Is my impression that most graduating doctors get hammered with biochemistry incorrect?
I'm pretty sure that if mechanics trained like doctors, they would be taking fluid mechanics classes to understand combustion, and materials and metallurgy classes to understand welding.
Of course, then they use practical rules of thumb later on, in order to deploy the best treatment at reasonable prices.
At least the "larger impact on quality of life" way of looking at it leads to a discussion of whether they are receiving government services equal to what they are paying in taxes. The uniformed "poor people pay a higher percentage" makes that discussion awful hard to have.
The state and local taxes don't skew it enough, at least not here (in Michigan).
At most, state income and sales taxes would add 10% to the lowest income group (there are state income tax deductions that lower the effective rate of the state income taxes, and food+toiletries are not taxed, so the actual effect is lower), bumping their rate to a punishing 15%, vs the 25% of *federal alone* for the highest fifth. That does not account for property taxes, but low income people are not expending an enormous portion of their income on property taxes (some fraction of their rent, most likely, so maybe 5% on the high side). In Michigan, I haven't paid local income taxes in the 3 different areas I have lived in, so I can't really speak to how punishing those get (but then again, if a locale chooses to have high taxes, how do you blame the rest of the country for it?).
Things are a little worse if you add 10% to the second quintile (they go up to 20%, versus that 25% federal), but somewhere around there (or perhaps at the start of the third quintile), it isn't clear you are talking about low income people anymore.
So sure, maybe the state/local situation in Michigan is particularly progressive, and maybe things should be even more progressive (making them regressive vs what is 'fair'), but nominally, claiming that the U.S. tax system is, overall, regressive, just doesn't seem to hold up. You could argue that the merely well off are paying more taxes than they should be compared to the wealthy, but nobody ever does that.
My supermarket stocks dozens of brands of bar soaps that are not antibacterial (er, that do not contain antibiotics) and at least 3 brands of liquid soap that are not antibacterial.
You are full of it.
It is certainly disappointing that so many soaps include antibiotics, but hyperbole isn't going to help that situation any.
The argument is that the lower your income, the more of it you spend on basic needs, so a sales tax tends to take away money that low income people would use for things like food, whereas it only comes out of disposable income for higher income people.
This is why things like the fair tax include a prebate.
It depends a great deal on how you go about defining rich people.
Personally, I don't think that being a billionaire is typical for rich people (there are many thousands of people worth several million dollars for each person worth billions).
I'll keep saying it: I'm not arguing rich people pay enough taxes (or too much); I'm arguing that they pay more taxes than other people, both in actual dollars and based on percentage of income. There are certainly hundreds of cases where this is not true (and then pretty much only percent-wise), but as a group, it is true.
I mean, how much is this costing them, and if they happened to win, they would get huge sums.
Same thing with all the tax breaks that people complain about. They didn't lose their monopolies or get punished in any way, and they got the breaks anyway.
This is bullshit, but it isn't a symptom of bad management (because there aren't any consequences).
There aren't that many people that do that, compared to the numbers of people who simply have high earned income working for somebody else. Somehow or another, as a group, the top 1% are paying an effective rate of 30%, so I don't find it particularly likely that the majority of the top 1% are paying less than that (it's mathematically possible, but not likely). I'm not real worried about why they pay those taxes (which is basically what we are discussing).
People like Warren Buffett are certainly getting a sweetheart deal out of that, but he has demonstrated that he is extremely good at deploying capital, so it isn't exactly bad for the country to let him invest his money (and the amount of taxes he pays in real dollars is certainly significant compared to the majority of folks). I guess there could be some work to correct for the difference between the uber-rich and the merely-incredibly-rich, but as a group, they are paying high effective rates. The top 20%, and certainly the top 40%, are not deriving the majority of their income from investments.
One special issue with a guy like Buffett is that he has probably never paid any taxes on more than $55 billion of his nominal wealth. That seems pretty unfair, but on the other hand, he has never accessed any of that wealth either (and Berkshire has certainly paid taxes over the years).
Read that link more carefully. They rolled capital gains into the stated incomes.
Warren Buffett is a hilarious special case. The majority of the top 1% do not have millions of dollars of capital gains income, they have millions of dollars of earned income.
I'm not trying to argue about whether the rates are appropriate, I'm just countering the notion that they are heavily skewed downward.
Sure, but in my state (Michigan), if an individual spent all of their after tax income on goods that had a sales tax, they would be paying a little less than an additional 10.35% to the state (that's 4.35% income tax to the state, and then 6% of what is left, so it will be a little less than 6% of overall income). It happens that food and rent are not taxed (and there is a tax break, for many people, on income spent on housing).
Property taxes are a lot harder to treat (especially when you try to decide how they impact renters), but they are generally pretty much progressive, as people that own/use less valuable property generally pay less (and it is further complicated by the fact that they also generally receive less services).
I suppose we could quibble over households vs individuals, but note on that page, there is no instance where moving up into a higher income group results in a cut in overall taxes.
And maybe the wealthy should be paying even higher taxes, I don't know, but the idea that they are paying lower taxes is simply false.
Companies should be able to protect sales channels, but if stuff leaks out, the legal process should focus on punishing the leak, not the downstream beneficiaries of the leak, and the onus should be on the company to show proof that a merchant should be complying with the MAP, not just a magic smash-wand.
Re:"soon-to-be Leader of the Free World"
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
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· Score: 1
Abortions aren't available free from the state, but they almost are, so that is kind of strange.
Divorce is pretty widely available, I'm not sure where you got that.
Also, I can drink all I want on a Sunday, I just can't buy alcohol before noon (as far as I can figure, this is a holdover from the days when communities went to church together, it is an attempt to get the drunks to go too; these days, we don't have communities anymore).
There is certainly a prohibitionist bent to the laws here, but we aren't the wacky theocracy that you are imagining.
If it were McCain, we would be talking about how he is thinking of getting an 8 track put in the presidential limo, so that 'he can keep up with the kids'.
You can't really load rockbox onto most of the ipods that Apple sells at this point.
I guess they probably won't spend all that much time porting to new devices until the hardware driving 32+ gb flash players starts to shake out and stabilize.
At the moment, the most up-to-date players that it runs on are the ipod video and some of the sandisk Sansa models.
I'm not a rocket scientist either, but if it were viable, it might chop off enough of the bottom of the fuel pyramid to make other missions easier or cheaper.
For hand-wavy reference purposes, a 3 million kg Saturn V launches about 47,000 kg into lunar vicinity, and about 118,000 kg into leo:
Fail what? The evidence used to claim that I was being dishonest came from the damn link I posted. What a cover up. I see the point that being incredibly explicit about the fact that they were talking about if-he-died would have been a good idea on the internets, where everybody knows you are a dog, but I wasn't trying to do a frame up or manipulate anything, I was just being terse.
The part where I said "According to Cringely" was intended to get people to read the article for themselves before seizing on what I said about it, so whatever to you sir.
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If I knew a woman that was dead set on getting plastic surgery, I would ask her who did her work...
Is my impression that most graduating doctors get hammered with biochemistry incorrect?
I'm pretty sure that if mechanics trained like doctors, they would be taking fluid mechanics classes to understand combustion, and materials and metallurgy classes to understand welding.
Of course, then they use practical rules of thumb later on, in order to deploy the best treatment at reasonable prices.
At least the "larger impact on quality of life" way of looking at it leads to a discussion of whether they are receiving government services equal to what they are paying in taxes. The uniformed "poor people pay a higher percentage" makes that discussion awful hard to have.
If the diseases were not debilitating and contagious, we could let the problem solve itself.
The state and local taxes don't skew it enough, at least not here (in Michigan).
At most, state income and sales taxes would add 10% to the lowest income group (there are state income tax deductions that lower the effective rate of the state income taxes, and food+toiletries are not taxed, so the actual effect is lower), bumping their rate to a punishing 15%, vs the 25% of *federal alone* for the highest fifth. That does not account for property taxes, but low income people are not expending an enormous portion of their income on property taxes (some fraction of their rent, most likely, so maybe 5% on the high side). In Michigan, I haven't paid local income taxes in the 3 different areas I have lived in, so I can't really speak to how punishing those get (but then again, if a locale chooses to have high taxes, how do you blame the rest of the country for it?).
Things are a little worse if you add 10% to the second quintile (they go up to 20%, versus that 25% federal), but somewhere around there (or perhaps at the start of the third quintile), it isn't clear you are talking about low income people anymore.
So sure, maybe the state/local situation in Michigan is particularly progressive, and maybe things should be even more progressive (making them regressive vs what is 'fair'), but nominally, claiming that the U.S. tax system is, overall, regressive, just doesn't seem to hold up. You could argue that the merely well off are paying more taxes than they should be compared to the wealthy, but nobody ever does that.
My supermarket stocks dozens of brands of bar soaps that are not antibacterial (er, that do not contain antibiotics) and at least 3 brands of liquid soap that are not antibacterial.
You are full of it.
It is certainly disappointing that so many soaps include antibiotics, but hyperbole isn't going to help that situation any.
The argument is that the lower your income, the more of it you spend on basic needs, so a sales tax tends to take away money that low income people would use for things like food, whereas it only comes out of disposable income for higher income people.
This is why things like the fair tax include a prebate.
It depends a great deal on how you go about defining rich people.
Personally, I don't think that being a billionaire is typical for rich people (there are many thousands of people worth several million dollars for each person worth billions).
I'll keep saying it: I'm not arguing rich people pay enough taxes (or too much); I'm arguing that they pay more taxes than other people, both in actual dollars and based on percentage of income. There are certainly hundreds of cases where this is not true (and then pretty much only percent-wise), but as a group, it is true.
The telecoms are generally well run.
I mean, how much is this costing them, and if they happened to win, they would get huge sums.
Same thing with all the tax breaks that people complain about. They didn't lose their monopolies or get punished in any way, and they got the breaks anyway.
This is bullshit, but it isn't a symptom of bad management (because there aren't any consequences).
Hmmm. I think my point still works if you switch "pretty much progressive" with "not punitively regressive".
There aren't that many people that do that, compared to the numbers of people who simply have high earned income working for somebody else. Somehow or another, as a group, the top 1% are paying an effective rate of 30%, so I don't find it particularly likely that the majority of the top 1% are paying less than that (it's mathematically possible, but not likely). I'm not real worried about why they pay those taxes (which is basically what we are discussing).
People like Warren Buffett are certainly getting a sweetheart deal out of that, but he has demonstrated that he is extremely good at deploying capital, so it isn't exactly bad for the country to let him invest his money (and the amount of taxes he pays in real dollars is certainly significant compared to the majority of folks). I guess there could be some work to correct for the difference between the uber-rich and the merely-incredibly-rich, but as a group, they are paying high effective rates. The top 20%, and certainly the top 40%, are not deriving the majority of their income from investments.
One special issue with a guy like Buffett is that he has probably never paid any taxes on more than $55 billion of his nominal wealth. That seems pretty unfair, but on the other hand, he has never accessed any of that wealth either (and Berkshire has certainly paid taxes over the years).
Read that link more carefully. They rolled capital gains into the stated incomes.
Warren Buffett is a hilarious special case. The majority of the top 1% do not have millions of dollars of capital gains income, they have millions of dollars of earned income.
I'm not trying to argue about whether the rates are appropriate, I'm just countering the notion that they are heavily skewed downward.
Sure, but in my state (Michigan), if an individual spent all of their after tax income on goods that had a sales tax, they would be paying a little less than an additional 10.35% to the state (that's 4.35% income tax to the state, and then 6% of what is left, so it will be a little less than 6% of overall income). It happens that food and rent are not taxed (and there is a tax break, for many people, on income spent on housing).
Property taxes are a lot harder to treat (especially when you try to decide how they impact renters), but they are generally pretty much progressive, as people that own/use less valuable property generally pay less (and it is further complicated by the fact that they also generally receive less services).
False. Here is my source:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/EffectiveTaxRates.shtml#1011537
Do you have a source for your claim?
I suppose we could quibble over households vs individuals, but note on that page, there is no instance where moving up into a higher income group results in a cut in overall taxes.
And maybe the wealthy should be paying even higher taxes, I don't know, but the idea that they are paying lower taxes is simply false.
Companies should be able to protect sales channels, but if stuff leaks out, the legal process should focus on punishing the leak, not the downstream beneficiaries of the leak, and the onus should be on the company to show proof that a merchant should be complying with the MAP, not just a magic smash-wand.
Abortions aren't available free from the state, but they almost are, so that is kind of strange.
Divorce is pretty widely available, I'm not sure where you got that.
Also, I can drink all I want on a Sunday, I just can't buy alcohol before noon (as far as I can figure, this is a holdover from the days when communities went to church together, it is an attempt to get the drunks to go too; these days, we don't have communities anymore).
There is certainly a prohibitionist bent to the laws here, but we aren't the wacky theocracy that you are imagining.
If it were McCain, we would be talking about how he is thinking of getting an 8 track put in the presidential limo, so that 'he can keep up with the kids'.
His advisers aren't that stupid.
You can't really load rockbox onto most of the ipods that Apple sells at this point.
I guess they probably won't spend all that much time porting to new devices until the hardware driving 32+ gb flash players starts to shake out and stabilize.
At the moment, the most up-to-date players that it runs on are the ipod video and some of the sandisk Sansa models.
four spaces.
I'm not a rocket scientist either, but if it were viable, it might chop off enough of the bottom of the fuel pyramid to make other missions easier or cheaper.
For hand-wavy reference purposes, a 3 million kg Saturn V launches about 47,000 kg into lunar vicinity, and about 118,000 kg into leo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V
From where I sit, the link was context.
I would see it completely differently if they had had the decency to go to him about it, rather than talking about it behind his back.
Fail what? The evidence used to claim that I was being dishonest came from the damn link I posted. What a cover up. I see the point that being incredibly explicit about the fact that they were talking about if-he-died would have been a good idea on the internets, where everybody knows you are a dog, but I wasn't trying to do a frame up or manipulate anything, I was just being terse.
The part where I said "According to Cringely" was intended to get people to read the article for themselves before seizing on what I said about it, so whatever to you sir.
Most voters are only taxpayers in a nominal sort of way. If you pretend that entitlement program taxes aren't really taxes, the skew is even worse.