I stand by my post. It's not just a good idea; it's the law.
Yes, you can give things away, but you can't write a contract that obligates you to give things away. It ain't a contract if there's no consideration. IANAL, But I Don't Have To Be in this case because I'm tellin' you the troof.
Gingrich played out to the religious right purely for
short-term political reasons,
First, Congressmen, including the seemingly powerful Speaker of the House, run for a single (short) two year term at a time to represent a very small geographic region. Gingrich represented a piece of Georgia, and he needed to play to his constituency as all other Congressmen play to theirs. Second, Newt Gingrich engineered the overthrow of the Democrats who had run the Congress for 40 years. He did it almost singlehandedly, and BTW also overthrew the weak and ineffective Republican leadership at the same time. But, the people it takes to run a revolution are not necessarily the right people to run the new order, and especially when the knives were out for him.
I thought Gingrich played his hand fairly decently and he was a darn sight more intellectual than most who work in Washington. He's the sort of guy that Slashdot should salute if Slashdot had any integrity about politics.
as was pointed out in an earlier post, Gore orchestrated a campaign that called Bradley racist. That is a lie and a smear of truly outrageous proportion. If you were not a recipient of that propaganda, it is because you were not in the demographic or precincts that were targetted. If you are not aware of that incident, it is because you are uninformed.
What we get in this forum is people like me backing up our claims with specific facts, and people like you trolling with one line, drive-by comments with no substance. No wonder your candidate is losing.
Picasso didn't make a career out of attacking other people's ethics and advocating a more ethical society in
general
give up. Gingrich made a career as a college professor, a whole entire career: it was being pointed out that he is a multidimensional person. People like you make a whole career out of being incapable of following a thread: a number of questions are at hand and you seem incapable of grasping them. Gingrich did make it in his political career (after having an entirely separate career as a college professor) by attacking the Democrats leading the Congress on their ethics. They were actually corrupt, and they paid for it. So, we can see there is nothing inherently less corrupt about Democrats than Republicans. That's the thread of this discussion.
As for your point about manipulating people: yes, on both sides of the aisle there are unsophisticated people who can be manipulated, and some Democrats make a career of it as well. That's what prompted Congressman J. C. Watts to call Jesse Jackson a "race-hustling poverty pimp," referring to the point that if Jesse Jackson were to actually do anything to eradicate poverty and racism, there'd be nobody to live on the welfare plantation that he oversees. Other examples of political upperclasses manipulating people in the trenches is the way politicians like Clinton and Packwood develop reputations as being pro-woman, but in their offices use their power and influence to grope and fondle women in positions of weakness, or politicians like the Kennedies or Kerry of Massachusetts who have vast wealth, and speak constantly about the disparity between the rich and the poor and the workingman, but who don't seem to wish to put their own vast wealth to work directly helping the poor and the workingman.
As has been said, fairly a few times: people like you are the problem, people who politicize every issue rather than pointing out that human frailty extends to all humans, not just those of one party.
I want to ask something about Babelfish which was referenced in the story, rather than about the story itself. I hope that's not too offtopic.
Why do the Slashdot editors invariably refer to it as "the fish"? Do you think it's cool or clever or something, or is there some history that I'm not aware of? I think it would be better to just call it "Babelfish"; alternatively, editors on the dot could start using coolbreviations for the soft, the hoo, the 5hin, the hat, etc.
It is predominantly liberal democrat, and rather accepting, or
so I thought.
oh, how openminded and accepting of you... casting liberals in one political party as "accepting", and thereby implying that others are
not. "They're just not our kind of people, are they?". Gee, and then you wonder where divisions in society come from. Try this: stop labelling and categorizing people.
Never attibute to competence that which can be explained by... what do you mean you doubt they keep the code to W2000 in a folder called W2000? why not? Sure, they've probably got a code name, but once you identify it, it's probably called that on every machine. MS is not some magical kingdom which breaks all the rules. They pull their code on one JLE at a time like everybody else. Do you ROT13 all your folder names? Neither do they.
The words "believe" and "faith" have many nuanced meanings. You seem to choose the senses that favor ambiguity, and use them to construct long discussions.
Anyways, I hope you see why I find the subject so interesting.
I believe you do. If you think that I am relying too much on "belief" when I say that, then you didn't understand my point.
dude, your post was tooooo looonnngg. I understood most of your quibbles, and I can see where you found ambiguity in what I wrote, but I also think you could have tried a little harder to parse what I wrote more sympathetically. For example,
I said We don't claim to know we had [a big bang], and we don't hold that we had one on faith, we simply say that the evidence we have seems to point to one and we are happy to change that belief with new evidence.
you said I'm curious how you can claim to not know something, yet at the same time allow yourself to turn something uncertain into a belief that has to be changed at some point.
My original statement could be parsed as, "We don't claim to know there was a Big Bang, but we believe the measurements we've taken, and we believe those measurements consistent with the Big Bang hypothesis. We believe our evidence is incomplete, and uncertain, but we believe it is all the evidence we have so far. I don't see what you are missing in that.
Technically, all science rests on faith.
no, science doesn't rest on faith, not in the sense that the faithful use the word faith. "Cogito ergo sum" is much more deeply profound than "faithito ergo diety"
we make broad assertions and cling to new beliefs that appear to
fit our ever changing viewpoints.
I've no idea what you are talking about. English (like all languages) is ambiguous. I know that if I throw a rock up in the air that it will come back down. I believe it. I have faith that it's true. That's a word game. You may think it is Unknowable, but I think my belief that "what goes up must come down" is rational, and it is nonsense to call it "clinging to faith". "What goes up must come down" is a knowable truth; science. "What dies that has been Good will go up to Heaven" is unknowable, not science, and while they like to call it Truth, it is not truth. I am not ruling out that it may be true, but it is not truth. Enough of the word games. I think you know what I mean.
good reasoning, but if you vote for Nader "no matter what", that might make his movement all the more likely to snowball next time even without matching funds, and if Bush is as incompetent as you think, a 2nd potential Bush presidency will sink the Republican's chances for many years to come. See? I'm simply saying that any "truth" here is unknowable, and while you may draw a conclusion for yourself, the "less filling, tastes great" debate that rages on Slashdot doesn't convince anybody.
I remain completely shocked that the fact that he enjoys a privilege of
forgiveness for his wastrel youth, while happily jailing thousands of Texans whose only crime is drug use, hasn't
been made a central political issue.
Because people from across the spectrum believe in forgiving transgressions of the past, particularly follies of youth, after they are in the past. Thus, Gore's illegal campaign finance behavior in the recent past looms larger than Hilary Clinton's illegal option trading of twenty years ago? Actually, what I really believe is that your latching on to the rumors of Bush's drug use really represents your ideological differences with Bush. Stick to debating the ideology and stop trying to find supposed hypocrisy in the mud of which there is plenty to go around.
I wish you were right, but in fact Scientists are slow to accept change, even when presented with evidence
don't confuse human frailty with anything about science. Humans do have a tendency to take things on/as faith... after all, the flesh is weak:) But the scientist's goal is still to be true to science, to drive out all such faith-based non-reasoning. Scientific truth transcends human perception, even if it turns out that scientific truth eventually "discovers" the existence of God. But that will need to follow evidence, not lead the search for it.
I hate to tell you this, but the romans killed jesus. Exactly the same way they killed all political dissidents.
I'm no expert by any means, but isn't there evidence that local Jewish religious/political figures did play a role in getting Jesus, a religious dissident ("render under Caesar"), killed? Since Jesus and his disciples were all Jews themselves, this wouldn't be any justification for medieval or modern, and "un-Christian" persecution of Jews... but the historical record is of some interest.
BTW, I read an interesting piece about the Dead Sea Scrolls which said they indicate that Christianity should not be thought of as a "descendant" of Judaism. Rather, Judaism at that time had two main strains, one messianic/afterlife-y and one... hmm... I'm no expert... "talmudic"/rules for living-y (please correct me if I've got that wrong). The messianic strain was realistically already an "equal" branch when it latched onto Jesus as the messiah. In this sense, the historical tension between the two theologies predates Jesus.
But I don't see how belief in a deity is in any way inherently inferior to
belief in science. Both science and organized religion are a matter of faith -- you have to accept what you are
tolded by the more learned "clergy."
I'm going to get flamed for this, of course, because the vast majority of atheists get unbelievably upset when
they're told that they take things on faith. But that's too bad, because it's one hundred percent true.
I'm not going to flame you, but I will point out that this idea of yours is severely deficient enough to be called "stupid" or "ignorant".
The flaws in your reasoning can be seen as:
Science changes its beliefs when presented with new evidence. Faith keeps trying to warp new evidence into the same old faith. If you can't understand this, have faith that faith and science are different, not the same.
There is evidence around us that we had a Big Bang, so we think we had one. We don't claim to know we had one, and we don't hold that we had one on faith, we simply say that the evidence we have seems to point to one and we are happy to change that belief with new evidence. We don't accuse those who weigh evidence differently of taking things on faith unless they seem to ignore all evidence.
I think a much better way to state a related point would be that God might have created the Universe yesterday, complete with all our personal memories, the fossil record, and whispers of the big bang. So, surely, God could have created the universe 6000 years ago in the same way. Science doesn't ignore this possibility, it just says there's no evidence for it so there is no reason to latch onto it: that would be faith.
Not false, just overstated... Feel free to use whatever teminology you wish, the
concept is my point.
you should feel free to use terminology that others will understand. Your post should have started something like, "one could make a justification for treating inheritance like income..." However, you didn't, and that's not how inheritance is treated anyway.
It is the person who is taxed,
not the money.
The tax is on the total size of the estate, not what each heir receives, and having nothing to do with the rest of their income. So, I would continue to say that the idle speculation you are attempting to pass off as insight is false.
Furthermore, I separately have addressed the rest of what is wrong with your use of the word income in a separate post
This sort of discussion (threadless, infoless) is so tedious I'm going to move on now. Go back to the beginning of the thread to see how for you've strayed from the topic in a few short uninformative posts.
"sigh" generally introduces a post by a person with an overblown estimation of their own opinion, and yours is no exception.
Your post was long and wrong, and you are anonymous so you probably won't even be back to check it. I'll just blow your first idea out of the water and leave the rest of the baloney that I haven't already addressed in some other posts here for some other discussion.
I'm tired of reading about this "double taxation" notion. Money is taxed every time it transfers hands.
There are a number of good reasons to tax income. It's an activity that people are eager to engage in on their own; the activity generates the wherewithal to pay; it is in some way a measure of benefits a person receives from being in a society. There are probably more. But, when I say "income" I mean what economists mean, money transferred to pay for production. Production, value creation, call it what you will, it is what makes up GDP. Other transfers of money that are not associated with creation are not at all the same thing and hardly deserve taxation by the same justifications.
yunior earns his money through the inheritance. The
Inheritence is his income and therefore subject to income tax payments by him... Why don't people understand this? It is basic common sense!
what you are saying is totally false: I inherited over $100K and I didn't have to pay any income tax. Inheritance tax is an entirely different tax, applied at a much higher percentage rate, and only to largish inheritances.
if inheritances were taxed the way you suggest, there'd be a revolution. Many, many people would be unable to afford to keep family houses, etc.
saying "Information is not poison" is not anything close to proving it or making it true.
What I took away from civics class was that we should allow free speech because we believe that restrictions on it can be abused, and that the small amount of poison we get is worth putting up with because of the benefits we get from the free exchange of other good ideas. This shaded, reasonable approach makes much more sense to me than your absolutist mantra.
And, it has only worked for us so far. Nazi Germany arose out of a democratic society, as did Marxist Leninism, starting in both cases with some poisonous ideas catching hold. You can't advocate the position without considering when it might and might not work.
This thread was a discussion of how progressive the tax code should be, and how all the discussion of the "rich" is phony. Now you are changing the subject.
above, I replied to someone else about the debt . To what I said there, I'll add that you need to make a better case that debt is bad than you have. Your conception of "interest" as purely bad is flawed. For example, borrowing money to pay for a college education which leads to a higher income in the future is a smart thing. Many corporations never pay off there debt, instead growing it all the time. Why? Because they use the borrowed money to generate more income than they pay in interest. Debt that shrinks as a percentage of income and/or wealth is not terribly important, but if you want to get rid of it you cannot simply advocate higher taxes without considering what the money is being spent on, which you haven't.
I took the argument made by the guy I was responding to, and I engaged in the debate.
You are just shooting from the hip at some minor point that have nothing to do with the thread, and indicating that your grasp of the issues leaves your opinion not terribly interesting.
1. "Surplus" refers to the derivative (from calculus) of what the debt refers to, and we do absolutely have a surplus. The debt is important as a percentage of GDP, but that has been shrinking. (analogy: owing $100 when you earn nothing is a big deal, but not if you earn $100,000 with prospects for growth.) But that's a separate discussion, anyway. The issue I was responding to had to do with tax policy.
2. Face it, both the Democrats and the Republicans meddle with the tax
code to encourage social behaviors.
simply, not true. Your example, government drug policy appears nowhere in the tax code. It is exactly your confusion of social policy legislation and the tax code which is the problem I was complaining about: thank you for illustrating my point.
There are several ways of responding to this without giving the wealthy a tax cut.
There is a whole separate question of how much the government should spend, but you didn't touch it so I won't. Therefore, surplus tax receipts indicate a tax cut is in order. If we keep a progressive tax system as you prefer, what's wrong with cutting everybody's taxes. People who pay no tax will receive no cut. People who pay moderate tax will receive moderate cuts. People who pay high taxes will receive the highest cuts.
As far as corporate taxes go, yes, there is some disproportionality (BTW, caused by folks who meddle with the tax code to encourage social behaviors they prefer, more typically a Democratic position). But, you need to understand the accounting to grasp why corporate taxes are gravy, not grave. People own corporations. People's income from investment is taxed, but taxable, successful investments represent corporate income which is also taxed. Together, corporate and personal taxes represent even more progressivity than the tax code would imply.
So, after cutting taxes, the rich will still be paying more (progressively) and the poor will still be paying less... This is the Bush proposal and I don't understand what your problem with it is since it fits the criteria you set out.
sorry, you are rebutting an argument that is not being made. The wealthy will still pay a disproportionate amount of tax under Bush's proposals, so that's not the issue. The issue is *how* disproportionately, and what exactly gets taxed. Inheritance tax is a tax on saved income, income that got taxed. So, it's a weird consumption encourager, and "unfair" in the sense that it is double taxation.
Separately, if the overall level of taxes is generating surpluses, that might be evidence for cutting taxes, and of course cutting them will result in the highest payers getting the biggest cuts, even though they will continue to be the highest payers, absolutely, relatively and proportionately. Supposedly smart Democrats are so dishonest on this point they should be disqualified from taking oaths of office. It's OK to want to soak the rich, but come out and say it.
Thanks for that pointer, I hadn't heard of it. I will point out, though, that it makes fun of rednecks (half the intelligence/twice the humor) so it's a little candy-assed isn't it? Giving itself an excuse to hide behind?
Slashdot Mirror
I stand by my post. It's not just a good idea; it's the law. Yes, you can give things away, but you can't write a contract that obligates you to give things away. It ain't a contract if there's no consideration. IANAL, But I Don't Have To Be in this case because I'm tellin' you the troof.
First, Congressmen, including the seemingly powerful Speaker of the House, run for a single (short) two year term at a time to represent a very small geographic region. Gingrich represented a piece of Georgia, and he needed to play to his constituency as all other Congressmen play to theirs. Second, Newt Gingrich engineered the overthrow of the Democrats who had run the Congress for 40 years. He did it almost singlehandedly, and BTW also overthrew the weak and ineffective Republican leadership at the same time. But, the people it takes to run a revolution are not necessarily the right people to run the new order, and especially when the knives were out for him.
I thought Gingrich played his hand fairly decently and he was a darn sight more intellectual than most who work in Washington. He's the sort of guy that Slashdot should salute if Slashdot had any integrity about politics.
What we get in this forum is people like me backing up our claims with specific facts, and people like you trolling with one line, drive-by comments with no substance. No wonder your candidate is losing.
give up. Gingrich made a career as a college professor, a whole entire career: it was being pointed out that he is a multidimensional person. People like you make a whole career out of being incapable of following a thread: a number of questions are at hand and you seem incapable of grasping them. Gingrich did make it in his political career (after having an entirely separate career as a college professor) by attacking the Democrats leading the Congress on their ethics. They were actually corrupt, and they paid for it. So, we can see there is nothing inherently less corrupt about Democrats than Republicans. That's the thread of this discussion.
As for your point about manipulating people: yes, on both sides of the aisle there are unsophisticated people who can be manipulated, and some Democrats make a career of it as well. That's what prompted Congressman J. C. Watts to call Jesse Jackson a "race-hustling poverty pimp," referring to the point that if Jesse Jackson were to actually do anything to eradicate poverty and racism, there'd be nobody to live on the welfare plantation that he oversees. Other examples of political upperclasses manipulating people in the trenches is the way politicians like Clinton and Packwood develop reputations as being pro-woman, but in their offices use their power and influence to grope and fondle women in positions of weakness, or politicians like the Kennedies or Kerry of Massachusetts who have vast wealth, and speak constantly about the disparity between the rich and the poor and the workingman, but who don't seem to wish to put their own vast wealth to work directly helping the poor and the workingman.
As has been said, fairly a few times: people like you are the problem, people who politicize every issue rather than pointing out that human frailty extends to all humans, not just those of one party.
Why do the Slashdot editors invariably refer to it as "the fish"? Do you think it's cool or clever or something, or is there some history that I'm not aware of? I think it would be better to just call it "Babelfish"; alternatively, editors on the dot could start using coolbreviations for the soft, the hoo, the 5hin, the hat, etc.
what gives?
I know Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a friend of mine. The person who wrote that memo is no Bill Gates.
That is, unless those easily identified worst case scenarios were few in number, in which case, picking those keys would be too easy to guess.
oh, how openminded and accepting of you... casting liberals in one political party as "accepting", and thereby implying that others are not. "They're just not our kind of people, are they?". Gee, and then you wonder where divisions in society come from. Try this: stop labelling and categorizing people.
Never attibute to competence that which can be explained by ... what do you mean you doubt they keep the code to W2000 in a folder called W2000? why not? Sure, they've probably got a code name, but once you identify it, it's probably called that on every machine. MS is not some magical kingdom which breaks all the rules. They pull their code on one JLE at a time like everybody else. Do you ROT13 all your folder names? Neither do they.
The words "believe" and "faith" have many nuanced meanings. You seem to choose the senses that favor ambiguity, and use them to construct long discussions.
Anyways, I hope you see why I find the subject so interesting.
I believe you do. If you think that I am relying too much on "belief" when I say that, then you didn't understand my point.
I said We don't claim to know we had [a big bang], and we don't hold that we had one on faith, we simply say that the evidence we have seems to point to one and we are happy to change that belief with new evidence.
you said I'm curious how you can claim to not know something, yet at the same time allow yourself to turn something uncertain into a belief that has to be changed at some point.
My original statement could be parsed as, "We don't claim to know there was a Big Bang, but we believe the measurements we've taken, and we believe those measurements consistent with the Big Bang hypothesis. We believe our evidence is incomplete, and uncertain, but we believe it is all the evidence we have so far. I don't see what you are missing in that.
Technically, all science rests on faith.
no, science doesn't rest on faith, not in the sense that the faithful use the word faith. "Cogito ergo sum" is much more deeply profound than "faithito ergo diety"
we make broad assertions and cling to new beliefs that appear to fit our ever changing viewpoints.
I've no idea what you are talking about. English (like all languages) is ambiguous. I know that if I throw a rock up in the air that it will come back down. I believe it. I have faith that it's true. That's a word game. You may think it is Unknowable, but I think my belief that "what goes up must come down" is rational, and it is nonsense to call it "clinging to faith". "What goes up must come down" is a knowable truth; science. "What dies that has been Good will go up to Heaven" is unknowable, not science, and while they like to call it Truth, it is not truth. I am not ruling out that it may be true, but it is not truth. Enough of the word games. I think you know what I mean.
I remain completely shocked that the fact that he enjoys a privilege of forgiveness for his wastrel youth, while happily jailing thousands of Texans whose only crime is drug use, hasn't been made a central political issue.
Because people from across the spectrum believe in forgiving transgressions of the past, particularly follies of youth, after they are in the past. Thus, Gore's illegal campaign finance behavior in the recent past looms larger than Hilary Clinton's illegal option trading of twenty years ago? Actually, what I really believe is that your latching on to the rumors of Bush's drug use really represents your ideological differences with Bush. Stick to debating the ideology and stop trying to find supposed hypocrisy in the mud of which there is plenty to go around.
don't confuse human frailty with anything about science. Humans do have a tendency to take things on/as faith... after all, the flesh is weak :) But the scientist's goal is still to be true to science, to drive out all such faith-based non-reasoning. Scientific truth transcends human perception, even if it turns out that scientific truth eventually "discovers" the existence of God. But that will need to follow evidence, not lead the search for it.
I'm no expert by any means, but isn't there evidence that local Jewish religious/political figures did play a role in getting Jesus, a religious dissident ("render under Caesar"), killed? Since Jesus and his disciples were all Jews themselves, this wouldn't be any justification for medieval or modern, and "un-Christian" persecution of Jews... but the historical record is of some interest.
BTW, I read an interesting piece about the Dead Sea Scrolls which said they indicate that Christianity should not be thought of as a "descendant" of Judaism. Rather, Judaism at that time had two main strains, one messianic/afterlife-y and one... hmm... I'm no expert... "talmudic"/rules for living-y (please correct me if I've got that wrong). The messianic strain was realistically already an "equal" branch when it latched onto Jesus as the messiah. In this sense, the historical tension between the two theologies predates Jesus.
But I don't see how belief in a deity is in any way inherently inferior to belief in science. Both science and organized religion are a matter of faith -- you have to accept what you are tolded by the more learned "clergy." I'm going to get flamed for this, of course, because the vast majority of atheists get unbelievably upset when they're told that they take things on faith. But that's too bad, because it's one hundred percent true.
I'm not going to flame you, but I will point out that this idea of yours is severely deficient enough to be called "stupid" or "ignorant".
The flaws in your reasoning can be seen as:
I think a much better way to state a related point would be that God might have created the Universe yesterday, complete with all our personal memories, the fossil record, and whispers of the big bang. So, surely, God could have created the universe 6000 years ago in the same way. Science doesn't ignore this possibility, it just says there's no evidence for it so there is no reason to latch onto it: that would be faith.
you should feel free to use terminology that others will understand. Your post should have started something like, "one could make a justification for treating inheritance like income..." However, you didn't, and that's not how inheritance is treated anyway.
It is the person who is taxed, not the money.
The tax is on the total size of the estate, not what each heir receives, and having nothing to do with the rest of their income. So, I would continue to say that the idle speculation you are attempting to pass off as insight is false.
Furthermore, I separately have addressed the rest of what is wrong with your use of the word income in a separate post
This sort of discussion (threadless, infoless) is so tedious I'm going to move on now. Go back to the beginning of the thread to see how for you've strayed from the topic in a few short uninformative posts.
I'm tired of reading about this "double taxation" notion. Money is taxed every time it transfers hands.
There are a number of good reasons to tax income. It's an activity that people are eager to engage in on their own; the activity generates the wherewithal to pay; it is in some way a measure of benefits a person receives from being in a society. There are probably more. But, when I say "income" I mean what economists mean, money transferred to pay for production. Production, value creation, call it what you will, it is what makes up GDP. Other transfers of money that are not associated with creation are not at all the same thing and hardly deserve taxation by the same justifications.
what you are saying is totally false: I inherited over $100K and I didn't have to pay any income tax. Inheritance tax is an entirely different tax, applied at a much higher percentage rate, and only to largish inheritances.
if inheritances were taxed the way you suggest, there'd be a revolution. Many, many people would be unable to afford to keep family houses, etc.
"they" are the registry ...
What I took away from civics class was that we should allow free speech because we believe that restrictions on it can be abused, and that the small amount of poison we get is worth putting up with because of the benefits we get from the free exchange of other good ideas. This shaded, reasonable approach makes much more sense to me than your absolutist mantra.
And, it has only worked for us so far. Nazi Germany arose out of a democratic society, as did Marxist Leninism, starting in both cases with some poisonous ideas catching hold. You can't advocate the position without considering when it might and might not work.
above, I replied to someone else about the debt . To what I said there, I'll add that you need to make a better case that debt is bad than you have. Your conception of "interest" as purely bad is flawed. For example, borrowing money to pay for a college education which leads to a higher income in the future is a smart thing. Many corporations never pay off there debt, instead growing it all the time. Why? Because they use the borrowed money to generate more income than they pay in interest. Debt that shrinks as a percentage of income and/or wealth is not terribly important, but if you want to get rid of it you cannot simply advocate higher taxes without considering what the money is being spent on, which you haven't.
1. "Surplus" refers to the derivative (from calculus) of what the debt refers to, and we do absolutely have a surplus. The debt is important as a percentage of GDP, but that has been shrinking. (analogy: owing $100 when you earn nothing is a big deal, but not if you earn $100,000 with prospects for growth.) But that's a separate discussion, anyway. The issue I was responding to had to do with tax policy.
2. Face it, both the Democrats and the Republicans meddle with the tax code to encourage social behaviors.
simply, not true. Your example, government drug policy appears nowhere in the tax code. It is exactly your confusion of social policy legislation and the tax code which is the problem I was complaining about: thank you for illustrating my point.
There is a whole separate question of how much the government should spend, but you didn't touch it so I won't. Therefore, surplus tax receipts indicate a tax cut is in order. If we keep a progressive tax system as you prefer, what's wrong with cutting everybody's taxes. People who pay no tax will receive no cut. People who pay moderate tax will receive moderate cuts. People who pay high taxes will receive the highest cuts.
As far as corporate taxes go, yes, there is some disproportionality (BTW, caused by folks who meddle with the tax code to encourage social behaviors they prefer, more typically a Democratic position). But, you need to understand the accounting to grasp why corporate taxes are gravy, not grave. People own corporations. People's income from investment is taxed, but taxable, successful investments represent corporate income which is also taxed. Together, corporate and personal taxes represent even more progressivity than the tax code would imply.
So, after cutting taxes, the rich will still be paying more (progressively) and the poor will still be paying less... This is the Bush proposal and I don't understand what your problem with it is since it fits the criteria you set out.
Separately, if the overall level of taxes is generating surpluses, that might be evidence for cutting taxes, and of course cutting them will result in the highest payers getting the biggest cuts, even though they will continue to be the highest payers, absolutely, relatively and proportionately. Supposedly smart Democrats are so dishonest on this point they should be disqualified from taking oaths of office. It's OK to want to soak the rich, but come out and say it.
Thanks for that pointer, I hadn't heard of it. I will point out, though, that it makes fun of rednecks (half the intelligence/twice the humor) so it's a little candy-assed isn't it? Giving itself an excuse to hide behind?