The Laffer curve actually states that lowering tax rates *can* increase total revenues. Lowering tax rates from 1% to 0% would not increase total revenues (this is obvious and a tautology, but it clearly points out that the result of the rate change depends on the precise shape of the curve over that rate change; this is something Art never talks about, for some reason).
Anyway, my point was to counter your argument by discussing actual tax rates and pointing out that current rates, and increases (small ones, for sane definitions of small) on them are unlikely to push all that many people into situations where they stop working because of the tax burden they see on the additional income. I'm sure that a few people would, but if Joe the Plumber thought he was going to be making $260,000 by buying the business under McCain and $225,000 by buying it under Obama, he would buy the business either way (and have a very clear reason to vote for McCain...).
Uh-huh. I was pointing out that even in the worst case scenario, it is unlikely that you would see less than 1/2 of the result of your effort. For people going from 25% tax to 50% tax (very few people will do this under any tax plan anywhere, the Laffer curve will see to tax rates), returns are reduced from 75% to 50%, a reduction of 33%. After that level is achieved, there is no further diminishing.
That sets aside the effects of tax rates on the economy, but you would have to do some work to establish that 5% marginal increases for people enjoying a very high standard of living actually lead to a reduction in economic activity (if the revenue is spent on circuses, it probably does, but spend it on education and infrastructure, and it gets a little muddier).
Also, check out MAME and MESS if you are concerned about old hardware getting emulated (the short story is that it is getting emulated; MAME (at least, I don't follow MESS much but expect they take a similar approach) is more interested in documenting the hardware than they are in making things efficient).
Fannie and Freddie made a mess, but the real garbage loans were all privately securitized (which implies that Fannie and Freddie weren't the sole cause).
I still think that the implicit guarantee increased the amount of money available in the mortgage market, and thus increased the amount of money that people were willing to pay for houses (building the excitement and euphoria about housing prices, leading to the bubble). Reasonable lending standards, across the board, would have prevented fun-money from impacting housing prices, preventing people from spending fun-money on stuff that they can't really afford, preventing the mess that other people now have to pay for.
The tax increases that Obama is proposing will not lead to a situation where you do 50% more work for 10% more return. I'm not sure I think the increases are a good thing, but that is absurd hyperbole (I doubt even the most liberal crazy democrats would argue for anything beyond 50% tax rates, Reagan, at least, demonstrated that the government is not the best spender for every dollar).
It will be several decades (at least!) before easily repurposable iron and trees (for charcoal) are all gone.
It probably makes sense to store a book containing knowledge of flint knapping for your grandchildren, but there are other skills that will serve you better.
Are you really under the impression that other people are listening to your third party vote?
I'm not trying to slam here, I am actually curious as to your motivation (because as far as I can tell, no one who votes for a major party candidate gives a hoot about the tiny fraction that don't...).
Combine that with a questionably licensed (read that as not licensed at all), questionably safe executable downloaded from some random location on the internet and it seems like you could do a little better than using strings (of course, those questions may pose more difficulty for some than they do for others).
The 'magic' Google phrase appears to be "Professional Write download".
I see two solutions. One is to just have society pick up the tab (I don't see that it makes a great deal of sense to slice subsidized health care into a bunch of arbitrary pools). The other is conception insurance (that is, actual insurance against the potential baby having a genetic condition, not contraception or something snarky). Of course, people with a family history of genetic disorders would have to pay quite a bit more for conception insurance than people with cleaner histories, but I'm not sure I have a problem with that.
Insurance companies are better at being insurance companies than you are.
Pretty much everybody has a predisposition to something, and the research backing these predispositions isn't particularly rock solid (that is, someone who drinks a lot will probably have more health problems than someone with a gene that has sort of been associated with some forms of a particular cancer), so they would certainly use the information, but it wouldn't be the denial of coverage that you are talking about, it would be slightly higher rates.
Bush seems to be getting quite a lot of the Hoover comparisons. Even from the crazy right (Art Laffer probably isn't crazy, but he sure is pretty far right ideologically):
Looking at it, the biggest drop in income shown on the table would be from being married filing separately and going from earning $99,949 to $99,950, for a loss of $16. It is true in a very technical sense that an increase in income can result in a larger increase in tax, but the increase in income needs to be less than $20 for the *year*, and the increase in tax doesn't come from shifting brackets, it comes from the table (which you acknowledge, just expanding a bit here).
The effective rates are jumpy (that is, after deductions and credits and so on, the rates go all over the place). The base rates for given levels of income are not X% on all income, they are for dollars from y to z. If you look at this pdf and calculate the percent tax for $5,000, $10,000 and $20,000, you will see that I am correct:
What you are driving at is that 'You can trust me' isn't really particularly valuable information.
The upside of the whole semantic web thing is that you still need some sort of trust metric without it, so publishing structured data where possible (rather than removing/ignoring structure in the publishing process; this seems to be the real world outcome of all of the energy going into the semantic web) ends up making things better, even if it doesn't magically solve the trust or effort problems that are inherent in describing data.
Many people think trade is a great thing, but only when it directly benefits them (this is evident in their shopping in stores and so on). Trade that benefits someone else is generally not given such praise, especially if it might hurt a third party.
I'd rather have something like an iPod Touch as my throw it in the bag every day computer. I have no desire to pay for an iPod though, given that I don't need it for anything and flash prices are still plummeting (for me, ~100 GB is the stop worrying about capacity point, and they aren't there yet).
I do see room (again, for me, I'm not sure about generally) for such devices being separate from cell phones. I'd rather have a smaller, cheaper phone with its own battery, and then a second device for fiddling.
Another contender in the same space is all the portable navigation devices; once they hit huge memory and wifi access, there really isn't any difference.
Slashdot Mirror
The Laffer curve actually states that lowering tax rates *can* increase total revenues. Lowering tax rates from 1% to 0% would not increase total revenues (this is obvious and a tautology, but it clearly points out that the result of the rate change depends on the precise shape of the curve over that rate change; this is something Art never talks about, for some reason).
Anyway, my point was to counter your argument by discussing actual tax rates and pointing out that current rates, and increases (small ones, for sane definitions of small) on them are unlikely to push all that many people into situations where they stop working because of the tax burden they see on the additional income. I'm sure that a few people would, but if Joe the Plumber thought he was going to be making $260,000 by buying the business under McCain and $225,000 by buying it under Obama, he would buy the business either way (and have a very clear reason to vote for McCain...).
Social security and medicare are going to require $60 trillion dollars of funding, based on the current demographics of the U.S.
The $1 trillion that you are talking about is a footnote in dealing with actually funding them over the next 50 years.
Uh-huh. I was pointing out that even in the worst case scenario, it is unlikely that you would see less than 1/2 of the result of your effort. For people going from 25% tax to 50% tax (very few people will do this under any tax plan anywhere, the Laffer curve will see to tax rates), returns are reduced from 75% to 50%, a reduction of 33%. After that level is achieved, there is no further diminishing.
That sets aside the effects of tax rates on the economy, but you would have to do some work to establish that 5% marginal increases for people enjoying a very high standard of living actually lead to a reduction in economic activity (if the revenue is spent on circuses, it probably does, but spend it on education and infrastructure, and it gets a little muddier).
Did you not find DOSBox, or did it not work?
Also, check out MAME and MESS if you are concerned about old hardware getting emulated (the short story is that it is getting emulated; MAME (at least, I don't follow MESS much but expect they take a similar approach) is more interested in documenting the hardware than they are in making things efficient).
Fannie and Freddie made a mess, but the real garbage loans were all privately securitized (which implies that Fannie and Freddie weren't the sole cause).
I still think that the implicit guarantee increased the amount of money available in the mortgage market, and thus increased the amount of money that people were willing to pay for houses (building the excitement and euphoria about housing prices, leading to the bubble). Reasonable lending standards, across the board, would have prevented fun-money from impacting housing prices, preventing people from spending fun-money on stuff that they can't really afford, preventing the mess that other people now have to pay for.
The tax increases that Obama is proposing will not lead to a situation where you do 50% more work for 10% more return. I'm not sure I think the increases are a good thing, but that is absurd hyperbole (I doubt even the most liberal crazy democrats would argue for anything beyond 50% tax rates, Reagan, at least, demonstrated that the government is not the best spender for every dollar).
It will be several decades (at least!) before easily repurposable iron and trees (for charcoal) are all gone.
It probably makes sense to store a book containing knowledge of flint knapping for your grandchildren, but there are other skills that will serve you better.
Are you really under the impression that other people are listening to your third party vote?
I'm not trying to slam here, I am actually curious as to your motivation (because as far as I can tell, no one who votes for a major party candidate gives a hoot about the tiny fraction that don't...).
Various election markets are pricing towards a 55% Obama 45% McCain result (That's pretty rough; call it 53/47 before you call me an idiot).
Also, of potential interest to readers here, Carly Fiorina.
I wonder if he calls her his billion dollar girl.
They were, but they left 6 months ago.
Microsoft seems to think that Professional Write will at least export plain text (they even think it will export to early versions of Word):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156517
Combine that with a questionably licensed (read that as not licensed at all), questionably safe executable downloaded from some random location on the internet and it seems like you could do a little better than using strings (of course, those questions may pose more difficulty for some than they do for others).
The 'magic' Google phrase appears to be "Professional Write download".
I see two solutions. One is to just have society pick up the tab (I don't see that it makes a great deal of sense to slice subsidized health care into a bunch of arbitrary pools). The other is conception insurance (that is, actual insurance against the potential baby having a genetic condition, not contraception or something snarky). Of course, people with a family history of genetic disorders would have to pay quite a bit more for conception insurance than people with cleaner histories, but I'm not sure I have a problem with that.
Insurance companies are better at being insurance companies than you are.
Pretty much everybody has a predisposition to something, and the research backing these predispositions isn't particularly rock solid (that is, someone who drinks a lot will probably have more health problems than someone with a gene that has sort of been associated with some forms of a particular cancer), so they would certainly use the information, but it wouldn't be the denial of coverage that you are talking about, it would be slightly higher rates.
Don't personify the internets!
We don't want them getting the idea that they are alive.
Your unconscious mind is a hell of a typist.
If you really like the hardware, get floola or something like it:
http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=WiwiHome
They explain how to add songs to the ipod, and how to copy songs off of the ipod, in the help.
Bush seems to be getting quite a lot of the Hoover comparisons. Even from the crazy right (Art Laffer probably isn't crazy, but he sure is pretty far right ideologically):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122506830024970697.html
Presumably, the people who do user support.
Looking at it, the biggest drop in income shown on the table would be from being married filing separately and going from earning $99,949 to $99,950, for a loss of $16. It is true in a very technical sense that an increase in income can result in a larger increase in tax, but the increase in income needs to be less than $20 for the *year*, and the increase in tax doesn't come from shifting brackets, it comes from the table (which you acknowledge, just expanding a bit here).
Of course, I didn't mail the ballot.
The effective rates are jumpy (that is, after deductions and credits and so on, the rates go all over the place). The base rates for given levels of income are not X% on all income, they are for dollars from y to z. If you look at this pdf and calculate the percent tax for $5,000, $10,000 and $20,000, you will see that I am correct:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf
Thank you for confirming my point though.
What you are driving at is that 'You can trust me' isn't really particularly valuable information.
The upside of the whole semantic web thing is that you still need some sort of trust metric without it, so publishing structured data where possible (rather than removing/ignoring structure in the publishing process; this seems to be the real world outcome of all of the energy going into the semantic web) ends up making things better, even if it doesn't magically solve the trust or effort problems that are inherent in describing data.
Many people think trade is a great thing, but only when it directly benefits them (this is evident in their shopping in stores and so on). Trade that benefits someone else is generally not given such praise, especially if it might hurt a third party.
I'd rather have something like an iPod Touch as my throw it in the bag every day computer. I have no desire to pay for an iPod though, given that I don't need it for anything and flash prices are still plummeting (for me, ~100 GB is the stop worrying about capacity point, and they aren't there yet).
I do see room (again, for me, I'm not sure about generally) for such devices being separate from cell phones. I'd rather have a smaller, cheaper phone with its own battery, and then a second device for fiddling.
Another contender in the same space is all the portable navigation devices; once they hit huge memory and wifi access, there really isn't any difference.