Did you miss the part where a follower of Jesus complains to him that a woman has wasted resources on Jesus that could have been spent on the poor... and Jesus replies that the woman has done the right thing and that the poor will be with us always? Yeah... all those who worship the poor and use the poor as justification for bizarre robin hood schemes seem to miss that one... just a coincidence I'm sure.
I think you may want to read the scriptures for guidance on this issue. Good lucky allying yourselves with the rich against the poor. Sounds like there's some rewards for such behavior in the eyes of who you pretend to believe in...
If one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells some of his property, his nearest relative is to come and redeem what his countryman has sold... If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you... If one of your countrymen becomes poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him work as a slave. Leviticus 25:25
Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. Psalm 82:3-4
He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who is kind to the needy. Proverbs 14:21
The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern. Proverbs 29:7
The LORD enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?' declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. Isaiah 3:14-15
Jesus answered, If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. Matthew 19:21
They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely. Mark 12:40
Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, 'Here's a good seat for you,' but say to the poor man, 'You stand there' or 'Sit on the floor by my feet,' have you not discriminated among yourselves and becomes judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom He promised those who love Him? But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? James 2:2-6
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. 1 John 3:17-18
They literally believe that if the Bible said Noah put "two of each kind" on a boat, then it happened. Now, I'm sorry, but once you've started digesting that as truth, there's not much chance of me introducing logic into the equation. Have you ever tried arguing with people who believe that they are the only ones who know the will of God? There's no way to put rational thought between the voices in their brain and their brain. It's like talking to a conspiracy theorist who "knows" the Apollo was faked. Every piece of evidence will be discarded in order to save their worldview.
Sounds like you're irked because, if anything, they are more organized and dedicated that you'd like.
I hold no particular attachment to the incidental place of my birth. If the knowledge fearing wing of the Tea Party does manage to dismantle the foundations of the Enlightenment that we've all benefited from, I have the will and the means to leave, without any regrets - I'm actually touring Central America this summer. There are lots of poorer places in the world, but very few that hold ignorance in such high esteem.
* Only 32 percent of registered voters said the Reagan Administration has done a good job handling the budget deficit; 60 percent said it has not.
* On the problem of illegal drugs, 36 percent said the Administration was doing a good job; 55 percent said it was not.
* On dealing with the conflicts in Central America, 35 percent rated the Administration as having done well; 52 percent said it had not....
Moreover, when voters were asked which party would do best at handling whatever they identified as the nation's most important problem - a question poll takers regard as a key leading indicator of voting decision - 40 percent said the Democrats and 29 percent said the Republicans. Democrats have never enjoyed such an advantage since the Times/CBS News Poll first asked the question in 1980, when indeed the Republicans had that big a margin before Mr. Reagan's first victory.
53 to 46% is a modern landslide, sure. However, the previous election, Reagan and Bush won with 60% of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes.
The Democrats picked up 8 seats in the Senate and 5 seats in the house in 86. In 1988 they picked up 2 more seats in the House and one in the Senate. If Dukakis hadn't been such terrible candidate, and Atwater had a little more integrity, I don't doubt he would have had a fight on his hands. The resort to such vile attack ads seems to support that belief.
In the late 80s, the republican base was slipping. Bush I barely won against Dukakis. Keep in mind, Bush was at the center of political power his whole life, headed the CIA, and had just completed 8 years as Vice President. His campaign had to resort to a racist attack ad about Willie Horton.
In 1992, Bush lost to Clinton, and many believe it was because he refused to identify himself as a "born again" Christian. Most evangelicals had been uninvolved in politics, until they were discovered by the dying Republican movement. As long as you professed to be evangelical and pro-life, you'd have local preachers pushing their followers to vote for you. Bush II toed the line, and got elected twice for it. The only problem is now the evangelical movements want one of their own in the White House - Sarah Palin - and that's something the ruling business party cannot allow. They brought her in for the VP job, but she couldn't pull the moderate record of McCain. Palin could have been the sideshow, but the business party is greedy, not crazy, and they'll never let her within ten miles of the big red button.
The evangelicals are an enormous and active voting bloc. They do exactly as their pastor or preacher tells them, and nearly half of them are in church every single sunday. Now they are being used up by two seats of power: Republicans and their own church leaders. The Republicans get a voting bloc that will campaign against their own interests, and the church leaders get access to power and a fanatical flock that now worships money, and gives them a bunch of it.
Just try to imagine Christ at a Tea Party rally, protesting tax dollars spent on the ill and the needy, and then signing up to join the Army the next day. The evangelicals have no idea which way is north. They don't even have a coherent set of values left. They are just following orders.
That's not even remote what I said. I said Clinton gave them a bigger tax cut. Bush's tax cuts, on TOP of Clintons tax cuts, of course puts Bush's rate lower, because he came after.
Well, this is one-- this is a great irony. George Bush owes almost his entire fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket and into the use of eminent domain laws to essentially legally cheat other people out of their land for less than it was worth to enrich him and his fellow investors...
One of the key sources I quote is a prominent Republican lawyer married to a United States senator who is the expert in Texas on municipal finance. The subsidy, he says, is $202.5 million. And Bush and his partners captured about 168 million of it.
Anecdotes are awesome... but I prefer the CBO's statistical analysis. Johnston may be right about the top 400 households, but I was unable to find any real data on that.
The point is that you replace the windows with another GUI concept, called bubbles. Did you watch the video?
Maybe you have time to read the first two paragraphs:
Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.
The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.
True. How fortunate that the US is #1 in manufacturing, and vastly ahead of #2 (Japan) and very far ahead of #3 (China).
You know what the most important thing is for statistics? Context. Our manufacturing per capita consistently places us outside of the top 10. It's like people celebrating a US or Canadian women's hockey victory despite the fact that we have more players by a factor of a thousand. Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Germany outperform us in a number of areas. And I bet if you took entertainment out of the equation it would really be illuminating.
You also may want to know that the #2 economy (by GDP alone) is now China. It also just overtook Germany as the world's largest exporter (again, by pure GDP, not per capita).
And worse, Bill Clinton signed a larger tax cut for the rich than George Bush ever did...
Alright, now you're just full of shit, by income tax and by effective tax rates. Read the tax rates here. Top bracket under Bush is 35%. Top bracket under Clinton is 39.6%. Capital gains tax was cut from 20% to 15%. Income from dividends went from 35% to 15%. The Estate Tax was halved, and even completely nonexistent for one year (this year, I think). And that's why you hear the babbling heads screaming bloody murder about keeping the Bush Tax Cuts.
There's even an article in the Times from 2007. This shit is no secret. "Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study."
And before you say a word about the richest paying the most taxes - OF COURSE. The top 1% of households hold more than 50% the assets. Why wouldn't they be paying most of the taxes?
If you have any other questions about reality, feel free to ask.
When you don't have a manufacturing sector, it's hard to create actual wealth. When corporate structures have co-opted your government into forcing you to compete with third world wages and shifted the tax burden from the richest to the middle class, it's impossible.
Hey, welcome to 18th Century France! I can't wait to see what happens next...
which are significant obstacles to an interstate insurance market and a contributor to the high US health care costs
I imagine it's the same level of contribution that frivolous lawsuits add - nearly 2%!
Health care is expensive because Americans have terrible diets, they don't exercise, and they expect a pill to solve problems like obesity. Since health coverage is out of reach of nearly 50 million Americans, everyone receives last minute care at hospitals instead of preventative care at less expensive clinics. And when they can afford health care, doctors maximize useless services and tests to push up profits, even when they are duplicative or entirely unnecessary. The incentive structure is totally fucked.
We are so far behind in quality of life at this point that it's embarrassing. Every time I overhear someone making fun of the fact that people in the EU get a month of paid vacation, or like you, claim that all we need to do is release the last threads of protection against the greed of giant insurers, I am again awed by the power of corporate propaganda.
this is backed up with opinion polls of business leaders at the time
Why do people believe that people who were born into money are the only ones who know how to run a business?
But I'm glad you recognize that while FDR may have stabilized the Depression in 1933 by ending deflation (which was awesome), his other efforts lead to 8 years of not much progress and much concern by businessmen.
Take a look at the deficit and the unemployment rate and GDP. Only when our war spending (Keynesian by nature) skyrocketed us to a 120% deficit per GDP did we exit the recession. We borrowed money, gave everyone a job, and virtually created the middle class who paid their debt off with taxes. Take a look at any deficit per GDP and compare it to Presidential administrations thereafter. When you get Reagan and Bush spending money they don't have and simultaneously cutting taxes, the deficit goes up. In between, Clinton comes in and raises taxes and cuts military spending. The deficit goes down.
The key idea in that paragraph is "gave everyone a job." When you give the money away to corporations, they pocket the money and stash it in other countries or in fine art or half million dollar watches, which does little but drive up the prices of collectibles. When you give someone a job, they buy things that affect the real economy, like cars, houses, education, meals, and so on - things that also create jobs.
It ain't rocket science. But pretending it is seems to be enormously profitable for a lucky few.
The internet is quickly turning everything we consume into data. Cable companies want to fragment what being on the internet means, and then charge you extra for wanting to use port 25 or have the "privilege" of using bittorrent. They want you to pay for cable TV even if you can get everything off of hulu or directly from nbc.com.
If they can use technology to kick off high bandwidth users or force them to pay more without having to expand infrastructure, that's a hell of a lot better than expanding infrastructure. More short term profit. Higher stock price.
You still fail to address the point that you're attacking here. All those governments (with the exception of China, should it make that list) are massively in debt. Sooner or later it's going to catch up with them (see Greece) and no amount of Keynesian economics will save their collective asses.
China doesn't make the list... though they are the #1 exporter and just overtook Japan as the second largest economy by GDP.
If you look at deficit per GDP, we're doing poorly, but not as bad as we were during WWII, when it was 120% or so. This takes the wind out of the sails of the anti-Keynesians, since WWII was massively Keynesian and the real end of the Great Depression.
Of course, taxes have to go up to pay it down, but that used to be patriotic, back when being a patriot meant giving a shit about your countrymen. McCain said it best: "The tax cut is not appropriate until we find out the cost of the war and the cost of reconstruction." His fall from a basic values system is sadly reflective of the state of the union.
The main issue here is that if your entire civilization is dependent on a finite resource, and that finite resource suddenly runs dry or is suddenly 1000% more expensive, there's no way for you to invest in alternatives. The abundant energy source is gone, and now you're trying to figure out how to put food on the table instead of tweaking the efficiency of new energy technologies.
In this way the accidental benefit of the rise of capitalism may be it's tendency away from efficiency. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit around.
such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's
It couldn't be that everyone had over leveraged themselves... if that were the case, something like the Glass-Steagall Act would have keep the markets free from similar crashes. Oh, that's right... it did for nearly 70 years until it was repealed in 1999.
Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
Then why are all states at the top of GDP per capita Keynesian or sitting on top of valuable natural resources?
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
The sound Canadian banking system holds the real answer: do not led greedy investors lurk in the shadows. Never take cops off the beat. Government oversight and transparency are the only realistic methods to preventing speculative bubbles, among other things.
Indeed... let's move forward with the current plan
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
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· Score: 5, Insightful
1) Cover our eyes and let companies do whatever they want. 2) Suffer from energy spikes, speculative bubbles, piss poor infrastructure and a ruined environment. 3) Shovel billions into corporate coffers so they can sock the money away in offshore accounts while simultaneously failing to develop energy alternatives 4) Failure!
You have to subsidize new technologies because corporations cannot justify R&D to their shareholders. BP and Exxon cannot manufacture solar panels unless they can demonstrate higher profits, which one can't do until the technology is sufficiently developed, which one can't do without huge investments.
Technology has thrown the entire paradigm of free market economics for a loop. The amount of technology and science that go into an average product make information asymmetry astronomical. This requires more government regulation, not less.
I would love the sort of hippy nonsense you are spouting to be true
I don't think the laws of thermodynamics are "hippy nonsense." Energy and matter, and thus all of nature, seek stable states. The current makeup of the atmosphere gives us our current climate. (Remember, the atmosphere is thinner than the ratio of an apple peel to an apple.) If you start pumping out all of the fossil fuels that have collected underground for hundreds of millions of years in about a century, then there will be some effect.
It seems like you may agree with this, and just didn't bother to read the rest of what I said.
the urge to survive is sadly very localised (i.e. you care about those you know), and the urge to say "like I give a fuck about them" is very very general.
This is sadly true. Unless we come up with a way to involve all of humanity in a common future, we're likely fucked. As we push the boundaries of the planet's ability to sustain us, perhaps there could be some valuation of our right to pollute? Ahh, screw it. It's just a plot by Al Gore to make money.
Nature seeks states of equilibrium. The question is not whether we are a part of nature. The question is whether we are hurtling the earth's climate toward a state of equilibrium that destroys our civilization.
This does not require the entire earth to become inhospitable. But if there are enough strains on world resources, it will end up putting us through decades of misery which may result in catastrophic wars, food shortages, and the loss of all coastal communities.
Famines have killed millions in the past, and are still killing millions in Africa. Right now we have easily exploitable resources that allow us to enjoy a certain quality of life, but we are dangerously close to depleting a number of those resources to new low states of equilibrium. Add in unpredictable droughts, rising sea levels, and the loss of many glaciers that supply freshwater through natural processes, and you can see why people are worried.
Come on, admit it... you couldn't support that many distros in 5 steps. Or come anywhere close to supporting 80% of the linux user base without a doubling or tripling of development time for the installer.
This is my main point: until "runs on Linux" covers a vast majority of users, without having huge development times just for the installer, without having to open up your source code, Linux adoption will continue to suffer.
Though I suppose if all development goes to HTML5 delivery, the point is moot.
So, in your crazy little head, assassinating someone - which the CIA and our proxy Mossad do regularly - is the activity of a thuggish dictatorship...
I guess when Chavez plots an assassination of a government we subsidize, that's a crime. However, when we carry out plotted assassinations against our enemies, it's justice. Yes, it makes perfect sense to me now!
Hypocrisy? What's that, a new Morrissey cover band?
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Did you miss the part where a follower of Jesus complains to him that a woman has wasted resources on Jesus that could have been spent on the poor... and Jesus replies that the woman has done the right thing and that the poor will be with us always? Yeah... all those who worship the poor and use the poor as justification for bizarre robin hood schemes seem to miss that one... just a coincidence I'm sure.
I think you may want to read the scriptures for guidance on this issue. Good lucky allying yourselves with the rich against the poor. Sounds like there's some rewards for such behavior in the eyes of who you pretend to believe in...
If one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells some of his property, his nearest relative is to come and redeem what his countryman has sold... If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you... If one of your countrymen becomes poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him work as a slave. Leviticus 25:25
Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. Psalm 82:3-4
He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who is kind to the needy. Proverbs 14:21
The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern. Proverbs 29:7
The LORD enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?' declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. Isaiah 3:14-15
Jesus answered, If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. Matthew 19:21
They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely. Mark 12:40
Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, 'Here's a good seat for you,' but say to the poor man, 'You stand there' or 'Sit on the floor by my feet,' have you not discriminated among yourselves and becomes judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom He promised those who love Him? But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? James 2:2-6
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. 1 John 3:17-18
They're not mindless, not in any way.
They literally believe that if the Bible said Noah put "two of each kind" on a boat, then it happened. Now, I'm sorry, but once you've started digesting that as truth, there's not much chance of me introducing logic into the equation. Have you ever tried arguing with people who believe that they are the only ones who know the will of God? There's no way to put rational thought between the voices in their brain and their brain. It's like talking to a conspiracy theorist who "knows" the Apollo was faked. Every piece of evidence will be discarded in order to save their worldview.
Sounds like you're irked because, if anything, they are more organized and dedicated that you'd like.
I hold no particular attachment to the incidental place of my birth. If the knowledge fearing wing of the Tea Party does manage to dismantle the foundations of the Enlightenment that we've all benefited from, I have the will and the means to leave, without any regrets - I'm actually touring Central America this summer. There are lots of poorer places in the world, but very few that hold ignorance in such high esteem.
As late as the middle of May Dukakis was leading 49 to 37 in the NYT poll.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/17/us/poll-shows-dukakis-leads-bush-many-reagan-backers-shift-sides.html?pagewanted=1
* Only 32 percent of registered voters said the Reagan Administration has done a good job handling the budget deficit; 60 percent said it has not.
* On the problem of illegal drugs, 36 percent said the Administration was doing a good job; 55 percent said it was not.
* On dealing with the conflicts in Central America, 35 percent rated the Administration as having done well; 52 percent said it had not. ...
Moreover, when voters were asked which party would do best at handling whatever they identified as the nation's most important problem - a question poll takers regard as a key leading indicator of voting decision - 40 percent said the Democrats and 29 percent said the Republicans. Democrats have never enjoyed such an advantage since the Times/CBS News Poll first asked the question in 1980, when indeed the Republicans had that big a margin before Mr. Reagan's first victory.
53 to 46% is a modern landslide, sure. However, the previous election, Reagan and Bush won with 60% of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes.
The Democrats picked up 8 seats in the Senate and 5 seats in the house in 86. In 1988 they picked up 2 more seats in the House and one in the Senate. If Dukakis hadn't been such terrible candidate, and Atwater had a little more integrity, I don't doubt he would have had a fight on his hands. The resort to such vile attack ads seems to support that belief.
In the late 80s, the republican base was slipping. Bush I barely won against Dukakis. Keep in mind, Bush was at the center of political power his whole life, headed the CIA, and had just completed 8 years as Vice President. His campaign had to resort to a racist attack ad about Willie Horton.
In 1992, Bush lost to Clinton, and many believe it was because he refused to identify himself as a "born again" Christian. Most evangelicals had been uninvolved in politics, until they were discovered by the dying Republican movement. As long as you professed to be evangelical and pro-life, you'd have local preachers pushing their followers to vote for you. Bush II toed the line, and got elected twice for it. The only problem is now the evangelical movements want one of their own in the White House - Sarah Palin - and that's something the ruling business party cannot allow. They brought her in for the VP job, but she couldn't pull the moderate record of McCain. Palin could have been the sideshow, but the business party is greedy, not crazy, and they'll never let her within ten miles of the big red button.
The evangelicals are an enormous and active voting bloc. They do exactly as their pastor or preacher tells them, and nearly half of them are in church every single sunday. Now they are being used up by two seats of power: Republicans and their own church leaders. The Republicans get a voting bloc that will campaign against their own interests, and the church leaders get access to power and a fanatical flock that now worships money, and gives them a bunch of it.
Just try to imagine Christ at a Tea Party rally, protesting tax dollars spent on the ill and the needy, and then signing up to join the Army the next day. The evangelicals have no idea which way is north. They don't even have a coherent set of values left. They are just following orders.
Oh NO! We're outside the top 10! Clear we "don't have a manufacturing sector" as you've said.
Who's "full of shit", now?
Manufacturing per GDP #75
Exports per GDP #179
That's not even remote what I said. I said Clinton gave them a bigger tax cut. Bush's tax cuts, on TOP of Clintons tax cuts, of course puts Bush's rate lower, because he came after.
Effective Federal Tax Rates
Top 1%
1988: 29.7
1992: 30.6
1996: 36.0
2000: 33.0
2004: 31.4
2006: 31.2
Top 10%
1988: 26.7
1992: 26.9
1996: 30.1
2000: 29.6
2004: 27.1
2006: 27.5
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=456
And I quote: DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Oooh! Look what else he said!
Well, this is one-- this is a great irony. George Bush owes almost his entire fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket and into the use of eminent domain laws to essentially legally cheat other people out of their land for less than it was worth to enrich him and his fellow investors...
One of the key sources I quote is a prominent Republican lawyer married to a United States senator who is the expert in Texas on municipal finance. The subsidy, he says, is $202.5 million. And Bush and his partners captured about 168 million of it.
Anecdotes are awesome... but I prefer the CBO's statistical analysis. Johnston may be right about the top 400 households, but I was unable to find any real data on that.
The point is that you replace the windows with another GUI concept, called bubbles. Did you watch the video?
Maybe you have time to read the first two paragraphs:
Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.
The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.
Please!
True. How fortunate that the US is #1 in manufacturing, and vastly ahead of #2 (Japan) and very far ahead of #3 (China).
You know what the most important thing is for statistics? Context. Our manufacturing per capita consistently places us outside of the top 10. It's like people celebrating a US or Canadian women's hockey victory despite the fact that we have more players by a factor of a thousand. Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Germany outperform us in a number of areas. And I bet if you took entertainment out of the equation it would really be illuminating.
You also may want to know that the #2 economy (by GDP alone) is now China. It also just overtook Germany as the world's largest exporter (again, by pure GDP, not per capita).
And worse, Bill Clinton signed a larger tax cut for the rich than George Bush ever did...
Alright, now you're just full of shit, by income tax and by effective tax rates. Read the tax rates here. Top bracket under Bush is 35%. Top bracket under Clinton is 39.6%. Capital gains tax was cut from 20% to 15%. Income from dividends went from 35% to 15%. The Estate Tax was halved, and even completely nonexistent for one year (this year, I think). And that's why you hear the babbling heads screaming bloody murder about keeping the Bush Tax Cuts.
There's even an article in the Times from 2007. This shit is no secret. "Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html
And before you say a word about the richest paying the most taxes - OF COURSE. The top 1% of households hold more than 50% the assets. Why wouldn't they be paying most of the taxes?
If you have any other questions about reality, feel free to ask.
When you don't have a manufacturing sector, it's hard to create actual wealth. When corporate structures have co-opted your government into forcing you to compete with third world wages and shifted the tax burden from the richest to the middle class, it's impossible.
Hey, welcome to 18th Century France! I can't wait to see what happens next...
In the beginning, there was God. He just magically appeared!
which are significant obstacles to an interstate insurance market and a contributor to the high US health care costs
I imagine it's the same level of contribution that frivolous lawsuits add - nearly 2%!
Health care is expensive because Americans have terrible diets, they don't exercise, and they expect a pill to solve problems like obesity. Since health coverage is out of reach of nearly 50 million Americans, everyone receives last minute care at hospitals instead of preventative care at less expensive clinics. And when they can afford health care, doctors maximize useless services and tests to push up profits, even when they are duplicative or entirely unnecessary. The incentive structure is totally fucked.
We are so far behind in quality of life at this point that it's embarrassing. Every time I overhear someone making fun of the fact that people in the EU get a month of paid vacation, or like you, claim that all we need to do is release the last threads of protection against the greed of giant insurers, I am again awed by the power of corporate propaganda.
this is backed up with opinion polls of business leaders at the time
Why do people believe that people who were born into money are the only ones who know how to run a business?
But I'm glad you recognize that while FDR may have stabilized the Depression in 1933 by ending deflation (which was awesome), his other efforts lead to 8 years of not much progress and much concern by businessmen.
Take a look at the deficit and the unemployment rate and GDP. Only when our war spending (Keynesian by nature) skyrocketed us to a 120% deficit per GDP did we exit the recession. We borrowed money, gave everyone a job, and virtually created the middle class who paid their debt off with taxes. Take a look at any deficit per GDP and compare it to Presidential administrations thereafter. When you get Reagan and Bush spending money they don't have and simultaneously cutting taxes, the deficit goes up. In between, Clinton comes in and raises taxes and cuts military spending. The deficit goes down.
The key idea in that paragraph is "gave everyone a job." When you give the money away to corporations, they pocket the money and stash it in other countries or in fine art or half million dollar watches, which does little but drive up the prices of collectibles. When you give someone a job, they buy things that affect the real economy, like cars, houses, education, meals, and so on - things that also create jobs.
It ain't rocket science. But pretending it is seems to be enormously profitable for a lucky few.
Being stupid is better than being ignorant. However, to understand what I just said would imply you have a dictionary and enough curiosity to read it.
The internet is quickly turning everything we consume into data. Cable companies want to fragment what being on the internet means, and then charge you extra for wanting to use port 25 or have the "privilege" of using bittorrent. They want you to pay for cable TV even if you can get everything off of hulu or directly from nbc.com.
If they can use technology to kick off high bandwidth users or force them to pay more without having to expand infrastructure, that's a hell of a lot better than expanding infrastructure. More short term profit. Higher stock price.
You still fail to address the point that you're attacking here. All those governments (with the exception of China, should it make that list) are massively in debt. Sooner or later it's going to catch up with them (see Greece) and no amount of Keynesian economics will save their collective asses.
China doesn't make the list... though they are the #1 exporter and just overtook Japan as the second largest economy by GDP.
If you look at deficit per GDP, we're doing poorly, but not as bad as we were during WWII, when it was 120% or so. This takes the wind out of the sails of the anti-Keynesians, since WWII was massively Keynesian and the real end of the Great Depression.
Of course, taxes have to go up to pay it down, but that used to be patriotic, back when being a patriot meant giving a shit about your countrymen. McCain said it best: "The tax cut is not appropriate until we find out the cost of the war and the cost of reconstruction." His fall from a basic values system is sadly reflective of the state of the union.
The main issue here is that if your entire civilization is dependent on a finite resource, and that finite resource suddenly runs dry or is suddenly 1000% more expensive, there's no way for you to invest in alternatives. The abundant energy source is gone, and now you're trying to figure out how to put food on the table instead of tweaking the efficiency of new energy technologies.
In this way the accidental benefit of the rise of capitalism may be it's tendency away from efficiency. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit around.
such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's
It couldn't be that everyone had over leveraged themselves... if that were the case, something like the Glass-Steagall Act would have keep the markets free from similar crashes. Oh, that's right... it did for nearly 70 years until it was repealed in 1999.
Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
Then why are all states at the top of GDP per capita Keynesian or sitting on top of valuable natural resources?
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
The sound Canadian banking system holds the real answer: do not led greedy investors lurk in the shadows. Never take cops off the beat. Government oversight and transparency are the only realistic methods to preventing speculative bubbles, among other things.
1) Cover our eyes and let companies do whatever they want.
2) Suffer from energy spikes, speculative bubbles, piss poor infrastructure and a ruined environment.
3) Shovel billions into corporate coffers so they can sock the money away in offshore accounts while simultaneously failing to develop energy alternatives
4) Failure!
You have to subsidize new technologies because corporations cannot justify R&D to their shareholders. BP and Exxon cannot manufacture solar panels unless they can demonstrate higher profits, which one can't do until the technology is sufficiently developed, which one can't do without huge investments.
Technology has thrown the entire paradigm of free market economics for a loop. The amount of technology and science that go into an average product make information asymmetry astronomical. This requires more government regulation, not less.
The heads of Google take their job seriously. Zuckerberg is just a douchebag who was at the right place at the right time.
I would love the sort of hippy nonsense you are spouting to be true
I don't think the laws of thermodynamics are "hippy nonsense." Energy and matter, and thus all of nature, seek stable states. The current makeup of the atmosphere gives us our current climate. (Remember, the atmosphere is thinner than the ratio of an apple peel to an apple.) If you start pumping out all of the fossil fuels that have collected underground for hundreds of millions of years in about a century, then there will be some effect.
It seems like you may agree with this, and just didn't bother to read the rest of what I said.
the urge to survive is sadly very localised (i.e. you care about those you know), and the urge to say "like I give a fuck about them" is very very general.
This is sadly true. Unless we come up with a way to involve all of humanity in a common future, we're likely fucked. As we push the boundaries of the planet's ability to sustain us, perhaps there could be some valuation of our right to pollute? Ahh, screw it. It's just a plot by Al Gore to make money.
Nature seeks states of equilibrium. The question is not whether we are a part of nature. The question is whether we are hurtling the earth's climate toward a state of equilibrium that destroys our civilization.
This does not require the entire earth to become inhospitable. But if there are enough strains on world resources, it will end up putting us through decades of misery which may result in catastrophic wars, food shortages, and the loss of all coastal communities.
Famines have killed millions in the past, and are still killing millions in Africa. Right now we have easily exploitable resources that allow us to enjoy a certain quality of life, but we are dangerously close to depleting a number of those resources to new low states of equilibrium. Add in unpredictable droughts, rising sea levels, and the loss of many glaciers that supply freshwater through natural processes, and you can see why people are worried.
Come on, admit it... you couldn't support that many distros in 5 steps. Or come anywhere close to supporting 80% of the linux user base without a doubling or tripling of development time for the installer.
This is my main point: until "runs on Linux" covers a vast majority of users, without having huge development times just for the installer, without having to open up your source code, Linux adoption will continue to suffer.
Though I suppose if all development goes to HTML5 delivery, the point is moot.
Because you don't have the weapons, money, and worldwide military dominance of an Empire?
So, in your crazy little head, assassinating someone - which the CIA and our proxy Mossad do regularly - is the activity of a thuggish dictatorship...
I guess when Chavez plots an assassination of a government we subsidize, that's a crime. However, when we carry out plotted assassinations against our enemies, it's justice. Yes, it makes perfect sense to me now!
Hypocrisy? What's that, a new Morrissey cover band?