Re:What about the rest of your evolutionism?
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1
Thank you for actually providing something intelligent. Most evolutionists just flame. So yes, it has been observed that hyrdogens can fuse into helium. Has it ever been observed with any higher order elements such as uranium?
We can observe the fusion of elements up to iron being produced in stars based on the light spectra the stars give of. Normal stellar fusion doesn't produce anything heavier than iron (which is a direct prediction of atomic physics, borne out by observation of the stars, BTW). Once you go heavier than iron, the only thing that produces enough energy to "squish" those heavier atoms together is a supernova. Not surprisingly, spectroscopy of supernova remnants do show that the heavier elements are produced. A good place to start is here if you want to understand some of the science behind it.
Basically, the "evolution" of heavier elements is a direct prediction of modern physics that is well supported by observations of the cosmos. If it weren't true, we would see very different observations in the stars, and if the underlying physical theories describing the properties of the atoms were wrong, we would have an awfully hard time making hydrogen bombs. Remember, the process of nuclear fusion was "discovered" because it was a direct consequence of modern physical theory, not because somebody tried it and then created a theory to match the observation. That's extremely strong evidence that our understanding of fusion is good.
Mr. Hovind, who appears to have trouble with even elementary physics, has clearly not made the effort to understand the theory he's trying to tear down. Creationists often don't think the consequences of their interpretations of physics through, and I strongly suspect that this is one of those cases.
Your article completely misses the meaning of the word "beneficial" in this case. A beneficial mutation is one that increases your likelihood of survival. The example of antibiotic resistance is a classic example. Yes, it can slow down some beneficial processes, but it makes the organism infinitely more likely to survive in its environment. Hand wavy crap like "it might make it more susceptible to other antibiotics!" simply misses the point. You measure fitness by how well it deals with the antibiotics in its environment. If resistance to antibiotic A confers a mild disadvantage, then there are two ways of looking at it: 1) If you live in an environment where you're likely to be killed by A, it's a beneficial mutation. If you live in an environment where you're unlikely to encounter A, it's a bad mutation as all you get is the bad side.
It's very much like saying that the fact that fish have gills is a bad thing because it means that they can't climb mountains. They live in the water, so gills are good. If they lived on land, having gills without lungs would be bad. Fitness is always a measure of how well you deal with your environment.
Anybody else want to try?
Try the frame-shift mutation that gave a Japanese bacterium the ability to "eat" nylon. Even if it doesn't help them "eat" carbohydrates as the formerly did, it gives them the ability to live "eat" a food that no other organism can consume. Essentially, they can live on nylon and not have to compete with anything for their food supply.
Even if that's more or less representative of the makeup of the people of the U.S. and the number of, and size of, the charities themselves?
No, I think that you're assuming that we'd be using the wrong metric. The incorrect metric, as you point out, is the overall percentage of money going to particular religions (obviously skewed by the prevalence of that particular religion). A better metric is, is there a correlation between which religion a faith-based group represents and the likelihood of funding? You might want to read David Kuo's book on the topic, Tempting Faith. The problem here is less a matter of a vast conspiracy and badly written policy and more a matter of obvious bias and misbehavior on the parts of the actors. Kuo recounts talking to somebody on the review board:
She talked about how the government employees gave them grant review instructions - look at everything objectively against a discreet list of requirements and score accordingly. "But," she said with a giggle, "when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero."
Once government gets into the business of propping up religious organizations, people just can't help but dole out the hand-outs inequitably. That's just the way it always works out, and that's why a lot of us are suspicious of such programs. It's easy to turn it into a program for quietly funneling taxpayer money into the pockets of favored religions.
You have to keep in mind that far more money is given to non-religious charities. This religious thing was a recent Bush-ism. And all I can say is that if they don't require you to convert, if they are thrifty and wise with the money, and they do a lot of good, then I think it's backwards to use the fact that the charity was created out of religious beliefs as a counterargument.
The whole point of the faith-based initiative was to get government funding to religious organizations by exempting them from rules that say that you're not allowed to discriminate if you receive government money. The counterargument to the program is simply that it won't be (and hasn't been) administered fairly, and I strongly suspect that aside from proselytizing, there's nothing that "faith based" organizations do that can't be found in an equivalent secular organization.
Re:Tag this article deathofcreationism
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1
Ok, lets start with the age of the earth. The moon moves away from the earth at a rate of about 1 inch per year. Billions of years ago, the moon would have been part of the earth.
Please explain, just using basic Newtonian mechanics (let's not get fancy and bring relativity into it just yet), why you would expect this rate to remain constant. Please take the ocean into account. I think that your extrapolation is... well... not a good one.
Erosion wears away at the surface of earth's land. After billions of years, why is surface of the earth not completely flat because of erosion?
Why would you think that erosion is the only process at work on the surface of the earth? Do you think that geologists really have such boring jobs? What about all the great activity that happens along fault lines and in regions where tectonic plates butt up against one another? The mere fact that the Himilayas are growing a couple of inches per year indicates that you can't simply assume that everything is getting flatter as time goes on. Again, a nonsense extrapolation gives you bad results.
The magnetic field of the earth is gradually declining in strength. Even 100 thousand years ago, the magnetic field would have been so strong that any living organism would be squished.
Now you've just departed from reality and you're in Hovind-land. Why, again are you doing a linear extrapolation on something that's clearly nonlinear? In fact, all evidence is that the phenomenon is cyclical. And by what physical phenomenon would you expect our magnetic field to "squish" organisms?
It's getting warm in my area. In fact, I would say that the average temperature has increased by 10 degrees F in the past several weeks. Extrapolating that, we'll all be superheated plasma in a few years. Bad extrapolation? Probably.
My question for people who assert a young earth is this: How do you explain the collinearity of the points in the first graph here? The only way I can think of is billions of years of time passing since the formation of the matter.
Re:Tag this article deathofcreationism
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1
Evolutionism takes more faith to believe in than creation. There is scientific evidence for creation, but evolutionism comes up short. If you can figure out some scientific evidence for evolutionism, go to www.drdino.com and claim your $250k prize! Please don't push your religion here though.
Ah, Hovind's $250K prize! All you need to do is prove, to the exclusion of all other possibilities things like "Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves" to the satisfaction of a secret panel of judges chosen by Hovind himself (read: there are no judges). I'll give you $250K if you can prove any empirical claim at all to those standards.
Of course, I don't know if the offer is still on the table, given that "Dr." Hovind is in prison for tax evasion these days.
It's not that I disagree with the sentiment, and I know you used the word "arguably," but unless the destinations are all Christian, I don't think it's a valid argument.
What if they overwhelmingly favored Christianity? I'd hate to think that the government could get away with such misbehavior simply by giving a small financial nod to some minority religion every once in a while.
You've made it clear that you regard a person's earnings as the property of the state, to be granted or withheld from the wage-earner at will. That is the antithesis of liberty.
I'm assuming that your suggested solution to this problem would be a tax-free society with no government, or perhaps a voluntary tithing system in which a few nice people make sure that roads get built and police act in the public interest?
Unfortunately, McCain seems to be courting that kind of conservative lately. In the past, I would have supported McCain, but since that commencement speech, he's been going places I'd rather not follow.
Sadly, I suppose there's a certain amount of pandering to be expected. The point where McCain went completely down the black hole for me was when he decided to go to a market in Baghdad to convince us of how safe it was while heavily guarded by troops who risked their lives to keep his sorry ass safe. It was kind of stunning to me that a person with his life experience would make a bunch of soldiers put their lives on the line so that he could generate transparent propaganda designed to keep them in the line of fire.
Well, that and the fact that he's all for torture now that he's no longer the one being tortured.
Personally I like Joesph Lieberman, he's a fair man who will work for his country rather than blindly for the party. I actually think the fact the democratic party tried to ignore him in 2006 gives him more credit in my book than anything. While I disagree with his stance on video games the fact he's proven he's willing to work with Democrats and Republicans makes him the best candidate. He'll never get the nomination but I'd still like to cast a vote for him some day.
I see where you're coming from, but for me Lieberman manages to combine the worst aspects of both sides of the aisle rather than the best. He's a Democrat when it comes to expanding government programs without regard to effectiveness and he's a Republican when it comes to lunatic hawkish foreign policy and socially backward moralizing. If you could start with a Libertarian and take the logical inverse of him, you'd have Joe Lieberman. I can't decide whether to admire his tenacity in insisting that the war in Iraq is still the greatest thing since sliced bread or simply wonder if he isn't mildly retarded.
I'd be much more interested in a candidate who doesn't feel the need to pander to social conservatives or randomly bomb people, but who can also think long and hard about the consequences of creating massive government programs. Unfortunately, the only people who seem to cover that ground these days are Libertarians, and they can't manage to come up with a candidate who doesn't have positions like, "Stop signs are an abuse of government power!" and "Government backed currency is interventionist! Let's go back to trading monkey skulls!"
One of the problems is your "genetic predispositions" section. What you're proposing for that is the opposite of insurance. Under a sensible insurance scheme (assuming no profit for the insurer, just to keep the numbers simple) if we all have a 10% chance of getting a disease that costs $1000 to fix, we all put $100 into the pool. The 10% of us who get the disease get that payment back out and can cover their costs. The 90% of us who don't get the disease lose $100 but our risks were covered, so we're still happy.
You're proposing that everybody set aside $100 to cover their 10% chance at a $1000 disease. When it hits, the unlucky few end up $900 in the hole and the rest get $100 for free. Not so good.
I take it you've never see a drug rep or other medical salesperson order lunch for the doctors and staff in a clinic. Who do you think ends-up footing the bill for that "free" food?
That's more along the lines of what I was expecting. The idea that hospital bandages are more expensive because they're tested by elite labs and certified to withstand nuclear war sounds like a lame excuse to cover up the fact that the whole system is either horribly inefficient, gouging its customers, or both.
The vast majority can afford basic health care on their own.
That's true, unless you're unfortunate enough to have a condition that makes you uninsurable. At that point, you're beyond "insurance" because something bad has already happened, so you're stuck paying out of pocket to stay alive until you don't have anything left. Presumably, in your idea of utopia, such a person would simply run out of money and die, solving the problem without any fuss.
What some people pay for insurance alone on their brand new car could cover the costs of medical insurance let alone getting rid of the new car and stick with the 5 year old model that is perfectly fine.
I think that you and I may be working with different definitions of the word "poor."
Regardless, I think that a big part of the problem is with how people view health insurance: It's supposed to be insurance against unexpected expenses. It's not supposed to be an all-you-can-eat buffet of expensive procedures that doctors can overbill for because it's all being paid for by somebody else. The system as it's designed clearly encourages skyrocketing prices for insurance premiums and medical procedures, and the fact that it's far from being a functional market can't be laid entirely at the feet of government health programs. The whole system is rife with issues like asymmetric information, moral hazards, and free rider problems, not to mention the simple fact that consumers consume the good of "life" at essentially an infinite marginal utility. It's clearly a mess from day one.
My point is simply that in any market--even one that functions properly--there will be people who can't afford the good at the equilibrium price. I'm simply asking whether we as a society value the market's results so highly (assuming that there's any way to make the health care market work in any way that resembles a truly functioning market) that we're willing to let a fairly large number of those people die because they couldn't pay the price of admission to the rest of their lives.
No, the reason medical supplies cost 10-50 times more than the equivalent (effectively identical) item purchased at a pharmacy is the much more stringent quality control, and the associated paperwork, traceability, insurance, etc.
I'd be very interested in seeing a detailed accounting of something like a box of bandages. I'm highly skeptical that the numbers work out the way you say they do.
Why is it whenever someone blasts the negative role of government control, somebody has to remark about the person being "cold" or "indifferent" to the poor? Where did he say that the unfortunate should be left to die? He didn't, did he?
Well, when somebody advocates taking the state out of the picture without a proposal for replacing benefit that the state provides (e.g. making sure that people get basic health care, even when they have no money), it's not totally out of line to infer that they believe that doing away with that benefit is no big deal. "Get the government out of health care" is all good and fine, but the question remains, how do we keep people with no money from being left to die? If I see a proposal that answers that question while fixing the broken half-assed market that is our health care system, I'll start taking it seriously. Until then, we're just waxing nostalgic about how great it would be if everything was more like a Charles Dickens novel again.
Why should "flood Geology", (I.e. The notion that 4 or 5 thousand years ago the earth was flooded) predict where oil, coal and natural gas are buried?
The point is this: Why should mainstream geology, which completely rejects flood geology, accurately predict where oil, coal, and natural gas are buried while flood geology fails to make any meaningful predictions? The obvious answer is that flood geology is bunk and mainstream geology more accurately reflects reality. The GP is requesting an alternate explanation for the disparity. I doubt that one will be forthcoming.
It is a perfect example of why the death tax should be abolished. It says that every time a generation in the family dies, they have to pay as much money as a new house to get to keep the property THEY ALREADY OWN.
No, her parents owned it. If she owned it, it wouldn't be income. You pay income taxes on receiving assets because those assets are income. That's the fundamental difference.
That's precisely the point. This is not income, but the government confiscating assets. There is an enormously important difference between the two that you are missing. The current system of taxation we have says that individuals have to pay a certain percentage of their income, and then what they have left over, they get to keep. The death tax says that the government can confiscate your assets every time someone dies.
No, I think that there's an important point that you're missing. That's possibly because you've bought into the "death tax" terminology that implies that somehow whenever somebody dies, the government gets a chunk of it. It's an estate tax. It's a tax on the transfer of wealth (read: income) from the people who earned that wealth to somebody else. The government isn't confiscating "her" house. It's preventing her from getting a $2.5 million dollar house that she did nothing to pay for tax free. I agree that it would be great if she could do that, but I don't see a meaningful reason to take something that is income in every sense of the word and call it "not income" because her parents earned it. She already gets an exemption of $2M ($1M in your carefully selected example), so she's still allowed go pull in $1-$2M in income without earning it and without paying taxes on it. Trying to paint this as putting a hard working girl in the poor house just doesn't work.
Untrue, and you're missing the point. Theoretical wealth has no practical application. By your standard, all people in San Diego are "the rich" since most people who own houses now have estates over a million dollars. $700,000 is the average price for a standalone house these days in San Diego. I lived for the last two years in a four bedroom standalone house in Daly City that was appraised at $1.5 million dollars. And believe me, it's not a great house.
Believe me, the implications of the California housing bubble are not lost on me. I don't own a home because in my area an entry level house is coming in at $700K or so. That doesn't mean that home owners don't have significant assets. If, for example, I live in a house that I rent that's worth $1M and my neighbor owns his $1M home, then he is worth a million dollars more than I am. Sure, it's a pain for him to sell his house and move to an area where the prices are less inflated, but I guarantee you that he won't starve. Of course, all of this is made less of an issue in that the government isn't taking his home from him. The government would be keeping his kids from getting his home tax-free without doing a lick of work to earn it. Then again, if it's "only" a $1M home, they'd skip the estate tax altogether on it.
They worked hard and earned their income, AND PAID TAXES ON THE INCOME ALREADY.
Yes, and their daughter didn't. That's why they aren't taxed but she is. They're dead in this example, remember? If the money were put in some sort of trust and she had to work for every penny of it, I'd be all for her just paying her marginal tax rate on it, but it's essentially just found money at this point. Tax rates are all about marginal cost and marginal utility of money. You don't want to take money that's being consumed at a high marginal utility (e.g. taking food money from the poor), and you don't want to take money that's earned at a high marginal cost or risk (e.g. discouraging investment and hard work). That's why progressive tax rates are popular, and that's why an estate tax with an exemption hi
Yes, assuming she wants to stay in her family's house, as many people do. If her family preferred the cash, they would move out of San Diego, as many people here do, and live like kings in cheaper parts of the country. But her family likes their house, likes their neighborhood, likes the ocean.
That's all good and fine, but this isn't exactly a sob story. I understand that it would be better if she got to keep all of the money that her parents earned, and it would be better if none of us ever had to pay taxes, but it doesn't make any sense from a public policy perspective.
If her parents die, the government tells her she needs to give them a check for $675,000, or move out. That's what I consider tragic.
The flip side of that is that she walks away with $1.8M in income that she didn't earn with which to buy a house anywhere she likes. The fact that she can't buy one on the beach (at least not in her current neighborhood) is unfortunate, but those are the breaks when stumbling into found income. I'd love for all of my income to be tax-free, but it just doesn't work that way.
That's why we passed a cap on property tax incomes in California. Sure, it's "fair" (for some arbitrary definition of fair) that people should pay a percentage of the value of their house, but the practical upshot of it was that property values were rising so fast, working families and people on fixed incomes (i.e. retired people) were being evicted from their own homes.
It's not about being fair. It's about practical public policy. You listed $675K in taxes. My wife and I paid roughly $43K in income taxes last year. We're not rich, but we're doing just fine. We paid more taxes than the average household, but it would still take us just shy of sixteen years to make up for the loss of tax revenue we'd get by waving a magic wand and calling her $2.5M in income "not income" because her parents earned it for her. Or, looking at the average American household's tax burden which, I believe is shy of $20,000 (let's round it up to $20K even), you're looking at the entire tax burden of 33.75 households for a year.
I'm a firm believer in property rights. If I own a house, I own a house damn it. Making my friend pay the equivalent cost of a new house just to keep the house her family has all ready bought (and paid off) is just theft on the part of the government.
Any tax is just "theft" by the government. The fact is, the government needs tax receipts to keep running. We could debate whether the government could be more thrifty (I think that we'd agree on this point), but fundamentally, the taxes have to come from somewhere. If we allowed people to avoid income taxes by just passing property around or saying "Well my parents earned it, not me, so it's not income" we'd basically be shifting more of the burden to people who work for a living. That's not putting sensible incentives in the right place, and it's generally not a healthy way to run an economy. It's like taking a skin graft off of somebody's face when there's plenty of good skin to be had elsewhere.
I'll say it again -- these people are not wealthy. They bought the house for next to nothing in the 70s, and property values have skyrocketed since then. They live on a very modest income. They're only theoreticaly rich, not practically rich. That's a very important difference to understand.
I understand the difference and no, it's not that important. If you have an asset that you can convert to millions of dollars in cash, you're fairly wealthy. It's inconvenient to move, but people in the real world do it all the time. I live in California as well, so I can appreciate that one can be house rich and cash poor, but the reality is that a $2.5M home is still way above what it takes to have a very nice home even in my area (San Francisco Bay). Even if she's stuck with only $1.8M, she can go and buy
It's not the Bill Gates getting nailed by this. My friend's family bought a four bedroom house in La Jolla near the beach when they emigrated from Vietnam back in the 70s. If her parents died in a car accident in 2011, the tax on the house alone (now worth $2.5M), not even counting any other assets, would be $675,000. There's no way in hell that she'll be able to keep her parents' house. Her mom runs a nail shop, and she works as a wedding planner, with very moderate means. It would simply be tragic.
You just described a person who has gotten an after-tax cash payment of more than $1.8M dropped in her lap (let's say, 30 years' income), and you're describing the result as tragic? Certainly, the death of her parents in a car accident would be tragic, but an incomplete transfer of wealth? My heart bleeds.
I'm not the grandparent, but I don't see it as a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes, when you say mean things, people get offended. That's just the way society works. If others learn a lesson and mind their manners, that's just a result of society's reaction to bad behavior. If you really want to say things like that, go right ahead. Just be aware that a large segment of society doesn't particularly approve. Personally, I think that the whole social dynamic that was exposed in the process was interesting. I like Matt Taibbi's take on it quite a bit.
Not if the lighting in the room has a yellow tint to it. Not if the white balance was set correctly. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying that a camera that sees a ping pong ball reflecting yellow light should change the white balance to make it white? If the ambient light is yellow and I take a picture of a white object, "accurate" white balance will make that object look yellow.
Yes. When I buy a food product labeled "X" I expect it to be X. I don't want "beef" that is made from dirt and soy. I don't want to buy canned tuna and find out that it's actually cat food byproducts. I certainly don't want to buy crap like that and find out that I have no recourse because there's no definition for those food items. I want there to be some reasonably objective standard defining what you're selling to me so that I can hold you to it if you don't meet it.
If the alternative is buying something labeled "chocolate" and finding out that it's brown candle wax, I'm going to go with regulation.
Seriously, the FDA is Attempting to Regulate Supplements, Herbs and Juices as "Drugs". This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone. Medical costs are already skyrocketing here in the US - we should have the freedom to choose whatever kind of treatment we want, not be forced into one choice: corporate drugs.
That's because those things are drugs. They're simply unregulated and largely untested drugs right now. Why people think that this is a good thing is beyond me. There are plenty of folk remedies that have been used "forever" that, when tested under a proper double-blind test regime, mystically lose their power to heal (read: they DON'T WORK). The bottom line is that regulating the drug industry gives us medicines that demonstrably work and are reasonably unlikely to have surprising and dangerous side effects. Compare that to the pre-FDA medical world and you'll see why they're out there.
Once again, he never took credit for its creation. He took credit for his part in its creation, which wasn't negligable and worth at least a tip of the hat.
What's amazing to me about the whole thing is that people seem to actively choose to be boneheads when parsing that sentence. If a senator said, "In 1988, I took the initiative in creating the bridge from Anytown to Metropolis," nobody would say, "He claimed he went out and built that bridge with his own hands! That slimy liar!" Somehow, it's perfectly OK to opt for a bizarre parsing when it's Gore and the Internet. I can figure out why some slimy spin doctors came up with the idea, but I can't figure out why even intelligent people, when shown the full quote, still insist on parsing it in the stupidest way possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, the "evolution" of heavier elements is a direct prediction of modern physics that is well supported by observations of the cosmos. If it weren't true, we would see very different observations in the stars, and if the underlying physical theories describing the properties of the atoms were wrong, we would have an awfully hard time making hydrogen bombs. Remember, the process of nuclear fusion was "discovered" because it was a direct consequence of modern physical theory, not because somebody tried it and then created a theory to match the observation. That's extremely strong evidence that our understanding of fusion is good.
Mr. Hovind, who appears to have trouble with even elementary physics, has clearly not made the effort to understand the theory he's trying to tear down. Creationists often don't think the consequences of their interpretations of physics through, and I strongly suspect that this is one of those cases.
It's very much like saying that the fact that fish have gills is a bad thing because it means that they can't climb mountains. They live in the water, so gills are good. If they lived on land, having gills without lungs would be bad. Fitness is always a measure of how well you deal with your environment.
Try the frame-shift mutation that gave a Japanese bacterium the ability to "eat" nylon. Even if it doesn't help them "eat" carbohydrates as the formerly did, it gives them the ability to live "eat" a food that no other organism can consume. Essentially, they can live on nylon and not have to compete with anything for their food supply.
The whole point of the faith-based initiative was to get government funding to religious organizations by exempting them from rules that say that you're not allowed to discriminate if you receive government money. The counterargument to the program is simply that it won't be (and hasn't been) administered fairly, and I strongly suspect that aside from proselytizing, there's nothing that "faith based" organizations do that can't be found in an equivalent secular organization.
Why would you think that erosion is the only process at work on the surface of the earth? Do you think that geologists really have such boring jobs? What about all the great activity that happens along fault lines and in regions where tectonic plates butt up against one another? The mere fact that the Himilayas are growing a couple of inches per year indicates that you can't simply assume that everything is getting flatter as time goes on. Again, a nonsense extrapolation gives you bad results.
Now you've just departed from reality and you're in Hovind-land. Why, again are you doing a linear extrapolation on something that's clearly nonlinear? In fact, all evidence is that the phenomenon is cyclical. And by what physical phenomenon would you expect our magnetic field to "squish" organisms?
It's getting warm in my area. In fact, I would say that the average temperature has increased by 10 degrees F in the past several weeks. Extrapolating that, we'll all be superheated plasma in a few years. Bad extrapolation? Probably.
My question for people who assert a young earth is this: How do you explain the collinearity of the points in the first graph here? The only way I can think of is billions of years of time passing since the formation of the matter.
Of course, I don't know if the offer is still on the table, given that "Dr." Hovind is in prison for tax evasion these days.
Well, that and the fact that he's all for torture now that he's no longer the one being tortured.
I'd be much more interested in a candidate who doesn't feel the need to pander to social conservatives or randomly bomb people, but who can also think long and hard about the consequences of creating massive government programs. Unfortunately, the only people who seem to cover that ground these days are Libertarians, and they can't manage to come up with a candidate who doesn't have positions like, "Stop signs are an abuse of government power!" and "Government backed currency is interventionist! Let's go back to trading monkey skulls!"
One of the problems is your "genetic predispositions" section. What you're proposing for that is the opposite of insurance. Under a sensible insurance scheme (assuming no profit for the insurer, just to keep the numbers simple) if we all have a 10% chance of getting a disease that costs $1000 to fix, we all put $100 into the pool. The 10% of us who get the disease get that payment back out and can cover their costs. The 90% of us who don't get the disease lose $100 but our risks were covered, so we're still happy.
You're proposing that everybody set aside $100 to cover their 10% chance at a $1000 disease. When it hits, the unlucky few end up $900 in the hole and the rest get $100 for free. Not so good.
Regardless, I think that a big part of the problem is with how people view health insurance: It's supposed to be insurance against unexpected expenses. It's not supposed to be an all-you-can-eat buffet of expensive procedures that doctors can overbill for because it's all being paid for by somebody else. The system as it's designed clearly encourages skyrocketing prices for insurance premiums and medical procedures, and the fact that it's far from being a functional market can't be laid entirely at the feet of government health programs. The whole system is rife with issues like asymmetric information, moral hazards, and free rider problems, not to mention the simple fact that consumers consume the good of "life" at essentially an infinite marginal utility. It's clearly a mess from day one.
My point is simply that in any market--even one that functions properly--there will be people who can't afford the good at the equilibrium price. I'm simply asking whether we as a society value the market's results so highly (assuming that there's any way to make the health care market work in any way that resembles a truly functioning market) that we're willing to let a fairly large number of those people die because they couldn't pay the price of admission to the rest of their lives.
No, her parents owned it. If she owned it, it wouldn't be income. You pay income taxes on receiving assets because those assets are income. That's the fundamental difference.
No, I think that there's an important point that you're missing. That's possibly because you've bought into the "death tax" terminology that implies that somehow whenever somebody dies, the government gets a chunk of it. It's an estate tax. It's a tax on the transfer of wealth (read: income) from the people who earned that wealth to somebody else. The government isn't confiscating "her" house. It's preventing her from getting a $2.5 million dollar house that she did nothing to pay for tax free. I agree that it would be great if she could do that, but I don't see a meaningful reason to take something that is income in every sense of the word and call it "not income" because her parents earned it. She already gets an exemption of $2M ($1M in your carefully selected example), so she's still allowed go pull in $1-$2M in income without earning it and without paying taxes on it. Trying to paint this as putting a hard working girl in the poor house just doesn't work.
Believe me, the implications of the California housing bubble are not lost on me. I don't own a home because in my area an entry level house is coming in at $700K or so. That doesn't mean that home owners don't have significant assets. If, for example, I live in a house that I rent that's worth $1M and my neighbor owns his $1M home, then he is worth a million dollars more than I am. Sure, it's a pain for him to sell his house and move to an area where the prices are less inflated, but I guarantee you that he won't starve. Of course, all of this is made less of an issue in that the government isn't taking his home from him. The government would be keeping his kids from getting his home tax-free without doing a lick of work to earn it. Then again, if it's "only" a $1M home, they'd skip the estate tax altogether on it.
Yes, and their daughter didn't. That's why they aren't taxed but she is. They're dead in this example, remember? If the money were put in some sort of trust and she had to work for every penny of it, I'd be all for her just paying her marginal tax rate on it, but it's essentially just found money at this point. Tax rates are all about marginal cost and marginal utility of money. You don't want to take money that's being consumed at a high marginal utility (e.g. taking food money from the poor), and you don't want to take money that's earned at a high marginal cost or risk (e.g. discouraging investment and hard work). That's why progressive tax rates are popular, and that's why an estate tax with an exemption hi
That's all good and fine, but this isn't exactly a sob story. I understand that it would be better if she got to keep all of the money that her parents earned, and it would be better if none of us ever had to pay taxes, but it doesn't make any sense from a public policy perspective.
The flip side of that is that she walks away with $1.8M in income that she didn't earn with which to buy a house anywhere she likes. The fact that she can't buy one on the beach (at least not in her current neighborhood) is unfortunate, but those are the breaks when stumbling into found income. I'd love for all of my income to be tax-free, but it just doesn't work that way.
It's not about being fair. It's about practical public policy. You listed $675K in taxes. My wife and I paid roughly $43K in income taxes last year. We're not rich, but we're doing just fine. We paid more taxes than the average household, but it would still take us just shy of sixteen years to make up for the loss of tax revenue we'd get by waving a magic wand and calling her $2.5M in income "not income" because her parents earned it for her. Or, looking at the average American household's tax burden which, I believe is shy of $20,000 (let's round it up to $20K even), you're looking at the entire tax burden of 33.75 households for a year.
Any tax is just "theft" by the government. The fact is, the government needs tax receipts to keep running. We could debate whether the government could be more thrifty (I think that we'd agree on this point), but fundamentally, the taxes have to come from somewhere. If we allowed people to avoid income taxes by just passing property around or saying "Well my parents earned it, not me, so it's not income" we'd basically be shifting more of the burden to people who work for a living. That's not putting sensible incentives in the right place, and it's generally not a healthy way to run an economy. It's like taking a skin graft off of somebody's face when there's plenty of good skin to be had elsewhere.
I understand the difference and no, it's not that important. If you have an asset that you can convert to millions of dollars in cash, you're fairly wealthy. It's inconvenient to move, but people in the real world do it all the time. I live in California as well, so I can appreciate that one can be house rich and cash poor, but the reality is that a $2.5M home is still way above what it takes to have a very nice home even in my area (San Francisco Bay). Even if she's stuck with only $1.8M, she can go and buy
I'm not the grandparent, but I don't see it as a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes, when you say mean things, people get offended. That's just the way society works. If others learn a lesson and mind their manners, that's just a result of society's reaction to bad behavior. If you really want to say things like that, go right ahead. Just be aware that a large segment of society doesn't particularly approve. Personally, I think that the whole social dynamic that was exposed in the process was interesting. I like Matt Taibbi's take on it quite a bit.
Yes. When I buy a food product labeled "X" I expect it to be X. I don't want "beef" that is made from dirt and soy. I don't want to buy canned tuna and find out that it's actually cat food byproducts. I certainly don't want to buy crap like that and find out that I have no recourse because there's no definition for those food items. I want there to be some reasonably objective standard defining what you're selling to me so that I can hold you to it if you don't meet it.
If the alternative is buying something labeled "chocolate" and finding out that it's brown candle wax, I'm going to go with regulation.