I don't think the issue is as simple as that. Yes percentagewise the rich spend less of their income, than the poor. However the poor spend their income on low cost, small profit goods, and services. The rich spend their income on higher-cost, greater profit-margin goods and services. A greater amount is passed down the economic chain. Also rich people's money can have a greater influence on the total system, than the poor. Investments, charitable donations, etc. As for taxes, generally in the US one spends more as one rises in the tax brackets. This also includes taxes that the poor don't pay. e.g. luxury taxes.
All of that is true to a greater or lesser extent, but it doesn't really have any bearing on a very important reason why progressive taxation is a good idea: Progressive taxes reflect the diminishing marginal utility of money. Wealthier people can pay out a larger percentage of their income while feeling the same "pain." Your first dollar is worth a lot more to you than your ten millionth dollar, and a sensible tax structure reflects that.
One could make the argument that it is fair because the newcomers are benefitting from the effort of those who have came before. Consequently the newcomers can do better than those who starting lower in the effort ladder.
I'll certainly buy into that argument for GDP. I'll heartily thank the generations that came before me for my high standard of living. I don't think that they're to thank for the housing bubble, or that a housing bubble is really something to be thankful for. It's more of an unhealthy artifact of a number of issues.
As for the property inflation, you're going to have that wherever the demand exceedes the supply. Tax or no tax.
Well yes, that's fundamentally true of any market. The question is, why does demand so far outstrip supply? My point is that Prop 13 exacerbates a problem that's already killing us. On one hand, the number of people who are willing to sell their homes and move out of high demand areas is smaller because they'd face a substantial tax burden on their new home, so we're providing a strong disincentive to contribute to the supply on the secondary market in tight markets. Turnover in areas where young professionals would normally find work is low enough that they generally have to live far from their places of employment. Additionally, new developments in areas with older homes tend to need to be extremely high value in order to pay for the services that they consume as the older home owners in the neighborhood aren't pulling the same amount of weight. The net result is a drop in affordable housing across the board.
And of course, all of this ignores the fact that the whole thing is a massive transfer tax based on factors that shouldn't really be taken into account in order for the system to be reasonably efficient. Other than that, it's a dream.
How is it flawed idea to allow people to stay in the homes they had previously bought and planned to spend the rest of their life in (or a good portion of it)?
Your question presumes that the property tax in general is a good idea. I tend to think that taxing the primary property of residence is not a wise policy. However, taxing two houses in the same neighborhood at ridiculously different rates is a worse policy. Likewise, when dealing with skyrocketing housing costs, giving home owners a strong disincentive to sell their homes falls into the category of "insane."
Without prop 13 a lot of elderly people would be living out on the streets or at the very least forced out of their current home and perhaps out of the state altogether. If you buy a home at a certain value and expect to pay a certain yearly tax for it, is it really fair if that tax goes up 10% a year when you haven't made any changes to your home ??
Well, as it stands, Prop 13 is doing a great job of helping to price nearly everybody except the elderly out of home ownership. California has experienced an insane increase in the price of homes over the past generation, and the government is doing everything it can to crush the secondary home market and transfer the tax burden to newcomers and the young. That's a great way to get votes, but it's not a sustainable policy.
My wife and I are young professionals in the SF Bay area and we're simply priced out of the market in most places. We make quite a bit more than our home-owning friends who graduated with us and entered less lucrative careers in other states. We know that we'll be fine because our earning power is at the high end of the scale, but I can't help but worry about the Californian economy when the vast majority of people in an area can only afford to own homes by entering into deal-with-the-devil mortgages and hoping that prices continue to climb. Prop 13 isn't the only cause (but, by the same token, the home price crunch isn't the only problem it causes), but it's definitely a bad idea to throw an unbelievably screwed up market distortion into an already broken--and crucial--market.
Of course, the Prop 13 problem will eventually solve itself when the demographics shift to the point where it hurts more people than it helps. At that point, the beneficiaries of Prop 13 who have turned a blind eye to the problems it caused should hope that the people who repeal it are more considerate when they're the voting majority. Finding an alternative to property taxes altogether (or at least means testing property taxes) seems to be the only sensible way of getting around the problem long term, though.
How so? That doesn't make any sense to me at all. Sales tax is the great equalizer. The more you spend, the more you pay in tax. Sales tax also encourages people to save and invest. I think you have your logic backwards.
In absolute terms, you're right. In relative terms, there's a big difference. A person making millions of dollars typically spends a much smaller fraction of their income than a middle-income wage earner. As a result, the average person pays sales tax (7.75% in my locality) on a much larger percentage of their income. Just running the calculation of a fixed sales tax rate times the percentage of income it's paid on shows very clearly that the poorer you are, the higher your sales tax burden as a percentage of your income. That's why people refer to it as a very regressive tax.
And yet, I'm not opposed to laws that prevent people from doing things that are likely to ruin at 15-year-old's life.
I can see where you're going with that, but what if applying those laws causes more damage than the activity they're meant to prevent. I'd argue that being arrested and prosecuted has huge physical, psychological, and social consequences. It's like saying, "Kids shouldn't smoke because it's bad for them, so we should execute all kids who smoke."
Likewise, I think that there's something missing from this line of argument:
1) Teens are irresponsible and won't properly evaluate the potentially dire consequences of a given activity. 2) We should create legal consequences that are arguably more severe than those that stem naturally from the offense. 3) Teens suddenly become able to evaluate the consequences of the action in question, and everything becomes better.
The jump from (2) to (3) seems like too big of a leap of faith to make good policy. This is the sort of activity that should be reported to parents for a stern (and insanely embarrassing) talking to. Going out and distributing the pictures of your significant other is a different matter (a crime with a very clear victim), but subjecting a couple of kids to some very destructive legal proceedings for what amounts to poor judgment and self destructive behavior is a ridiculous solution.
So, call me an ignorant foreigner (I'm Canadian), but why are US military forces doing the job of a domestic police force in a middle-eastern country?
Because we annihilated their ability to police themselves and then, through inadequate enforcement of law and order at the beginning of the operation, allowed massive discontent and lawlessness to build to the point where it's difficult to put together a coherent local police force. I suppose that for some people, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
His emphasis in on 'war' not major. He's talking about a declared war in the legal sense. All of the things you listed are 'police actions' in the technical, legal desciption. Not War(tm), which is the GP's point.
None of which makes the "Pedantry modded up as insight" complaint any less accurate.
This is relying on forgiveness rather than simply asking permission. I'm sure the university has a procedure on the books to request a specific, temporary exemption from school policies to conduct bona-fide research. The important factor is oversight: the university still has the authority and responsibility to tell a professor no if the request is not reasonable.
I think that the problem here is that Tor is not (in and of itself) a problem for network administrators. There's no reason to assume that it will adversely impact the network. If the admins suddenly noticed that the prof was soaking up enough bandwidth to bring down a portion of the network or otherwise degrading an academic resource, they'd certainly have the authority (moral and statutory) to ask him to stop. There's no reason to have yet another rule on the books saying "No Tor because it causes bad behavior X to occur" when you could simply have a rule that states "Don't do bad behavior X."
Harmless according to the Tor user? This assumes that the Tor user is not pursuing illegal activities, but no one knows since it's Tor. Who's to say if he wasn't running a Tor server, allowing external users use of the university's resources? Who's to say the external users aren't kiddie porn sickos?
Indeed. In fact, who's to say he's not conducting illegal drug deals over his office phone when the door is closed? Wait a minute. How do I know that you're not doing something terrible right now. The implications of my uncertainty are staggering!
In my neighborhood, the price of a single family home starts at around $600K and increases quite rapidly from there (I rent an apartment). Pulling down the government numbers for average income in my area, my only assumption is that I'm either surrounded by people who bought their houses decades ago when prices were sane or I'm surrounded by people who are living well outside their means by way of some very risky credit arrangements. I would guess that if I were to look into the age demographics, I'd see a disturbing trend toward the latter.
Couldn't I just as easily say that CDs cost way too much twenty years ago? If we're going to ignore market conditions that drive the prices and arbitrarily decide which price level is the right one, why not choose today's? What makes the 1983 price the correct one?
Following that reasoning, have executive compensation packages stayed consistent with inflation over that time period? Why or why not? Which is the correct one?
Okay, seriously now. These CDs cost money because they cost money to make. The cost isn't just in the printing, but the whole god damn production. You have to hire a producer, audio engineers, album designers. You must rent time in a recording studio, buy instruments, and (the most important) make enough money so that you can live decently. Maybe $16 is too high. When I buy bands from small bands not signed to a big label, they might cost $9 to $12.
The issue is that none of the things you listed should have increased in price faster than inflation. The recording studio should have *decreased* significantly. The original high price of CDs (relative to other media with equivalent product on them) was attributed to the "new technology" issue. That made sense for the time, but 20 years later, the actual physical cost of making a CD has rapidly approached zero, so the only way for them to justify scaling the price of a CD up with inflation is if one or more of the things you listed has increased in price faster than inflation. That just hasn't happened. The RIAA is simply wishing that their profit margins were higher. Don't we all?
No violence. Felony firearms though, and he appears to be a repeat offender.
I'd be hesitant to lock up a nonviolent offender for a long time at all. I suppose the severity of the firearms part would depend on whether it's a "pointed a gun at somebody for $14" or "we got him on a firearms technicality after arresting him for stealing $14." The latter is an idiotic gotcha while the former is a pretty damn serious crime.
I'm all for the rights of law abiding citizens to own firearms, but as soon as you show that you don't have the judgment to own them (e.g. committing any sort of violent crime or misusing a firearm), I'm also all for taking them away from you with a pretty damn stiff penalty for ignoring the prohibition. Life in prison for somebody who hasn't committed a violent crime is pretty nutty, though. This case sounds like the results of some asinine "3 strikes" law or something else designed to take common sense out of the loop.
He's young, so it is going to cost lots of money to incarcerate him, and if he does eventually get out, I am pretty sure he will be even more broken than when he went in.
My take on it is, if he's nonviolent we should try to fix him as best we can. If he's honestly and demonstrably a threat, I don't have any trouble burying him for a long time just to keep him off the street. Unless it's obviously a one time violent outburst, I don't really consider giving violent offenders a lot of slack a worthwhile policy. Sure, a violent offender might be perfectly well behaved if you let him out on the street again, but I don't see what such a person has done to deserve my risking life and limb in an experiment on his behalf.
It's true that it's expensive to lock dangerous people up, but I bet we could afford it if we stopped throwing nonviolent drug offenders and the like in prison. The fact that we have huge numbers of people in prison who should be in rehab or simply left alone is the core of the financial problem. If we could simply do a better job of classifying who is dangerous enough to lock up, we could probably avoid a lot of our criminal justice problems.
A headline in my local paper reads something like "Man faces life in prison for robbing pizza woman of $14". It sucks that people don't see something wrong with that.
I suppose it depends on how the robbery was committed. Life in prison may be a little stiff for even the most frightening of nonviolent robberies, but beating somebody to a bloody pulp or stabbing them in the process of stealing $14 might make it more reasonable.
I'm not sure why the fact that the device had a "bulge" from batteries or wires on it is such a shocking thing. Given that it had BLINKING LEDs on the front, one might reasonably assume that some sort of electrical phenomenon was afoot.
I know exactly what it properly means and I know the term is commonly abused on slashdot and other internet forums (it is a pet peeve of mine). However, it is pretty clear that your intent was to discredit his argument purely by assaulting his character (hence the use of the word "essentially"). The fact that you did not go out and explicitly say that his criticisms are wrong because of the flaws that you tried to plant in the readers minds does not let you off the hook.
It's important to note that calling somebody a "former scientist" appears to be claim to present that person as an authority. That's all good and fine, but "former scientist" certainly is a questionable credential to use to claim authority. Questioning the person's credentials to act as an authority is a perfectly valid thing to do.
I seem to recall scientists sounding the alarm over Ozone depletion winning the Nobel Prize. Yet, I don't have skin cancer. With all the alarm that raised over the "ozone hole", can you tell me without a shred of doubt that global warming is not experiencing the same media driven hype cycle?
Surely you're not serious about this? There's something truly classic about calling somebody an alarmist and then using an example of an actual environmental crisis that was fixed because a good scientific model sounded the alarm. If that's an example of your being up to date on environmental science, maybe you should do some more digging before assuming that climate scientists are just yanking our chains because they don't like people to make money.
Question 1: How exactly are starving children, AIDS, and deaths from smoking not major health problems? You realize that AIDS and famine are ravaging entire countries right now, yes?
Question 2: How many of the non-issues that you mention had broad scientific consensus and how many of them were simply sensationalist media stories of results from fringe groups?
Remember, the messenger is not the message. Where I learned the information is irrelevant to the content of the argument.
When your "information" is simply an unsubstantiated assertion, where you learned it is very important. I can simply make the assertion that global warming is 100% fact and claim victory by your standards. There is such a thing as a valid argument from authority, but you don't seem to be in a position to provide one, so you're going to have to come up with some sources. Pointing out that you don't seem to have the authority for people to take your naked assertions on face value is hardly worthy of "logical fallacy" status.
Gee... you coulda fooled me. I guess that's why politicians are funding this bullshit in the first place. Don't forget: A number of these "climatologists" are on welfare. They don't study without government grants.
Indeed. I seriously considered becoming a climatologist to live in opulent splendor on government grants, but I decided to go the humble route and head off to engineering school instead. Not a day goes by when I don't curse the decision to get on the university-employed climatologist gravy train.
lol! Aren't only financial? You must have married money cause I think it financially ruins most men.
Eh, I married an electrical engineer. Solid employment, practical buying habits, and the same set of ridiculous hobbies and vices I have, so we share the cost of soldering irons and computer parts. Highly recommended, although YMMV.
I agree as long as it can be done in an efficient manner. In my locality, we had separate recycling bins for paper, plastic, glass, and organic waste. Of course, it proved far too complicated for the average Joe to get it right, so we eventually went to a "dump all of your recyclable crap into this bin and we'll sort it for you" system. I like it because it's pretty convenient, but it has to increase cost and complexity on the back end.
My point is, we'd either have to train people to separate out hazardous waste into another bin (so far, not a totally successful proposition, but I suppose it's easier than what we do right now) or come up with a good way of sorting it on the back end. I'm not to clear on the specifics of it, but it might also be the case that CFL bulbs need to be kept intact in order to keep from polluting, so any system that involves dumping buckets full of them into a truck and driving them around may defeat itself by crushing them into a fine mercury-laden powder.
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Well yes, that's fundamentally true of any market. The question is, why does demand so far outstrip supply? My point is that Prop 13 exacerbates a problem that's already killing us. On one hand, the number of people who are willing to sell their homes and move out of high demand areas is smaller because they'd face a substantial tax burden on their new home, so we're providing a strong disincentive to contribute to the supply on the secondary market in tight markets. Turnover in areas where young professionals would normally find work is low enough that they generally have to live far from their places of employment. Additionally, new developments in areas with older homes tend to need to be extremely high value in order to pay for the services that they consume as the older home owners in the neighborhood aren't pulling the same amount of weight. The net result is a drop in affordable housing across the board.
And of course, all of this ignores the fact that the whole thing is a massive transfer tax based on factors that shouldn't really be taken into account in order for the system to be reasonably efficient. Other than that, it's a dream.
Well, as it stands, Prop 13 is doing a great job of helping to price nearly everybody except the elderly out of home ownership. California has experienced an insane increase in the price of homes over the past generation, and the government is doing everything it can to crush the secondary home market and transfer the tax burden to newcomers and the young. That's a great way to get votes, but it's not a sustainable policy.
My wife and I are young professionals in the SF Bay area and we're simply priced out of the market in most places. We make quite a bit more than our home-owning friends who graduated with us and entered less lucrative careers in other states. We know that we'll be fine because our earning power is at the high end of the scale, but I can't help but worry about the Californian economy when the vast majority of people in an area can only afford to own homes by entering into deal-with-the-devil mortgages and hoping that prices continue to climb. Prop 13 isn't the only cause (but, by the same token, the home price crunch isn't the only problem it causes), but it's definitely a bad idea to throw an unbelievably screwed up market distortion into an already broken--and crucial--market.
Of course, the Prop 13 problem will eventually solve itself when the demographics shift to the point where it hurts more people than it helps. At that point, the beneficiaries of Prop 13 who have turned a blind eye to the problems it caused should hope that the people who repeal it are more considerate when they're the voting majority. Finding an alternative to property taxes altogether (or at least means testing property taxes) seems to be the only sensible way of getting around the problem long term, though.
I can see where you're going with that, but what if applying those laws causes more damage than the activity they're meant to prevent. I'd argue that being arrested and prosecuted has huge physical, psychological, and social consequences. It's like saying, "Kids shouldn't smoke because it's bad for them, so we should execute all kids who smoke."
Likewise, I think that there's something missing from this line of argument:
1) Teens are irresponsible and won't properly evaluate the potentially dire consequences of a given activity.
2) We should create legal consequences that are arguably more severe than those that stem naturally from the offense.
3) Teens suddenly become able to evaluate the consequences of the action in question, and everything becomes better.
The jump from (2) to (3) seems like too big of a leap of faith to make good policy. This is the sort of activity that should be reported to parents for a stern (and insanely embarrassing) talking to. Going out and distributing the pictures of your significant other is a different matter (a crime with a very clear victim), but subjecting a couple of kids to some very destructive legal proceedings for what amounts to poor judgment and self destructive behavior is a ridiculous solution.
Because we annihilated their ability to police themselves and then, through inadequate enforcement of law and order at the beginning of the operation, allowed massive discontent and lawlessness to build to the point where it's difficult to put together a coherent local police force. I suppose that for some people, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
In my neighborhood, the price of a single family home starts at around $600K and increases quite rapidly from there (I rent an apartment). Pulling down the government numbers for average income in my area, my only assumption is that I'm either surrounded by people who bought their houses decades ago when prices were sane or I'm surrounded by people who are living well outside their means by way of some very risky credit arrangements. I would guess that if I were to look into the age demographics, I'd see a disturbing trend toward the latter.
Couldn't I just as easily say that CDs cost way too much twenty years ago? If we're going to ignore market conditions that drive the prices and arbitrarily decide which price level is the right one, why not choose today's? What makes the 1983 price the correct one?
Following that reasoning, have executive compensation packages stayed consistent with inflation over that time period? Why or why not? Which is the correct one?
I'm all for the rights of law abiding citizens to own firearms, but as soon as you show that you don't have the judgment to own them (e.g. committing any sort of violent crime or misusing a firearm), I'm also all for taking them away from you with a pretty damn stiff penalty for ignoring the prohibition. Life in prison for somebody who hasn't committed a violent crime is pretty nutty, though. This case sounds like the results of some asinine "3 strikes" law or something else designed to take common sense out of the loop.
My take on it is, if he's nonviolent we should try to fix him as best we can. If he's honestly and demonstrably a threat, I don't have any trouble burying him for a long time just to keep him off the street. Unless it's obviously a one time violent outburst, I don't really consider giving violent offenders a lot of slack a worthwhile policy. Sure, a violent offender might be perfectly well behaved if you let him out on the street again, but I don't see what such a person has done to deserve my risking life and limb in an experiment on his behalf.
It's true that it's expensive to lock dangerous people up, but I bet we could afford it if we stopped throwing nonviolent drug offenders and the like in prison. The fact that we have huge numbers of people in prison who should be in rehab or simply left alone is the core of the financial problem. If we could simply do a better job of classifying who is dangerous enough to lock up, we could probably avoid a lot of our criminal justice problems.
I'm not sure why the fact that the device had a "bulge" from batteries or wires on it is such a shocking thing. Given that it had BLINKING LEDs on the front, one might reasonably assume that some sort of electrical phenomenon was afoot.
There's a difference between paying for research and paying for conclusions. One is funding and the other is bribery. HTH.
Question 1: How exactly are starving children, AIDS, and deaths from smoking not major health problems? You realize that AIDS and famine are ravaging entire countries right now, yes?
Question 2: How many of the non-issues that you mention had broad scientific consensus and how many of them were simply sensationalist media stories of results from fringe groups?
I agree as long as it can be done in an efficient manner. In my locality, we had separate recycling bins for paper, plastic, glass, and organic waste. Of course, it proved far too complicated for the average Joe to get it right, so we eventually went to a "dump all of your recyclable crap into this bin and we'll sort it for you" system. I like it because it's pretty convenient, but it has to increase cost and complexity on the back end.
My point is, we'd either have to train people to separate out hazardous waste into another bin (so far, not a totally successful proposition, but I suppose it's easier than what we do right now) or come up with a good way of sorting it on the back end. I'm not to clear on the specifics of it, but it might also be the case that CFL bulbs need to be kept intact in order to keep from polluting, so any system that involves dumping buckets full of them into a truck and driving them around may defeat itself by crushing them into a fine mercury-laden powder.