You already subsidize other rich people's other toys.
For example, some of your local taxes may be paying to clean up beachfront property that raises the values of expensive beachfront houses that the wealthy own.
Or you might be paying taxes that are spent to create boat docks so the wealthy have the places to park their yachts.
Or repairs to a drawbridge that is used by the wealthy to get their yachts in and out of a harbor.
You're paying for roads that the wealthy run their big-rigs on to deliver their raw materials to each other to create their widgets that perhaps only other wealthy people can afford.
You're paying for the runways they land their private jets on, you're paying for the air-traffic controllers that direct their private jets, hell, you're subsidizing the companies that make their fuel their jets use.
You're subsiding their massive insurance contracts, so when 9 guys plow their Ferrari's into each other in Japan, everyone's insurance rates go up.
In fact, I pretty much cannot think of ANYTHING that the wealthy pay for by themselves -- which is perhaps, why they are so goddam wealthy.
Please, take a stress pill and sit down for a moment. My point is that YOU don't get to vote on where your tax dollars get spent, and there's plenty of government waste to bitch and moan about.
All you can do is vote in some representative who you HOPE will take your interests with him to D.C., and somehow, your vote will translate into his vote on spending bills.
And just as you can bitch and moan about money wasted on electric car subsidies, I can bitch and moan about hyper expensive jets that don't do anything. Or Oil Company subsidies, or bridges to Nowhere, or truck subsidies to small businesses (which is why every doctor owns a Hummer).
So in other words, please shut up. If you want a vote in how money is spent in government, then you'd better run for office, or run a lobby. Because right now, they way the US system is set up, you have no say.
You're forgetting that's the price if you have to buy all the parts retail, and one person assembles it. Now try and imagine a company assembling these, they are buying the parts wholesale and in bulk, which lowers the overall cost of the finished product.
How much would your phone cost if you had to buy all the individual parts retail by themselves?
Well maybe if you include all the images and the PDFs. I have a rather extensive website and if I recall, even when I backed up the entire thing, it came out to maybe 76MB, and that included all the image hosting I was doing for a different website.
The problem is the same problem we're having now with "windows" software. Bloated because it's being generated by machine rather than hand-coded. All these WYSIWYG HTML code generators that allow people to just drag and drop text and pictures and let Dreamweaver do the rest -- or worse -- those crazy websites that just build other websites (i.e blogger).
The point is: You can get away with a lot less, but nobody cares because bandwidth is fast and cheap and so is processing time. If the NY Times took 10 minutes to load, you'd better believe they would do something to optimize it.
But that's like asking modern programmers to hand-optimize their code for office applications. It's just not going to happen. MS Word loads and runs fast enough even though the code for that thing is a nightmare. Yet, for the majority of what you use Word for, the free, scaled down desk accessory "Wordpad" is more than enough.
How many days have you worked this year to subsidize a plane that has no equal in the air, constantly crashes and kills it's pilots and yet Lockheed, instead of being fired for making a piece-of-shit, is given MORE money to try and fix all the problems with a plane we do not need because if we ever get into a shooting war with a country that has enough air power to challenge even our old F-16's, then air forces are going to be the least of our worries.
Oh, and it's cheaper too. In the meantime, I'll stick with my Honda Reflex scooter. 70mpg, and will pretty much go anywhere and do anything. Not so great though in the snow and bad weather, but, I'm learning to deal with that.
It's a lobbying group for businesses. Therefore, the Chinese can hack away all they want with my blessing. No harm done.
In fact, considering the harm brought onto US citizens by the Chamber of Commerce, the more damage done to them by the Chinese, the better it is for American citizens.
If we were serious about ending slavery, we should stop doing business with Saudi Arabia. We just happen to look the other way because they have us by the balls due to the fact that we are addicted to their oil.
But I find the whole thing ironic. I wonder how America would have responded if, in 1811, a company in say... Spain had donated 11 million to wiping out slavery in the USA.
Yes, yes, as if I've never had any friends who also might have tried and hated Android. Yes, you're so right, I'm a completely clueless Apple Fanboi, who decided after no research whatsoever that iOS was the way to go.
Dude seriously, I see that *you* posted as anonymous coward. I guess you don't have the Karma to Burn that I do.
Seriously, Treo wasn't "mainstream"? Between the Treo and the Handspring they were the first "smartphones" ever! I suppose you also consider Blackberry to be a "niche" phone?
Don't get me wrong. Android is OK. But it has to make some serious strides (and figure out how to remain open while avoiding the tons of malware that are out there already), in order to really become great. And early Android phones were terrible. Trust me on that one.
And I liked my Palm Pilot so much, I bought a Treo. However, the Treo was a terrible phone, I had to spend extra and buy it on eBay because the 680 wasn't supported by t-Mobile and for years I lived with it. Then, finally I started phone shopping.
A friend lent me his Nokia 900 and I found it to be un-useable. It interpreted *everything* as me wanting to use the device, including putting it back into a belt-holster... So it would start playing videos in my pocket, and when I wanted to really use it to make a phone call, the battery was dead.
I didn't like the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, but, when the iPhone4 came out, it finally supported a bluetooth keyboard. So, I bought the iPhone & keyboard. When I'm away from the keyboard, I've learned to live with the onscreen keyboard.
For the last year and 2 months now, it's been OK. I haven't wanted to run my phone over with my car, something I've wanted to do to both the Treo and the Nokia. Sure, it doesn't do everything, but, I have to admit it's better than what I was getting previously. The keyboard has made taking notes and writing emails very easy, making the phone a 60% desktop replacement.
It's a fairly good PDA, and even with AT&T service, it's been a use-able phone. All it has to do is not suck entirely, which tends to be what the other products do.
Considered that kids want what the other kids have, my guess is that this quote from Nokia that kids want a Windows Phone is rubbish. Kids want an iPhone. Apple is already on track to be the biggest phone-maker in the world.
Nokia, RIM, Samsung, and Sony do not have a chance unless they undertake some serious R&D and make something equally revolutionary. And somehow "revolutionary" isn't a word *anyone* associates with Microsoft. Windows phone ain't it, any more than GEOS phone. WebOS could have been it, but Palm and the HP both screwed that pooch.
Usenet, Gopher, Archie, Veronica MUDs, Cleveland Freenet, Dorsai Embassy, heck even Fidonet, and there were thousands of BBSes that never charged a dime (I should know, I ran one back in the day). The point is; there was a huge interconnected network, and it ran just fine without ads.
I'm going to assume you're either 12, or you never connected a modem to a computer until 1995.
This has to be from an American news source. I was listening to Radio Japan (shortwave radio geek) last night when they also announced Canada's stance, but claimed last night that it was because China and the *United States* do not adhere to the accord, so it's pointless, because the two biggest polluters in the world are ignoring the treaty.
Funny how the USA gets left out of the summary here. Hrmmm. Shades of 1984 when the news is changed to make your country seem not as bad as it actually is. I'd be suspicious of anything I read or hear from American news sources. Clearly there's substantial bias.
Yes, that was for the effects work. All the live action was shot with a Panavision camera, as Panavision has a near-monopoly on Hollywood due to contracts/union deals.
However, because of the demands of the effects work, the only thing accurate enough to shoot 10 passes exactly the same (at the time) was Disney's Vistavision cameras.
Remember that hardly anybody had been doing blue-screen at the time for over a decade. Even 2001 was shot mostly with "in camera" effects work (which is why it's not grainy, you never see matte boxes but to it's detriment, nothing can pass in front of each other, which would have made shooting the battle sequences near impossible).
If this is the Microsoft I'm familiar with, it'll probably be: "Windows isn't done 'till Office won't run." I mean, we are talking about an entity that cannot keep interfaces consistent across divisions of the same company.
I am forced to work with Outlook 2007 under Windows XP. What a nightmare. Copy/Paste doesn't even work consistently within the application itself. Sometimes you'll copy text out of a message and paste into a reply of the same thread, and either the OS or the App will add extra returns and spaces/tabs for no apparent reason. Annoying.
Worse still is Outlook's annoying habit of "are you sure" for EVERYTHING. Find an email with an attachment, open it, close the email. Windows/Outlook asks "Save changes to attachment?" NO. All I did was OPEN it, I didn't change squat! Why the app can't figure this out is a MAJOR FAILURE of Q/A.
So trust me, it'll be Office that breaks under Win8. Or something else critical. Or maybe it'll be by design so that everyone that "upgrades" to Win8 will be forced to buy new copies of Office.
I'm *not* a programmer. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the concepts, I just never bothered to pick up the syntax.
15 years back, I worked in a small software company that did "multimedia" titles for the then booming 'CDROM entertainment' industry, which book publishers were into in a big way, just before the internet changed all that.
When we got a project, we'd often have to find people familiar with Macromind Director, a rapid-development authorware environment.
People would waltz into our office, claiming to be wizards in 'lingo', which was Director's built-in programming language. Although Director had a "score" in which to build your projects, we used it only to hold placeholders, and everything was built in code.
Anyhow, the point is; to weed out the real people from the ones who thought they knew what they were talking about, we developed a few simple questions which would tell us just how clever each candidate was.
And example would be: We would ask the candidate "You have a screen with 50 buttons on it -- but Director has only 32 channels on the score - how do you make it so that all 50 are clickable?"
The obvious solution is to parse the screen - X-Y co-ordinates; very simple, elegant, and should be a basic answer to anyone that's even written Hello World.
You wouldn't believe the responses we would get, people would outright lie to try and come up with a response, everything from "use the extra channels in lingo" to "channel swapping", etc., point is -- within 3 questions we could usually tell who was a programmer versus who was just saying that, or even thought they were a programmer because they'd done a few simple tricks in Director.
My guess is that with outsourcing, NONE of the upper management who makes these decisions is enough of an engineer to really quantify if the outsourcer is really representing a company full of skilled programmers or a company full of book-in-lap hacks.
So, they are likely misrepresenting their skill set, but that's true everywhere. The actual number of really talented programmers is always smaller than you think, and everyone else out there may think they are great, but that's only because they've never come up against the really, really good ones.
"A method and procedure for placing the same content, with a slightly different summary and headline on the front page, sometimes within mere hours of each other."
There may be prior art, but I've never seen it done better or more frequently than here.
It sounds like someone read the last half of Snow Crash and thought that this was somehow a good idea. Either that, or the Wikipedia article on L. Ron Hubbard, and figured he could get a lot of underage girls that way.
Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are separate entities as much as your delusion would have you think otherwise and each entity pays it's own taxes.
Hey, I'm part of the middle class and pay 30%, but since I'm one of 200 million, that makes my effective tax rate 6000% !!!
Secondly, anyone who got rich didn't *ever* pay their full rate -- Warren Buffet himself says that his tax rate is 17%, so, your entire diatribe about 45% is utter bull.
You wrote: "Capital gains is where you have taken your savings (that were previously earned, somehow, and have already paid income taxes on at the EARNED rate)" --- Yeah... Keep shilling for the rich. That like saying "I went to the store and bought socks, and they charged me 8% sales tax, which is on money I already paid taxes for because it came from my income."
You talking BULLSHIT. When you make money, you pay taxes. If you're making money in the stock market, you're going to pay taxes. End of story.
And frankly, the rich should be gloriously happy they aren't paying SALES TAX as well considering they are buying and selling.
Tell me, why is there one set of laws for the rest of us and another set of laws for the rich? Why is it that if I buy socks, I have to pay 8% tax, but if it buy stocks, I pay 0% tax?
And then you're screaming about money earned on those stocks? Get over it. Capital Gains should be taxed at 30% at least. It's earned income, just like the interest in your bank account.
Forget it. This dude's a FOX News Shill. Either that or he's too dumb to realize that almost all the wealthy are paying 15% or less tax rate due to Capital Gains.
Parent Post: Please find me ONE example of a wealthy (i.e. making a million or more per year) person who pays even 35% -- my guess is that you will not.
You wrote: " In fact they tend (on average) a higher percentage "
Citation needed.
In fact, the very wealthy pay a far lower percentage on their money earned that you do. Warren Buffet himself has stated that his secretary, who probably earns a $60,000 to $80,000 per year salary, pays a higher percentage of her income as taxes than he does, and most people cannot even fathom what Buffet makes per year (hint: more than a billion).
While YOU are paying taxes (probably automatically deducted from your paycheck), you're likely having 25% to 30% of your pay going into taxes.
The rich have most of their income coming not from "working" (i.e., payroll), their income is coming from the stock market, where their money is making money for them. These are "capital gains", which are taxed at 15% -- let me repeat that in case you missed it -- at least 10% lower or maybe as much as half of what YOU are taxed at.
And that assumes that they are being completely honest with their incomes. Most of the wealthy have complicated accounting, offshore accounts, tax havens, and other grey-area dodges/loopholes that allow many of them to come in well under the 15% tax rate.
Anyone who assumes that the Rich are paying their fair share is either naive, or woefully misinformed.
Exxon Mobile for example, paid ZERO corporate taxes last year, in fact, they were GIVEN money by the government in the form of energy subsidies. General Electric also paid ZERO corporate taxes. This is while they are laying off thousands and raking in record profits.
Please find me an example of any wealthy individual or corporate entity that pays as much in taxes by percentage as the rest of us do.
Slashdot Mirror
You already subsidize other rich people's other toys.
For example, some of your local taxes may be paying to clean up beachfront property that raises the values of expensive beachfront houses that the wealthy own.
Or you might be paying taxes that are spent to create boat docks so the wealthy have the places to park their yachts.
Or repairs to a drawbridge that is used by the wealthy to get their yachts in and out of a harbor.
You're paying for roads that the wealthy run their big-rigs on to deliver their raw materials to each other to create their widgets that perhaps only other wealthy people can afford.
You're paying for the runways they land their private jets on, you're paying for the air-traffic controllers that direct their private jets, hell, you're subsidizing the companies that make their fuel their jets use.
You're subsiding their massive insurance contracts, so when 9 guys plow their Ferrari's into each other in Japan, everyone's insurance rates go up.
In fact, I pretty much cannot think of ANYTHING that the wealthy pay for by themselves -- which is perhaps, why they are so goddam wealthy.
Please, take a stress pill and sit down for a moment. My point is that YOU don't get to vote on where your tax dollars get spent, and there's plenty of government waste to bitch and moan about.
All you can do is vote in some representative who you HOPE will take your interests with him to D.C., and somehow, your vote will translate into his vote on spending bills.
And just as you can bitch and moan about money wasted on electric car subsidies, I can bitch and moan about hyper expensive jets that don't do anything. Or Oil Company subsidies, or bridges to Nowhere, or truck subsidies to small businesses (which is why every doctor owns a Hummer).
So in other words, please shut up. If you want a vote in how money is spent in government, then you'd better run for office, or run a lobby. Because right now, they way the US system is set up, you have no say.
You're forgetting that's the price if you have to buy all the parts retail, and one person assembles it. Now try and imagine a company assembling these, they are buying the parts wholesale and in bulk, which lowers the overall cost of the finished product.
How much would your phone cost if you had to buy all the individual parts retail by themselves?
Well maybe if you include all the images and the PDFs. I have a rather extensive website and if I recall, even when I backed up the entire thing, it came out to maybe 76MB, and that included all the image hosting I was doing for a different website.
The problem is the same problem we're having now with "windows" software. Bloated because it's being generated by machine rather than hand-coded. All these WYSIWYG HTML code generators that allow people to just drag and drop text and pictures and let Dreamweaver do the rest -- or worse -- those crazy websites that just build other websites (i.e blogger).
The point is: You can get away with a lot less, but nobody cares because bandwidth is fast and cheap and so is processing time. If the NY Times took 10 minutes to load, you'd better believe they would do something to optimize it.
But that's like asking modern programmers to hand-optimize their code for office applications. It's just not going to happen. MS Word loads and runs fast enough even though the code for that thing is a nightmare. Yet, for the majority of what you use Word for, the free, scaled down desk accessory "Wordpad" is more than enough.
How many days have you worked this year to subsidize a plane that has no equal in the air, constantly crashes and kills it's pilots and yet Lockheed, instead of being fired for making a piece-of-shit, is given MORE money to try and fix all the problems with a plane we do not need because if we ever get into a shooting war with a country that has enough air power to challenge even our old F-16's, then air forces are going to be the least of our worries.
This gets 125MPG, is a diesel/electric hybrid, and is much cooler looking than any Tesla.
http://reversetrike.com/xr3-hybrid.html
Oh, and it's cheaper too. In the meantime, I'll stick with my Honda Reflex scooter. 70mpg, and will pretty much go anywhere and do anything. Not so great though in the snow and bad weather, but, I'm learning to deal with that.
It's a lobbying group for businesses. Therefore, the Chinese can hack away all they want with my blessing. No harm done.
In fact, considering the harm brought onto US citizens by the Chamber of Commerce, the more damage done to them by the Chinese, the better it is for American citizens.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/14/world/asia/afghanistan-rape-victim/index.html
And this is in a country we're throwing billions of dollars at. We have troops ON THE GROUND.
And yet, if a woman gets raped in that country, *she* goes to jail. It's outrageous.
If we were serious about ending slavery, we should stop doing business with Saudi Arabia. We just happen to look the other way because they have us by the balls due to the fact that we are addicted to their oil.
But I find the whole thing ironic. I wonder how America would have responded if, in 1811, a company in say... Spain had donated 11 million to wiping out slavery in the USA.
Yes, yes, as if I've never had any friends who also might have tried and hated Android. Yes, you're so right, I'm a completely clueless Apple Fanboi, who decided after no research whatsoever that iOS was the way to go.
Dude seriously, I see that *you* posted as anonymous coward. I guess you don't have the Karma to Burn that I do.
Seriously, Treo wasn't "mainstream"? Between the Treo and the Handspring they were the first "smartphones" ever! I suppose you also consider Blackberry to be a "niche" phone?
Don't get me wrong. Android is OK. But it has to make some serious strides (and figure out how to remain open while avoiding the tons of malware that are out there already), in order to really become great. And early Android phones were terrible. Trust me on that one.
And I liked my Palm Pilot so much, I bought a Treo. However, the Treo was a terrible phone, I had to spend extra and buy it on eBay because the 680 wasn't supported by t-Mobile and for years I lived with it. Then, finally I started phone shopping.
A friend lent me his Nokia 900 and I found it to be un-useable. It interpreted *everything* as me wanting to use the device, including putting it back into a belt-holster... So it would start playing videos in my pocket, and when I wanted to really use it to make a phone call, the battery was dead.
I didn't like the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, but, when the iPhone4 came out, it finally supported a bluetooth keyboard. So, I bought the iPhone & keyboard. When I'm away from the keyboard, I've learned to live with the onscreen keyboard.
For the last year and 2 months now, it's been OK. I haven't wanted to run my phone over with my car, something I've wanted to do to both the Treo and the Nokia. Sure, it doesn't do everything, but, I have to admit it's better than what I was getting previously. The keyboard has made taking notes and writing emails very easy, making the phone a 60% desktop replacement.
It's a fairly good PDA, and even with AT&T service, it's been a use-able phone. All it has to do is not suck entirely, which tends to be what the other products do.
Considered that kids want what the other kids have, my guess is that this quote from Nokia that kids want a Windows Phone is rubbish. Kids want an iPhone. Apple is already on track to be the biggest phone-maker in the world.
Nokia, RIM, Samsung, and Sony do not have a chance unless they undertake some serious R&D and make something equally revolutionary. And somehow "revolutionary" isn't a word *anyone* associates with Microsoft. Windows phone ain't it, any more than GEOS phone. WebOS could have been it, but Palm and the HP both screwed that pooch.
Usenet, Gopher, Archie, Veronica MUDs, Cleveland Freenet, Dorsai Embassy, heck even Fidonet, and there were thousands of BBSes that never charged a dime (I should know, I ran one back in the day). The point is; there was a huge interconnected network, and it ran just fine without ads.
I'm going to assume you're either 12, or you never connected a modem to a computer until 1995.
Sure, it wasn't the internet YOU know and love, but in many ways, it was a better place. Now get off my lawn.
From the Summary: " including China and India "
This has to be from an American news source. I was listening to Radio Japan (shortwave radio geek) last night when they also announced Canada's stance, but claimed last night that it was because China and the *United States* do not adhere to the accord, so it's pointless, because the two biggest polluters in the world are ignoring the treaty.
Funny how the USA gets left out of the summary here. Hrmmm. Shades of 1984 when the news is changed to make your country seem not as bad as it actually is. I'd be suspicious of anything I read or hear from American news sources. Clearly there's substantial bias.
Yes, that was for the effects work. All the live action was shot with a Panavision camera, as Panavision has a near-monopoly on Hollywood due to contracts/union deals.
However, because of the demands of the effects work, the only thing accurate enough to shoot 10 passes exactly the same (at the time) was Disney's Vistavision cameras.
Remember that hardly anybody had been doing blue-screen at the time for over a decade. Even 2001 was shot mostly with "in camera" effects work (which is why it's not grainy, you never see matte boxes but to it's detriment, nothing can pass in front of each other, which would have made shooting the battle sequences near impossible).
If this is the Microsoft I'm familiar with, it'll probably be: "Windows isn't done 'till Office won't run." I mean, we are talking about an entity that cannot keep interfaces consistent across divisions of the same company.
I am forced to work with Outlook 2007 under Windows XP. What a nightmare. Copy/Paste doesn't even work consistently within the application itself. Sometimes you'll copy text out of a message and paste into a reply of the same thread, and either the OS or the App will add extra returns and spaces/tabs for no apparent reason. Annoying.
Worse still is Outlook's annoying habit of "are you sure" for EVERYTHING. Find an email with an attachment, open it, close the email. Windows/Outlook asks "Save changes to attachment?" NO. All I did was OPEN it, I didn't change squat! Why the app can't figure this out is a MAJOR FAILURE of Q/A.
So trust me, it'll be Office that breaks under Win8. Or something else critical. Or maybe it'll be by design so that everyone that "upgrades" to Win8 will be forced to buy new copies of Office.
I'm *not* a programmer. But that doesn't mean I don't understand the concepts, I just never bothered to pick up the syntax.
15 years back, I worked in a small software company that did "multimedia" titles for the then booming 'CDROM entertainment' industry, which book publishers were into in a big way, just before the internet changed all that.
When we got a project, we'd often have to find people familiar with Macromind Director, a rapid-development authorware environment.
People would waltz into our office, claiming to be wizards in 'lingo', which was Director's built-in programming language. Although Director had a "score" in which to build your projects, we used it only to hold placeholders, and everything was built in code.
Anyhow, the point is; to weed out the real people from the ones who thought they knew what they were talking about, we developed a few simple questions which would tell us just how clever each candidate was.
And example would be: We would ask the candidate "You have a screen with 50 buttons on it -- but Director has only 32 channels on the score - how do you make it so that all 50 are clickable?"
The obvious solution is to parse the screen - X-Y co-ordinates; very simple, elegant, and should be a basic answer to anyone that's even written Hello World.
You wouldn't believe the responses we would get, people would outright lie to try and come up with a response, everything from "use the extra channels in lingo" to "channel swapping", etc., point is -- within 3 questions we could usually tell who was a programmer versus who was just saying that, or even thought they were a programmer because they'd done a few simple tricks in Director.
My guess is that with outsourcing, NONE of the upper management who makes these decisions is enough of an engineer to really quantify if the outsourcer is really representing a company full of skilled programmers or a company full of book-in-lap hacks.
So, they are likely misrepresenting their skill set, but that's true everywhere. The actual number of really talented programmers is always smaller than you think, and everyone else out there may think they are great, but that's only because they've never come up against the really, really good ones.
A patent on duplicate stories!
"A method and procedure for placing the same content, with a slightly different summary and headline on the front page, sometimes within mere hours of each other."
There may be prior art, but I've never seen it done better or more frequently than here.
It sounds like someone read the last half of Snow Crash and thought that this was somehow a good idea. Either that, or the Wikipedia article on L. Ron Hubbard, and figured he could get a lot of underage girls that way.
Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are separate entities as much as your delusion would have you think otherwise and each entity pays it's own taxes.
Hey, I'm part of the middle class and pay 30%, but since I'm one of 200 million, that makes my effective tax rate 6000% !!!
Secondly, anyone who got rich didn't *ever* pay their full rate -- Warren Buffet himself says that his tax rate is 17%, so, your entire diatribe about 45% is utter bull.
You wrote:
"Capital gains is where you have taken your savings (that were previously earned, somehow, and have already paid income taxes on at the EARNED rate)"
---
Yeah... Keep shilling for the rich. That like saying "I went to the store and bought socks, and they charged me 8% sales tax, which is on money I already paid taxes for because it came from my income."
You talking BULLSHIT. When you make money, you pay taxes. If you're making money in the stock market, you're going to pay taxes. End of story.
And frankly, the rich should be gloriously happy they aren't paying SALES TAX as well considering they are buying and selling.
Tell me, why is there one set of laws for the rest of us and another set of laws for the rich? Why is it that if I buy socks, I have to pay 8% tax, but if it buy stocks, I pay 0% tax?
And then you're screaming about money earned on those stocks? Get over it. Capital Gains should be taxed at 30% at least. It's earned income, just like the interest in your bank account.
Go back to licking your master's shoes.
Forget it. This dude's a FOX News Shill. Either that or he's too dumb to realize that almost all the wealthy are paying 15% or less tax rate due to Capital Gains.
Parent Post: Please find me ONE example of a wealthy (i.e. making a million or more per year) person who pays even 35% -- my guess is that you will not.
Your wrote:
You have a credit card, and you've reached the limit
How exactly does increasing your income lower that debt?
Please take Economics 101.
You use the extra income to pay off your debt, you idiot.
If you can't figure that out, how does your brain generate enough power to even post on Slashdot?
You wrote:
" In fact they tend (on average) a higher percentage "
Citation needed.
In fact, the very wealthy pay a far lower percentage on their money earned that you do. Warren Buffet himself has stated that his secretary, who probably earns a $60,000 to $80,000 per year salary, pays a higher percentage of her income as taxes than he does, and most people cannot even fathom what Buffet makes per year (hint: more than a billion).
While YOU are paying taxes (probably automatically deducted from your paycheck), you're likely having 25% to 30% of your pay going into taxes.
The rich have most of their income coming not from "working" (i.e., payroll), their income is coming from the stock market, where their money is making money for them. These are "capital gains", which are taxed at 15% -- let me repeat that in case you missed it -- at least 10% lower or maybe as much as half of what YOU are taxed at.
And that assumes that they are being completely honest with their incomes. Most of the wealthy have complicated accounting, offshore accounts, tax havens, and other grey-area dodges/loopholes that allow many of them to come in well under the 15% tax rate.
Anyone who assumes that the Rich are paying their fair share is either naive, or woefully misinformed.
Exxon Mobile for example, paid ZERO corporate taxes last year, in fact, they were GIVEN money by the government in the form of energy subsidies. General Electric also paid ZERO corporate taxes. This is while they are laying off thousands and raking in record profits.
Please find me an example of any wealthy individual or corporate entity that pays as much in taxes by percentage as the rest of us do.
Excepting Alice...