I think movie production is a fair comparison. GI Joe: Retaliation got delayed nine whole months, so when I delay my projects at work get delayed by 3, by that metric I am doing a great job.
I've heard 99% more truth out of Rush Limburger than I have out of ANY Repubmocrat in the last 4 decades, sad isn't it?
No, you haven't. You've just been a carefully selected slurry of lies and disinformation for so long that you no longer have any grasp on reality. It is a common syndrome among his listeners.
Okay, I almost feel like you are some evil pointy-haired-boss pretending to be an engineer so that you can try to speak as "one of us" and convince us to commoditize ourselves out of existence. Like somehow you think that programming is hard only because engineers are stupid and haven't bothered to make it easy, and you think that posing as a coder on Slashdot and whining about it will get us off our asses.
I'll skip the long drawn-out explanation for how ridiculous you are and just state that what you are asking for is not possible, the Turing Machine isn't just some paradigm that we can toss out the window because you don't like it, and that the industry is already churning out too many retards that only know how to do their job by screwing together buzzword frameworks without you helping us along.
Ah, here's the confusion. A Fair Tax has a very specific meaning: it is a consumption tax. I had no idea you were talking about an income tax. None of what I've said applies to you.
That chart assumes that rich people will pay a consumption tax on every dollar they earn, which is completely wrong. It's also worth noting that the person who pays the most as a percentage of their income on your chart is the guy making $100,000. And that's even ignoring other regressive tax and fee structures, which move the line to a lower income.
Now, about the second point. Yes, a fair tax with a 25% rate with a $26k deduction would actually increase (by 2 to 7%) the rate paid by the people who benefited the most. The top.1% pay about 16% federal taxes and about.03% state and local taxes. Their total tax load is about 17%. It scales from there to the middle income folks who pay a total tax load of about 42%, then "down" to the impoverished who pay about 28% total tax load of their income.
Take a look just a second at the numbers you posted. If they pay.03% in state and local taxes, and those are in the form of 6-10% consumption taxes, then the reasonable assumption is that if you give them a 25% consumption tax, they would pay somewhere around 1.25% of their income into it. Actually, it would probably be less, because the tax would encourage them to spend even less and invest even more. If you can explain to me how going from 17% down to less than 2% is an increase in their tax burden, I'm all ears.
In order for "fair" taxation to be anywhere near fair, you have to assume that there is actual equal opportunity for success in this country. Until you can make the claim with a straight face that a poor black kid growing up in downtown Oakland has the same opportunity as a kid with rich parents growing up in San Rafael, I don't have any idea why you would think there is anything fair about taxing the same way as adults when the former claws his way up into the middle class and the latter gets to coast by and still be rich.
Everybody thinks they are super clever when they start talking about a "true" fair tax, but the basic question is an argument over what "fair" means. Is it fair for each person to pay an equal portion of their income in taxes? What about the same flat dollar amount per person, wouldn't that be more fair? Or maybe it would be fair for the people who by far benefited the most from the political and economic systems of this country to put the most back into the system that helped them get where they are in the first place?
The rich buy less as a portion of their income. They tend to reinvest their money to make even more instead, whereas a poor person spends every dime that they make.
Which, of course, assumes that the rich spend their money. Since the rich do not and instead reinvest it, your entire line of reasoning completely falls apart. If you want to tax wealth, you have to tax wealth. Also, as stated repeatedly, many national sales tax plans don't exclude necessities. And necessities don't even begin to close the gap between what the poor pay as a percentage compared to the rich. It's all a big lie.
I think they have a couple of reasons for this lawsuit. First, they don't want any precedents set. A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users, and Aereo claims they are protected because they are just a long wire between the antenna and the user. If that argument holds for free over-the-air programming, it might be used later to protect streaming of something that is not quite so free. Also, they are probably worried about losing out on revenue from selling people the programming if they don't see it for free over the air when it broadcasts (or via DVR). They want additional advertising value to go to re-runs rather than disappearing into this system, and they are possibly scared it will hurt things like DVD/iTunes sales. They want to be in control as much as possible of any format swapping you do.
Personally, I think they are shooting themselves in the foot, in that I bet they could negotiate advertising revenue by leveraging these additional live viewers, and this adds to the ever-increasing perception that the old school broadcasters are unfriendly to viewers because they can't keep up with the times, but those are of course the typical mistakes these people make anyway, so it isn't surprising.
Ridiculous. You talk about evolution over millions of years as if it contained a bunch of discrete changes the size of farmers mass killing prey or entirely new predators showing up to kill an indigenous population. Those sorts of things can happen, but most evolution in anything more than one cell is basically indistinguishable along a timeline of "TENS OF YEARS" much less noticeable advantageous for a predator or prey. It's not like a hamster is giving birth one day and out pops a gerbil and shazam, a new species is born. Natural Selection takes trait variances that alter survival chances by fractions of a percent and causes them to manifest just a little more each generation across an entire population. This is not comparable at all to your alleged counterexamples.
And we may not have been able to observe changes over millions of years, but we certainly have gotten to watch evolution happen. It is repeatedly demonstrable in single celled organisms where we can watch hundreds and thousands of generations in a matter of years.
Do you know what's actually dangerous to science? Individuals thinking that they are so smart that they can hand wave away thousands upon thousands of hours of expert research on the grounds of a couple of trite little anecdotes because they apparently think they are so much smarter than the entire body of scientists working on a subject that the scientists have never considered this particular line of reasoning. If your negation of an entire body of scientific research can be expressed in a few lines, it either A) better include an incredible new piece of evidence that nobody in the field has seen before or B) is probably a crass oversimplification that isn't nearly as clever as you think it is. I don't see a lot of A) here..
Right, you just insert unsubstantiated beliefs from a religious text until somebody can prove otherwise. More power to you, but don't pretend that it is in any way a rational decision that equates in any way to what actual research there is on any given subject. Creationism doesn't challenge my reasoning because it has nothing to do with reason. If I have to fill the gaps with something, I'll choose the Flying Spaghetti Monster and wait for you to explain to me why your nonsensical choice has any "merits" over mine.
"Since I cannot defend with certainty any scientific answer that doesn't raise problem I personally default to faith, as I accept that I lack both evidence and intelligence to explain corner cases of science. "
What kind of lame justification is that? I can't see what's on the other side of my cubicle wall right now, so I have no proof that it exists, so I default to being ? Just because we don't have an explanation for something doesn't mean that there isn't one and we should "default" to any particular religious doctrine.
They are just waiting to see which country loves the telescope enough to cede ownership rather than let it be cut in half, then they will give it to that country because they must be the real, loving mother!
True enough. But cut it, the whole of CPB and the NEA and a few thousand other useless and/or programs that are nice to have in fat times and it is real money, even on the Federal Budget scale.
Not really. As much as our politicians would love for us to all believe that it's a fight about all the little bit like this, there's no amount of discretionary budget you are going to cut to make a real difference. The longer you let our politicians turn thumb wrestling matches over things tiny programs into huge government-shutting-down cat fights, the longer it is going to be before any meaningful discussion about the budget.
Well, except for the whole 28% from Foundations and Businesses which you claim "is a write for the foundation or business". Oh, did you think that NPR has some magical status that makes it treated differently from other non-profits when people donate to it? That when I donate to NPR, I get a dollar for dollar discount on my taxes due each year?
Honestly, I can't even figure out where you are getting 58% from even with your own numbers, but however you are coming up with it, if you apply the same calculations to churches and the 100% of their income that people get to write off in the exact same way, I am confident that you'll find that your church is a government organization.
He did not say that one race was better than another. He said that people of one race in a particular country statistically have different behavior patterns than another race in the same country, and then made a few inferences.
Right, he just said that black people are much more likely to be violent, stupid, dishonest, lazy, and racist. But hey, if you are into those things, black people are totally better! See? No judgement here!
You're not examining his argument closely, as it is perfectly valid. For GGP's analysis to be correct, we have to count every dollar donated to an organization that results in a tax exemption as money coming directly from the taxpayer. Since Church donations are usually all written off, every church (and nonprofit for that matter) would then be 100% government funded.
The obvious hole is that tax exemptions for donations are almost always smaller than the donation itself (NPR included) so neither churches nor NPR are government funded, but that's exactly the point.
The implication of the above statement was not that overly complex civilizations rapidly collapse, it was that the market will take care of the predicted resource issues. The statements are not the least bit analogous.
I'm not really sure how history is supposed to be a guide here. When's the last time we've run into any of the described concerns? Or is your argument that if we see a herd of angry, stampeding bulls running towards us, we shouldn't bother getting out of the way because historically, we've never been run over by bulls?
I think your listed commute distance is atypical, but let's go with it anyway. If the Volt has a 30 mile range and you are driving 60 miles a day, you are halving your fuel consumption. If it averages around 30 mpg on gasoline, then even including recharge costs you're looking at the equivalent of something like 50-60 miles per gallon.
Put another way, the average driver drives 13-14k miles a year. Assuming that driving is fairly evenly distributed and Volt drivers charge nightly, you can drive about 11k miles a year on pure electric. It's a little worse than that because people take the occasional road trip and the like, but that still sounds like they hit a pretty good number to start out with.
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I think movie production is a fair comparison. GI Joe: Retaliation got delayed nine whole months, so when I delay my projects at work get delayed by 3, by that metric I am doing a great job.
I've heard 99% more truth out of Rush Limburger than I have out of ANY Repubmocrat in the last 4 decades, sad isn't it?
No, you haven't. You've just been a carefully selected slurry of lies and disinformation for so long that you no longer have any grasp on reality. It is a common syndrome among his listeners.
Okay, I almost feel like you are some evil pointy-haired-boss pretending to be an engineer so that you can try to speak as "one of us" and convince us to commoditize ourselves out of existence. Like somehow you think that programming is hard only because engineers are stupid and haven't bothered to make it easy, and you think that posing as a coder on Slashdot and whining about it will get us off our asses.
I'll skip the long drawn-out explanation for how ridiculous you are and just state that what you are asking for is not possible, the Turing Machine isn't just some paradigm that we can toss out the window because you don't like it, and that the industry is already churning out too many retards that only know how to do their job by screwing together buzzword frameworks without you helping us along.
Also, I should have read more closely, as you clearly stated income up above. Sorry.
Ah, here's the confusion. A Fair Tax has a very specific meaning: it is a consumption tax. I had no idea you were talking about an income tax. None of what I've said applies to you.
[Citation Needed]
That chart assumes that rich people will pay a consumption tax on every dollar they earn, which is completely wrong. It's also worth noting that the person who pays the most as a percentage of their income on your chart is the guy making $100,000. And that's even ignoring other regressive tax and fee structures, which move the line to a lower income.
Now, about the second point. Yes, a fair tax with a 25% rate with a $26k deduction would actually increase (by 2 to 7%) the rate paid by the people who benefited the most. The top .1% pay about 16% federal taxes and about .03% state and local taxes. Their total tax load is about 17%. It scales from there to the middle income folks who pay a total tax load of about 42%, then "down" to the impoverished who pay about 28% total tax load of their income.
Take a look just a second at the numbers you posted. If they pay .03% in state and local taxes, and those are in the form of 6-10% consumption taxes, then the reasonable assumption is that if you give them a 25% consumption tax, they would pay somewhere around 1.25% of their income into it. Actually, it would probably be less, because the tax would encourage them to spend even less and invest even more. If you can explain to me how going from 17% down to less than 2% is an increase in their tax burden, I'm all ears.
In order for "fair" taxation to be anywhere near fair, you have to assume that there is actual equal opportunity for success in this country. Until you can make the claim with a straight face that a poor black kid growing up in downtown Oakland has the same opportunity as a kid with rich parents growing up in San Rafael, I don't have any idea why you would think there is anything fair about taxing the same way as adults when the former claws his way up into the middle class and the latter gets to coast by and still be rich.
Everybody thinks they are super clever when they start talking about a "true" fair tax, but the basic question is an argument over what "fair" means. Is it fair for each person to pay an equal portion of their income in taxes? What about the same flat dollar amount per person, wouldn't that be more fair? Or maybe it would be fair for the people who by far benefited the most from the political and economic systems of this country to put the most back into the system that helped them get where they are in the first place?
And this is why nobody takes Libertarians seriously.
The rich buy less as a portion of their income. They tend to reinvest their money to make even more instead, whereas a poor person spends every dime that they make.
Which, of course, assumes that the rich spend their money. Since the rich do not and instead reinvest it, your entire line of reasoning completely falls apart. If you want to tax wealth, you have to tax wealth. Also, as stated repeatedly, many national sales tax plans don't exclude necessities. And necessities don't even begin to close the gap between what the poor pay as a percentage compared to the rich. It's all a big lie.
I think they have a couple of reasons for this lawsuit. First, they don't want any precedents set. A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users, and Aereo claims they are protected because they are just a long wire between the antenna and the user. If that argument holds for free over-the-air programming, it might be used later to protect streaming of something that is not quite so free. Also, they are probably worried about losing out on revenue from selling people the programming if they don't see it for free over the air when it broadcasts (or via DVR). They want additional advertising value to go to re-runs rather than disappearing into this system, and they are possibly scared it will hurt things like DVD/iTunes sales. They want to be in control as much as possible of any format swapping you do.
Personally, I think they are shooting themselves in the foot, in that I bet they could negotiate advertising revenue by leveraging these additional live viewers, and this adds to the ever-increasing perception that the old school broadcasters are unfriendly to viewers because they can't keep up with the times, but those are of course the typical mistakes these people make anyway, so it isn't surprising.
Ridiculous. You talk about evolution over millions of years as if it contained a bunch of discrete changes the size of farmers mass killing prey or entirely new predators showing up to kill an indigenous population. Those sorts of things can happen, but most evolution in anything more than one cell is basically indistinguishable along a timeline of "TENS OF YEARS" much less noticeable advantageous for a predator or prey. It's not like a hamster is giving birth one day and out pops a gerbil and shazam, a new species is born. Natural Selection takes trait variances that alter survival chances by fractions of a percent and causes them to manifest just a little more each generation across an entire population. This is not comparable at all to your alleged counterexamples.
And we may not have been able to observe changes over millions of years, but we certainly have gotten to watch evolution happen. It is repeatedly demonstrable in single celled organisms where we can watch hundreds and thousands of generations in a matter of years.
Do you know what's actually dangerous to science? Individuals thinking that they are so smart that they can hand wave away thousands upon thousands of hours of expert research on the grounds of a couple of trite little anecdotes because they apparently think they are so much smarter than the entire body of scientists working on a subject that the scientists have never considered this particular line of reasoning. If your negation of an entire body of scientific research can be expressed in a few lines, it either A) better include an incredible new piece of evidence that nobody in the field has seen before or B) is probably a crass oversimplification that isn't nearly as clever as you think it is. I don't see a lot of A) here..
Right, you just insert unsubstantiated beliefs from a religious text until somebody can prove otherwise. More power to you, but don't pretend that it is in any way a rational decision that equates in any way to what actual research there is on any given subject. Creationism doesn't challenge my reasoning because it has nothing to do with reason. If I have to fill the gaps with something, I'll choose the Flying Spaghetti Monster and wait for you to explain to me why your nonsensical choice has any "merits" over mine.
"Since I cannot defend with certainty any scientific answer that doesn't raise problem I personally default to faith, as I accept that I lack both evidence and intelligence to explain corner cases of science. " What kind of lame justification is that? I can't see what's on the other side of my cubicle wall right now, so I have no proof that it exists, so I default to being ? Just because we don't have an explanation for something doesn't mean that there isn't one and we should "default" to any particular religious doctrine.
They are just waiting to see which country loves the telescope enough to cede ownership rather than let it be cut in half, then they will give it to that country because they must be the real, loving mother!
True enough. But cut it, the whole of CPB and the NEA and a few thousand other useless and/or programs that are nice to have in fat times and it is real money, even on the Federal Budget scale.
Not really. As much as our politicians would love for us to all believe that it's a fight about all the little bit like this, there's no amount of discretionary budget you are going to cut to make a real difference. The longer you let our politicians turn thumb wrestling matches over things tiny programs into huge government-shutting-down cat fights, the longer it is going to be before any meaningful discussion about the budget.
Well, except for the whole 28% from Foundations and Businesses which you claim "is a write for the foundation or business". Oh, did you think that NPR has some magical status that makes it treated differently from other non-profits when people donate to it? That when I donate to NPR, I get a dollar for dollar discount on my taxes due each year?
Honestly, I can't even figure out where you are getting 58% from even with your own numbers, but however you are coming up with it, if you apply the same calculations to churches and the 100% of their income that people get to write off in the exact same way, I am confident that you'll find that your church is a government organization.
He did not say that one race was better than another. He said that people of one race in a particular country statistically have different behavior patterns than another race in the same country, and then made a few inferences.
Right, he just said that black people are much more likely to be violent, stupid, dishonest, lazy, and racist. But hey, if you are into those things, black people are totally better! See? No judgement here!
You're not examining his argument closely, as it is perfectly valid. For GGP's analysis to be correct, we have to count every dollar donated to an organization that results in a tax exemption as money coming directly from the taxpayer. Since Church donations are usually all written off, every church (and nonprofit for that matter) would then be 100% government funded.
The obvious hole is that tax exemptions for donations are almost always smaller than the donation itself (NPR included) so neither churches nor NPR are government funded, but that's exactly the point.
The implication of the above statement was not that overly complex civilizations rapidly collapse, it was that the market will take care of the predicted resource issues. The statements are not the least bit analogous.
I'm not really sure how history is supposed to be a guide here. When's the last time we've run into any of the described concerns? Or is your argument that if we see a herd of angry, stampeding bulls running towards us, we shouldn't bother getting out of the way because historically, we've never been run over by bulls?
I think your listed commute distance is atypical, but let's go with it anyway. If the Volt has a 30 mile range and you are driving 60 miles a day, you are halving your fuel consumption. If it averages around 30 mpg on gasoline, then even including recharge costs you're looking at the equivalent of something like 50-60 miles per gallon.
Put another way, the average driver drives 13-14k miles a year. Assuming that driving is fairly evenly distributed and Volt drivers charge nightly, you can drive about 11k miles a year on pure electric. It's a little worse than that because people take the occasional road trip and the like, but that still sounds like they hit a pretty good number to start out with.