We spend over $1 TRILLION a year, probably over $1.5T, on military/intel. We have a GDP that's about $15T. We might not be spending 50%, but we're spending something like 10%.
We need to spend at most $300B to actually protect the country from actual threats. The extra $1.2T we spend on military/intel is more than enough to pay our $1.17T deficit, and leave a $30B surplus - $100 for every living American, about $300 per taxpayer.
Especially when considering the first $15K everyone has to spend to live like a decent person (including costs of working, like commuting and wardrobe, and the higher rents/costs near most workplaces). After that's paid, most people don't have much left. People making $80K+ still have over $65K left. When you look at taxes as a fraction of discretionary income, beyond necessities, the rich pay a lot less share than the rest of us. When they should be paying a larger share. The system benefits them more, so they should pay a larger share.
That's the first country you thought of, instead of all the countries much more like the US that prove you wrong, because you are indeed what that last post called you. And your followup post proves you're determined to prove it.
There's 1.4M people in the top 1%, according to your stats, who take in over $1.6 TRILLION, paying an effective income tax rate of 23.27% on it, leaving them with $1.3T. The Federal deficit was $1.17T in 2010. Based on income alone, just the top 1% could eliminate the deficit and have $130 BILLION left over (about $88,000 each - over double the gross median income). So your statement that there aren't enough is simply, mathematically and objectively false.
But we don't have to take all their money to put "a dent" in the deficit. A 10% dent of $117B would require only 8.6 points more than 23.27%, or 31.86%. A 20% dent would be about 40%.
It's perfectly obvious that the richest are sucking the money out of the rest of us. It's not quite as obvious, but still clear, that they're getting far more for their money out of the system than the rest of us. There's no need to get into the math to see that the richest, who have all the money, are where to go to get the money to pay for the system. But there's the math right there.
You Republicans, er, "libertarians", of course, would rather we all hand over the other money we've managed to protect from the rich. Our Social Security principal you'd see evaporated in the stock market, along with the pensions the rich just destroyed in the past decade. Our paltry substitute for joint healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid, you'd see shoveled into the pockets of the wasteful, redundant, counterproductive private insurers - and the wasteful, greedy medical industry that partners with them. That's the kind of "savings" that costs more, by eradicating effective organization of pension and health expenses, and along the way makes no dent in the deficit.
Of course, to really eliminate the deficit we'd have to cut the $1.5T war budget to something like the $300B max we require to actually defend the country. That $1.2T would turn the deficit back into the surplus Clinton/Gore gave us. But you Republicans will never give up the war pork barrel that keeps these richest people rich, or even the $4B a year in direct oil corp subsidies that is tightly integrated with the war pork barrel and the richest Americans. So of course you have to pretend the rich don't have the money. I just don't have to pretend to believe it.
No, China has a lower tax rate. Because China's government directly owns industries, including farms and factories. And because China centrally plans its economy, which directs as much money from various incomes to various expenses, as the government chooses. That's Communism.
But of course there are many other countries apart from the US and China. However, there's nothing you Republicans won't say, no matter how irrational, to derail any attempt at reasonably managing a country. You're corporate anarchists. You really should be talking about Somalia, or any of a number of other failed African countries. After all, your favorite corporations have been right there keeping them failed.
We don't take taxes from people because people are evil. We take it because those people cost money to protect and enable to make the money they do.
The rich are especially dependent on government expenses to make their money. Most of their income comes from corporations, which are state creations, and from equity trades of corporations, which are protected only by the state, and both of which cost loads in our justice system to protect from theft and fraud. Not to mention bailouts of their financial system, which they crashed when they got the way destroying regulations. And that's even before considering their huge haul from government contracts, especially in war profiteering and the energy exploitation that the government must pay per-gallon prices for, too.
Of course the government can get far more than the $2.5T it currently gets from the people, of the $15T the people get.
You Republicans have no credibility left when talking about debt, taxes, fixing problems, or "realistically".
It has nothing to do with it. roman_mir is a raving ideologue who is interested in logic only when its lingo gives them an excuse to ignore reason when it's shoved in their face.
They started this thread insisting that Europe's socialist medical system is a better alternative to America's capitalist medical industry. They don't care about medicine. They care about only pushing whatever they can complain about. They're a stereotpyical deranged "libertarian" who can think of only one point at a time, while they whine, regardless of how that point invalidates their next whine.
You always hide behind whining about "ad hominem" when I point out that you are consistently wrong, and consistently for the same reasons. You don't know what "ad hominem" means. I'm not proving a point by pointing out your personal defects. I'm pointing out that your personal defects are ideological, which is why, after I've demonstrated how wrong your statements are, I can point out that you're always wrong.
Pointing out that someone arguing with you is a committed liar does not invalidate that point. It is an important point for anyone wondering how much attention to pay to the counterargument. It's also important in judging the quality of an argument that it's being defended with fallacious whining about ad hominem attacks.
The American people paid most of what those pics from the ISS cost. That's where I got the idea: from the reality of who paid for that.
But it does appear they might have been talking about space tourism. Which is also mostly paid for by the American people.
So while that post might have been talking (unclearly) about space tourists, it implies that rich people are paying for what the American people are paying for. Which is indeed more interesting to me than what rich people get for their ticket price.
The litigation started to really ramp up when the FDA started "streamlining" the medine approval process to favor big incumbent medical corps, while making the cost of approval so large that only those big incumbents could afford to risk producing a new product. Meanwhile extending patent and other monopoly protections of profits far beyond what's required to protect required profitability and into extreme profitability. While limiting liabilities from when medicine is pushed on patients but fails in ways either known to be excessively risky during R&D or production, or known not to have been quantified as risks.
That time coincided with the capture by pharmacos and other medical product makers/marketers of medical professionals, starting in med school. So doctors and pharmacists are mainly retailers of medical products, not caretakers of patients' health. Of course the parallel growth of parasitic lawyers was inevitable, but without the medical infrastructure to feed on they would seek blood elsewhere.
I know this because I was pre-med in the mid-late 1980s, and have worked IT for many insurance businesses. Reagan reinvented the FDA, and along with it the medical education system in the US. The primary constraint on US medicine is the failure to produce more practicing doctors, which has slipped far behind the growth in demand for medicine (growing and aging population, excessive environmental risks including diet and toxins, newly available diagnostics and treatments). We should have at least double the number of doctors, but the medical industry "weeds out" candidates for the profession, selecting more on the basis of greed and tolerance of hazing than on compassion and intellect.
Adam Smith was right about supply and demand. The US has increased its demand for medicine while constraining its supply. Thus medicine is much more expensive. US politicians and officials are science-illiterate, but they're also compassion-retarded. Americans are easily fooled by corporate marketing trolling with theocracy and other social bigotry/stupidity. The results are found in Bush's choking stemcell research, but the causes are systemic.
Europe's healthcare systems, where the treatments in this story are found, are much more regulated and government financed than in the US.
Government money isn't preventing the abortion pill. Theocrat money, that promoted Republican rule that you sucker "libertarians" voted for every chance you got, paid to prevent the abortion pill that's available in Europe. Where the government paid to develop and distribute it. Much to the dismay of "libertarians" and theocrats.
Once again, your dogma makes you attack government in the US, even by hitting it with actual socialism elsewhere. You are so dogmatic that you'll lie by ignoring the truth. And are putty in the hands of the theocrats for whom dogma and lies are a way of life.
These therapies are available, but there aren't that many patients. Not enough to support dispensing the therapies many places in the world.
The US doesn't have to offer every single medical treatment. Not when so many are targeted at so few patients. Not when our medical system isn't properly organized or financed to deliver even basic medical services to nearly everyone in the country first. Basic care for practically everyone is a higher priority than the most exotic care for a few.
The US does deliver that exotic treatment of rare diseases, often uniquely in the world, in vast overproportion to our population or even our weighted socioeconomic status in the world. There's plenty of unusual therapies for other countries to be the only ones to offer.
If we're worried that strategic medical innovation is happening elsewhere, we should simply do what those other countries do in a world they share with the US: piggyback on the basic research and early practice when therapies are new, to commodify them to serve lots more people more cheaply, safely and effectively.
That's how medicine works when it's primarily a service, not primarily a profitable business. The profit is retained, but not at the expense of the majority of the people's needs.
I asked for an Android app that remote unlocks/starts with a car device like I can already do with my physical keys, and you told me that the car device I mentioned exists.
I asked for the Android app again, and you quoted to me the definition of what I asked for.
Who cares? The claim to sarcasm isn't as important as the claim to clarity. There are plenty of Teabaggers and other mental defectives around here who'd post that message without a drop of sarcasm. I'm happy to correct it for those others who might take it at face value.
So the Soviets denounced Stalin - after the damage was done. Then they did some more damage, even if not quite to the vast level done by Stalin.
After the Soviets "nationalized" property, all income and consumption was prescribed by the state. That is robbery from top to bottom. That there was "no legal framework" for owning the products of one's own labor, or determining those products, is just the institutionalizing of robbery.
104 thousand people, or whatever the true number outside the official counts, is a very large amount killed. In Vietnam "only" 55,000 Americans were killed. In both places far more were wounded. And of course many times more were sent to kill. Vietnam isn't a counterargument to the ruin a war wages on a generation, it's a supporting argument.
Even you admit that Afghanistan killed 104 thousand Soviets - it's killed only a few thousand Americans (and Iraq is irrelevant to this discussion). It's clearly dozens of times as ruinous to our people directly. And though Afghanistan is also bad for our economy, and our people in many other ways (ultimately morally), Afghanistan was far worse to people in the Soviet Union. Because the Soviets had far less resources with which to work. And indeed the Soviet economy was far more dependent on war. There was little else organizing its economy, other than subsistence that frequently couldn't be satisfied.
The race to the bottom is in the bottom of bad behavior.
This discussion is going nowhere. You're lying, throwing around invalid trollery (like raising Iraq), moving the goalposts, touting nonsense. Which is exactly what I'd expect from someone working from the Soviet model.
It's a vast overstatement that "artists are merely a medium for his or her work". But it's true that artwork is a medium of communication between people, only one of whom is the artist. Without someone to perceive the art, the art might as well not exist. The art's effect is created by the beholder in their own mind. More educated and sensitive minds make more of the art they experience. More cultivated audiences recognize better art and give it more value. The most popular art, especially after generations as folk art, is mostly made of the experience of the audience that perpetuates the artwork.
This essential dynamic is key to all creation. That's one reason why copyright was created in the US Constitution only on the basis that it would control copying works for only limited times. After a while the audience is the main source of value in the art, with the original creator's contribution necessary but insufficient to give it the value it obtained in the culture.
Artists have the natural right to endlessly change their created works. Just as everyone has the right to be wrong creatively. The problem is the monopoly on controlling the work that our current legal regimes grant to artists and to their agents. Lucas is free to ruin Star Wars as much as he likes, and as long as his money holds out for budgets. But 34 years after releasing Star Wars it's as much the property of the generations of audiences who've perpetuated it as it is its original creators'. There should be no limit on anyone reediting what's released, or creating their own versions from scratch.
Only the power of business to capture government-protected monopolies trumps our free speech rights, and ignores the value of the people in the market in creating value in what we consume.
The US should run NASA videos and slideshows of space imagery all the time, seeding news and talk shows with them as "news events". We'd get a lot more people appreciating the truly elevating work we spend so relatively little to get from NASA. In fact NASA should probably get a half-billion bucks a year just to mail a DVD to every American household at Christmastime.
Instead all we get is the terminally boring NASA TV channel, and only on some cable systems (Cox in New Orleans, but not any in the NYC area). Germans do get it, or at least they did in the 90s. WTF.
What I want more than a digital wallet is an app on my phone that unlocks and starts my car, instead of using my physical keys. My keys already have a remote un/lock and alarm dis/arm button, and I could get a remote starter installed on them too. But I want my phone to do it, and to do it over at least WiFi if not 3G/4G.
Yes, the wireless control is a security risk, but so are physical keys. And so is the remote un/lock dis/arm on them. I want to get the benefit of access from the security, as long as I'm getting the risks.
Where's my Android app and in-car lock it controls?
Slashdot Mirror
We spend over $1 TRILLION a year, probably over $1.5T, on military/intel. We have a GDP that's about $15T. We might not be spending 50%, but we're spending something like 10%.
We need to spend at most $300B to actually protect the country from actual threats. The extra $1.2T we spend on military/intel is more than enough to pay our $1.17T deficit, and leave a $30B surplus - $100 for every living American, about $300 per taxpayer.
Especially when considering the first $15K everyone has to spend to live like a decent person (including costs of working, like commuting and wardrobe, and the higher rents/costs near most workplaces). After that's paid, most people don't have much left. People making $80K+ still have over $65K left. When you look at taxes as a fraction of discretionary income, beyond necessities, the rich pay a lot less share than the rest of us. When they should be paying a larger share. The system benefits them more, so they should pay a larger share.
That's the first country you thought of, instead of all the countries much more like the US that prove you wrong, because you are indeed what that last post called you. And your followup post proves you're determined to prove it.
There's 1.4M people in the top 1%, according to your stats, who take in over $1.6 TRILLION, paying an effective income tax rate of 23.27% on it, leaving them with $1.3T. The Federal deficit was $1.17T in 2010. Based on income alone, just the top 1% could eliminate the deficit and have $130 BILLION left over (about $88,000 each - over double the gross median income). So your statement that there aren't enough is simply, mathematically and objectively false.
But we don't have to take all their money to put "a dent" in the deficit. A 10% dent of $117B would require only 8.6 points more than 23.27%, or 31.86%. A 20% dent would be about 40%.
It's perfectly obvious that the richest are sucking the money out of the rest of us. It's not quite as obvious, but still clear, that they're getting far more for their money out of the system than the rest of us. There's no need to get into the math to see that the richest, who have all the money, are where to go to get the money to pay for the system. But there's the math right there.
You Republicans, er, "libertarians", of course, would rather we all hand over the other money we've managed to protect from the rich. Our Social Security principal you'd see evaporated in the stock market, along with the pensions the rich just destroyed in the past decade. Our paltry substitute for joint healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid, you'd see shoveled into the pockets of the wasteful, redundant, counterproductive private insurers - and the wasteful, greedy medical industry that partners with them. That's the kind of "savings" that costs more, by eradicating effective organization of pension and health expenses, and along the way makes no dent in the deficit.
Of course, to really eliminate the deficit we'd have to cut the $1.5T war budget to something like the $300B max we require to actually defend the country. That $1.2T would turn the deficit back into the surplus Clinton/Gore gave us. But you Republicans will never give up the war pork barrel that keeps these richest people rich, or even the $4B a year in direct oil corp subsidies that is tightly integrated with the war pork barrel and the richest Americans. So of course you have to pretend the rich don't have the money. I just don't have to pretend to believe it.
No, China has a lower tax rate. Because China's government directly owns industries, including farms and factories. And because China centrally plans its economy, which directs as much money from various incomes to various expenses, as the government chooses. That's Communism.
But of course there are many other countries apart from the US and China. However, there's nothing you Republicans won't say, no matter how irrational, to derail any attempt at reasonably managing a country. You're corporate anarchists. You really should be talking about Somalia, or any of a number of other failed African countries. After all, your favorite corporations have been right there keeping them failed.
We don't take taxes from people because people are evil. We take it because those people cost money to protect and enable to make the money they do.
The rich are especially dependent on government expenses to make their money. Most of their income comes from corporations, which are state creations, and from equity trades of corporations, which are protected only by the state, and both of which cost loads in our justice system to protect from theft and fraud. Not to mention bailouts of their financial system, which they crashed when they got the way destroying regulations. And that's even before considering their huge haul from government contracts, especially in war profiteering and the energy exploitation that the government must pay per-gallon prices for, too.
Of course the government can get far more than the $2.5T it currently gets from the people, of the $15T the people get.
You Republicans have no credibility left when talking about debt, taxes, fixing problems, or "realistically".
It has nothing to do with it. roman_mir is a raving ideologue who is interested in logic only when its lingo gives them an excuse to ignore reason when it's shoved in their face.
They started this thread insisting that Europe's socialist medical system is a better alternative to America's capitalist medical industry. They don't care about medicine. They care about only pushing whatever they can complain about. They're a stereotpyical deranged "libertarian" who can think of only one point at a time, while they whine, regardless of how that point invalidates their next whine.
You always hide behind whining about "ad hominem" when I point out that you are consistently wrong, and consistently for the same reasons. You don't know what "ad hominem" means. I'm not proving a point by pointing out your personal defects. I'm pointing out that your personal defects are ideological, which is why, after I've demonstrated how wrong your statements are, I can point out that you're always wrong.
Pointing out that someone arguing with you is a committed liar does not invalidate that point. It is an important point for anyone wondering how much attention to pay to the counterargument. It's also important in judging the quality of an argument that it's being defended with fallacious whining about ad hominem attacks.
Bill Clinton was impeached, but not convicted, and hasn't been president for well over a decade. His blowjob wasn't from a hooker, either.
Since that's the best you can do, it's obvious that there's nothing like equivalence between the two parties. Admit it already.
The American people paid most of what those pics from the ISS cost. That's where I got the idea: from the reality of who paid for that.
But it does appear they might have been talking about space tourism. Which is also mostly paid for by the American people.
So while that post might have been talking (unclearly) about space tourists, it implies that rich people are paying for what the American people are paying for. Which is indeed more interesting to me than what rich people get for their ticket price.
The litigation started to really ramp up when the FDA started "streamlining" the medine approval process to favor big incumbent medical corps, while making the cost of approval so large that only those big incumbents could afford to risk producing a new product. Meanwhile extending patent and other monopoly protections of profits far beyond what's required to protect required profitability and into extreme profitability. While limiting liabilities from when medicine is pushed on patients but fails in ways either known to be excessively risky during R&D or production, or known not to have been quantified as risks.
That time coincided with the capture by pharmacos and other medical product makers/marketers of medical professionals, starting in med school. So doctors and pharmacists are mainly retailers of medical products, not caretakers of patients' health. Of course the parallel growth of parasitic lawyers was inevitable, but without the medical infrastructure to feed on they would seek blood elsewhere.
I know this because I was pre-med in the mid-late 1980s, and have worked IT for many insurance businesses. Reagan reinvented the FDA, and along with it the medical education system in the US. The primary constraint on US medicine is the failure to produce more practicing doctors, which has slipped far behind the growth in demand for medicine (growing and aging population, excessive environmental risks including diet and toxins, newly available diagnostics and treatments). We should have at least double the number of doctors, but the medical industry "weeds out" candidates for the profession, selecting more on the basis of greed and tolerance of hazing than on compassion and intellect.
Adam Smith was right about supply and demand. The US has increased its demand for medicine while constraining its supply. Thus medicine is much more expensive. US politicians and officials are science-illiterate, but they're also compassion-retarded. Americans are easily fooled by corporate marketing trolling with theocracy and other social bigotry/stupidity. The results are found in Bush's choking stemcell research, but the causes are systemic.
Europe's healthcare systems, where the treatments in this story are found, are much more regulated and government financed than in the US.
Government money isn't preventing the abortion pill. Theocrat money, that promoted Republican rule that you sucker "libertarians" voted for every chance you got, paid to prevent the abortion pill that's available in Europe. Where the government paid to develop and distribute it. Much to the dismay of "libertarians" and theocrats.
Once again, your dogma makes you attack government in the US, even by hitting it with actual socialism elsewhere. You are so dogmatic that you'll lie by ignoring the truth. And are putty in the hands of the theocrats for whom dogma and lies are a way of life.
These therapies are available, but there aren't that many patients. Not enough to support dispensing the therapies many places in the world.
The US doesn't have to offer every single medical treatment. Not when so many are targeted at so few patients. Not when our medical system isn't properly organized or financed to deliver even basic medical services to nearly everyone in the country first. Basic care for practically everyone is a higher priority than the most exotic care for a few.
The US does deliver that exotic treatment of rare diseases, often uniquely in the world, in vast overproportion to our population or even our weighted socioeconomic status in the world. There's plenty of unusual therapies for other countries to be the only ones to offer.
If we're worried that strategic medical innovation is happening elsewhere, we should simply do what those other countries do in a world they share with the US: piggyback on the basic research and early practice when therapies are new, to commodify them to serve lots more people more cheaply, safely and effectively.
That's how medicine works when it's primarily a service, not primarily a profitable business. The profit is retained, but not at the expense of the majority of the people's needs.
I asked for an Android app that remote unlocks/starts with a car device like I can already do with my physical keys, and you told me that the car device I mentioned exists.
I asked for the Android app again, and you quoted to me the definition of what I asked for.
You are a complete moron.
In closing: Fuck you, asshole.
Who cares? The claim to sarcasm isn't as important as the claim to clarity. There are plenty of Teabaggers and other mental defectives around here who'd post that message without a drop of sarcasm. I'm happy to correct it for those others who might take it at face value.
So the Soviets denounced Stalin - after the damage was done. Then they did some more damage, even if not quite to the vast level done by Stalin.
After the Soviets "nationalized" property, all income and consumption was prescribed by the state. That is robbery from top to bottom. That there was "no legal framework" for owning the products of one's own labor, or determining those products, is just the institutionalizing of robbery.
104 thousand people, or whatever the true number outside the official counts, is a very large amount killed. In Vietnam "only" 55,000 Americans were killed. In both places far more were wounded. And of course many times more were sent to kill. Vietnam isn't a counterargument to the ruin a war wages on a generation, it's a supporting argument.
Even you admit that Afghanistan killed 104 thousand Soviets - it's killed only a few thousand Americans (and Iraq is irrelevant to this discussion). It's clearly dozens of times as ruinous to our people directly. And though Afghanistan is also bad for our economy, and our people in many other ways (ultimately morally), Afghanistan was far worse to people in the Soviet Union. Because the Soviets had far less resources with which to work. And indeed the Soviet economy was far more dependent on war. There was little else organizing its economy, other than subsistence that frequently couldn't be satisfied.
The race to the bottom is in the bottom of bad behavior.
This discussion is going nowhere. You're lying, throwing around invalid trollery (like raising Iraq), moving the goalposts, touting nonsense. Which is exactly what I'd expect from someone working from the Soviet model.
You're creepy. Goodbye.
Actually they pay a lot less, percentage-wise. Which is what matters.
Well, they're paying to feel the view.
The rest of us are paying to just see it. And paying most of the cost for the rich people to hitch a ride.
You can say "the anniversary is 50 years". Just like I can say "the three storey house is three storeys".
There is no difference between "commercial" art and any other kind of art, except style and perhaps meaning.
It's a vast overstatement that "artists are merely a medium for his or her work". But it's true that artwork is a medium of communication between people, only one of whom is the artist. Without someone to perceive the art, the art might as well not exist. The art's effect is created by the beholder in their own mind. More educated and sensitive minds make more of the art they experience. More cultivated audiences recognize better art and give it more value. The most popular art, especially after generations as folk art, is mostly made of the experience of the audience that perpetuates the artwork.
This essential dynamic is key to all creation. That's one reason why copyright was created in the US Constitution only on the basis that it would control copying works for only limited times. After a while the audience is the main source of value in the art, with the original creator's contribution necessary but insufficient to give it the value it obtained in the culture.
Artists have the natural right to endlessly change their created works. Just as everyone has the right to be wrong creatively. The problem is the monopoly on controlling the work that our current legal regimes grant to artists and to their agents. Lucas is free to ruin Star Wars as much as he likes, and as long as his money holds out for budgets. But 34 years after releasing Star Wars it's as much the property of the generations of audiences who've perpetuated it as it is its original creators'. There should be no limit on anyone reediting what's released, or creating their own versions from scratch.
Only the power of business to capture government-protected monopolies trumps our free speech rights, and ignores the value of the people in the market in creating value in what we consume.
You mean every American taxpayer? We're hardly all rich. Only the tiniest percentage of us are. And they don't pay taxes.
The US should run NASA videos and slideshows of space imagery all the time, seeding news and talk shows with them as "news events". We'd get a lot more people appreciating the truly elevating work we spend so relatively little to get from NASA. In fact NASA should probably get a half-billion bucks a year just to mail a DVD to every American household at Christmastime.
Instead all we get is the terminally boring NASA TV channel, and only on some cable systems (Cox in New Orleans, but not any in the NYC area). Germans do get it, or at least they did in the 90s. WTF.
And the Android network app that I said is what I'm really interested in is...?
What I want more than a digital wallet is an app on my phone that unlocks and starts my car, instead of using my physical keys. My keys already have a remote un/lock and alarm dis/arm button, and I could get a remote starter installed on them too. But I want my phone to do it, and to do it over at least WiFi if not 3G/4G.
Yes, the wireless control is a security risk, but so are physical keys. And so is the remote un/lock dis/arm on them. I want to get the benefit of access from the security, as long as I'm getting the risks.
Where's my Android app and in-car lock it controls?