A "scientific" probability is supported by facts. Since the existence of God is probably impossible to disprove, you have no facts upon which to base your probabilities. In actuality, there are no scientific probabilities for facts. It is either true or untrue. It is not something that can or cannot happen. You can state your confidence percentage (which is what I think he was trying to say), but again, that needs to be supported by FACTS.
Large groups of people working together only happens because of stable societies. Big wars are signs of stable societies. Because, then you have enough control over the infighting to support the creation of armies and the war economy (outfighting?).
You seem very simple-minded. It has to be true or false. Right or wrong.
All of the scriptures from all religions have nuggets of wisdom if you are willing to actually use your brain and THINK instead of mindlessly parroting facts. Just because you read a book does not mean you have to believe everything in it. Just because one thing is wrong, does not mean the whole book is false. You can make any claim you want. I make my own choices based upon my experiences as to how much weight I give to your claims. Since you seem to be very narrow-minded, the weight will be very low. I acquire knowledge wherever I can and accept nothing, not even science, on blind faith. I believe to do so is the height of intellectual laziness.
How are most religions mutually contradictory? The result of most religions is to stabilize society by teaching morality. And the underlying morality of most religions is pretty darn similar. Even more, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all believe in the same god (or at least they claim to). I was taught that there are many ways to God, and that what may be correct for me is not necessarily correct for someone else. So I accept all (or at least most) religions at face value. Any belief system can be perverted, even atheism (such as trying to argue that based upon "science", God doesn't exist. Its a perversion of science.).
Furthermore, science then says you should give this belief with no evidence a very low probability of being true.
How very unscientific of you. A very low probability of being true means it has a high probability of being false. How can you state your high probabilities when you have no evidence? A lack of evidence does not imply that the evidence does not exist. A belief that God does not exist is as fallacious and unsupportable as a belief he does exist. A belief in God is unscientific since it is impossible to prove the negative. But, a lack of ability to prove a negative does not in any way imply that the assertion is false.
Powered by electrons made in the USA. Might not be green enough for you, but a lot better than the terrorist-mobiles that a lot of the electric car haters seem to like so much.
I agree with you that digitizing records is not a good reason for a librarian to learn to program. Yes, it could help in the immediate future, but in the long term it won't be a requirement. But, a librarian's real job is helping people do research. So, they should learn SQL so that they can make custom queries of databases to find what they need.
And, yes, you will probably have low-paid grunts (people who are just programmers) on the team if you are making translation software or animation, but it is much better if the expert on the subject also knows how to program. If they know the capabilities of the programming language as well as knowing how to figure out the solution to the problem, then they will be much more effective at their job. They can then tell the grunts what to do (or outsource it to India) and keep all of the money for themselves. Programmers are a commodity. Just like knowing Spanish makes you a much more useful landscape designer (so you can tell the illegals what to do), knowing programming will make you much more useful in just about any other field, because you can then tell the programmers what to do.
I am an engineer who programs. I do automation. Most of my time is spent programming, but I would not have this job if I were not an engineer. The working conditions are great. Job satisfaction is pretty good. Not a girl, so don't know about sexual harassment, but have not seen any in my office (but there are not any female engineers). We outsource the gruntwork, but then the program has to be fixed, tested, and installed. If my boss could outsource my job he would (not because he is a dick or anything but because he is a businessman and is not going to give me charity) but he can't. Your life sucks because you don't have a useful skill to leverage with your programming, so you are a commodity. The point is, as you seem to agree, that people should not become just programmers. Programming should be a skill, not a job. Everyone should learn to program, just like everyone needs to learn to write. I write emails all day long (or at least it seems like it), but my career is not writing. My value add is engineering, which I leverage with my programming and writing skills. There are very few professions that I can think of where your worth does not increase dramatically from knowing how to program.
I have come to the conclusion that it is not the government's fault. I used to blame the government for "overreaching its authority" until we had the incident with the underwear bomber guy. Napolitano come out and said that no one was seriously injured, the attack was thwarted (partly by the people in the plane, yes, but it was thwarted), and that the system was working. Next thing you know there is a huge uproar and demands for the government to make sure nothing like it happens again. Now everyone has to go through the backscatter machines.
The American people love to yell and scream when someone infringes on our (individual) rights. But as soon as our safety is threatened, we are willing to sacrifice our rights (we justify it by saying we are sacrificing other people's rights, that is why the Republicans want to be able to profile muslims, but in the end everyone's get sacrificed) to move our chances of being killed in a terrorist attack from one in a million to one in a billion. The politicians just want to get re-elected. And we are much more likely to re-elect someone who takes away our rights than to elect someone who is "weak on national security".
"Authority instead of evidence"? Average ocean temperatures are higher. The polar ice caps are melting. There is evidence of global warming. It can be argued that humans aren't causing it or, more importantly, that it is not detrimental to humans. But, I very rarely hear those arguments (a little more often for the first, almost never for the second). And it can be shown that the temperature has gone up as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up. The problem is, though, that average temperature can vary from year to year a whole lot more than the rate of increase. This means that you have to look at trends in the long term. Scientific proof is just about impossible in the short term because you could have several years of warmer (or cooler) temperatures as a statistical anomaly and draw improper conclusions. I have not seen any (legitimate) articles that prove that the Earth has stopped warming using statistics. It is usually just some crackpot (paid off by the oil companies) pumping the data into excel on his computer and claiming it is proof. The reason why there is "scientific consensus" is because of the evidence. Not in spite of it.
Huh??? I have not heard of any conservative initiatives to try to control climate change by non-governmental means. They just yell "GLOBAL WARMING DOES NOT EXIST, CAN'T YOU SEE THE SNOW ON THE GROUND" then walk away mumbling "George Soros", "Unions" and something about the "Liberal Media".
George Soros is the Conservatives' boogeyman. You should look him up. The conspiracy theories they come up with are hilarious. I actually haven't heard of Soros making comments about climate change, but climate change is always pulled in to the conspiracy theories about him.
That sounds to me like a "for the hell of it" argument. Why do you want a "redistribution of wealth"? What's wrong with where it is now? I think such an attitude is especially reprehensible when you don't seem to care whether the redistribution does any good or not.
Try reading my whole post. The income inequality in the US is reprehensible. But, more importantly, the US economy is doing poorly. There is not enough demand to justify increasing production. The reason for this is that the financial crisis hit the middle class the hardest. Rich people hoard their money. The middle class is who buys things (houses, boats, vacations, tvs) and drives this economy. 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. The consumers can't afford to spend because unemployment has gone up and the median wage has gone down. But, the rich are doing great... the stock market is back to where it was before the crash. So regardless of the unsustainable increase in income inequality, the economy will do better if the middle class gets more money. That is why I support it. That is why Republicans don't (if the economy does better then Obama might get re-elected, and it is better to let millions of Americans suffer than to lose the stick to beat your opponents with).
This is where my argument comes in. I'm pointing out that jobs are lost this way, as we move wealth that could be used to employ people in efficient businesses that provide more value (and more subsequent jobs) to government jobs that might do something important, but usually in a very inefficient way.
We are talking about rich people paying more taxes and the poor/middle class paying less taxes. Net zero revenue to the government. The poor/middle class still work for the same efficient businesses that they did before. They just pay less taxes. The rich still work for the same corporations that buy politicians to give them loopholes. They just pay a little more taxes. But, now the poor/middle class people have more money so can afford to buy more widgets. So the same efficient companies that they work for now have to increase production to make more widgets to match demand, so they hire more poor/middle class (and maybe even a rich) people to help them make more widgets. Unemployment goes down, the company has more profit, a rising tide raises all boats.
I don't care how inefficient NASA is.
If you were a US voter, then you should.
Fine... I care about the efficiency of NASA. But THEY WOULD NOT GET MORE MONEY FROM THIS PROPOSAL SO IT IS IRRELEVANT !!! NASA has nothing to do with what we are talking about. Do you understand???
That's because it hasn't happened yet. When it does, the Apollo program will look like a very expensive hobby in comparison.
Yeah, and Henry Ford was an idiot because I can make cars 100x better than he did (who cares if technology has changed to make things easier/cheaper and that technology would not be at the point it is now except for his contribution).
The money is not going to NASA. It is going to the people (who you claim are 10x as efficient as government).
This is a variation of the broken window fallacy. The money already came from the people who were "10x" efficient as government. For some reason, there's a lot of people who think that taking money, doing something stupid with it (the "breaking of the window"), and returning it is somehow better than not bothering with that process in the first place.
I am not trying to say that decreasing taxes on the middle class and increasing them on the rich will be more efficient. My point is that NASA has nothing to do with it. So your made up "10 time more efficient" claim does not need to be refuted because it is has nothing to do with the argument. As you have probably noticed, this po
The obvious rebuttal is what about the people that would have been hired by that take home pay? For the rich person a big part, if not the only part of the business that matters to them is the take home pay. The less they get out, the less valuable the enterprise is to them. That's the part of "Going Galt" that most people have yet to figure out.
That is true. But, I don't think another 3% on their income over $1m is going to make them decide the business is not worth it (they are already making $1m+ per year on the business). Also, if the economy gets better, then they will actually have people to buy their products so the business can expand. It doesn't take much to make up for that 3% hit they are taking.
But it also means the less they have to spend and invest. That's my point. Now maybe you live in an efficient country where you are taking a small hit when you let your government bureaucracy take that wealth. Living in the US, I don't have that luxury. The US has corruption and fraud to a considerable degree, but the normal inefficiency of the bureaucracy, even when accounting for corruption and fraud, is staggering both in its scale and degree.
There are areas of government activity that are at least a factor of ten less efficient than their private counterparts, for example, NASA, big science projects, and defense R&D. Some things even have negative value, such as Social Security, farm subsidies, or Obamacare.
You have forgotten what we are debating. I don't want more taxes for the hell of it. This is actually basically a transfer payment (redistribution of wealth) where one group is taxed more while another is taxed less. I don't care how inefficient NASA is. (By the way is not something I am going to grant you. I don't remember private companies going to the moon cheaper than NASA did.) That is irrelevant. The money is not going to NASA. It is going to the people (who you claim are 10x as efficient as government).
I will also not grant you that Social Security has a negative value. It is totally irrelevant to this discussion (I know that you are trying to distract me instead of attempting to actually argue your points effectively) but I can't let such a blatantly unsupported statement like that pass. It is an insurance program against disability or financial mishaps in old age as well as a retirement program. I am against the retirement program but I do believe that we need the safety nets to keep the disabled and financially incompetent/unlucky elderly off the streets. If you believe that there is another method to do this, then by all means propose it.
Obamacare is trying to solve a similar problem. Right now, in the US, hospitals are not legally allowed to let someone die because they cannot pay. Obamacare tries to solve this problem by requiring that everyone pay into the system what they can afford. I would be perfectly fine with changing the bill so that a person would be allowed to be uninsured if they put $1,000,000 in escrow so that the government would be assured that they would be able to pay their debts if they were picked up by an ambulance (got into a car wreck or collapsed from a stroke). But somehow I don't think it is the millionaires who are proclaiming that they shouldn't have to buy insurance (they usually already have it). It is these republican leeches who think that they are entitled not to buy insurance, but then expect me to pay for it (through higher hospital bills) when they need medical care that they can't pay for. But, it is not surprising. Republicans love to socialize costs so that the middle class has to pick up the tab. That is why they like to deregulate everything. It lets their rich backers game the system and legally steal money from their companies, but when everything collapses the middle class picks up the tab (see 2008 financial crisis). When Black Friday happened (the crash that led into the Great Depression), you had bankers jumping out win
Obama promised to capture or kill OBL. It is done. He promised to reform healthcare. It is done (or at least as done as he could accomplish in this political atmosphere). He tried very hard to close gitmo. He got DADT repealed. Yes, I expect my politicians to keep their promises, or at least try to. I don't expect Gingrich to, though.
Your response makes no sense. I am talking about return on tax dollars invested. I agree with you that poor people don't save much while rich people do. I save quite a bit. It is a good thing to do if you can afford to do it. But, if you are giving a tax cut of $1bn (for example), then it is more effective to give it to the poor and lower middle class than it is to give it to the rich because the rich will save more of it while the poor cannot afford to save it. So, a tax cut to the poor of $1bn would most likely increase consumer spending by almost $1bn (because they cannot afford not to spend it) while a tax cut of $1bn to the rich would increase consumer spending by a much lower amount (because they can afford to save a lot of it). And since the biggest reason for high unemployment right now is low demand for products, anything you do to increase consumer spending (ie consumers buying products) will help employment because companies will have to hire more people to make more products.
Employee's pay is tax deductible. So is all of the other business spending you were talking about. If a business owner is taking home $1,000,000+, then they probably do not have problems expanding their business if it needs it. So, if they have not expanded the business already, it probably does not need expanding. So a millionaires tax would not affect their hiring decisions (except for possibly encouraging them to hire MORE employees so that they could take their take home pay under $1,000,000).
Almost all economists agree that getting money to poorer people helps stimulate the economy the best. The reason is that rich people will just save the money and it will not do much stimulating. Poorer people will buy products that they need and it will stimulate the economy. 70% of our GDP comes from consumer spending. If people buy more products, then companies will hire more people to make more products. Hence, unemployment decreases.
I said the first link. If google is doing its job correctly, the first link should be a link to the candidate's homepage. If someone does not know who a candidate is, they will usually search for their name and click on the first link and first get the candidate's view of themselves. If they want to do research beyond that, then they can browse the rest of the search to see what other people have to say. Are you arguing that google should only return web pages that are positive about the candidate? Because that sounds a lot like censoring and would not allow a person to make a well-informed decision when they vote.
I also noticed that you, again did not provide any links to support your claim. The second link for Santorum was www.spreadingsantorum.com, which I assume you can figure out what it is about. But that is somewhat of a special case. For the rest of the candidates (including Gingrich) the second link is for Wikipedia, and I have to get down to the fourth or fifth link before I find anything negative.
So again I say, do you want to support your bullshit with facts or do they get in the way of your talking points?
Who wants to prevent fair competition? The Democrat SuperPAC? You are arguing that they should be censored. If you search for Newt Gingrich on google, his page (www.newt.com) is the first website that is returned. So, obviously his message is not being censored. So how does having a website with his name that provides a counterargument to his platform in any way "trick" voters to vote against him? How can people make good choices if they only look at the candidate's propaganda? It seems to me that this is providing more fair competition than usual, and that you are opposed to it.
What hate??? It simply links to unflattering (politically) news articles of Newt. Their are no lies or deception. They are refuting his platform. A public debate requires both sides to present their argument. You seem to want to censor the opposing view (by saying that when people search for Newt they should only see things that are positive about him).
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A "scientific" probability is supported by facts. Since the existence of God is probably impossible to disprove, you have no facts upon which to base your probabilities. In actuality, there are no scientific probabilities for facts. It is either true or untrue. It is not something that can or cannot happen. You can state your confidence percentage (which is what I think he was trying to say), but again, that needs to be supported by FACTS.
Rules of thumb are quite useful, you know.
And unscientific. Game and match.
Large groups of people working together only happens because of stable societies. Big wars are signs of stable societies. Because, then you have enough control over the infighting to support the creation of armies and the war economy (outfighting?).
Please no... I have a feeling I might end up suicidal if we did.
You seem very simple-minded. It has to be true or false. Right or wrong.
All of the scriptures from all religions have nuggets of wisdom if you are willing to actually use your brain and THINK instead of mindlessly parroting facts. Just because you read a book does not mean you have to believe everything in it. Just because one thing is wrong, does not mean the whole book is false. You can make any claim you want. I make my own choices based upon my experiences as to how much weight I give to your claims. Since you seem to be very narrow-minded, the weight will be very low. I acquire knowledge wherever I can and accept nothing, not even science, on blind faith. I believe to do so is the height of intellectual laziness.
How are most religions mutually contradictory? The result of most religions is to stabilize society by teaching morality. And the underlying morality of most religions is pretty darn similar. Even more, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all believe in the same god (or at least they claim to). I was taught that there are many ways to God, and that what may be correct for me is not necessarily correct for someone else. So I accept all (or at least most) religions at face value. Any belief system can be perverted, even atheism (such as trying to argue that based upon "science", God doesn't exist. Its a perversion of science.).
Furthermore, science then says you should give this belief with no evidence a very low probability of being true.
How very unscientific of you. A very low probability of being true means it has a high probability of being false. How can you state your high probabilities when you have no evidence? A lack of evidence does not imply that the evidence does not exist. A belief that God does not exist is as fallacious and unsupportable as a belief he does exist. A belief in God is unscientific since it is impossible to prove the negative. But, a lack of ability to prove a negative does not in any way imply that the assertion is false.
Powered by electrons made in the USA. Might not be green enough for you, but a lot better than the terrorist-mobiles that a lot of the electric car haters seem to like so much.
You also probably learned how to use a screwdriver (or what a torq bit is), which makes it a lot easier to take a computer case off.
I agree with you that digitizing records is not a good reason for a librarian to learn to program. Yes, it could help in the immediate future, but in the long term it won't be a requirement. But, a librarian's real job is helping people do research. So, they should learn SQL so that they can make custom queries of databases to find what they need.
And, yes, you will probably have low-paid grunts (people who are just programmers) on the team if you are making translation software or animation, but it is much better if the expert on the subject also knows how to program. If they know the capabilities of the programming language as well as knowing how to figure out the solution to the problem, then they will be much more effective at their job. They can then tell the grunts what to do (or outsource it to India) and keep all of the money for themselves. Programmers are a commodity. Just like knowing Spanish makes you a much more useful landscape designer (so you can tell the illegals what to do), knowing programming will make you much more useful in just about any other field, because you can then tell the programmers what to do.
I am an engineer who programs. I do automation. Most of my time is spent programming, but I would not have this job if I were not an engineer. The working conditions are great. Job satisfaction is pretty good. Not a girl, so don't know about sexual harassment, but have not seen any in my office (but there are not any female engineers). We outsource the gruntwork, but then the program has to be fixed, tested, and installed. If my boss could outsource my job he would (not because he is a dick or anything but because he is a businessman and is not going to give me charity) but he can't. Your life sucks because you don't have a useful skill to leverage with your programming, so you are a commodity. The point is, as you seem to agree, that people should not become just programmers. Programming should be a skill, not a job. Everyone should learn to program, just like everyone needs to learn to write. I write emails all day long (or at least it seems like it), but my career is not writing. My value add is engineering, which I leverage with my programming and writing skills. There are very few professions that I can think of where your worth does not increase dramatically from knowing how to program.
On what platforms do people code in Objective C besides an ipod/pad/mac/ect?
I have come to the conclusion that it is not the government's fault. I used to blame the government for "overreaching its authority" until we had the incident with the underwear bomber guy. Napolitano come out and said that no one was seriously injured, the attack was thwarted (partly by the people in the plane, yes, but it was thwarted), and that the system was working. Next thing you know there is a huge uproar and demands for the government to make sure nothing like it happens again. Now everyone has to go through the backscatter machines.
The American people love to yell and scream when someone infringes on our (individual) rights. But as soon as our safety is threatened, we are willing to sacrifice our rights (we justify it by saying we are sacrificing other people's rights, that is why the Republicans want to be able to profile muslims, but in the end everyone's get sacrificed) to move our chances of being killed in a terrorist attack from one in a million to one in a billion. The politicians just want to get re-elected. And we are much more likely to re-elect someone who takes away our rights than to elect someone who is "weak on national security".
"Authority instead of evidence"? Average ocean temperatures are higher. The polar ice caps are melting. There is evidence of global warming. It can be argued that humans aren't causing it or, more importantly, that it is not detrimental to humans. But, I very rarely hear those arguments (a little more often for the first, almost never for the second). And it can be shown that the temperature has gone up as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up. The problem is, though, that average temperature can vary from year to year a whole lot more than the rate of increase. This means that you have to look at trends in the long term. Scientific proof is just about impossible in the short term because you could have several years of warmer (or cooler) temperatures as a statistical anomaly and draw improper conclusions. I have not seen any (legitimate) articles that prove that the Earth has stopped warming using statistics. It is usually just some crackpot (paid off by the oil companies) pumping the data into excel on his computer and claiming it is proof. The reason why there is "scientific consensus" is because of the evidence. Not in spite of it.
Huh??? I have not heard of any conservative initiatives to try to control climate change by non-governmental means. They just yell "GLOBAL WARMING DOES NOT EXIST, CAN'T YOU SEE THE SNOW ON THE GROUND" then walk away mumbling "George Soros", "Unions" and something about the "Liberal Media".
George Soros is the Conservatives' boogeyman. You should look him up. The conspiracy theories they come up with are hilarious. I actually haven't heard of Soros making comments about climate change, but climate change is always pulled in to the conspiracy theories about him.
Wow. Where to begin?
That sounds to me like a "for the hell of it" argument. Why do you want a "redistribution of wealth"? What's wrong with where it is now? I think such an attitude is especially reprehensible when you don't seem to care whether the redistribution does any good or not.
Try reading my whole post. The income inequality in the US is reprehensible. But, more importantly, the US economy is doing poorly. There is not enough demand to justify increasing production. The reason for this is that the financial crisis hit the middle class the hardest. Rich people hoard their money. The middle class is who buys things (houses, boats, vacations, tvs) and drives this economy. 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. The consumers can't afford to spend because unemployment has gone up and the median wage has gone down. But, the rich are doing great... the stock market is back to where it was before the crash. So regardless of the unsustainable increase in income inequality, the economy will do better if the middle class gets more money. That is why I support it. That is why Republicans don't (if the economy does better then Obama might get re-elected, and it is better to let millions of Americans suffer than to lose the stick to beat your opponents with).
This is where my argument comes in. I'm pointing out that jobs are lost this way, as we move wealth that could be used to employ people in efficient businesses that provide more value (and more subsequent jobs) to government jobs that might do something important, but usually in a very inefficient way.
We are talking about rich people paying more taxes and the poor/middle class paying less taxes. Net zero revenue to the government. The poor/middle class still work for the same efficient businesses that they did before. They just pay less taxes. The rich still work for the same corporations that buy politicians to give them loopholes. They just pay a little more taxes. But, now the poor/middle class people have more money so can afford to buy more widgets. So the same efficient companies that they work for now have to increase production to make more widgets to match demand, so they hire more poor/middle class (and maybe even a rich) people to help them make more widgets. Unemployment goes down, the company has more profit, a rising tide raises all boats.
I don't care how inefficient NASA is.
If you were a US voter, then you should.
Fine... I care about the efficiency of NASA. But THEY WOULD NOT GET MORE MONEY FROM THIS PROPOSAL SO IT IS IRRELEVANT !!! NASA has nothing to do with what we are talking about. Do you understand???
That's because it hasn't happened yet. When it does, the Apollo program will look like a very expensive hobby in comparison.
Yeah, and Henry Ford was an idiot because I can make cars 100x better than he did (who cares if technology has changed to make things easier/cheaper and that technology would not be at the point it is now except for his contribution).
The money is not going to NASA. It is going to the people (who you claim are 10x as efficient as government).
This is a variation of the broken window fallacy. The money already came from the people who were "10x" efficient as government. For some reason, there's a lot of people who think that taking money, doing something stupid with it (the "breaking of the window"), and returning it is somehow better than not bothering with that process in the first place.
I am not trying to say that decreasing taxes on the middle class and increasing them on the rich will be more efficient. My point is that NASA has nothing to do with it. So your made up "10 time more efficient" claim does not need to be refuted because it is has nothing to do with the argument. As you have probably noticed, this po
The obvious rebuttal is what about the people that would have been hired by that take home pay? For the rich person a big part, if not the only part of the business that matters to them is the take home pay. The less they get out, the less valuable the enterprise is to them. That's the part of "Going Galt" that most people have yet to figure out.
That is true. But, I don't think another 3% on their income over $1m is going to make them decide the business is not worth it (they are already making $1m+ per year on the business). Also, if the economy gets better, then they will actually have people to buy their products so the business can expand. It doesn't take much to make up for that 3% hit they are taking.
But it also means the less they have to spend and invest. That's my point. Now maybe you live in an efficient country where you are taking a small hit when you let your government bureaucracy take that wealth. Living in the US, I don't have that luxury. The US has corruption and fraud to a considerable degree, but the normal inefficiency of the bureaucracy, even when accounting for corruption and fraud, is staggering both in its scale and degree.
There are areas of government activity that are at least a factor of ten less efficient than their private counterparts, for example, NASA, big science projects, and defense R&D. Some things even have negative value, such as Social Security, farm subsidies, or Obamacare.
You have forgotten what we are debating. I don't want more taxes for the hell of it. This is actually basically a transfer payment (redistribution of wealth) where one group is taxed more while another is taxed less. I don't care how inefficient NASA is. (By the way is not something I am going to grant you. I don't remember private companies going to the moon cheaper than NASA did.) That is irrelevant. The money is not going to NASA. It is going to the people (who you claim are 10x as efficient as government).
I will also not grant you that Social Security has a negative value. It is totally irrelevant to this discussion (I know that you are trying to distract me instead of attempting to actually argue your points effectively) but I can't let such a blatantly unsupported statement like that pass. It is an insurance program against disability or financial mishaps in old age as well as a retirement program. I am against the retirement program but I do believe that we need the safety nets to keep the disabled and financially incompetent/unlucky elderly off the streets. If you believe that there is another method to do this, then by all means propose it.
Obamacare is trying to solve a similar problem. Right now, in the US, hospitals are not legally allowed to let someone die because they cannot pay. Obamacare tries to solve this problem by requiring that everyone pay into the system what they can afford. I would be perfectly fine with changing the bill so that a person would be allowed to be uninsured if they put $1,000,000 in escrow so that the government would be assured that they would be able to pay their debts if they were picked up by an ambulance (got into a car wreck or collapsed from a stroke). But somehow I don't think it is the millionaires who are proclaiming that they shouldn't have to buy insurance (they usually already have it). It is these republican leeches who think that they are entitled not to buy insurance, but then expect me to pay for it (through higher hospital bills) when they need medical care that they can't pay for. But, it is not surprising. Republicans love to socialize costs so that the middle class has to pick up the tab. That is why they like to deregulate everything. It lets their rich backers game the system and legally steal money from their companies, but when everything collapses the middle class picks up the tab (see 2008 financial crisis). When Black Friday happened (the crash that led into the Great Depression), you had bankers jumping out win
Obama promised to capture or kill OBL. It is done. He promised to reform healthcare. It is done (or at least as done as he could accomplish in this political atmosphere). He tried very hard to close gitmo. He got DADT repealed. Yes, I expect my politicians to keep their promises, or at least try to. I don't expect Gingrich to, though.
Your response makes no sense. I am talking about return on tax dollars invested. I agree with you that poor people don't save much while rich people do. I save quite a bit. It is a good thing to do if you can afford to do it. But, if you are giving a tax cut of $1bn (for example), then it is more effective to give it to the poor and lower middle class than it is to give it to the rich because the rich will save more of it while the poor cannot afford to save it. So, a tax cut to the poor of $1bn would most likely increase consumer spending by almost $1bn (because they cannot afford not to spend it) while a tax cut of $1bn to the rich would increase consumer spending by a much lower amount (because they can afford to save a lot of it). And since the biggest reason for high unemployment right now is low demand for products, anything you do to increase consumer spending (ie consumers buying products) will help employment because companies will have to hire more people to make more products.
Employee's pay is tax deductible. So is all of the other business spending you were talking about. If a business owner is taking home $1,000,000+, then they probably do not have problems expanding their business if it needs it. So, if they have not expanded the business already, it probably does not need expanding. So a millionaires tax would not affect their hiring decisions (except for possibly encouraging them to hire MORE employees so that they could take their take home pay under $1,000,000).
Almost all economists agree that getting money to poorer people helps stimulate the economy the best. The reason is that rich people will just save the money and it will not do much stimulating. Poorer people will buy products that they need and it will stimulate the economy. 70% of our GDP comes from consumer spending. If people buy more products, then companies will hire more people to make more products. Hence, unemployment decreases.
I said the first link. If google is doing its job correctly, the first link should be a link to the candidate's homepage. If someone does not know who a candidate is, they will usually search for their name and click on the first link and first get the candidate's view of themselves. If they want to do research beyond that, then they can browse the rest of the search to see what other people have to say. Are you arguing that google should only return web pages that are positive about the candidate? Because that sounds a lot like censoring and would not allow a person to make a well-informed decision when they vote.
I also noticed that you, again did not provide any links to support your claim. The second link for Santorum was www.spreadingsantorum.com, which I assume you can figure out what it is about. But that is somewhat of a special case. For the rest of the candidates (including Gingrich) the second link is for Wikipedia, and I have to get down to the fourth or fifth link before I find anything negative.
So again I say, do you want to support your bullshit with facts or do they get in the way of your talking points?
Who wants to prevent fair competition? The Democrat SuperPAC? You are arguing that they should be censored. If you search for Newt Gingrich on google, his page (www.newt.com) is the first website that is returned. So, obviously his message is not being censored. So how does having a website with his name that provides a counterargument to his platform in any way "trick" voters to vote against him? How can people make good choices if they only look at the candidate's propaganda? It seems to me that this is providing more fair competition than usual, and that you are opposed to it.
What hate??? It simply links to unflattering (politically) news articles of Newt. Their are no lies or deception. They are refuting his platform. A public debate requires both sides to present their argument. You seem to want to censor the opposing view (by saying that when people search for Newt they should only see things that are positive about him).