welfare state thrown in (which only deals with the distribution of wealth not the production). Even that is failing, mainly because of the welfare part.
They have everything to do with socialism:
Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: socialism
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
You're right, socialist central planning on the other hand is definitely made of love because it places human rights ahead of profits. Right?
Don't you know that plants have been using the Sun's energy for millions of years, no wonder there is nothing left! The solution is simple: burn the forests.
You could turn that around and say the Republicans are at least split between the social conservatives who couldn't give a rat's ass about the free market as long as they get their way on loony issues like gay marriage and abortion, and fiscal conservative/libertarian camp who do. On the Dems side there is nobody to check endless expansion of government power, on the Reps side at least there are a few who will give it a try.
Wow how naive can you be? Obama came to power with an agenda to implement certain things that left had wanted to do for years and finally got their chance (no 1 being the healthcare bill). That's the change he was talking about. According to any poll, majority of people were against the bailouts, majority of people were against the stimulus, majority of people were against Obamacare, majority of people are in favour of Arizona type immigration control. I guess the change the according to you the populace should enact would be very different to the change that he is actually enacting. Dems were elected simply because people were sick of Bush and neo-cons, they never got the mandate or popular support to do any of those things they are doing.
Also, what is it about a multi-billion company that cant find an advertising agency that can make one decent commercial for them? Seems like every single ad by Microsoft is somewhere between bad and embarrassingly bad.
I'm safe in the numbers, just like I'm anonymous when walking down a busy street. everyone can see me, but nobody cares.
Nobody cares until somebody has a reason to care. Say your future employer, or your insurance company, or your opponent's lawyers in a future lawsuit, or your spouse in divorce proceedings, or any malicious person who is trying to find any damaging information about you etc etc. To take it to the extreme, are you really comfortable with the idea of every detail of your life being recorded and permanently stored and made accessible to anybody who wants it, for any purpose, just because nobody has any interest to look at it right now?
I still think it's worth going an extra mile to please our politically correct and feminist colleagues. After all it's not like it takes much effort and it does help create a happier and more harmonious workplace. That's why I prefer using the term bitch-hours. I hope it catches on.
Well take slashdot. It is owned by a for-profit publicly traded corporation. True we don't give our names and addresses but many of do give our personal readily identifiable email address and of course IP and probably 1000s of us can be identified if somebody choose to do so and linked to quite detailed overview of our political and other opinions - valuable data for advertisers, political parties, potential employers and who knows who else. This data will still be there years from now and who knows what can happen with it, the financial incentive is certainly there to sell it. Now, I tend to trust slashdot (famous last words?) but I am just trying to illustrate how difficult it is to truly guard your online privacy unless you are a kind of person who only ever communicates through encrypted messages or something like that.
Master Miyagi: Man who catch dust-sized glass sphere with laser chopsticks accomplish anything.
I agree, if online privacy was really as important to the majority of people as it is to some /. posters there would be companies advertising "guaranteed" privacy the same way they advertise lower prices or whatever other advantage they claim over their competitors. The reason companies don't care is that their customers don't care. Those of us who do just need to be more careful about who we do business with but IMHO it's a losing battle as long as the public awareness of the importance of privacy is nonexistent.
Anti any corporation? How about Geeknet Incorporated that owns slashdot? By the way, it is naive to see the world as government v. corporations. Corporations wouldn't have the power they have if it wasn't for the government. It is the government that gives them their (IMHO) excessive legal protection and it is the government that allows itself to be manipulated by the corporate money which has enormous impact on most legislation. I don't have a problem with a corporation that obtains its profits honestly by providing good products or whatever it is that it does. I do have a problem with corporations that profit from government favors. I think the semi-legitimate anger as exists among many /. posters is quite naively directed solely towards the corporations and what they mistakenly see as a failure of the fee market (which we don't have) rather than the way I see it which is government corruption.
As far as I know to send a copyright abuse notice you need to provide your full name, address etc and the details of the copyrighted work and some evidence. You can't just anonymously send an email and that's it. I guess you could fake all that but it would be a bit more elaborate than you make it sound
That's what monkeys are for.