This is a little more complicated because now you're talking about large companies. A lot of this issue is really about how dealing with these taxes will affect smaller businesses. Smaller businesses don't have multiple locations, warehouses, head offices, etc.; they're just operated out of someone's home, or a single office space somewhere, and that's it.
Surely the legislators can come up with a way of dealing with larger companies that might try to have a warehouse in Oregon (no sales tax) while having their HQ in Silicon Valley or NYC (presumably high sales tax). Maybe they could base it on where all their employees are, so if 3/4 of their employees are in an HQ in a high-sales-tax locale, and 1/4 are in a warehouse in Oregon, then they have to charge customers 3/4 of the high sales tax in their HQ's location.
Right, just about every state has a "use tax" that people are supposed to file with their state income taxes. Of course, almost no one actually does. Do Vermonters really claim all their NH purchases?
Ok, so why is this, and why is this not the case when I buy groceries, or a drink at a coffee shop, or just about anything else? No one asks me where my home address is when I buy stuff like that.
And how exactly does the car dealership figure out your tax anyway? What if your house lies immediately over the city line, and some municipal tax doesn't apply to you but it applies to everyone on the opposite side of the street as you? What if you're an Indian and members of your tribe aren't subject to a particular sales tax, but your non-tribe-member roomates are subject to that tax?
Perhaps, but that still doesn't answer my question. Let's change it a little:
Ok, so how does some Starbucks shop in Washington handle it when someone visits from out-of-state, or from any other taxing jurisdiction for that matter?
It's not just the small companies that don't bother checking where you're from when you buy something at their local brick&mortar shop.
No, it's no different at all: the point of sale is the location of the merchant (for smaller merchants; for really big merchants it's not so simple, but that's not the issue here because it's the small merchants that are crying foul about the burden of dealing with this).
Here's an example: Bob has an old-tyme hardware store in Sometown, MO, population 500. He doesn't have an internet site at all, or any kind of mail-order business. His only concessions to modern times are a telephone, and a credit-card terminal, since so many people even in this small town pay for everything with debit and credit cards. His town is near a state line, so some customers drive over the line to visit his store as there's no closer store on their side. They all pay MO sales tax when they show up in person. However, sometimes one of them doesn't feel like making the drive that day, and just calls him up and asks him to send a part in the mail, which he's happy to do since business is slow and the Post Office is a 1-minute walk away. They pay for it with credit card, read over the phone. What tax do they pay? Bob just charges them the regular sales tax for his state and town. The transaction is no different than if the customer had walked into the store, except that now the customer is having a third party transport the goods for him.
Before you jump on the third-party transport aspect, having a third party transport your goods doesn't change the tax you pay either: you still pay the tax based on the merchant's location. If you drive across a state line (or just to a neighboring town, where there's a different municipal sales tax) to a furniture store and buy a new bed, which of course you have no way of transporting in your Prius, they charge you tax based on their location, even though the bed is going to be transported (for an additional fee) by either their truck or a contracted freight service to your home address. They don't charge you based on your home address.
Yes, actually it's almost impossibly hard to determine tax in so many other locales because of the extreme complexity. There've been many posts made about this, so I'm not going to repeat them here, but here's a quote from this article:
"Cnet kindly reminds us how convoluted this country’s tax structure can be. You can expect to pay sales tax on bottled soda in New Jersey, but not on bottled water, even cookies. A mink handbag is taxed in Rhode Island, but not a mink fur coat. It’s a big mess, in other words."
In addition, there's places where the location isn't good enough, because certain people get a tax and others don't, regardless of their address; this is the case on many Indian reservations.
No, you didn't. Where'd you get that idea? There's no way that some mom-n-pop mail order company in 1975 had the ability to figure the proper sales tax for 10,000 different tax jurisdictions across the country, just as they don't now. Sears Robuck wasn't the only mail order company back then.
Taxing the recipient of the goods based on the seller's location, with the collected tax going to the seller's state, would result in the recipient paying tax into a jurisdiction that does not represent her/him.
So what? When I drive across the state line and buy stuff over there, the tax goes to that state, even though I'm not represented there. If I don't like it, I don't have to drive over there. It's no different with internet sales, except that instead of going there physically, I'm going there virtually.
No, it shows that sales tax, as currently implemented in the Unites States, is a horrible mess and has a high frictional cost. It doesn't mean it has a high frictional cost all the time; if they wiped out all state and local sales taxes, and replaced them with a single federal sales tax, it'd be easy and would have much lower enforcement costs than federal income tax does (since you'd only need to collect from companies in this scenario, not individuals). I believe that's sorta how it's done in the EU with their VAT.
You are right about it being regressive in theory, but I'm not so sure that's true in practice. It's pretty hard to evade sales taxes: retailers won't sell things to you unless you pay it on the spot. But rich people come up with all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding income tax. The main problem with trying to tax rich people on purchases is that they frequently go out of the country to buy things, though I suppose if they go for a shopping trip in Paris they're going to pay a lot more tax there than they would in Manhattan, but I wonder what the tax rates are for megayachts built in the EU. Also, don't forget the costs of enforcement: I've read that the IRS uses 1/3 of the money it collects just to operate its own bureaucracy. So theoretically, if you replaced income taxes with sales taxes, you'd only need about 2/3 as much revenue, as sales taxes surely don't require remotely as much money and resources to enforce.
I wonder if that Cain guy was onto something with his 8-8-8 idea.
You are talking about things that you didn't in fact think about. You should go read the 16th, then go read the link to my comment where I explain that what is in the amendment is not in fact authorisation to collect an income tax. It is an allowance to tax 'income' (without defining what that is) without apportionment.
I DID read the 16th; it's extremely short and concise and there's really no way to misunderstand it. It lets you tax income. It doesn't have to define it, the definition is fairly obvious, and I'm sure court decisions have defined it more exactingly.
so the 'income tax' in fact was explained to be a corporate profit tax.
No, profit and income are two different things. The Amendment says "income", not "profit". If they had meant corporate profit, they would have said so. It just says that the government can tax income, that's it. There's no way for a rational person to misunderstand that simple language. And anything the SCOTUS says really doesn't matter, only the text of the Amendment. The SCOTUS can only interpret laws (and they don't always do so correctly, which can be changed in subsequent court decisions). They can also declare things "unconstitutional". However, they can't declare part of the Constitution to be unconstitutional, and that makes no sense whatsoever.
I only read part of your comment, but stopped wasting my time when it became clear that it was pure lunacy and that you completely fail to understand the simple truth that when something is part of the Constitution (this includes Amendments), that it's by definition Constitutional. (You also make some wacky arguments that the 16th conflicts with some earlier parts of the Constitution, including the 4th Amendment, which again shows you either don't understand or are willfully ignoring the simple truth that Amendments supersede older parts of the Constitution. It doesn't matter if the 16th violates the 4th as you allege, because the 16th supersedes the 4th. If the States all decided they wanted to ban free speech and private ownership of guns, they could easily pass a new Amendment completely overturning the 1st and 2nd. The only reason this doesn't happen is that it'd be extemely unpopular and because it's really hard to get all the States to agree on Constitutional changes, which of course was the intent of the Founders when they devised the Amendment process.)
Ok, so how does some little independently-owned mom-n-pop coffee shop in Washington handle it when someone visits from out-of-state, or from any other taxing jurisdiction for that matter?
Does that also apply when you've already paid taxes in the state where the purchase was made? So if I drive to the next state, and eat a meal there, and pay taxes on that meal (let's say that the taxes are actually higher in the restaurant's state than in my own), then I'm supposed to pay taxes again in my own state? That's double taxation, and doesn't sound quite right.
I'm not a lawyer, but the idea of forcing people to obey laws in jurisdictions other than where they're located seems wrong to me. How on earth is anyone supposed to figure out what the law is in tens of thousands of different jurisdictions across the country? It's impossible.
If they want to fix the sales tax "loophole", at the federal level, it's easy: pass a law requiring e-merchants to collect sales tax based on the merchant's physical location. That's already the way it is if you buy stuff in person: you dont pay sales tax based on your home address, you pay based on where the store is. Why should e-commerce be any different? Moreover, if you have some dispute with the tax authorities, it'd only be the authorities in your own state and locality, not some authorities 2500 miles away in some state and small town you've never heard of or visited before, and you'd go to your local courthouse to resolve the dispute, instead of being required to fly across the country to do so.
Not being from the USA, you obviously cannot comprehend just how insane many of our citizens are, and what kind of wacky convoluted arguments they'll come up with which defy all logic and reason.
Yes, you're right, as this is quite simple: if it's part of the Constitution (and that includes the Amendments), then by definition, it's "constitutional". Furthermore, newer Amendments overrule old ones, so it doesn't matter if the original Constitutional text, or some of Amendments 1-10 could be construed as forbidding income tax, because Amendment 16 explicitly allows it, so that's the final word on the matter. In fact, free speech, freedom of religion, etc. could be repealed, and we could be forced to quarter soldiers in our homes: all the government has to do is pass a new Constitutional Amendment overturning Amendments 1 and 4. Of course, it's very very hard to pass new Amendments (by design), so such a thing is unlikely, but it's possible.
WTF? Income tax is not unconstitutional, it's by definition part of the constitution. Go read the 16th Amendment; they passed that just so they could have an income tax. And no, it's not "voluntary"; the amendment is extremely concise and says nothing about such tax being "voluntary". There's a reason this is called an "amendment": it overrules anything older in the Constitution that might be construed as forbidding it. Just because you don't like a particular amendment (I don't care for the 17th myself) doesn't mean that what's in that amendment is "unconstitutional". The amendments ARE the Constitution.
John lives in New Jersey, but only a few miles away from the Pennsylvania state line. The nearest town from him is 20 miles away, but just 3 miles away from him is Stroudsburg, PA, a decently-sized town. Because of proximity, naturally John regularly drives over the border to this town to do all his grocery shopping and other shopping. Which state does John pay his sales tax to? Simple: it all goes to Pennsylvania, not New Jersey which he resides in. Sales tax is levied at the merchant's location, not the customer's.
Here's another similar analogy: it's 1975, and the internet doesn't exist. John wants to buy a quadrophonic stereo system, and he wants a particular model. No one in his state has the model he wants, however he calls around a lot (costing him a pretty penny in long-distance charges), and finds one at a specialty retailer in Boston, several states away. He doesn't want to trust any private shippers or the USPS with delivering this expensive piece of delicate equipment, so he drives 5 hours to Boston to pick it up in person. At the shop there, he has to pay sales tax. Does the retailer charge him based on his home address? Of course not; he has to pay the exact same sales tax that any local Bostonite would, and that tax money goes to Massachusetts and Boston (assuming Boston has a separate municipal sales tax as many cities do). John's home state of New Jersey doesn't get a cent.
So will someone please explain why these sales tax initiatives require the retailer to charge tax based on the customer's location, rather than the retailer's location? If I set up a shop in Kansas (with no mail orders or internet orders), all my customers, no matter how far they drive to visit me, will have to pay sales tax to the state of Kansas. It doesn't matter if they have an Oregon driver's license and try to argue they don't owe tax because OR has no sales taxes. If you're in KS and buy something, yo pay KS sales tax. So why should it be an different for internet sales? It'd surely make calculations a lot easier for any merchants, big or small, and be a boon to their localities and states. Of course, one might argue that a bunch of merchants might move their operations to tax-free jurisdictions like OR, but that's just too bad for high-tax states, and besides, many small business people don't have the capital to just pack up and move cross-country based on this one factor, or they might not be willing to leave all their family and friends just because of that. And secondly, for large corporations with operations in many states, this would complicate things and would certainly require special legislation so they can't just stick a small office in a tax-free state to avoid charging sales tax.
Yes, but we're not talking about government surveillance or police abuses or other issues here, we're talking about libel and free speech. Yes, the US has a lot of issues, but crazy libel laws and restrictions on free speech aren't big problems here (yet), while obviously these are big problems in the UK. Focus on the issue at hand.
Your links seem to suggest that the defendant bears the burden of proving his/her statement to be true. In the US, it's the other way around: the plaintiff has to prove that the statement is false (and secondly, that it was made in a malicious manner), for the suit to go forward.
Unfortunately, yes, in the US you have to pay for your own legal costs to defend yourself. However, a libel case like this would most likely be immediately dismissed, so your legal costs would be minimal. Also, you're able to countersue for your legal costs and harassment, and depending on how ridiculous the libel claims are, you're likely to win, so the plaintiff will have to pay your legal costs (plus more, if they're found to have been malicious in their claims).
Yes, our criminal "justice" system is a farce. However, this has very little to do with libel laws, since those are a civil matter, not criminal.
Our civil justice system isn't all that great either (you can spend a fortune in legal fees defending yourself), but at least we don't have to worry much about ridiculous libel suits. Anything like this suit would be dismissed right away in our courts, and then the defendant could countersue for legal fees and harassment. For all our faults, we do have a very strong tradition of free speech that prevents abuses like this.
Oh please. There's no shortage of people, both American and not, criticizing the US for all kinds of things on this forum, and much of it rightfully so: wars, imperialism, the war on drugs, drone bombings, Guantanamo, corporatism run amok, corruption, "corporations are people", no universal health care, warrantless wiretapping, slow and expensive ISP and cellular service, I could go on and on.
For a refreshing change, we've hit on an issue where, for once, the US really does things right (free speech, and libel laws that actually make a lot of sense--something derogatory has to be proven not only untrue but also malicious for you to get in trouble for it). It's fine that Americans are proud of this.
I wasn't going to say it; you're absolutely right, PDF isn't the way to go, and wasn't even meant for that. PDF is meant to be a portable way of saving content at a particular size; if your PDF is a booklet with all the pages at 8.5x11, then it's only going to look right printed at 8.5x11 (or shown on a screen of that size), otherwise the text will be too small. PDFs can be made in other sizes too, but if you make a PDF magazine with the pages set for a 7" screen, it's only going to look right on a 7" screen, and on larger screens it'll look blown-up, and on smaller screens it'll look too small again.
This is exactly what HTML and similar markup languages were designed for. Even so, however, when you combine text with photos, you're usually going to have problems of some kind, depending on how large or small you scale it, and you can't make a page look a certain way if you're really picky about what the page should look like.
Honestly, I don't think there's a way to solve this problem. Either you give up on having total control of formatting, and let it be handled more-or-less automatically, and design your pages so that they can be scaled between a wide array of sizes, or you retain total control of the smallest detail of formatting, but restrict yourself to a single size. Web designers have already encountered this problem, which is why a lot of web pages are restricted to a certain horizontal size so that they look right, even though on high-res wide-screen monitors with a maximized browser window, you wind up with big empty spaces on the sides.
because it's currently thought that much of the rampant diagnoses of ADHD in boys is due to female teachers not understanding gender differences in behavior between boys and girls.
Yet somehow this wasn't a problem 50+ years ago, even though back then there were even fewer male teachers in those K-3 grades.
BS. Medicine used to be dominated by men too (at least for the doctor positions), yet these days there's tons of female doctors, and they're having a hard time convincing women to go into nursing because the smart ones all want to be doctors instead (gee, wonder why...). Law used to be dominated by men too, and now there's plenty of female attorneys. Women have pushed into many male-dominated fields, but engineering isn't one of them. Then again, neither is construction.
What's the correlation? Well, engineering and construction share one trait which they don't share with law or medicine: prestige. Lawyers and doctors, in our society, are highly esteemed. Sure, lawyers have nasty jokes about them, but everyone thinks they make tons of money, and when an actual lawyer comes around, everyone bows down to him/her. I've seen it in my extended family; it's weird. But construction workers and engineers? Nope, they're seen as crappy jobs in this society. Construction work is seen as being for men who aren't very smart and only have muscle as a useful advantage. Engineering is seen as being for men who are socially retarded and "geeky". Programming is even worse. Why would women want to get into a profession that is viewed poorly by the population at large?
Contrast this with other cultures, namely India and China: in those places, engineering and programming are seen as prestigious careers, and pay extremely well (compared to other professions there), and as a result, there's tons of women in these STEM fields in those countries, unlike here in the West.
I'm an engineer, and if I had a son or daughter, I'd discourage them from STEM too, unless they plan to make a business out of it somehow. Working for a company is never going to get you very far. If a kid is smart enough for a STEM career, they're smart enough for a medical career instead, and they'll do far, far better there.
Also, here's a #7 for you: 7) Overhaul the election systems in this country and move to proportional or approval voting, or a system like Cordorcet or Borla, etc., so that we're not stuck with two shitty corrupt parties. This means adopting new systems not only at the local and state levels, but also a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Plurality system at the national level, and also to eliminate the hopelessly obsolete Electoral College.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a little more complicated because now you're talking about large companies. A lot of this issue is really about how dealing with these taxes will affect smaller businesses. Smaller businesses don't have multiple locations, warehouses, head offices, etc.; they're just operated out of someone's home, or a single office space somewhere, and that's it.
Surely the legislators can come up with a way of dealing with larger companies that might try to have a warehouse in Oregon (no sales tax) while having their HQ in Silicon Valley or NYC (presumably high sales tax). Maybe they could base it on where all their employees are, so if 3/4 of their employees are in an HQ in a high-sales-tax locale, and 1/4 are in a warehouse in Oregon, then they have to charge customers 3/4 of the high sales tax in their HQ's location.
Right, just about every state has a "use tax" that people are supposed to file with their state income taxes. Of course, almost no one actually does. Do Vermonters really claim all their NH purchases?
Ok, so why is this, and why is this not the case when I buy groceries, or a drink at a coffee shop, or just about anything else? No one asks me where my home address is when I buy stuff like that.
And how exactly does the car dealership figure out your tax anyway? What if your house lies immediately over the city line, and some municipal tax doesn't apply to you but it applies to everyone on the opposite side of the street as you? What if you're an Indian and members of your tribe aren't subject to a particular sales tax, but your non-tribe-member roomates are subject to that tax?
Perhaps, but that still doesn't answer my question. Let's change it a little:
It's not just the small companies that don't bother checking where you're from when you buy something at their local brick&mortar shop.
No, it's no different at all: the point of sale is the location of the merchant (for smaller merchants; for really big merchants it's not so simple, but that's not the issue here because it's the small merchants that are crying foul about the burden of dealing with this).
Here's an example: Bob has an old-tyme hardware store in Sometown, MO, population 500. He doesn't have an internet site at all, or any kind of mail-order business. His only concessions to modern times are a telephone, and a credit-card terminal, since so many people even in this small town pay for everything with debit and credit cards. His town is near a state line, so some customers drive over the line to visit his store as there's no closer store on their side. They all pay MO sales tax when they show up in person. However, sometimes one of them doesn't feel like making the drive that day, and just calls him up and asks him to send a part in the mail, which he's happy to do since business is slow and the Post Office is a 1-minute walk away. They pay for it with credit card, read over the phone. What tax do they pay? Bob just charges them the regular sales tax for his state and town. The transaction is no different than if the customer had walked into the store, except that now the customer is having a third party transport the goods for him.
Before you jump on the third-party transport aspect, having a third party transport your goods doesn't change the tax you pay either: you still pay the tax based on the merchant's location. If you drive across a state line (or just to a neighboring town, where there's a different municipal sales tax) to a furniture store and buy a new bed, which of course you have no way of transporting in your Prius, they charge you tax based on their location, even though the bed is going to be transported (for an additional fee) by either their truck or a contracted freight service to your home address. They don't charge you based on your home address.
Yes, actually it's almost impossibly hard to determine tax in so many other locales because of the extreme complexity. There've been many posts made about this, so I'm not going to repeat them here, but here's a quote from this article:
"Cnet kindly reminds us how convoluted this country’s tax structure can be. You can expect to pay sales tax on bottled soda in New Jersey, but not on bottled water, even cookies. A mink handbag is taxed in Rhode Island, but not a mink fur coat. It’s a big mess, in other words."
In addition, there's places where the location isn't good enough, because certain people get a tax and others don't, regardless of their address; this is the case on many Indian reservations.
No, you didn't. Where'd you get that idea? There's no way that some mom-n-pop mail order company in 1975 had the ability to figure the proper sales tax for 10,000 different tax jurisdictions across the country, just as they don't now. Sears Robuck wasn't the only mail order company back then.
Taxing the recipient of the goods based on the seller's location, with the collected tax going to the seller's state, would result in the recipient paying tax into a jurisdiction that does not represent her/him.
So what? When I drive across the state line and buy stuff over there, the tax goes to that state, even though I'm not represented there. If I don't like it, I don't have to drive over there. It's no different with internet sales, except that instead of going there physically, I'm going there virtually.
No, it shows that sales tax, as currently implemented in the Unites States, is a horrible mess and has a high frictional cost. It doesn't mean it has a high frictional cost all the time; if they wiped out all state and local sales taxes, and replaced them with a single federal sales tax, it'd be easy and would have much lower enforcement costs than federal income tax does (since you'd only need to collect from companies in this scenario, not individuals). I believe that's sorta how it's done in the EU with their VAT.
You are right about it being regressive in theory, but I'm not so sure that's true in practice. It's pretty hard to evade sales taxes: retailers won't sell things to you unless you pay it on the spot. But rich people come up with all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding income tax. The main problem with trying to tax rich people on purchases is that they frequently go out of the country to buy things, though I suppose if they go for a shopping trip in Paris they're going to pay a lot more tax there than they would in Manhattan, but I wonder what the tax rates are for megayachts built in the EU. Also, don't forget the costs of enforcement: I've read that the IRS uses 1/3 of the money it collects just to operate its own bureaucracy. So theoretically, if you replaced income taxes with sales taxes, you'd only need about 2/3 as much revenue, as sales taxes surely don't require remotely as much money and resources to enforce.
I wonder if that Cain guy was onto something with his 8-8-8 idea.
You are talking about things that you didn't in fact think about. You should go read the 16th, then go read the link to my comment where I explain that what is in the amendment is not in fact authorisation to collect an income tax. It is an allowance to tax 'income' (without defining what that is) without apportionment.
I DID read the 16th; it's extremely short and concise and there's really no way to misunderstand it. It lets you tax income. It doesn't have to define it, the definition is fairly obvious, and I'm sure court decisions have defined it more exactingly.
so the 'income tax' in fact was explained to be a corporate profit tax.
No, profit and income are two different things. The Amendment says "income", not "profit". If they had meant corporate profit, they would have said so. It just says that the government can tax income, that's it. There's no way for a rational person to misunderstand that simple language. And anything the SCOTUS says really doesn't matter, only the text of the Amendment. The SCOTUS can only interpret laws (and they don't always do so correctly, which can be changed in subsequent court decisions). They can also declare things "unconstitutional". However, they can't declare part of the Constitution to be unconstitutional, and that makes no sense whatsoever.
I only read part of your comment, but stopped wasting my time when it became clear that it was pure lunacy and that you completely fail to understand the simple truth that when something is part of the Constitution (this includes Amendments), that it's by definition Constitutional. (You also make some wacky arguments that the 16th conflicts with some earlier parts of the Constitution, including the 4th Amendment, which again shows you either don't understand or are willfully ignoring the simple truth that Amendments supersede older parts of the Constitution. It doesn't matter if the 16th violates the 4th as you allege, because the 16th supersedes the 4th. If the States all decided they wanted to ban free speech and private ownership of guns, they could easily pass a new Amendment completely overturning the 1st and 2nd. The only reason this doesn't happen is that it'd be extemely unpopular and because it's really hard to get all the States to agree on Constitutional changes, which of course was the intent of the Founders when they devised the Amendment process.)
Ok, so how does some little independently-owned mom-n-pop coffee shop in Washington handle it when someone visits from out-of-state, or from any other taxing jurisdiction for that matter?
Does that also apply when you've already paid taxes in the state where the purchase was made? So if I drive to the next state, and eat a meal there, and pay taxes on that meal (let's say that the taxes are actually higher in the restaurant's state than in my own), then I'm supposed to pay taxes again in my own state? That's double taxation, and doesn't sound quite right.
I'm not a lawyer, but the idea of forcing people to obey laws in jurisdictions other than where they're located seems wrong to me. How on earth is anyone supposed to figure out what the law is in tens of thousands of different jurisdictions across the country? It's impossible.
If they want to fix the sales tax "loophole", at the federal level, it's easy: pass a law requiring e-merchants to collect sales tax based on the merchant's physical location. That's already the way it is if you buy stuff in person: you dont pay sales tax based on your home address, you pay based on where the store is. Why should e-commerce be any different? Moreover, if you have some dispute with the tax authorities, it'd only be the authorities in your own state and locality, not some authorities 2500 miles away in some state and small town you've never heard of or visited before, and you'd go to your local courthouse to resolve the dispute, instead of being required to fly across the country to do so.
Not being from the USA, you obviously cannot comprehend just how insane many of our citizens are, and what kind of wacky convoluted arguments they'll come up with which defy all logic and reason.
Yes, you're right, as this is quite simple: if it's part of the Constitution (and that includes the Amendments), then by definition, it's "constitutional". Furthermore, newer Amendments overrule old ones, so it doesn't matter if the original Constitutional text, or some of Amendments 1-10 could be construed as forbidding income tax, because Amendment 16 explicitly allows it, so that's the final word on the matter. In fact, free speech, freedom of religion, etc. could be repealed, and we could be forced to quarter soldiers in our homes: all the government has to do is pass a new Constitutional Amendment overturning Amendments 1 and 4. Of course, it's very very hard to pass new Amendments (by design), so such a thing is unlikely, but it's possible.
WTF? Income tax is not unconstitutional, it's by definition part of the constitution. Go read the 16th Amendment; they passed that just so they could have an income tax. And no, it's not "voluntary"; the amendment is extremely concise and says nothing about such tax being "voluntary". There's a reason this is called an "amendment": it overrules anything older in the Constitution that might be construed as forbidding it. Just because you don't like a particular amendment (I don't care for the 17th myself) doesn't mean that what's in that amendment is "unconstitutional". The amendments ARE the Constitution.
That's irrelevant. Here's an analogy for you:
John lives in New Jersey, but only a few miles away from the Pennsylvania state line. The nearest town from him is 20 miles away, but just 3 miles away from him is Stroudsburg, PA, a decently-sized town. Because of proximity, naturally John regularly drives over the border to this town to do all his grocery shopping and other shopping. Which state does John pay his sales tax to? Simple: it all goes to Pennsylvania, not New Jersey which he resides in. Sales tax is levied at the merchant's location, not the customer's.
Here's another similar analogy: it's 1975, and the internet doesn't exist. John wants to buy a quadrophonic stereo system, and he wants a particular model. No one in his state has the model he wants, however he calls around a lot (costing him a pretty penny in long-distance charges), and finds one at a specialty retailer in Boston, several states away. He doesn't want to trust any private shippers or the USPS with delivering this expensive piece of delicate equipment, so he drives 5 hours to Boston to pick it up in person. At the shop there, he has to pay sales tax. Does the retailer charge him based on his home address? Of course not; he has to pay the exact same sales tax that any local Bostonite would, and that tax money goes to Massachusetts and Boston (assuming Boston has a separate municipal sales tax as many cities do). John's home state of New Jersey doesn't get a cent.
So will someone please explain why these sales tax initiatives require the retailer to charge tax based on the customer's location, rather than the retailer's location? If I set up a shop in Kansas (with no mail orders or internet orders), all my customers, no matter how far they drive to visit me, will have to pay sales tax to the state of Kansas. It doesn't matter if they have an Oregon driver's license and try to argue they don't owe tax because OR has no sales taxes. If you're in KS and buy something, yo pay KS sales tax. So why should it be an different for internet sales? It'd surely make calculations a lot easier for any merchants, big or small, and be a boon to their localities and states. Of course, one might argue that a bunch of merchants might move their operations to tax-free jurisdictions like OR, but that's just too bad for high-tax states, and besides, many small business people don't have the capital to just pack up and move cross-country based on this one factor, or they might not be willing to leave all their family and friends just because of that. And secondly, for large corporations with operations in many states, this would complicate things and would certainly require special legislation so they can't just stick a small office in a tax-free state to avoid charging sales tax.
Yes, but we're not talking about government surveillance or police abuses or other issues here, we're talking about libel and free speech. Yes, the US has a lot of issues, but crazy libel laws and restrictions on free speech aren't big problems here (yet), while obviously these are big problems in the UK. Focus on the issue at hand.
Your links seem to suggest that the defendant bears the burden of proving his/her statement to be true. In the US, it's the other way around: the plaintiff has to prove that the statement is false (and secondly, that it was made in a malicious manner), for the suit to go forward.
Unfortunately, yes, in the US you have to pay for your own legal costs to defend yourself. However, a libel case like this would most likely be immediately dismissed, so your legal costs would be minimal. Also, you're able to countersue for your legal costs and harassment, and depending on how ridiculous the libel claims are, you're likely to win, so the plaintiff will have to pay your legal costs (plus more, if they're found to have been malicious in their claims).
Yes, our criminal "justice" system is a farce. However, this has very little to do with libel laws, since those are a civil matter, not criminal.
Our civil justice system isn't all that great either (you can spend a fortune in legal fees defending yourself), but at least we don't have to worry much about ridiculous libel suits. Anything like this suit would be dismissed right away in our courts, and then the defendant could countersue for legal fees and harassment. For all our faults, we do have a very strong tradition of free speech that prevents abuses like this.
Oh please. There's no shortage of people, both American and not, criticizing the US for all kinds of things on this forum, and much of it rightfully so: wars, imperialism, the war on drugs, drone bombings, Guantanamo, corporatism run amok, corruption, "corporations are people", no universal health care, warrantless wiretapping, slow and expensive ISP and cellular service, I could go on and on.
For a refreshing change, we've hit on an issue where, for once, the US really does things right (free speech, and libel laws that actually make a lot of sense--something derogatory has to be proven not only untrue but also malicious for you to get in trouble for it). It's fine that Americans are proud of this.
And before you say it PDF is not the way to go
I wasn't going to say it; you're absolutely right, PDF isn't the way to go, and wasn't even meant for that. PDF is meant to be a portable way of saving content at a particular size; if your PDF is a booklet with all the pages at 8.5x11, then it's only going to look right printed at 8.5x11 (or shown on a screen of that size), otherwise the text will be too small. PDFs can be made in other sizes too, but if you make a PDF magazine with the pages set for a 7" screen, it's only going to look right on a 7" screen, and on larger screens it'll look blown-up, and on smaller screens it'll look too small again.
This is exactly what HTML and similar markup languages were designed for. Even so, however, when you combine text with photos, you're usually going to have problems of some kind, depending on how large or small you scale it, and you can't make a page look a certain way if you're really picky about what the page should look like.
Honestly, I don't think there's a way to solve this problem. Either you give up on having total control of formatting, and let it be handled more-or-less automatically, and design your pages so that they can be scaled between a wide array of sizes, or you retain total control of the smallest detail of formatting, but restrict yourself to a single size. Web designers have already encountered this problem, which is why a lot of web pages are restricted to a certain horizontal size so that they look right, even though on high-res wide-screen monitors with a maximized browser window, you wind up with big empty spaces on the sides.
because it's currently thought that much of the rampant diagnoses of ADHD in boys is due to female teachers not understanding gender differences in behavior between boys and girls.
Yet somehow this wasn't a problem 50+ years ago, even though back then there were even fewer male teachers in those K-3 grades.
BS. Medicine used to be dominated by men too (at least for the doctor positions), yet these days there's tons of female doctors, and they're having a hard time convincing women to go into nursing because the smart ones all want to be doctors instead (gee, wonder why...). Law used to be dominated by men too, and now there's plenty of female attorneys. Women have pushed into many male-dominated fields, but engineering isn't one of them. Then again, neither is construction.
What's the correlation? Well, engineering and construction share one trait which they don't share with law or medicine: prestige. Lawyers and doctors, in our society, are highly esteemed. Sure, lawyers have nasty jokes about them, but everyone thinks they make tons of money, and when an actual lawyer comes around, everyone bows down to him/her. I've seen it in my extended family; it's weird. But construction workers and engineers? Nope, they're seen as crappy jobs in this society. Construction work is seen as being for men who aren't very smart and only have muscle as a useful advantage. Engineering is seen as being for men who are socially retarded and "geeky". Programming is even worse. Why would women want to get into a profession that is viewed poorly by the population at large?
Contrast this with other cultures, namely India and China: in those places, engineering and programming are seen as prestigious careers, and pay extremely well (compared to other professions there), and as a result, there's tons of women in these STEM fields in those countries, unlike here in the West.
I'm an engineer, and if I had a son or daughter, I'd discourage them from STEM too, unless they plan to make a business out of it somehow. Working for a company is never going to get you very far. If a kid is smart enough for a STEM career, they're smart enough for a medical career instead, and they'll do far, far better there.
Also, here's a #7 for you:
7) Overhaul the election systems in this country and move to proportional or approval voting, or a system like Cordorcet or Borla, etc., so that we're not stuck with two shitty corrupt parties. This means adopting new systems not only at the local and state levels, but also a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Plurality system at the national level, and also to eliminate the hopelessly obsolete Electoral College.