Neither Social Security nor Medicare are welfare programs. I'm not sure how they fit into this conversation. Can you enlighten me?
Also, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been paid for primarily through supplemental funding requests and are not included in your DoD numbers.
The recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are largely funded through supplementary spending bills outside the Federal Budget, so they are not included in the military budget figures listed above.[12] In addition, the United States has black budget military spending which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures. Other military-related items, like maintenance of the nuclear arsenal and the money spent by the Veterans Affairs Department, are not included in the official budget. Thus, the total amount spent by the United States on military spending is higher. last paragraph here
I hate to say it but The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (like Battlefield Earth, the Mission: Earth series, and other books that inspired fringe cults) are just not that good... and not something I'd use as a base for a religio-political outlook.
I understand the sentiment, but you're shooting yourself in the foot. There is no corporation out there that volunteers to get less from the government. They only have a obligation to their shareholders to get as must profit as possible and they will lobby to get the best deal they can based on their current situation. And, if their situation changes so will their lobbying.
Why should you be the sucker?
But, on the other hand, I think that's too cynical. The reason I support a government that looks out for it's citizens is that when I was a child my family needed that help. I grew up and used public roads and public schools while a publicly funded military kept the Russkies from swooping down on our rural Oregon home. Now my wife and are and trending towards that dividing line where we'd be better off under McCain's tax plan rather than Obama's. But, I still will vote for Obama because I want kids today to have the same advantages that I had and if I have to pay incrementally more on the marginal income we'll earn over $250k a year I guess I don't see it as a major sacrifice.
With a few exception, you do NOT own the mineral right, the water rights or, for that matter, the radio frequency and airspace rights to your own land.
For example, my tenuous understandings is that all the water rights for the entire Colorado river and it's tributaries where sold by the 1800s. If your property was parceled out as part of a development at any time in the last 100 years the water and mineral rights were probably severed from the surface rights.
YMMV, of course. You may have done the due diligence to verify that you've retained mineral and water rights to your property, but most people don't.
I thought they simply liked collecting the fees from generating mortgages with the assumption that they could package them and foist them off as Collateralized Debt Obligations sold to third-party investors who were eager to earn a high rate of return on an investment that they didn't understand?
It's probably more-efficient to let the IRS handle the rebates, rather than to have a separate Welfare department.
You are correct. The "earned-income tax credit" (or socialist, welfare, communism as it is known on the far right) is a "tax rebate" for lower income people who pay most of their "taxes" as Social Security and Welfare contributions rather than as income tax. Dating back to 1975 and updated by Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, it is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever established (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_Income_Tax_Credit#Impact)
But, I'd like to respond to what will, I'm sure, become flood of libertarian posts by people who managed to pick themselves up by their parent's bootstraps. Government hands out billions of dollars of welfare a year and most of it does NOT go to struggling citizens. Most of it is wrapped up in corporate tax credits or in under-valued water, mining, forestry, radio-frequency, grazing and other leases that convert public property into private profits. I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
That's actually the opposite of what many of us want. How about: just stop letting people immigrate into the U.S. as glorified indentured servants.
I've said it before: I'd love to have open borders for technical talent. I'm willing to compete with anyone in the world on technical ability. And, if they're better than me I guess I'll just have a chance to work for them when they start their own companies.
However, I don't want to take part in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits. And, that's what H1-B and similar programs are designed to do.
I'm not afraid to jump into this fray. Whether or not crying "class warfare" at every criticism of a capital gains tax cut is "pretentious and boring", you didn't respond to the meat of the AC's argument. To paraphrase, while a tax cut on capital gains "ought" to not be a class issue, in reality the benefits of such a tax cut fall almost exclusively to the wealthiest 20%.
In fact, for dividends about 68% go to the 20% with the highest incomes and for capital gains 98% go to the 20% with the highest incomes. When it comes to wealth, the numbers are probably skewed even farther, since many retirees and "trust fund babies" may have great wealth compared to their actual yearly income.
Anyway, I'll avoid the class warfare rhetoric and let the raw numbers speak for themselves:
In summary, though, if you want to be taken seriously with the cut capital gains plans, you should be ready to defend the idea that most of those gains go to a small percentage of the population. Perhaps you're a believer in trickle down economics?
You make a good point. If I have a $10,000 and I spend it all on hookers and booze I can't, later, go and spend it on a post-graduate engineering classwork even if that would be an arguably better use of my funds.
On the other hand, I think it's worthwhile to remind people what could be purchased in lieu of what we (i.e. the current administration) have decided our priorities are. I'd love it if the news coverage of the current bailouts actually did a cost-benefit analysis of an AIG bailout versus fundamental science research or early education or medical research or distributed energy generation or mass transit etc..
So just because the bailout may be fait accompli doesn't mean that we shouldn't have the conversation. Maybe next time we'll make better choices.
I have to disagree. In the long run, I'd say that you could just write a billion dollar check to the top 700 science and engineering university programs in the country and it would be much better for the U.S. economy than banking bailouts.
Exactly. What was the last national project of any significant size? The space shuttle? The Hubble (I had to look this one up; Congress funded it in 1978)? Wonderful projects but their inceptions date back to the 70's. My entire life, almost, has been spent in a country that only is willing to spend money on the military and, lately, banking company bailouts.
An just think, after you've spend 70 times your initial estimate you've just about spent the same amount as the current banking bailout in the U.S. or five years of war in Iraq.
What do you think is better for the economy (if you're going to be spending taxpayer money anyway; let's keep the libertarians out of this rhetorical question:-) ) $700B of science and engineering funding or $700B of bailouts to investment banks?
I can say the text quality on a CRT television is absolutely horrible, totally unusable for browsing or programming.
Maybe unsuitable for browsing, my good sir, but my Timex Sinclair 1000 and I can assure you that a CRT television is perfectly suitable for programming!
Funny. I wonder whether Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, and Rove understand how many lifetime Democratic voters they've created.
In the 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) where voter affiliation is kept by party, the Democrats have scored perceptible gains since the presidential election of 2004 while the Republicans have suffered significant losses. To be specific, the number of registered Democrats in party registration states has grown by nearly 700,000 since President George W. Bush was reelected in November 2004, while the total of registered Republicans has declined by almost 1 million.
This is a strong argument for the "Republocrat" label. The only thing the Democrats would have had to do is NOT do anything at all. Instead they caved to a made up threat (the current FISA bill was adequate) and gave immunity to the telecoms. As a Democrat it felt like a real betrayal.
But, I'm not stupid. Republicans have got us into this mess. The Democrats, to their discredit, have failed to get us out of it. There's really only one course of action: step one, kick out the Republicans that have made our country weaker; step two, kick out the Democrats who enabled them.
I am sorry that you are misinformed. The Goodling/Gonzales scandal is primary due to the fact that the hiring and firing of career prosecutors (i.e. not political appointments) was done through a political process.
On July 28, 2008, a Justice Department report concluded that Goodling had violated federal law and Justice Department policy by discriminating against job applicants who weren't Republican or conservative loyalists. Goodling improperly subjected candidates for certain career positions to the same politically based evaluation she used on candidates for political positions, the report concluded.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to educate you about this topic.
Regards.
P.S. To keep this on-topic and to clarify my earlier post: I was expressing surprise that the current corrupted Justice Department higher ups allowed this prosecution to take place. I guess I was too cynical; I guess Stevens was just too corrupt to be protected.
I'm just amazed that Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling didn't manage to get a slightly more pliant political hack into whatever federal prosecutor's office handles these things up in Alaska.
Unfortunately, until their hand-picked lapdogs retire, we're going have 30 more years of their political hacks demeaning the Justice department down here in the Contiguous 48. But, luckily, they must have missed a couple of independent souls up there in Alaska.
Please, for the sake of our country, try and read a little bit. Whatever political beliefs you may have, knowing a little bit of history will make you a better citizen. Wikipedia may not be completely unbiased, but it's a good starting point.
Here's a quick overview...
An alliance of tribal chiefs (the Mujahideen) with support from three successive U.S. administrations from Carter to Bush I (are you old enough to remember all those Stinger missiles?) was the primary opposition to the USSR's invation. Once the USSR withdrew -- starting in 1989 and primarily due to economic reasons of their own making -- a civil war ravaged the country as the various warlords jockeyed for position. Eventually, the winning group, a psychotic group of religious fanatics known as the Taliban, took control and ruled as a theocracy until we overthrew that overnment.
It was under the protection of the Taliban that al-Queda -- not even a cohesive group until 1988 -- was able to establish terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Now, I can already foresee the attacks on this post: 1. many of the founders of al-Queda were part of the Mujahideen 2. their ability to fund their operations was perfected during that war and the subsequent civil war 3. Bin Laden, who led the group that was later to become al-Queda, did have a broader view than just the regional conflict
However, to claim that Al queda WON a war with the USSR is a gross misrepresentation of history.
...it's more rational for them to kill the dove than the hawk.
I think you may be right:
Martin Luther King Anwar Sadat (killed for peace treaty with Israel) Yitzhak Rabin (killed for peace treaty with Egypt) Benazir Bhutto (killed for trying to bring democracy to Pakistan) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (killed while trying to normalize relations with Pakistan).... The list goes on and on...
Nothing is more threatening to an extremist of any stripe than a moderate.
Don't be silly. Al Queda was a marginal, regional group of thugs that happened to have some financial backing until we invaded Iraq. Suddenly, they get support across the Arab world and we lose any of the international sympathy that we had after 9/11. Six years and thousands of American dead and wounded later, Al Queda is strengthening in Afghanistan while their preferred candidate, McCain, promises 100 more years of an "infidel" presence in Iraq. That's almost the same complaint, by the way, that motivated Bin Laden in the first place.
So, even if the Iraqi main street is pacified, the extremists will continue to recruit there; stirring passions in the ignorant, insulted, and under-employed and convincing them that the one hope of Heaven is to strap on a belt of explosives. There's a chance, though, that this message can be blunted if the U.S. can advertise our message of economic freedom and good will while pushing the military presence into the background. Unfortunately, McCain is not the guy to walk that walk and the extremists know this.
I know this is going a little far afield, but I wanted to say that a large percentage of the anti-H1B movement is not based in an anti-immigrant or anti-globalization mindset. Many of us are most concerned about the creation of a second class of workers who lack the rights of freedom of economic movement and the rights of free association.
I believe that the U.S. would stronger if we offered unlimited green cards to every engineer who wanted to enter the country so long as those individuals are not tied, like some sort of indentured servant, to a particular company or job. Freedom makes our country stronger; servitude doesn't.
It was my first introduction to CRPGs (played during lunch on the two available Apple II computers in the Junior High library) and there were dozens of 5 1/2 disks with adventures being traded in the school. If I remember correctly there was on adventure on the main game disk, but others could be loaded in (including one based on Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail).
You know, a friend and I were just talking about how work had pretty much destroyed the creative joy we used to get out of coding. I can certainly see the attraction to an IT/sysadmin/network admin career with coding (open source, of course) as a hobby.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither Social Security nor Medicare are welfare programs. I'm not sure how they fit into this conversation. Can you enlighten me?
Also, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been paid for primarily through supplemental funding requests and are not included in your DoD numbers.
I hate to say it but The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (like Battlefield Earth, the Mission: Earth series, and other books that inspired fringe cults) are just not that good... and not something I'd use as a base for a religio-political outlook.
I understand the sentiment, but you're shooting yourself in the foot. There is no corporation out there that volunteers to get less from the government. They only have a obligation to their shareholders to get as must profit as possible and they will lobby to get the best deal they can based on their current situation. And, if their situation changes so will their lobbying.
Why should you be the sucker?
But, on the other hand, I think that's too cynical. The reason I support a government that looks out for it's citizens is that when I was a child my family needed that help. I grew up and used public roads and public schools while a publicly funded military kept the Russkies from swooping down on our rural Oregon home. Now my wife and are and trending towards that dividing line where we'd be better off under McCain's tax plan rather than Obama's. But, I still will vote for Obama because I want kids today to have the same advantages that I had and if I have to pay incrementally more on the marginal income we'll earn over $250k a year I guess I don't see it as a major sacrifice.
With a few exception, you do NOT own the mineral right, the water rights or, for that matter, the radio frequency and airspace rights to your own land.
For example, my tenuous understandings is that all the water rights for the entire Colorado river and it's tributaries where sold by the 1800s. If your property was parceled out as part of a development at any time in the last 100 years the water and mineral rights were probably severed from the surface rights.
YMMV, of course. You may have done the due diligence to verify that you've retained mineral and water rights to your property, but most people don't.
They were forced to?
I thought they simply liked collecting the fees from generating mortgages with the assumption that they could package them and foist them off as Collateralized Debt Obligations sold to third-party investors who were eager to earn a high rate of return on an investment that they didn't understand?
But I could be mistaken...
It's probably more-efficient to let the IRS handle the rebates, rather than to have a separate Welfare department.
You are correct. The "earned-income tax credit" (or socialist, welfare, communism as it is known on the far right) is a "tax rebate" for lower income people who pay most of their "taxes" as Social Security and Welfare contributions rather than as income tax. Dating back to 1975 and updated by Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, it is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever established (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_Income_Tax_Credit#Impact)
But, I'd like to respond to what will, I'm sure, become flood of libertarian posts by people who managed to pick themselves up by their parent's bootstraps. Government hands out billions of dollars of welfare a year and most of it does NOT go to struggling citizens. Most of it is wrapped up in corporate tax credits or in under-valued water, mining, forestry, radio-frequency, grazing and other leases that convert public property into private profits. I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
That's actually the opposite of what many of us want. How about: just stop letting people immigrate into the U.S. as glorified indentured servants.
I've said it before: I'd love to have open borders for technical talent. I'm willing to compete with anyone in the world on technical ability. And, if they're better than me I guess I'll just have a chance to work for them when they start their own companies.
However, I don't want to take part in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits. And, that's what H1-B and similar programs are designed to do.
I'm not afraid to jump into this fray. Whether or not crying "class warfare" at every criticism of a capital gains tax cut is "pretentious and boring", you didn't respond to the meat of the AC's argument. To paraphrase, while a tax cut on capital gains "ought" to not be a class issue, in reality the benefits of such a tax cut fall almost exclusively to the wealthiest 20%.
In fact, for dividends about 68% go to the 20% with the highest incomes and for capital gains 98% go to the 20% with the highest incomes. When it comes to wealth, the numbers are probably skewed even farther, since many retirees and "trust fund babies" may have great wealth compared to their actual yearly income.
Anyway, I'll avoid the class warfare rhetoric and let the raw numbers speak for themselves:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=818&DocTypeID=1
In summary, though, if you want to be taken seriously with the cut capital gains plans, you should be ready to defend the idea that most of those gains go to a small percentage of the population. Perhaps you're a believer in trickle down economics?
If there's no Federal Reserve bank then I guess we're really fucked...
Or, I supposed they could just deliver the money in huge dump trucks.
You make a good point. If I have a $10,000 and I spend it all on hookers and booze I can't, later, go and spend it on a post-graduate engineering classwork even if that would be an arguably better use of my funds.
On the other hand, I think it's worthwhile to remind people what could be purchased in lieu of what we (i.e. the current administration) have decided our priorities are. I'd love it if the news coverage of the current bailouts actually did a cost-benefit analysis of an AIG bailout versus fundamental science research or early education or medical research or distributed energy generation or mass transit etc..
So just because the bailout may be fait accompli doesn't mean that we shouldn't have the conversation. Maybe next time we'll make better choices.
I have to disagree. In the long run, I'd say that you could just write a billion dollar check to the top 700 science and engineering university programs in the country and it would be much better for the U.S. economy than banking bailouts.
Exactly. What was the last national project of any significant size? The space shuttle? The Hubble (I had to look this one up; Congress funded it in 1978)? Wonderful projects but their inceptions date back to the 70's. My entire life, almost, has been spent in a country that only is willing to spend money on the military and, lately, banking company bailouts.
An just think, after you've spend 70 times your initial estimate you've just about spent the same amount as the current banking bailout in the U.S. or five years of war in Iraq.
What do you think is better for the economy (if you're going to be spending taxpayer money anyway; let's keep the libertarians out of this rhetorical question :-) ) $700B of science and engineering funding or $700B of bailouts to investment banks?
I can say the text quality on a CRT television is absolutely horrible, totally unusable for browsing or programming.
Maybe unsuitable for browsing, my good sir, but my Timex Sinclair 1000 and I can assure you that a CRT television is perfectly suitable for programming!
Funny. I wonder whether Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, and Rove understand how many lifetime Democratic voters they've created.
A new electorate in the making
This is a strong argument for the "Republocrat" label. The only thing the Democrats would have had to do is NOT do anything at all. Instead they caved to a made up threat (the current FISA bill was adequate) and gave immunity to the telecoms. As a Democrat it felt like a real betrayal.
But, I'm not stupid. Republicans have got us into this mess. The Democrats, to their discredit, have failed to get us out of it. There's really only one course of action: step one, kick out the Republicans that have made our country weaker; step two, kick out the Democrats who enabled them.
I am sorry that you are misinformed. The Goodling/Gonzales scandal is primary due to the fact that the hiring and firing of career prosecutors (i.e. not political appointments) was done through a political process.
Wikipedia
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to educate you about this topic.
Regards.
P.S. To keep this on-topic and to clarify my earlier post: I was expressing surprise that the current corrupted Justice Department higher ups allowed this prosecution to take place. I guess I was too cynical; I guess Stevens was just too corrupt to be protected.
I'm just amazed that Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling didn't manage to get a slightly more pliant political hack into whatever federal prosecutor's office handles these things up in Alaska.
Unfortunately, until their hand-picked lapdogs retire, we're going have 30 more years of their political hacks demeaning the Justice department down here in the Contiguous 48. But, luckily, they must have missed a couple of independent souls up there in Alaska.
Please, for the sake of our country, try and read a little bit. Whatever political beliefs you may have, knowing a little bit of history will make you a better citizen. Wikipedia may not be completely unbiased, but it's a good starting point.
Here's a quick overview...
An alliance of tribal chiefs (the Mujahideen) with support from three successive U.S. administrations from Carter to Bush I (are you old enough to remember all those Stinger missiles?) was the primary opposition to the USSR's invation. Once the USSR withdrew -- starting in 1989 and primarily due to economic reasons of their own making -- a civil war ravaged the country as the various warlords jockeyed for position. Eventually, the winning group, a psychotic group of religious fanatics known as the Taliban, took control and ruled as a theocracy until we overthrew that overnment.
It was under the protection of the Taliban that al-Queda -- not even a cohesive group until 1988 -- was able to establish terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Now, I can already foresee the attacks on this post:
1. many of the founders of al-Queda were part of the Mujahideen
2. their ability to fund their operations was perfected during that war and the subsequent civil war
3. Bin Laden, who led the group that was later to become al-Queda, did have a broader view than just the regional conflict
However, to claim that Al queda WON a war with the USSR is a gross misrepresentation of history.
Because social and economic liberties are neither orthagonal nor are they equal in weight.
...it's more rational for them to kill the dove than the hawk.
I think you may be right:
Martin Luther King ....
Anwar Sadat (killed for peace treaty with Israel)
Yitzhak Rabin (killed for peace treaty with Egypt)
Benazir Bhutto (killed for trying to bring democracy to Pakistan)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (killed while trying to normalize relations with Pakistan)
The list goes on and on...
Nothing is more threatening to an extremist of any stripe than a moderate.
Don't be silly. Al Queda was a marginal, regional group of thugs that happened to have some financial backing until we invaded Iraq. Suddenly, they get support across the Arab world and we lose any of the international sympathy that we had after 9/11. Six years and thousands of American dead and wounded later, Al Queda is strengthening in Afghanistan while their preferred candidate, McCain, promises 100 more years of an "infidel" presence in Iraq. That's almost the same complaint, by the way, that motivated Bin Laden in the first place.
So, even if the Iraqi main street is pacified, the extremists will continue to recruit there; stirring passions in the ignorant, insulted, and under-employed and convincing them that the one hope of Heaven is to strap on a belt of explosives. There's a chance, though, that this message can be blunted if the U.S. can advertise our message of economic freedom and good will while pushing the military presence into the background. Unfortunately, McCain is not the guy to walk that walk and the extremists know this.
I know this is going a little far afield, but I wanted to say that a large percentage of the anti-H1B movement is not based in an anti-immigrant or anti-globalization mindset. Many of us are most concerned about the creation of a second class of workers who lack the rights of freedom of economic movement and the rights of free association.
I believe that the U.S. would stronger if we offered unlimited green cards to every engineer who wanted to enter the country so long as those individuals are not tied, like some sort of indentured servant, to a particular company or job. Freedom makes our country stronger; servitude doesn't.
It was my first introduction to CRPGs (played during lunch on the two available Apple II computers in the Junior High library) and there were dozens of 5 1/2 disks with adventures being traded in the school. If I remember correctly there was on adventure on the main game disk, but others could be loaded in (including one based on Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail).
You know, a friend and I were just talking about how work had pretty much destroyed the creative joy we used to get out of coding. I can certainly see the attraction to an IT/sysadmin/network admin career with coding (open source, of course) as a hobby.