Yes, my ill-tempered idiocy of pointing out that since no one pays for any other browser, no one would pay for IE. It was a bogus court case to extort money from Microsoft, as has been done countless time with successful businesses. Why piss off citizens with raising taxes to fund the government when you can just file bogus charges against a multi-billion dollar company and confiscate money from them? You have absolutely no ground to stand on when claiming that MS charges for IE, hence why you resort to childish temper tantrums.
No, it was a troll. If you want a Ford, you obviously must buy a Ford and (if it's new) pay Ford for it. That is 100% irrelevant to the BBC tax which applies merely to having a TV hooked up - even if you have NO INTENTION of ever watching any BBC channels. Since people have no choice in if they pay the fee, regardless of if they use the service, that makes it a tax. Just because it's "part of the government, but not run by the government" doesn't change that it's still a tax.
Why are you incapable of distinguishing between voluntarily paying for a product / service and being forced to pay for a product / service that you don't want?
That's like arguing that you pay for disk defragmenter since it's included as part of Windows. They rarely (if ever) increase the price of Windows, yet they keep adding more and more features - so your theory of every feature increases the cost to customers is bullshit. Do you even think before posting or do you just see that MS is mentioned in an article and go into a blind religious rage?
The price for Linux is higher because when you get all the trial bloatware installed, those companies (Norton's and such) pay the manufacturer to put the trial versions on there as an advertisement, thus helping to subsidize your PC - since the software doesn't run on Linux, there's no subsidy. It still makes buying a Windows PC cheaper and since MS relies on selling things like Office much more than they do on Windows sales, they probably don't charge much (if anything) to manufacturer's because they want as many people using Windows as possible.
Not true. It depends on the AV programs (I run MSE and Malwarebytes full version side by side 24/7 no problems), not to mention that MS will almost undoubtedly include an option to turn it off (or even auto turn off upon detection of installing AV software), just like how Windows Firewall turns off when you install firewall software.
Ah, the mythical MS tax. Funny how when you go to companies that sell PC's with both Windows and Linux, you normally pay MORE for the Linux version of the PC - I guess that's how that MS tax works? You pay less money to get a PC with Windows (even if you have every intention of blasting away Windows and installing Linux) and that's considered a tax, right?
a piece of Windows that simply couldn't be removed. That's called leveraging your existing monopoly to create a new one
Sorry, but that argument is bullshit. Just because 1% of the time if you open a particular type of file or something it opens IE doesn't change the fact that you can install any other browser that you want and set it as the default. That's like complaining that even though you can change the ringtone on your phone to any ringtone you desire, you can't uninstall the ringtones that were pre-installed (even though you can set a new one as the default).
The first thing I do upon a new Windows install (Win 7, but on the rare occasions I've had to use Vista, that too) is turn off UAC. Nothing is more annoying than Clippy's brother going "You just clicked on something, are you sure you wanted to click on that? Are you sure? Are you sure you wanted to click that you're sure that you wanted to click on that?" 450 times a minute.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Occupy Flash?
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The point about regressive is that it doesn't need to be higher the less you make; due to marginal utility, a flat tax across the board will disproportionately affect the poor.
No, it doesn't. If everyone pays 10% in taxes, then everyone loses 10% of their income. Just because you personally want to make a judgement of how much money people "should" have and think that some people "can afford" to have a higher percentage of their income taken from them doesn't change this.
Non-regressive taxes are not a free ride.
Hence why I proposed flat taxes and pointed out why flat tax rates aren't regressive. Progressive taxes, which you support, are a free ride because the extra penalty for being successful is used to reward those who didn't work as hard and weren't successful.
Also, if you'll read more carefully, you'll see that I said. I did AmeriCorps the year *prior* to the Great Recession, thus putting me in the job market right as it hit. But I don't think I was asking for sympathy; just establishing that I was broke going into the Great Recession, and was broke for most of it due to the suckiness of the job market.
No, I was well aware that you said that. As I said, you chose to do that which paid little and didn't establish experience in your field or allow you to already have a job (which yes, you might have been laid off from but you also might have proven yourself to be a good employee and have been kept on). You were broke going in due to your choice to do AmeriCorps - you could have chosen to go directly into your chosen field and earned several times as much money, not to mention reduced the chance of being stuck looking for a job during the recession. As I said, I graduated right after things went to crap and had a rough first year too before I found full time work (which wasn't in my field and was paying about half of what I'd have been making if I'd found a job in my field).
Um....I don't think I said anything about theft. Just argued that flat taxes are inherently regressive
Again, I pointed out that a flat tax cannot be regressive, by it's very definition. Secondly, you're arguing for progressive taxes, which means wealth redistribution - ie theft.
From my perspective, what *you're* advocating is theft.
Because you think that you and your pals have a right to someone else's money, so you think that them keeping the money they earned is "stealing" from you. That's patently false and sheer greed on your part. It's normal for a person to not want their property stolen - not greed. What exactly have you and those you support done to deserve other people's money?
It's not that strange to argue that those making 80% of the money should be providing 80% of the taxes.
And a flat tax would accomplish that since the more you earn, the more you pay in actual dollars. You're also ignoring that in our current system, the 53% who pay income taxes pay 100% of the taxes and it gets more lopsided the higher up you go. I can't find the link right now to give exact numbers, but the IRS data shows that the top earners (top 1%? 5%? I forget which) earn 20% of all income in the US by pay almost 40% of the taxes - that's paying almost twice as much in taxes as you just deemed fair. You're also then ignoring the lower earners who pay 0% in income taxes - by your own argument, even the poor should pay federal income taxes so that the group earning only 1% of total income pays 1% of total income taxes.
What's the point of robbing the poor to pay the rich?
Again, someone defending their right to their property is NOT stealing from thieves. If we had high income taxes on the poor which were used to provide money transfers (welfare) to the rich, then you'd have an argument - and that would be just as wrong as the current system of stealing from high ear
The fruits of your labor is what you get for doing something useful. The problem is that most of the superhigh profits in this world are not obtained that way. If I buy a bunch of Apple stock today, and sell them in a year, there's no labor involved - it's pure gambling.
For some, it's gambling. For others, there is labor involved in researching the company and the industry as well as the economy in general to determine if it's a smart investment move. You're also ignoring that buying stock is providing money to a company so that they can use it to buy more capital, buy new factories, hire more workers, etc with the promise that if the company is successful, you will gain money as a result. That's providing a service to a company and is no different from any other service that you could provide them.
Taking away 60% of what a man gets by virtue of owning a factory or some other production facility, where other people work to produce useful things - much less so.
Because you're shortsighted and don't look at the work that the man did to earn the money and experience to build and run the company that provided people with jobs. You're also failing to realize that if you rape him too hard, he'll simply shut the company down and all of those employees will be standing in the unemployment line thanks to your "wisdom".
There is one thing that I'm sure you and I can both agree on, but for different reasons - most businesses are run by short sighted and greedy people. If they were thinking about the big picture or weren't so focused on sheer nominal amounts of money, they'd simply start closing plants and letting people see how harsh life without the "evil" businesses is until the thieving bastards in the government got their hands off other people's money. I know my city is home to multiple multinational businesses that provide well over 10,000 jobs per company just at the main offices and the city or state (I forget which) was talking about raising their taxes which would cost them over $1 billion per year. They flat out held a press conference and stated that for less than $1 billion total (not recurring yearly) they could pack up and move to a country like Ireland that only has about a 15% corporate tax rate and leave a nice gaping whole in our economy. You may want to demonize them, but unless you're self-employed they're the ones writing your paycheck and providing you with food, shelter, a computer, etc and they could easily stop.
In simple terms, raising taxes means less poor (and less uber-reach), and more happy and healthy people overall.
No, it doesn't. You're assuming that the money is being 100% given to the poor (it's not, politicians will embezzle the shit out of it, like they always do) and you're assuming that the poor will spend it in a useful manner. They've done plenty of studies that show that those who didn't work hard and earn their money and don't know how to manage it will waste money given to them and end up poor again (professional athletes are a fantastic example of people going from being poor to millionaires and then pissing it all away and ending up back in poverty). You can take $10,000 a year and give it to a person who's making less than someone else, but if they waste that $10,000 a year on things like $150 dinners at restaurants multiple times a week, then they are no better off in the big picture than if they didn't have the money. You're also coming up with some very unsubstantiated claims that people will magically become more healthy if they're given money that they didn't earn. As for happiness? Sure, the poor people may be happier, but the hard working people who are being treated as slaves and having their money stolen are less happy, so did you really affect the net happiness of society?
Your counter argument assumes as an axiom that "citizens should be allowed to keep fruits of labor". First of all, this is quite obviously false in any society today,
Sweet. Send me a check for half of your salary each year, since by your own admission you don't have a right to keep it.
since all of them have some form of taxation.
Except that you're failing to understand the difference between a tax that funds a shared resource (police, fire, EMT, roads, etc) and a tax that exists purely to take property from one person and give it to another person that did nothing to earn it.
The extreme anarcho-capitalist argument that "all taxes are theft" is just that - extreme to the point that vast majority of people treat it as hogwash that it is; so I'm not going to bother refuting that.
When did I say that? Never. I never said anything negative about taxes as a whole, I specifically spoke about the kind of taxes that your article was discussing where money is directly taken from one group of people for the explicit purpose of giving it to another group of people who didn't earn it. That's called "theft" - just because the government says it's OK to steal a certain percentage from certain people doesn't change that it's still theft.
At that point you can debate more economic freedom (low taxes) vs higher overall prosperity (high taxes).
There you go again, falsely stating that high taxes will increase GDP and prosperity when your own sources don't support it. Soviet Russia had some pretty high taxes - do you really think that they had a higher overall prosperity than the US? The UK has much higher taxes than the US and I don't know anyone who'd argue that they're more prosperous than the US.
The balance that I consider optimal is somewhere in between, but certainly much closer to the latter than what U.S. has today.
And what is your justification for that? How do you justify stealing money? As I said, for things that everyone benefits from, everyone should pay for. You're also ignoring that even with a flat tax rate, the more you earn the more you pay (that's basic math). Why must the punishment for success increase the more successful you are? People with your mentality are why I continually question why I work myself to death working full time and doing grad school to improve my lot in life - because you want to demonize me for working harder than others and punish me by stealing the money I worked so hard to gain.
Wow, that was the worst attempt at trolling I've ever seen.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Occupy Flash?
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If by "regressive" you mean "don't get to free ride". Everyone pays the same percentage for sales tax, SS / Medicaid / Medicare tax, and any other non-income taxes. That's not regressive. Regressive would mean that the lower your income is, the higher percentage you pay. Since it's a set percentage, it cannot be regressive. I graduated from college in December 2008, so I'm very much aware of how shitty it was to find a job. I spent most of 2009 working at Wendy's making about $7.15 an hour and then I had some part time work doing tech support for a small company but they didn't have enough business coming in and had to let me go. Our incomes for the year were probably pretty similar, though you chose to do something as low paying as AmeriCorps, so sorry, but you're not getting sympathy on that part. The difference between you and me is that I think people should be responsible for themselves and not steal money (even if it's legally sanctioned and the theft is done by the government and the ill gotten gains distributed by the government) from others who were more successful. The whole concept of Rape the Rich is pure jealousy, plain and simple. You look at someone with a high paying job and think "That bastard owes me money". I see someone with a high paying job and think "I'm going to bust my ass at work and in grad school so that someday I can be in his position".
Regarding your sig, did you actually read the article that you're linking to? If you look at the graph, you see that starting in the 50's the countries GDP growth has been fairly stable, regardless of the highest tax bracket. Now, you might use this as justification to rape the successful, but as your own source points out, that won't increase GDP. The counter argument is that citizens should be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor, especially since there's no historical evidence that raping the rich increases GDP and has a "trickle down" effect for the less successful.
It is too a tax. It's a tax on owning a TV / having the TV connected to the broadcast network. If you don't own a TV, you don't pay it, but it's still a tax - just like how you don't have to pay fuel taxes if you don't have a car (but it's still a tax). I really don't get the religious zealotry among Brits denying their TV tax.
The French tax is a tax based on having a computer hooked up to the internet, even if you never download music - 100% identical to how if you have a TV you are taxed to pay for the BBC, even if you never watch the BBC.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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No, they're not. Try reading the IRS's official numbers - 47% of the country leeches off the other 53%. Also, if you bothered reading anything about the 53% movement, most of them are far from rich - they're merely people who worked hard and were responsible for their lives, where those in the 47% want to make excuses for why they "can't" put out the effort necessary to succeed (even by a loose definition of success).
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Yes, which are all minor taxes in comparison to income tax. I never said that they pay "no taxes", I said "no federal income tax" specifically, which is the largest tax by far and funds the majority of taxes. It's sad that people cling to this notion that there should be free riders who tax from others and think that it's a "right".
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Only if you consider a society where hard work (both in school and at work) is rewarded and those who aren't willing to put out the effort fall behind to be "a larger problem". The whole thing boils down to jealousy. Someone who half-assed their way through a watered down online college "degree" is pissy that they can't find a job when competing against people who went to a good school and worked hard to get good grades and they're demanding that the government confiscate the earnings of those who worked hard to pay those who slacked off.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Oh, they have a very clearly defined goal alright - take money from those who were hard working and successful and give it to those who were lazy and utter failures in life. Hence why the 53% movement was started, because 53% of the country pays 100% of federal income taxes while 47% leeches - and it's that 47% who claim to be "the 99%".
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Sorry to break it to you, but they jumped the shark on day one when they wanted to blame the minority of the population who are successful people for why a small portion of society is unsuccessful.
How about Survivor: Venezuela. Each person has to earn enough money not just to survive, but to afford all the costs (travel, bribing police and politicians, etc) to get back to the US.
Exactly. I'm in grad school now (same university where I received my bachelors a few years back) and they now have it so that every lecture is automatically recorded (both audio and anything visual done on the projector / pc) and posted online with the ability to link it to podcast software to automatically download. It's great for going back to better understand a particular topic while doing homework.
I didn't just say intelligent, I also mentioned more human level emotions too. When have you seen happiness or sadness in a pig? A pig isn't an animal most people can connect with emotionally, where dogs are. Also, I never said it was a "rule", I specifically said "generally".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, my ill-tempered idiocy of pointing out that since no one pays for any other browser, no one would pay for IE. It was a bogus court case to extort money from Microsoft, as has been done countless time with successful businesses. Why piss off citizens with raising taxes to fund the government when you can just file bogus charges against a multi-billion dollar company and confiscate money from them? You have absolutely no ground to stand on when claiming that MS charges for IE, hence why you resort to childish temper tantrums.
No, it was a troll. If you want a Ford, you obviously must buy a Ford and (if it's new) pay Ford for it. That is 100% irrelevant to the BBC tax which applies merely to having a TV hooked up - even if you have NO INTENTION of ever watching any BBC channels. Since people have no choice in if they pay the fee, regardless of if they use the service, that makes it a tax. Just because it's "part of the government, but not run by the government" doesn't change that it's still a tax.
Why are you incapable of distinguishing between voluntarily paying for a product / service and being forced to pay for a product / service that you don't want?
That's like arguing that you pay for disk defragmenter since it's included as part of Windows. They rarely (if ever) increase the price of Windows, yet they keep adding more and more features - so your theory of every feature increases the cost to customers is bullshit. Do you even think before posting or do you just see that MS is mentioned in an article and go into a blind religious rage?
The price for Linux is higher because when you get all the trial bloatware installed, those companies (Norton's and such) pay the manufacturer to put the trial versions on there as an advertisement, thus helping to subsidize your PC - since the software doesn't run on Linux, there's no subsidy. It still makes buying a Windows PC cheaper and since MS relies on selling things like Office much more than they do on Windows sales, they probably don't charge much (if anything) to manufacturer's because they want as many people using Windows as possible.
Not true. It depends on the AV programs (I run MSE and Malwarebytes full version side by side 24/7 no problems), not to mention that MS will almost undoubtedly include an option to turn it off (or even auto turn off upon detection of installing AV software), just like how Windows Firewall turns off when you install firewall software.
Mediocre like MS Security Essentials, the best free AV software out there?
Ah, the mythical MS tax. Funny how when you go to companies that sell PC's with both Windows and Linux, you normally pay MORE for the Linux version of the PC - I guess that's how that MS tax works? You pay less money to get a PC with Windows (even if you have every intention of blasting away Windows and installing Linux) and that's considered a tax, right?
In reality when you pay for Windows, you pay for Windows and IE
Yea, just like you pay for Chrome, Opera, Firefox....oh, wait....they're all free too. Huh....
a piece of Windows that simply couldn't be removed. That's called leveraging your existing monopoly to create a new one
Sorry, but that argument is bullshit. Just because 1% of the time if you open a particular type of file or something it opens IE doesn't change the fact that you can install any other browser that you want and set it as the default. That's like complaining that even though you can change the ringtone on your phone to any ringtone you desire, you can't uninstall the ringtones that were pre-installed (even though you can set a new one as the default).
The first thing I do upon a new Windows install (Win 7, but on the rare occasions I've had to use Vista, that too) is turn off UAC. Nothing is more annoying than Clippy's brother going "You just clicked on something, are you sure you wanted to click on that? Are you sure? Are you sure you wanted to click that you're sure that you wanted to click on that?" 450 times a minute.
The point about regressive is that it doesn't need to be higher the less you make; due to marginal utility, a flat tax across the board will disproportionately affect the poor.
No, it doesn't. If everyone pays 10% in taxes, then everyone loses 10% of their income. Just because you personally want to make a judgement of how much money people "should" have and think that some people "can afford" to have a higher percentage of their income taken from them doesn't change this.
Non-regressive taxes are not a free ride.
Hence why I proposed flat taxes and pointed out why flat tax rates aren't regressive. Progressive taxes, which you support, are a free ride because the extra penalty for being successful is used to reward those who didn't work as hard and weren't successful.
Also, if you'll read more carefully, you'll see that I said. I did AmeriCorps the year *prior* to the Great Recession, thus putting me in the job market right as it hit. But I don't think I was asking for sympathy; just establishing that I was broke going into the Great Recession, and was broke for most of it due to the suckiness of the job market.
No, I was well aware that you said that. As I said, you chose to do that which paid little and didn't establish experience in your field or allow you to already have a job (which yes, you might have been laid off from but you also might have proven yourself to be a good employee and have been kept on). You were broke going in due to your choice to do AmeriCorps - you could have chosen to go directly into your chosen field and earned several times as much money, not to mention reduced the chance of being stuck looking for a job during the recession. As I said, I graduated right after things went to crap and had a rough first year too before I found full time work (which wasn't in my field and was paying about half of what I'd have been making if I'd found a job in my field).
Um....I don't think I said anything about theft. Just argued that flat taxes are inherently regressive
Again, I pointed out that a flat tax cannot be regressive, by it's very definition. Secondly, you're arguing for progressive taxes, which means wealth redistribution - ie theft.
From my perspective, what *you're* advocating is theft.
Because you think that you and your pals have a right to someone else's money, so you think that them keeping the money they earned is "stealing" from you. That's patently false and sheer greed on your part. It's normal for a person to not want their property stolen - not greed. What exactly have you and those you support done to deserve other people's money?
It's not that strange to argue that those making 80% of the money should be providing 80% of the taxes.
And a flat tax would accomplish that since the more you earn, the more you pay in actual dollars. You're also ignoring that in our current system, the 53% who pay income taxes pay 100% of the taxes and it gets more lopsided the higher up you go. I can't find the link right now to give exact numbers, but the IRS data shows that the top earners (top 1%? 5%? I forget which) earn 20% of all income in the US by pay almost 40% of the taxes - that's paying almost twice as much in taxes as you just deemed fair. You're also then ignoring the lower earners who pay 0% in income taxes - by your own argument, even the poor should pay federal income taxes so that the group earning only 1% of total income pays 1% of total income taxes.
What's the point of robbing the poor to pay the rich?
Again, someone defending their right to their property is NOT stealing from thieves. If we had high income taxes on the poor which were used to provide money transfers (welfare) to the rich, then you'd have an argument - and that would be just as wrong as the current system of stealing from high ear
The fruits of your labor is what you get for doing something useful. The problem is that most of the superhigh profits in this world are not obtained that way. If I buy a bunch of Apple stock today, and sell them in a year, there's no labor involved - it's pure gambling.
For some, it's gambling. For others, there is labor involved in researching the company and the industry as well as the economy in general to determine if it's a smart investment move. You're also ignoring that buying stock is providing money to a company so that they can use it to buy more capital, buy new factories, hire more workers, etc with the promise that if the company is successful, you will gain money as a result. That's providing a service to a company and is no different from any other service that you could provide them.
Taking away 60% of what a man gets by virtue of owning a factory or some other production facility, where other people work to produce useful things - much less so.
Because you're shortsighted and don't look at the work that the man did to earn the money and experience to build and run the company that provided people with jobs. You're also failing to realize that if you rape him too hard, he'll simply shut the company down and all of those employees will be standing in the unemployment line thanks to your "wisdom".
There is one thing that I'm sure you and I can both agree on, but for different reasons - most businesses are run by short sighted and greedy people. If they were thinking about the big picture or weren't so focused on sheer nominal amounts of money, they'd simply start closing plants and letting people see how harsh life without the "evil" businesses is until the thieving bastards in the government got their hands off other people's money. I know my city is home to multiple multinational businesses that provide well over 10,000 jobs per company just at the main offices and the city or state (I forget which) was talking about raising their taxes which would cost them over $1 billion per year. They flat out held a press conference and stated that for less than $1 billion total (not recurring yearly) they could pack up and move to a country like Ireland that only has about a 15% corporate tax rate and leave a nice gaping whole in our economy. You may want to demonize them, but unless you're self-employed they're the ones writing your paycheck and providing you with food, shelter, a computer, etc and they could easily stop.
In simple terms, raising taxes means less poor (and less uber-reach), and more happy and healthy people overall.
No, it doesn't. You're assuming that the money is being 100% given to the poor (it's not, politicians will embezzle the shit out of it, like they always do) and you're assuming that the poor will spend it in a useful manner. They've done plenty of studies that show that those who didn't work hard and earn their money and don't know how to manage it will waste money given to them and end up poor again (professional athletes are a fantastic example of people going from being poor to millionaires and then pissing it all away and ending up back in poverty). You can take $10,000 a year and give it to a person who's making less than someone else, but if they waste that $10,000 a year on things like $150 dinners at restaurants multiple times a week, then they are no better off in the big picture than if they didn't have the money. You're also coming up with some very unsubstantiated claims that people will magically become more healthy if they're given money that they didn't earn. As for happiness? Sure, the poor people may be happier, but the hard working people who are being treated as slaves and having their money stolen are less happy, so did you really affect the net happiness of society?
Your counter argument assumes as an axiom that "citizens should be allowed to keep fruits of labor". First of all, this is quite obviously false in any society today,
Sweet. Send me a check for half of your salary each year, since by your own admission you don't have a right to keep it.
since all of them have some form of taxation.
Except that you're failing to understand the difference between a tax that funds a shared resource (police, fire, EMT, roads, etc) and a tax that exists purely to take property from one person and give it to another person that did nothing to earn it.
The extreme anarcho-capitalist argument that "all taxes are theft" is just that - extreme to the point that vast majority of people treat it as hogwash that it is; so I'm not going to bother refuting that.
When did I say that? Never. I never said anything negative about taxes as a whole, I specifically spoke about the kind of taxes that your article was discussing where money is directly taken from one group of people for the explicit purpose of giving it to another group of people who didn't earn it. That's called "theft" - just because the government says it's OK to steal a certain percentage from certain people doesn't change that it's still theft.
At that point you can debate more economic freedom (low taxes) vs higher overall prosperity (high taxes).
There you go again, falsely stating that high taxes will increase GDP and prosperity when your own sources don't support it. Soviet Russia had some pretty high taxes - do you really think that they had a higher overall prosperity than the US? The UK has much higher taxes than the US and I don't know anyone who'd argue that they're more prosperous than the US.
The balance that I consider optimal is somewhere in between, but certainly much closer to the latter than what U.S. has today.
And what is your justification for that? How do you justify stealing money? As I said, for things that everyone benefits from, everyone should pay for. You're also ignoring that even with a flat tax rate, the more you earn the more you pay (that's basic math). Why must the punishment for success increase the more successful you are? People with your mentality are why I continually question why I work myself to death working full time and doing grad school to improve my lot in life - because you want to demonize me for working harder than others and punish me by stealing the money I worked so hard to gain.
Wow, that was the worst attempt at trolling I've ever seen.
If by "regressive" you mean "don't get to free ride". Everyone pays the same percentage for sales tax, SS / Medicaid / Medicare tax, and any other non-income taxes. That's not regressive. Regressive would mean that the lower your income is, the higher percentage you pay. Since it's a set percentage, it cannot be regressive. I graduated from college in December 2008, so I'm very much aware of how shitty it was to find a job. I spent most of 2009 working at Wendy's making about $7.15 an hour and then I had some part time work doing tech support for a small company but they didn't have enough business coming in and had to let me go. Our incomes for the year were probably pretty similar, though you chose to do something as low paying as AmeriCorps, so sorry, but you're not getting sympathy on that part. The difference between you and me is that I think people should be responsible for themselves and not steal money (even if it's legally sanctioned and the theft is done by the government and the ill gotten gains distributed by the government) from others who were more successful. The whole concept of Rape the Rich is pure jealousy, plain and simple. You look at someone with a high paying job and think "That bastard owes me money". I see someone with a high paying job and think "I'm going to bust my ass at work and in grad school so that someday I can be in his position".
Regarding your sig, did you actually read the article that you're linking to? If you look at the graph, you see that starting in the 50's the countries GDP growth has been fairly stable, regardless of the highest tax bracket. Now, you might use this as justification to rape the successful, but as your own source points out, that won't increase GDP. The counter argument is that citizens should be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor, especially since there's no historical evidence that raping the rich increases GDP and has a "trickle down" effect for the less successful.
It is too a tax. It's a tax on owning a TV / having the TV connected to the broadcast network. If you don't own a TV, you don't pay it, but it's still a tax - just like how you don't have to pay fuel taxes if you don't have a car (but it's still a tax). I really don't get the religious zealotry among Brits denying their TV tax.
The French tax is a tax based on having a computer hooked up to the internet, even if you never download music - 100% identical to how if you have a TV you are taxed to pay for the BBC, even if you never watch the BBC.
No, they're not. Try reading the IRS's official numbers - 47% of the country leeches off the other 53%. Also, if you bothered reading anything about the 53% movement, most of them are far from rich - they're merely people who worked hard and were responsible for their lives, where those in the 47% want to make excuses for why they "can't" put out the effort necessary to succeed (even by a loose definition of success).
Yes, which are all minor taxes in comparison to income tax. I never said that they pay "no taxes", I said "no federal income tax" specifically, which is the largest tax by far and funds the majority of taxes. It's sad that people cling to this notion that there should be free riders who tax from others and think that it's a "right".
Only if you consider a society where hard work (both in school and at work) is rewarded and those who aren't willing to put out the effort fall behind to be "a larger problem". The whole thing boils down to jealousy. Someone who half-assed their way through a watered down online college "degree" is pissy that they can't find a job when competing against people who went to a good school and worked hard to get good grades and they're demanding that the government confiscate the earnings of those who worked hard to pay those who slacked off.
Oh, they have a very clearly defined goal alright - take money from those who were hard working and successful and give it to those who were lazy and utter failures in life. Hence why the 53% movement was started, because 53% of the country pays 100% of federal income taxes while 47% leeches - and it's that 47% who claim to be "the 99%".
Sorry to break it to you, but they jumped the shark on day one when they wanted to blame the minority of the population who are successful people for why a small portion of society is unsuccessful.
Don't forget - OCCUPY SLASHDOT!!!
How about Survivor: Venezuela. Each person has to earn enough money not just to survive, but to afford all the costs (travel, bribing police and politicians, etc) to get back to the US.
Exactly. I'm in grad school now (same university where I received my bachelors a few years back) and they now have it so that every lecture is automatically recorded (both audio and anything visual done on the projector / pc) and posted online with the ability to link it to podcast software to automatically download. It's great for going back to better understand a particular topic while doing homework.
I didn't just say intelligent, I also mentioned more human level emotions too. When have you seen happiness or sadness in a pig? A pig isn't an animal most people can connect with emotionally, where dogs are. Also, I never said it was a "rule", I specifically said "generally".