Re:Something good may yet come out of this
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the cost of petrol in Europe (and the US) artifitially inflated by taxes? It's just that the US doesn't tax gasoline as heavily as European countries.
If this is so, it would see that neither Europeans nor Americans are truely aware of what energy costs, both suffering from a tax induced distortion. And of the two the Americans would seem to have the least distorted notion of the price of energy.
Why energy and food are frequently excluded.
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure. The inflation numbers that most people quote exclude 'the volatile food and energy sectors' because those sectors are deemed to introduce more noise usually than information.
If you are trying to figure out whether you have inflation issues or not you don't want to include a commodity that surges %40 for a couple of months and then drops %50 for a couple of months. The oscillations around the equillibrium price is just noise.
Now if the equillibrium price for energy were to rise in the long term that would be a problem, but as energy is vital to all other economic endevors it would be reflected in price increases in everything else. Same with food. So the better part of valor is to exclude them, and let the rest of the economy smooth out their effects on pricing by reflecting any increases in the equillibrium prices for those commodities.
BLS does a household survey as well to measure things about the labor pool (this is where they get the statistics on discouraged workers for example). The payroll survey is a survey of employers. Since employers have a legal duty to report information about their employees to the feds for tax purposes, it tends to be fairly accurate over time (although the month to month reports will underestimate during recoveries as many small businesses are created below the radar).
Annecdotes in a large system don't really communicate much. I take the BLS statistics as what they are: the most reliable data on what they claim to measure. When you put rising payrolls together with rising median wage (in real dollars) you get a picture of a country where there are more jobs and the median wage for those jobs is higher. This doesn't mean that things are better for all people and in all places.
As to job loss under Bush, I'm sure at least some of it can be blamed on his bone headed trade policy, like steel tariffs.
What part of "the wage data I quoted you was in real 2001 dollars" do you not understand? I gave a link to wage data indicating an increase of 40-50% in median wages in the last 20 years in real 2001 dollars.
Also, please note, payrolls, unlike unemployment, doesn't involved discouraged workers. It's determined by a straight up survey of employers by the BLS. Do you know of any better source for data than those I have quoted?
During the 1983-2003 time period US population according to the Census Bureau increased by 60 million. So population goes up by 60 million and jobs increase by 40 million and that's not keeping up? Given that the current labor force participation rate tends to run at ~66%, this is right on track. How are we falling behind again?
Fewer people working harder would constitute an increase in productivity. So would improved efficiency of methods, and better capitalization of workers. No doubt the productivity gains are a combination of these and other factors.
As to industrial production, the Fed generally counts physical output of units by US industry, and occasionally derives output from industrial inputs to US industry. This would preclude your Made in Mexico shipped to France senario.
As to that industrial output translating into American jobs... as I pointed out and sourced in previous posts, since 1983 we've added 40 million jobs and seen a 40-50% increase in the median wage in real dollars. No matter how you slice it that means there are more American jobs today, and they pay more than they did 20 years ago. How do your theories account for those two facts?
Go check out the Federal Reserve data on Industrial production. In real dollars,
we had about $840 Billion in Industrial production in 1983. In 2003 we had about $1.3 Trillion dollars in industrial output. Manufacturing in the US is growing in real terms, about 50% over the last 20 years. Only manufacturing employment is down, and most of that is do to productivity growth, not outsourcing.
I'm also confused how those jobs have all been replaced by *lower paying* service jobs at the same time that real dollar median income has risen 40-50%?
Nope. In point of fact, I'm not an engineer by training myself:) And I don't for a minute deny that there are other hard disciplines out there (like architecture). But my general observation while IN college was that most of my classmates where majoring in English or Psychology and not working to hard.
Also, please note I did not offer proof of my theory because there isn't any, and I'm not sure how one would develop decent evidence of it either way. Its just my anecdotal gut feel from what I've seen myself. I could easily be wrong.
Your point about engineering salaries vs finance or management is well taken however. That certainly bears consideration. And while I'd be the first to claim that being a good manager is EXTREMELY hard (I know good managers, I couldn't begin to do their job), I wouldn't be surprised to discover that being a run of the mill manager is not as much work as being an engineer.
I find it very odd that almost exactly the same arguments get trotted out against outsourcing of IT as were used to oppose outsourcing of manufacturing.
Outsourcing of manufacturing in the 1980s was supposedly going to destroy the middle class. All of those displaced factory workers were going to be working burger flipping jobs. It was bad for the companies outsourcing since they were supposedly eroding their customer base because 'there won't be anyone left with a job to afford to buy their goods'.
Guess what. All these arguments were bunk in the 1980s, and I believe they are also bunk now. The US GDP has roughly doubled since 1983 (from around $5 Billion to around $10 Billion:
http://www.eh.net/hmit/gdp/gdp_answer.php
Go to bls.gov. Payrolls have increased by over 40 million from Jan 1983 to Jan 2004.
According to the US Census bureau per capita income has increased from ~$16,000 to ~$22,000 from 1983 to 2001 (The last year for which data is available).
So outsourcing manufacturing was NOT armagedon for the US economy. Outsourcing IT won't be either. In fact it's likely that IT employment, like manufacturing employment before it, and agricultural employment before it, will simply fall victim primarily to rapidly rising productivity more than outsourcing.
Actually, it has very little to do with rewards. According to the NSF enrollment in engineering dropped by 20% from 1983 to 1999 (a period when engineering was a very secure and renumerative career):
My personal theory is that the enrollment drop is
due to a combination of declining quality in K-12 education and laziness among American college students. Engineering is a lot harder major than English or Elementary Education. I have no evidence to support this hypothesis though.
Actually, he might just be a traditional constitutionalist. After all, under a strict interpretation of the 10th ammendment the funding of R&D is one of the few things the Federal government is authorized to spend money on.
As to workers and capital, they both basically want the same thing. They want the right to be able to preserve their own profit at the expense of other citizens. Capital wants trade barriers to allow them to make their competitors goods more expensive, labor wants trade barriers to make their competitors labor more expensive. Both groups want someone else to pay more for what they're selling than what it's worth. Their both seeking the right to tax indirectly through government regulation.
It is the government's job to do whatever the majority wants without harming the minority.
I'm so happy to hear you say this:) So obviously you are opposed to progressive income tax, which taxes heavily a minority ( the top 5% of wage earners pay over %50 of the taxes ). This is harming a minority to do what the majority wants.
Or is it OK to harm some minorities and not others?
The day IT unionizes I'm out of the field. Unions tend to trade high demand, high productivity, high skilled workers for benefits for low skilled, low demand, low skilled workers.
My one experience with being forced to unionized was when I was a grad student, and it almost halved my salary. You see the typical TA stipend for Physics grad students is much higher than the typical TA stipend for English grad students. This is primarily due to the chronic undersupply of qualified Physics grad students to TA courses. But in the union shop where I went to grad school the union demanded that all TAs were paid the same rate. Net result: I was making half what I'd be making anywhere else. The university wanted quite badly to pay Physics TAs more, because they were having the devils own time recruiting, but the union wouldn't let them.
If IT unionizes there will be a great sucking sound as the talent moves on to find new fields, and people will look back and wonder why high tech just stopped innovating all of a sudden.
Furthermore, why does everyone think the draft was ok, even necessary, during WW II? Seems to me, if a war is popular, you don't need the draft.
Quite the contrary, you need drafts more during popular wars. Drafts are fundamentally about managing a nations human resources in times of war. One aspect of that can be to compel service in those who wish not to serve. Another is to prevent service in those who you can't afford to have serve.
For example, if you let all of your young college students go off and enlist, where exactly are you expecting to get your next generation of officer corp in the event the war is protracted? If you put rifles in the hands of engineers and others who are keeping your industrial machinery (which you need to prosecute the war) running how exactly are you going to continue to be able to fight?
Look at the experience of Britain in WWI. All of their young idealistic college students dropped out and enlisted. When the war dragged on they discovered they'd eaten the seed corn. They'd thrown their best human resources away as grunts on the front lines early in the war.
I've always found the errors emmited by
Python to be exceptionally clear and
lucid ( human readable stack traces with
line numbers and all ). In what way do you
find them to be deficient?
I'd love to answer your questions to the best of my ability. Whenever possible I'll try to provide references. When I refer to HR 25 ( the actual bill embodying the proposal ) you can check it out at
thomas.loc.gov. Follow the link and type in "H.R. 25" in the "Search by Bill Number" box.
You asked:
1) The site repeatedly emphasises that you will now take home 100% of your paycheck - no taxes deducted. How does the split between federal and state taxes work? Are all states now required to take thier income solely from sales tax, and is the percentage they get fixed? Either way, is this an infringement on state's rights?
There is no requirement in the legislation ( HR 25 ) that the states do anything with regard to how they choose to tax their residents. You are correct that to do so would be an infringement on states rights. There are provisions in the bill though to allow states to voluntarily perform the sales tax collections if their sales taxes are in conformance with the retail sales tax in HR 25, and it allows them to keep 0.5% of the take for their troubles. I suspect this would tend to encourage states that do have sales taxes to bring them into conformance, and to perform the collections.
So in summary, you would only keep 100% of your paycheck if you live in a state/locality that doesn't level an income tax of its own.
2) How does this affect retirement/pension plans other than social security? Personally, I don't pay into social security, but I do pay into a state retirement plan which is IMO much better; would this plan force me to switch to social security?
HR 25 in no way forces you from your state retirement plan into social security. To the extent that your pension income would have been taxed as income by the federal government before ( I think all such pensions are taxed as income currently, I know military pensions are ) it would not be so taxed now.
3) According to the website, everything would be taxed at 23% (with a refund for "necessities"). Given that, as a college student on a very limited income, I pay almost no taxes, wouldn't I be voting to have less money if I approved this?
First, the refund for 'necessities' is a simple refund of 23% of the poverty line for your household size. For a single person the poverty line is about $8000 ( I'm pulling this from memory, but it's close). So as a household of one you'd get back:
$8000*0.23 = $1840 per year
$1840 per year / 12 months = $153.33 per month
So you'd only be paying sales tax on every dollar beyond about $8000 ( the taxes on the first $8000 you spend having been refunded to you ). Please also keep in mind that you're college tuition is exempt from the Fair Tax ( education is the only exempted retail good/service exempted). I don't know how much you spend a year, or how you get the money you spend, but if you earn it, you pay 7.5% from the first dollar for payroll taxes ( even if you owe no income tax ). So you're break even point as a single person ( just on payroll taxes ) is $11870.96:
$11870.96 * 0.075 = $890.32 payroll tax
or
( $11870.96 - $8000 )* 0.23 = $890.32 Fair Tax
So if you're making less than $11870.96 ( or so, keep in mind the $8000 is close but a little low ) you'll do better just based on not paying payroll taxes ( never mind income tax ).
4) Wouldn't this increase the rate at which society fractures into the "haves" and "have-nots", as those earning {m/b}illions would have almost none of it taxed unless they choose to spend?
This is an interesting question, and one that it's very hard to give a definitive answer to. Clearly someone with a very high income who doesn't spend will pay less taxes in this instance. However folks in the middle class who are working hard and saving rather than consuming in an attempt
3.) It's fair for everyone. Why should a person who earns a higher income pick up the slack for the person who does not? The very idea that a high-income earner should do this is not fair. That aside, with the Fair Tax proposal mentioned in the parent, necessities like food, clothing, shelter, and daycare are all tax exempt. In this respect, someone who earns only enough money to survive is 100% free of any tax burden.
I'm sorry but you are misrepresenting the FairTax proposal as set out at http://www.fairtax.org/. The FairTax proposal excempts *only* education from the retail level national sales tax. It deals with the regressivity problem not by excempting various thing ( which has been a real nightmare where tried ) but by refunding to each household the sales tax that would be paid by that household if it spent up to the poverty level ( for a household of that size ).
So if the poverty line for a household of 4 people is $20,000 ( I'm pulling the $20,000 out of the air, I don't know what the real number is ), that household would get:
$20,000 * 0.23 = $4600 per year
$4600 per year / 12 months = $383.33 per month
So the Social Security Administration would cut the hypothetical household of 4 people a $383.33 check every month to reimburse the tax they pay on essentials.
This is a *MUCH* better, less politicized solution to the problem.
First, out of curiosity, which three countries have a higher corporate income tax rate than the US, and what is your source for that statement ( not that I disbelieve you, but I'm curious )?
Second, have you checked out the http://www.fairtax.org site or read HR 25?
In response to your
2) Economic - consumption taxes can just as easily increase, not decrease, the cost of goods. Check out the prices of alcohol in Iceland or cigarettes, or gasoline in the UK versus gasoline in the USA.
please note that the FairTax proposal entails replacing all current federal personal and corporate income tax, capital gains tax, payroll tax, etc with the national retail sales tax. It's undeniable that some chunk of the cost of the goods you buy consists of the hidden costs of those taxes and the cost of complying with those other federal taxes ( current estimate of Federal US compliance costs are in the range of $200 billion or aroudn 2% of GDP, that's not the taxes themselves, just what it costs to comply with current federal tax law). The estimates I've heard for the 'hidden' tax cost on most goods is 20-30%. We can certainly argue over the number there, but it's clear that the cost in our goods and services of the current tax system is non-zero.
In response to your
3) Fair for who? - why should a low-income person have to pay the same proportion of tax on an item as a high-income person? In effect, a consumption tax increases the relative tax burden on those least able to afford it.
please note that the FairTax proposal provides for refunding of the sales tax paid by households up to the poverty level for that household. So if you spend no more that the poverty line for a household of your size, you effectively pay no sales tax.
Additionally note the following perspective on the Fairness of the FairTax proposal:
Income is roughly a representation of what you contribute to society ( yes, I know, one can point to egregious examples of cases where this is untrue, both in terms of overpaid and underpaid persons, but on average it mostly works ). So an income tax taxes what you contribute to society. A retail sales tax taxes what you take out. I find taxing people on what they take much fairer than taxing them on what they contribute.
In response to your
5) A key reason jobs are being located abroad is the cost of employing those people is lower. Salaries will be a major determinant of that cost not corporate tax rates by themselves. Unless of course you are arguing for an across the board reduction in pay levels for all American programmers. Thought not.
while I will not deny that the lower salary cost of programmers is a factor in IT jobs moving overseas, please note that there are very real costs in trying to get your IT work handled overseas. There is a growing realization of these 'non-salary' costs. Please also note that the salary costs for US employees are not even vaguely the full cost per employee. You also have payroll taxes to pay, benefit costs, and the cost of capitalizing that employee ( providing the stuff they need at work to do their job, like their computer ). Eliminating the payroll taxes and complaince costs associated with them would contribute to reducing the overall cost of US employees. How much that cost reduction would reduce the rate of jobs going overseas can be argued, but I would suggest it's clearly non-zero.
I might be willing to give you superior async
networking, and it has it's place in providing
VERY simple capabilities as an embedded language, but other than that I challenge you
to name one task where Tcl is the best choice.
I'm not a one language wonder by any means,
I'll happily use ( and have used in the past )
Perl, Python, Php, C, C++, or Java depending on the
problem. I've got no problem learning a new
language.
So here's the challenge, name one task where Tcl
is the best choice for the job.
Run, do not walk, away from Tcl. I've written applications in Python, Perl, and Tcl. Python is a joy, Perl will do exactly as advertised ( get the job done), Tcl is a nightmare. I would never, under any circumstances, use Tcl for any purpose if not forced.
If you can't imagine a police officer trusting this technology on their handguns, which they keep to protect themselves, why should a law abiding citizen trust them?
I'm curious if when this legislation goes into effect if all new handguns issued to NJ police officers to contain this technology or if handguns for police have been exempted.
Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. Nothing in my comments about the CM-CMTS system acting together as a bridge in any way precludes a flat network. Just because you have a flat network does not mean that every CPE device sees all traffic on the network. A flat network means that your network is one layer 2 domain. Do you REALLY have an application that requires all devices on the network to be able to see all traffic on the network? What IOS command do you use to cause the CMTS to behave as a HUB rather than a bridge?
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the cost of petrol in Europe (and the US) artifitially inflated by taxes? It's just that the US doesn't tax gasoline as heavily as European countries.
If this is so, it would see that neither Europeans nor Americans are truely aware of what energy costs, both suffering from a tax induced distortion. And of the two the Americans would seem to have the least distorted notion of the price of energy.
Sure. The inflation numbers that most people quote exclude 'the volatile food and energy sectors' because those sectors are deemed to introduce more noise usually than information.
If you are trying to figure out whether you have inflation issues or not you don't want to include a commodity that surges %40 for a couple of months and then drops %50 for a couple of months. The oscillations around the equillibrium price is just noise.
Now if the equillibrium price for energy were to rise in the long term that would be a problem, but as energy is vital to all other economic endevors it would be reflected in price increases in everything else. Same with food. So the better part of valor is to exclude them, and let the rest of the economy smooth out their effects on pricing by reflecting any increases in the equillibrium prices for those commodities.
BLS does a household survey as well to measure things about the labor pool (this is where they get the statistics on discouraged workers for example). The payroll survey is a survey of employers. Since employers have a legal duty to report information about their employees to the feds for tax purposes, it tends to be fairly accurate over time (although the month to month reports will underestimate during recoveries as many small businesses are created below the radar).
Annecdotes in a large system don't really communicate much. I take the BLS statistics as what they are: the most reliable data on what they claim to measure. When you put rising payrolls together with rising median wage (in real dollars) you get a picture of a country where there are more jobs and the median wage for those jobs is higher. This doesn't mean that things are better for all people and in all places.
As to job loss under Bush, I'm sure at least some of it can be blamed on his bone headed trade policy, like steel tariffs.
What part of "the wage data I quoted you was in real 2001 dollars" do you not understand? I gave a link to wage data indicating an increase of 40-50% in median wages in the last 20 years in real 2001 dollars.
Also, please note, payrolls, unlike unemployment, doesn't involved discouraged workers. It's determined by a straight up survey of employers by the BLS. Do you know of any better source for data than those I have quoted?
During the 1983-2003 time period US population according to the Census Bureau increased by 60 million. So population goes up by 60 million and jobs increase by 40 million and that's not keeping up? Given that the current labor force participation rate tends to run at ~66%, this is right on track. How are we falling behind again?
Fewer people working harder would constitute an increase in productivity. So would improved efficiency of methods, and better capitalization of workers. No doubt the productivity gains are a combination of these and other factors.
As to industrial production, the Fed generally counts physical output of units by US industry, and occasionally derives output from industrial inputs to US industry. This would preclude your Made in Mexico shipped to France senario.
As to that industrial output translating into American jobs... as I pointed out and sourced in previous posts, since 1983 we've added 40 million jobs and seen a 40-50% increase in the median wage in real dollars. No matter how you slice it that means there are more American jobs today, and they pay more than they did 20 years ago. How do your theories account for those two facts?
I'm also confused how those jobs have all been replaced by *lower paying* service jobs at the same time that real dollar median income has risen 40-50%?
These were real 2001 dollars.n c/p53.html
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histi
So they are already inflation adjusted, thus yielding about a 40% increase in real wages.
Nope. In point of fact, I'm not an engineer by training myself :) And I don't for a minute deny that there are other hard disciplines out there (like architecture). But my general observation while IN college was that most of my classmates where majoring in English or Psychology and not working to hard.
Also, please note I did not offer proof of my theory because there isn't any, and I'm not sure how one would develop decent evidence of it either way. Its just my anecdotal gut feel from what I've seen myself. I could easily be wrong.
Your point about engineering salaries vs finance or management is well taken however. That certainly bears consideration. And while I'd be the first to claim that being a good manager is EXTREMELY hard (I know good managers, I couldn't begin to do their job), I wouldn't be surprised to discover that being a run of the mill manager is not as much work as being an engineer.
Outsourcing of manufacturing in the 1980s was supposedly going to destroy the middle class. All of those displaced factory workers were going to be working burger flipping jobs. It was bad for the companies outsourcing since they were supposedly eroding their customer base because 'there won't be anyone left with a job to afford to buy their goods'.
Guess what. All these arguments were bunk in the 1980s, and I believe they are also bunk now. The US GDP has roughly doubled since 1983 (from around $5 Billion to around $10 Billion:
http://www.eh.net/hmit/gdp/gdp_answer.php
Go to bls.gov. Payrolls have increased by over 40 million from Jan 1983 to Jan 2004.
According to the US Census bureau per capita income has increased from ~$16,000 to ~$22,000 from 1983 to 2001 (The last year for which data is available).
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/p01.html
So outsourcing manufacturing was NOT armagedon for the US economy. Outsourcing IT won't be either. In fact it's likely that IT employment, like manufacturing employment before it, and agricultural employment before it, will simply fall victim primarily to rapidly rising productivity more than outsourcing.
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind02/c2/c2s2.htm#eng ineering
My personal theory is that the enrollment drop is due to a combination of declining quality in K-12 education and laziness among American college students. Engineering is a lot harder major than English or Elementary Education. I have no evidence to support this hypothesis though.
Actually, he might just be a traditional constitutionalist. After all, under a strict interpretation of the 10th ammendment the funding of R&D is one of the few things the Federal government is authorized to spend money on.
As to workers and capital, they both basically want the same thing. They want the right to be able to preserve their own profit at the expense of other citizens. Capital wants trade barriers to allow them to make their competitors goods more expensive, labor wants trade barriers to make their competitors labor more expensive. Both groups want someone else to pay more for what they're selling than what it's worth. Their both seeking the right to tax indirectly through government regulation.
I'm so happy to hear you say this
Or is it OK to harm some minorities and not others?
My one experience with being forced to unionized was when I was a grad student, and it almost halved my salary. You see the typical TA stipend for Physics grad students is much higher than the typical TA stipend for English grad students. This is primarily due to the chronic undersupply of qualified Physics grad students to TA courses. But in the union shop where I went to grad school the union demanded that all TAs were paid the same rate. Net result: I was making half what I'd be making anywhere else. The university wanted quite badly to pay Physics TAs more, because they were having the devils own time recruiting, but the union wouldn't let them.
If IT unionizes there will be a great sucking sound as the talent moves on to find new fields, and people will look back and wonder why high tech just stopped innovating all of a sudden.
For example, if you let all of your young college students go off and enlist, where exactly are you expecting to get your next generation of officer corp in the event the war is protracted? If you put rifles in the hands of engineers and others who are keeping your industrial machinery (which you need to prosecute the war) running how exactly are you going to continue to be able to fight?
Look at the experience of Britain in WWI. All of their young idealistic college students dropped out and enlisted. When the war dragged on they discovered they'd eaten the seed corn. They'd thrown their best human resources away as grunts on the front lines early in the war.
I've always found the errors emmited by Python to be exceptionally clear and lucid ( human readable stack traces with line numbers and all ). In what way do you find them to be deficient?
I'd love to answer your questions to the best of my ability. Whenever possible I'll try to provide references. When I refer to HR 25 ( the actual bill embodying the proposal ) you can check it out at thomas.loc.gov. Follow the link and type in "H.R. 25" in the "Search by Bill Number" box.
You asked:
There is no requirement in the legislation ( HR 25 ) that the states do anything with regard to how they choose to tax their residents. You are correct that to do so would be an infringement on states rights. There are provisions in the bill though to allow states to voluntarily perform the sales tax collections if their sales taxes are in conformance with the retail sales tax in HR 25, and it allows them to keep 0.5% of the take for their troubles. I suspect this would tend to encourage states that do have sales taxes to bring them into conformance, and to perform the collections.
So in summary, you would only keep 100% of your paycheck if you live in a state/locality that doesn't level an income tax of its own.
HR 25 in no way forces you from your state retirement plan into social security. To the extent that your pension income would have been taxed as income by the federal government before ( I think all such pensions are taxed as income currently, I know military pensions are ) it would not be so taxed now.
First, the refund for 'necessities' is a simple refund of 23% of the poverty line for your household size. For a single person the poverty line is about $8000 ( I'm pulling this from memory, but it's close). So as a household of one you'd get back:
$8000*0.23 = $1840 per year
$1840 per year / 12 months = $153.33 per month
So you'd only be paying sales tax on every dollar beyond about $8000 ( the taxes on the first $8000 you spend having been refunded to you ). Please also keep in mind that you're college tuition is exempt from the Fair Tax ( education is the only exempted retail good/service exempted). I don't know how much you spend a year, or how you get the money you spend, but if you earn it, you pay 7.5% from the first dollar for payroll taxes ( even if you owe no income tax ). So you're break even point as a single person ( just on payroll taxes ) is $11870.96:
$11870.96 * 0.075 = $890.32 payroll tax
or
( $11870.96 - $8000 )* 0.23 = $890.32 Fair Tax
So if you're making less than $11870.96 ( or so, keep in mind the $8000 is close but a little low ) you'll do better just based on not paying payroll taxes ( never mind income tax ).
This is an interesting question, and one that it's very hard to give a definitive answer to. Clearly someone with a very high income who doesn't spend will pay less taxes in this instance. However folks in the middle class who are working hard and saving rather than consuming in an attempt
I'm sorry but you are misrepresenting the FairTax proposal as set out at http://www.fairtax.org/. The FairTax proposal excempts *only* education from the retail level national sales tax. It deals with the regressivity problem not by excempting various thing ( which has been a real nightmare where tried ) but by refunding to each household the sales tax that would be paid by that household if it spent up to the poverty level ( for a household of that size ).
So if the poverty line for a household of 4 people is $20,000 ( I'm pulling the $20,000 out of the air, I don't know what the real number is ), that household would get:
$20,000 * 0.23 = $4600 per year
$4600 per year / 12 months = $383.33 per month
So the Social Security Administration would cut the hypothetical household of 4 people a $383.33 check every month to reimburse the tax they pay on essentials.
This is a *MUCH* better, less politicized solution to the problem.
Second, have you checked out the http://www.fairtax.org site or read HR 25?
In response to your
please note that the FairTax proposal entails replacing all current federal personal and corporate income tax, capital gains tax, payroll tax, etc with the national retail sales tax. It's undeniable that some chunk of the cost of the goods you buy consists of the hidden costs of those taxes and the cost of complying with those other federal taxes ( current estimate of Federal US compliance costs are in the range of $200 billion or aroudn 2% of GDP, that's not the taxes themselves, just what it costs to comply with current federal tax law). The estimates I've heard for the 'hidden' tax cost on most goods is 20-30%. We can certainly argue over the number there, but it's clear that the cost in our goods and services of the current tax system is non-zero.
In response to your
please note that the FairTax proposal provides for refunding of the sales tax paid by households up to the poverty level for that household. So if you spend no more that the poverty line for a household of your size, you effectively pay no sales tax.
Additionally note the following perspective on the Fairness of the FairTax proposal:
Income is roughly a representation of what you contribute to society ( yes, I know, one can point to egregious examples of cases where this is untrue, both in terms of overpaid and underpaid persons, but on average it mostly works ). So an income tax taxes what you contribute to society. A retail sales tax taxes what you take out. I find taxing people on what they take much fairer than taxing them on what they contribute.
In response to your
while I will not deny that the lower salary cost of programmers is a factor in IT jobs moving overseas, please note that there are very real costs in trying to get your IT work handled overseas. There is a growing realization of these 'non-salary' costs. Please also note that the salary costs for US employees are not even vaguely the full cost per employee. You also have payroll taxes to pay, benefit costs, and the cost of capitalizing that employee ( providing the stuff they need at work to do their job, like their computer ). Eliminating the payroll taxes and complaince costs associated with them would contribute to reducing the overall cost of US employees. How much that cost reduction would reduce the rate of jobs going overseas can be argued, but I would suggest it's clearly non-zero.
I'm not a one language wonder by any means, I'll happily use ( and have used in the past ) Perl, Python, Php, C, C++, or Java depending on the problem. I've got no problem learning a new language.
So here's the challenge, name one task where Tcl is the best choice for the job.
No, no it's not. There is a reason no one else uses pass by name. It sucks.
How exactly does P-B-N make recursion and package scoping any easier than it is in a decently designed language?
Run, do not walk, away from Tcl. I've written applications in Python, Perl, and Tcl. Python is a joy, Perl will do exactly as advertised ( get the job done), Tcl is a nightmare. I would never, under any circumstances, use Tcl for any purpose if not forced.
Seek treatment.
If you can't imagine a police officer trusting this technology on their handguns, which they keep to protect themselves, why should a law abiding citizen trust them?
I'm curious if when this legislation goes into effect if all new handguns issued to NJ police officers to contain this technology or if handguns for police have been exempted.
Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. Nothing in my comments about the CM-CMTS system acting together as a bridge in any way precludes a flat network. Just because you have a flat network does not mean that every CPE device sees all traffic on the network. A flat network means that your network is one layer 2 domain. Do you REALLY have an application that requires all devices on the network to be able to see all traffic on the network? What IOS command do you use to cause the CMTS to behave as a HUB rather than a bridge?