I have a CLIE PEG SJ-20, and I have to say that I almost LIKE it smaller.
It's all about trade-offs. You can have a bigger ebook screen and less portability than one gets with a handheld. If you opt for the ebook reader, you get more text per page, less scrolling, less eyestrain, and more attractive fonts.
My wife's Handspring is a beast compared to my CLIE.
I have a cell phone module for my Visor, a GPS module, and a smartmedia module. Let's see you plug those into your CLIE.;-)
Funny a page from a paperback novel is much smaller than 8.2" diagonal
I just took a standard-sized paperback novel (Lester Del Rey's Moon of Mutiny) and it measures within one tenth of an inch of 8.2" across its diagonal. Like the screen, your penis probably isn't as big as you thought it was, either.
I got a sony clie PEG-T415 with a hi-res monochrome display for like $200 bucks. The display is the same size as the palm screen, but twice the resolution, and since it's monochrome it's especially crisp.
But it's small compared to an e-book. I'm not saying that it's unusable, but it's not the same.
why would anyone want to buy a single function handheld over a PDA?
Because, despite your satisfaction with the legibility and screen quality of your Palm IIIxe, there is simply no comparison between the screen of a Palm III and the screen of a good, dedicated e-book reader.
It's like comparing the output of my old Epson MX-80 (9-pin, dot-matrix, impact) printer with that of a modern laser printer (if you're too young to know what the MX-80 was, here's a picture of one). I could easily read the printouts from the MX-80. The print from the MX-80 was perfectly legible but the amount of eyestrain that one would experience over the long-haul was really significant.
Note that I do read e-books on a Handspring Visor, but I don't, for a minute, try to convince myself that the quality of the experience is comparable to using a dedicated e-book reader.
What's the point... of ebooks when you've got handhelds?
Although I use a Handspring Visor for reading "ebooks", the dedicated readers are far superior from standpoint of their display quality. The Gemstar GEB-2150 has an 8.2" diagonal display. The resolution on the Gemstar models is typically (always?) over 100dpi. That's a lot of pixels and screen real-estate compared to the average handheld.
In the business of government, that is exactly what profit is. Power is directly proportional to profit, because power guarantees profit. How could it not?
Power and profit are not the same. There is nothing wrong with a democratically elected government having power. It has nothing to do with national debt or budget deficits.
What stops Microsoft from appending some legal agreement in an EULA that specifies that their software can not be used by any individuals for the purpose of proliferating spam email. Define spam. Define a harsh penalty per email sent. Then try to enforce it.
Microsoft does not want to risk the courts ruling that EULAs are not legal, binding contracts. If Microsoft were to take that case to court, the spammer could challenge the legality of the EULA, showing that it was not signed, that there was no evidence that he read read or understood it, that the click-through agreement allowed him to click on "I accept" without even forcing him to scroll to the end of the document, that he clicked it in.5 seconds, which was inadequate to read the entire document, that he did not know how the scroll bars worked and thought what showed in the window was the complete agreement, that he purchased the computer with the software already installed and he never clicked "I agree" at any point, etc., etc., etc.
There is a reason that the BSA and software companies take pirates to court for copyright violation rather than for violating the terms of the legally questionable EULAs.
They take money from some people, keep a profit for themselves, and distribute the rest to other people. That is the simple business model of government,
Have you even seen a newspaper or news program in the past six months? Thanks to the idiotic tax cut and the war launched because of imaginary weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. government will spending over $300 million dollars more than it takes in next year. How is that a profit? Did you used to work as an accountant at Enron?
and just in case you missed the "profit" part, there is a very good reason why the US government has grown immensely over the past century: it benefits those in power.
You act like the government is some kind of amorphous creature that eats money, never giving anything back. The government is composed of elected, appointed, and hired U.S. citizens. Every one of those U.S. citizens who takes home a government paycheck puts money back into the economy. So, for example, a corporal in the Army gets a paycheck and uses it to buy food, clothing, and shelter for his family. He may use some of it to make car payments, buy some DVDs, take his significant other out to dinner, buy a new carpet for his home, pay an electrician to install a ceiling fan, etc.
But, to allay your fears that the government is always growing larger, the Clinton administration's Reinventing Government initiative resulted in the elimination of 377,000 civilian jobs, cutting the federal work force by 17% over those eight years.
If your lawyer lets you hang on a flawed interpretation of the evidence, that's hardly the technology's fault.
What if your lawyer doesn't "[let] you hang" but, instead, mounts a logical, well-reasoned defense that the ignorant jury doesn't fully comprehend? If you are technologically savvy, juries are seldom made up of "your peers." More often than not, they are made up of disgruntled, semi-literate, cognitively impaired buffoons who think that the two most valuable parts of a newspaper are the horoscopes and the lottery numbers.
I'm going to be a stickler here. Sorry if it annoys you:
As I re-read your previous post, I see that you did not, in fact, intend to say that.
Not only did I not intend to say it, I did not say it.
The sentence "this runs the deficit up," was meant to refer to the tax cut, not the sale of bonds, but the clumsy structure of that paragraph, combined with my lazy reading of it, lead to a moment of miscomunication.
What I wrote:
So Bush pushes through a tax cut for the wealthy. This runs the deficit up.
That hardly seems clumsy or misleading.
So, you advocate more social welfare spending, but with neither higher taxation, nor deficits. A perfect plan, other than being completely impossible.
If you read a bit more carefully, you will see that I also said:
All I was saying is that giving the money to social programs is better for the economy than giving it out to the wealthy -- many of whom will invest it overseas. If you want to twiddle the economy with tax cuts, then cut taxes of those in the lower and middle incomes.
To put it another way, I am advocating neither increased spending on social programs nor a tax cut (for any socio-economic group). But, if you hold the opinion that giving government money away is the best way to stimulate the economy, then it should be given to those with the most need -- whether through tax cuts or through social programs. To better explain my position on this issue, allow me to list some of my key beliefs:
1. Those in the lower incomes tend to spend all of the money that they get on goods and services.
2. The wealthy can afford to invest money.
3. In economic hard times, the wealthy invest more heavily in overseas markets and government bonds.
4. If sales are down at a company due to the economy, it is unlikely that wealthy investors will put their money in that company.
5. If you want businesses to grow, then you need to stimulate demand for their product.
6. Government bonds compete with stocks for investor money. The more money going into bonds, the less investor money there is for stocks.
7. If there are valid reasons for cutting taxes at some times, then there have to be valid reasons for raising them at other times. It's "voodoo economics" to argue that a budget surplus is a reason for a tax cut in prosperous times and economic stimulation is a reason for a tax cut in bleak times. If taxes are only cut, the national debt will spiral out of control.
8. The Republicans push for tax cuts that they know that we, as a nation, can't afford in the long run. It is a political ploy to buy votes that might work for a term or two. The Democratic Presidents who succeed them, in order to reign in the debt, are forced to raise taxes. (This backfired on George H.W. Bush after Reagan pulled this stunt. After Reagan's two terms, Mr. "Read-My-Lips" was the one who had to raise taxes.) It's like divorced parents where the father (played by the Republicans) tries to buy the childrens' love by indulging them with candy, staying up late, etc., leaving mom (the Democrats) to be the bad guy of who makes the kids eat healthy, sets reasonable bedtimes, etc.
9. In prosperous times, we should pay down the debt. If we increase the debt in bleak economic times (via deficit spending) and never pay it down, it doesn't take too many economic cycles before we are drowning in debt.
10. Government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts for the wealthy. The feds "buy American." They hire Americans. The Americans they hire use their government paychecks to buy goods and services in the U.S.
11. The wealthy, as a group, have no "buy American" mentality. The wealthy are more likely to buy a Rolls Royce than an American car. They are more likely to buy French wine than a California wine. Giving money to them is a crap shoot. Some of it will find its way back into the U.S. economy and much of it will go overseas.
Evidently simple quotation marks aren't good enough. I shall write that down in my book of Life's Lessons.
Going back, I did see the quotation marks, but was initially thrown by the italicized sentence, believing that was the means by which you indicated quoted text. Please accept my apologies for my error.
1) Ad hominem. Thank you for playing, we have some wonderful consolation prizes for you.
It wasn't an attack. It was an observation. I did not say that your arguments were without merit because of the vulgar way in which it appeared that you presented them.
Ad hominem directed at me quoting poster I was responding to. I won't stoop to the level of describing in any great detail the level of brilliance displayed.
Since you, in no way, showed that it was a quote, either via the BLOCKQUOTE modifier or the use of ITALICS, it appeared to be your words at the time that I replied. If you want to quote others, then don't have their text appear to be something you wrote. Brilliance is certainly not quoting another poster and having it appear in normal, non-italicized, non-indented text which appears to all the world to be something you wrote.
Okay, you obviously don't know how the bond market works. The number of Federal bonds issued has nothing to do with how many people want to buy them. Investors playing the bond market does not drive the debt up.
You are the one that doesn't understand bonds. I'll try to make it simple for you: The government issues bonds to pay for the deficit. Bonds are, in effect, citizens loaning the government money. I did not say that investors buying bonds increased the deficit. I said that the government issues bonds to pay for deficit spending. And when investors buy those bonds, that's money that's not being invested in the private sector.
I only said that an increase of welfare benifits is not an effective way to end an economic slump.
And I only said that cutting social programs was not an effective way to end the economic slump.
Deficits in bleak times make sense, because it shifts some of the pain into more prosperous times, when the burden can be handled.
When? How much have we paid down the national debt during prosperous times. Every time that there is prosperity, Congress and the President spend the money rather than paying down the debt. When Bush heard "surplus", he went around the country screaming "it's not the government's money -- it's your money!" Did you ever hear him suggest, for even an instant, that the surplus be used to pay down the massive debt?
At the end of the 12 Reagan/Bush years, the national debt had skyrocketed. They accrued more debt in those 12 years than we had accrued in the 200 years prior to their administrations. Approximately 25 cents of every tax dollar collected by the federal government went towards servicing (paying the interest on) the portion of the debt that they accrued. Want a 25% tax cut with no cut in government services? Pay off the debt and then have a tax cut.
Republicans demand a tax cut when there is a budget surplus because "it's not the government's money." They want a tax cut in bleak economic times to "stimulate the economy." They don't want to raise taxes in down years because it will "slow the recovery." They don't want to raise taxes in prosperous years because there's a budget surplus -- because they don't budget anything to paying off the national debt. If everything is a reason for a tax cut and nothing is a reason for a tax increase, how do we pay off the debt? How do we fund government services with an ever-smaller tax base?
If $350 billion dollars will create jobs and prosperity, why not have a $1 trillion dollar tax cut? Imagine how prosperous we would be then!
To even attempt to do so is not only futile, but counter-productive, as higher taxation would only serve to slow down the recovery.
Imagine what would happen if you managed your money like Bush and his Republican cohorts are handling ours.
National: Times are bad and tax revenue is down. You: You lose your job and have to take one with lower pay.
National. You give large tax breaks to the people that are suffering the least. You: You give large sums of money back to your employer to help him grow his business.
National: You pay for that tax cut by issuing bonds, which are bought up by the rich seeking a safe investment. You: You borrow the money back from your employer, agreeing to pay him with interest.
National: Eventually the economy starts to recover and tax revenue is up. You: You get a promotion and a raise.
National: All tax revenue is spent on everything from defense to funding anti-abortionist missionaries. You: You go on a spending spree.
National: The feds continue to pay interest on the bonds but don't pay the bonds off. You: You just continue to pay the interest to your employer, never paying down the principle.
To even attempt to do so is not only futile, but counter-productive, as higher taxation would only serve to slow down the recovery.
No, my point is that increased spending on social programs in not going to be the massive boon to the economy that the original post had implied.
I never meant to imply that social programs would be a "massive boon" to the economy. I was refuting the argument that money put into those programs was wasted. Helping the poor with food stamps increases sales in grocery stores. Paying the government personnel who adminster the food stamp programs gives money to the middle class. And the middle class spends as much money as they make.
All I was saying is that giving the money to social programs is better for the economy than giving it out to the wealthy -- many of whom will invest it overseas. If you want to twiddle the economy with tax cuts, then cut taxes of those in the lower and middle incomes.
Bonds: The rich will buy government bonds. Why is that bad? Because the bonds are used to fund the deficit. So Bush pushes through a tax cut for the wealthy. This runs the deficit up. The government issues bonds. Who has money to buy bonds? The wealthy people who just got a big tax cut. Then they enjoy not only a tax cut, but interest on the money borrowed to fund the tax cut for years to come. And who pays the interest? The U.S. taxpayers, most of whom are not wealthy.
You can make the case that more welfare is a good idea, but not on the grounds that it will end the recession any more quickly.
Sure I can. Without welfare, many unemployed people would lose their houses, rack up debt that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, and probably have more difficulty getting employment (hire any homeless people lately?).
Okay, let's just tax everything over $50,000 a year at a rate of 100% then.
Bad idea. It encourages the wealthy to move overseas, taking their money with them. You want a progressive tax rate so that if they earn more, they keep more.
Sure, nobody will have surplus wealth to invest in the market, but think of all the nifty new government programs we could afford!
Since when have Republicans been concerned about what we can afford? They control the Presidency and both houses of Congress and their own "budget" calls for spending over $300 billion more than they can afford. That's a record for the feds spending more than they take in through taxes -- and, they are still trying to cut the taxes in order to drive that deficit even higher in later years.
Mostly, it hires bureaucrats who don't produce anything.
Just who are these "bureacrats"? I'm tired of that nebulous argument about unnamed, mysterious people. What, specifically, are people at the EPA, BATF, or the Social Security Administration supposed to "produce"? Are they supposed to organize production lines and start producing staplers? Personal computers? VCRs? Cattle feed? Mag wheels? Just what is it that you want them to produce?
That only stimulates consumer spending (assuming that much of the money you are talking about ever gets to those who need it, which is total fantasy.) What the economy needs right now is a stimulus of investment, not just spending.
More idiotic supply-side economics crap. What good does it do for an investor to pour money into a company that can't sell its products? How will it help for an investor to put money into Nike if Nike can't sell the shoes it already makes? And why would an investor put money into a company that has a shrinking market?
What investors are doing in this economy is putting money into overseas currency and corporations. So you give money to an investor in this economy, and it will probably go out of the country more often than not, creating no jobs for Americans and probably help fund companies that compete with American firms.
If your reasoning were rational, it would argue for robbery: After all, what does a robber do with the money he stole from you?
So you want to be the anti-Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to fund tax cuts for the rich?
Taxes are not analogous to theft. Taxes are NECESSARY. They pay for our military. They pay for social programs. They pay for federal law enforcement. They pay for parks and recreation. They even pay the salaries of the people who are pushing for tax cuts (while voting themselves pay raises). The list goes on and on. Robbery contributes nothing to the country. Robbery does not provide for national defense. Robbers don't prosecute companies that pollute. Robbers do not provide unemployment checks to people out of work. You act like we get nothing for the tax dollars that we pay to the federal government. Every program from the Interstate highway system to rural electrification has been paid for by taxes.
You know how Bush kept saying "it's your money"? Well, he was wrong. It's not your money. That's not how government works. You elect representatives and agree to abide by laws that they pass. If they pass a law saying that you will pay income tax, then the tax money that they collect is not yours. It's the government's.
If all the money we are supposedly spending on the poor actually ended up in the hands of the poor, we could put each and every poor family in America into ritsy hotel rooms, complete with room service for their meals.
So what's your point? That we should have no one overseeing the programs and, instead, just leave the money in big baskets in poor neighborhoods? Whether you like it or not, there have to be people that administer and police the programs. Much of the idea of the programs is to provide training and assistance to get people off of the wefare roles. I'd much rather spend the money towards education, career counseling, nutrition counselors, drug awareness programs, etc. than to put people up in ritzy hotels with room service.
Money to purchase goods and services is going to companies that are increasingly outsourcing labor overseas. So a portion of it isn't going to U.S. workers at all, and that portion is steadily growing...
But the federal government gives strong preferential treatment to U.S. businesses. You won't find the government buying fleets of cars from Kia, Hyundai, BMW, or Saab.
Under the Republican tax scheme, the majority of tax cuts would go to the same CEOs that are laying off U.S. workers and shipping their jobs overseas. Those bastards should have their taxes doubled, not cut.
My disposable income, which I most certianly do dispose of, is much higher than what " a lower-income person who is trying to scrape together money for a new windshield in their car, clothes for their kids, a new refrigerator, a new mattress, etc." will spend all year.
So are you saying that you have no savings? That you spend every dollar that you get? Because that's what the lower income people do. They won't spend 60% of a tax cut. They will spend 100% of it. So, for economic stimulation, you give the money to the people who will put it back into the economy.
Your bought the dems line of BS. Try to think aobut how this works for yourself....don't just paraphrase what you've heard from others. "Your" theory just doesn't pan out.
I reasoned that out for myself. I don't have to listen to other people's theories in order to reason things out. It's sound, straight-forward, economics. That others have come to the same conclusion is no surprise to me.
Increased GDP, no shit, that is the whole point. There is a tax sweet spot that maximizes GDP growth.
Paying huge sums of interest on the federal debt hurts the GDP while fiddling with taxation has little to do with economic growth according to most respected economists.
Let's look at this rationally: What does the federal government do with tax dollars? It buys goods and services, primarily from U.S. corporations. That money then goes to U.S. workers who spend it, supporting everyone from salespeople to restaurant workers to truck drivers.
Others will complain about the tax dollars of the rich going to social programs. They may not like it, but who is more likely to spend money that they get: Someone who has a six figure income or a lower-income person who is trying to scrape together money for a new windshield in their car, clothes for their kids, a new refrigerator, a new mattress, etc.? The poor have a whole list of things that they need to buy while the rich want for little. If you want money stimulate the economy, then give it to people who need to spend it.
Actually, it appears that you are out of your league. The other poster, to whom you were replyings, cited figures and mounted logical arguments in favor of his position. I found them much more compelling than the ad-hominem attack shown above.
It's not just dial-up ISPs with transient IP addressing blocking SMTP, it's DSL and cable modem ISPs with stable IPs also.
I'm painfully aware of that. That is the main reason that I subscribe to a cable modem SOHO business account. When my ISP (Cox) started coming up with more and more port blocking combined with absurd changes to the TOS, I switched from residental to business. Cost about $20 more per month, but completely worth it.
I have no doubt that it will be handled as well as the war on terror, i.e. as soon as they discover they can't get the real culprits they will go after some high profile easy, but unrelated, targets.
What's so hard about going after spammers?
Look, there's no one alive that hates the Bush administration more than I do, but you and I both know that this is not the place to discuss that. I simply was commenting on using some of the same techniques to pressure countries into turning over spammers that we now use to pressure them into turning over suspected terrorists.
the only time I've ever seen a port 25 block was for my ISP...and it seems like they did the exact OPPOSITE of what they claimed.
They sound like a bunch of morons.
Many ISPs, especially dial-up ISPs block port 25 access to everything other than their own mail servers. While I generally despise port blocking, I can see a real rationale for this. It's not practical to run a mail server on a residential dial-up account. No sooner would dial-up user update the DNS records to point to their IP du heure than they would have to reconnect and get a new IP. Also, most dial-up ISPs won't tolerate a user maintaining a 24/7 connection and it's not very practical to have an MX host that's only up part-time.
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I have a CLIE PEG SJ-20, and I have to say that I almost LIKE it smaller.
;-)
It's all about trade-offs. You can have a bigger ebook screen and less portability than one gets with a handheld. If you opt for the ebook reader, you get more text per page, less scrolling, less eyestrain, and more attractive fonts.
My wife's Handspring is a beast compared to my CLIE.
I have a cell phone module for my Visor, a GPS module, and a smartmedia module. Let's see you plug those into your CLIE.
Funny a page from a paperback novel is much smaller than 8.2" diagonal
I just took a standard-sized paperback novel (Lester Del Rey's Moon of Mutiny) and it measures within one tenth of an inch of 8.2" across its diagonal. Like the screen, your penis probably isn't as big as you thought it was, either.
I got a sony clie PEG-T415 with a hi-res monochrome display for like $200 bucks. The display is the same size as the palm screen, but twice the resolution, and since it's monochrome it's especially crisp.
But it's small compared to an e-book. I'm not saying that it's unusable, but it's not the same.
why would anyone want to buy a single function handheld over a PDA?
Because, despite your satisfaction with the legibility and screen quality of your Palm IIIxe, there is simply no comparison between the screen of a Palm III and the screen of a good, dedicated e-book reader.
It's like comparing the output of my old Epson MX-80 (9-pin, dot-matrix, impact) printer with that of a modern laser printer (if you're too young to know what the MX-80 was, here's a picture of one). I could easily read the printouts from the MX-80. The print from the MX-80 was perfectly legible but the amount of eyestrain that one would experience over the long-haul was really significant.
Note that I do read e-books on a Handspring Visor, but I don't, for a minute, try to convince myself that the quality of the experience is comparable to using a dedicated e-book reader.
An AC asked:
What's the point... of ebooks when you've got handhelds?
Although I use a Handspring Visor for reading "ebooks", the dedicated readers are far superior from standpoint of their display quality. The Gemstar GEB-2150 has an 8.2" diagonal display. The resolution on the Gemstar models is typically (always?) over 100dpi. That's a lot of pixels and screen real-estate compared to the average handheld.
In the business of government, that is exactly what profit is. Power is directly proportional to profit, because power guarantees profit. How could it not?
Power and profit are not the same. There is nothing wrong with a democratically elected government having power. It has nothing to do with national debt or budget deficits.
What stops Microsoft from appending some legal agreement in an EULA that specifies that their software can not be used by any individuals for the purpose of proliferating spam email. Define spam. Define a harsh penalty per email sent. Then try to enforce it.
.5 seconds, which was inadequate to read the entire document, that he did not know how the scroll bars worked and thought what showed in the window was the complete agreement, that he purchased the computer with the software already installed and he never clicked "I agree" at any point, etc., etc., etc.
Microsoft does not want to risk the courts ruling that EULAs are not legal, binding contracts. If Microsoft were to take that case to court, the spammer could challenge the legality of the EULA, showing that it was not signed, that there was no evidence that he read read or understood it, that the click-through agreement allowed him to click on "I accept" without even forcing him to scroll to the end of the document, that he clicked it in
There is a reason that the BSA and software companies take pirates to court for copyright violation rather than for violating the terms of the legally questionable EULAs.
And that's profit. Let me explain...
So you have redefined "profit" as size and power rather than as money. Sorry, but that's not what profit means to me.
Case in point: the US government has been consistently spending more than it "earns" for the past century -- check the national debt if you need proof
That is the point of this discussion: While Clinton was actually running a surplus, Bush's budget has set a new record for deficit spending.
They take money from some people, keep a profit for themselves, and distribute the rest to other people. That is the simple business model of government,
Have you even seen a newspaper or news program in the past six months? Thanks to the idiotic tax cut and the war launched because of imaginary weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. government will spending over $300 million dollars more than it takes in next year. How is that a profit? Did you used to work as an accountant at Enron?
and just in case you missed the "profit" part, there is a very good reason why the US government has grown immensely over the past century: it benefits those in power.
You act like the government is some kind of amorphous creature that eats money, never giving anything back. The government is composed of elected, appointed, and hired U.S. citizens. Every one of those U.S. citizens who takes home a government paycheck puts money back into the economy. So, for example, a corporal in the Army gets a paycheck and uses it to buy food, clothing, and shelter for his family. He may use some of it to make car payments, buy some DVDs, take his significant other out to dinner, buy a new carpet for his home, pay an electrician to install a ceiling fan, etc.
But, to allay your fears that the government is always growing larger, the Clinton administration's Reinventing Government initiative resulted in the elimination of 377,000 civilian jobs, cutting the federal work force by 17% over those eight years.
If your lawyer lets you hang on a flawed interpretation of the evidence, that's hardly the technology's fault.
What if your lawyer doesn't "[let] you hang" but, instead, mounts a logical, well-reasoned defense that the ignorant jury doesn't fully comprehend? If you are technologically savvy, juries are seldom made up of "your peers." More often than not, they are made up of disgruntled, semi-literate, cognitively impaired buffoons who think that the two most valuable parts of a newspaper are the horoscopes and the lottery numbers.
As I re-read your previous post, I see that you did not, in fact, intend to say that.
Not only did I not intend to say it, I did not say it.
The sentence "this runs the deficit up," was meant to refer to the tax cut, not the sale of bonds, but the clumsy structure of that paragraph, combined with my lazy reading of it, lead to a moment of miscomunication.
What I wrote:That hardly seems clumsy or misleading.
So, you advocate more social welfare spending, but with neither higher taxation, nor deficits. A perfect plan, other than being completely impossible.
If you read a bit more carefully, you will see that I also said: To put it another way, I am advocating neither increased spending on social programs nor a tax cut (for any socio-economic group). But, if you hold the opinion that giving government money away is the best way to stimulate the economy, then it should be given to those with the most need -- whether through tax cuts or through social programs. To better explain my position on this issue, allow me to list some of my key beliefs:
1. Those in the lower incomes tend to spend all of the money that they get on goods and services.
2. The wealthy can afford to invest money.
3. In economic hard times, the wealthy invest more heavily in overseas markets and government bonds.
4. If sales are down at a company due to the economy, it is unlikely that wealthy investors will put their money in that company.
5. If you want businesses to grow, then you need to stimulate demand for their product.
6. Government bonds compete with stocks for investor money. The more money going into bonds, the less investor money there is for stocks.
7. If there are valid reasons for cutting taxes at some times, then there have to be valid reasons for raising them at other times. It's "voodoo economics" to argue that a budget surplus is a reason for a tax cut in prosperous times and economic stimulation is a reason for a tax cut in bleak times. If taxes are only cut, the national debt will spiral out of control.
8. The Republicans push for tax cuts that they know that we, as a nation, can't afford in the long run. It is a political ploy to buy votes that might work for a term or two. The Democratic Presidents who succeed them, in order to reign in the debt, are forced to raise taxes. (This backfired on George H.W. Bush after Reagan pulled this stunt. After Reagan's two terms, Mr. "Read-My-Lips" was the one who had to raise taxes.) It's like divorced parents where the father (played by the Republicans) tries to buy the childrens' love by indulging them with candy, staying up late, etc., leaving mom (the Democrats) to be the bad guy of who makes the kids eat healthy, sets reasonable bedtimes, etc.
9. In prosperous times, we should pay down the debt. If we increase the debt in bleak economic times (via deficit spending) and never pay it down, it doesn't take too many economic cycles before we are drowning in debt.
10. Government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts for the wealthy. The feds "buy American." They hire Americans. The Americans they hire use their government paychecks to buy goods and services in the U.S.
11. The wealthy, as a group, have no "buy American" mentality. The wealthy are more likely to buy a Rolls Royce than an American car. They are more likely to buy French wine than a California wine. Giving money to them is a crap shoot. Some of it will find its way back into the U.S. economy and much of it will go overseas.
Evidently simple quotation marks aren't good enough. I shall write that down in my book of Life's Lessons.
Going back, I did see the quotation marks, but was initially thrown by the italicized sentence, believing that was the means by which you indicated quoted text. Please accept my apologies for my error.
1) Ad hominem. Thank you for playing, we have some wonderful consolation prizes for you.
It wasn't an attack. It was an observation. I did not say that your arguments were without merit because of the vulgar way in which it appeared that you presented them.
Ad hominem directed at me quoting poster I was responding to. I won't stoop to the level of describing in any great detail the level of brilliance displayed.
Since you, in no way, showed that it was a quote, either via the BLOCKQUOTE modifier or the use of ITALICS, it appeared to be your words at the time that I replied. If you want to quote others, then don't have their text appear to be something you wrote. Brilliance is certainly not quoting another poster and having it appear in normal, non-italicized, non-indented text which appears to all the world to be something you wrote.
Okay, you obviously don't know how the bond market works. The number of Federal bonds issued has nothing to do with how many people want to buy them. Investors playing the bond market does not drive the debt up.
You are the one that doesn't understand bonds. I'll try to make it simple for you: The government issues bonds to pay for the deficit. Bonds are, in effect, citizens loaning the government money. I did not say that investors buying bonds increased the deficit. I said that the government issues bonds to pay for deficit spending. And when investors buy those bonds, that's money that's not being invested in the private sector.
I only said that an increase of welfare benifits is not an effective way to end an economic slump.
And I only said that cutting social programs was not an effective way to end the economic slump.
Deficits in bleak times make sense, because it shifts some of the pain into more prosperous times, when the burden can be handled.
When? How much have we paid down the national debt during prosperous times. Every time that there is prosperity, Congress and the President spend the money rather than paying down the debt. When Bush heard "surplus", he went around the country screaming "it's not the government's money -- it's your money!" Did you ever hear him suggest, for even an instant, that the surplus be used to pay down the massive debt?
At the end of the 12 Reagan/Bush years, the national debt had skyrocketed. They accrued more debt in those 12 years than we had accrued in the 200 years prior to their administrations. Approximately 25 cents of every tax dollar collected by the federal government went towards servicing (paying the interest on) the portion of the debt that they accrued. Want a 25% tax cut with no cut in government services? Pay off the debt and then have a tax cut.
Republicans demand a tax cut when there is a budget surplus because "it's not the government's money." They want a tax cut in bleak economic times to "stimulate the economy." They don't want to raise taxes in down years because it will "slow the recovery." They don't want to raise taxes in prosperous years because there's a budget surplus -- because they don't budget anything to paying off the national debt. If everything is a reason for a tax cut and nothing is a reason for a tax increase, how do we pay off the debt? How do we fund government services with an ever-smaller tax base?
If $350 billion dollars will create jobs and prosperity, why not have a $1 trillion dollar tax cut? Imagine how prosperous we would be then!
To even attempt to do so is not only futile, but counter-productive, as higher taxation would only serve to slow down the recovery.
Imagine what would happen if you managed your money like Bush and his Republican cohorts are handling ours.
National: Times are bad and tax revenue is down.
You: You lose your job and have to take one with lower pay.
National. You give large tax breaks to the people that are suffering the least.
You: You give large sums of money back to your employer to help him grow his business.
National: You pay for that tax cut by issuing bonds, which are bought up by the rich seeking a safe investment.
You: You borrow the money back from your employer, agreeing to pay him with interest.
National: Eventually the economy starts to recover and tax revenue is up.
You: You get a promotion and a raise.
National: All tax revenue is spent on everything from defense to funding anti-abortionist missionaries.
You: You go on a spending spree.
National: The feds continue to pay interest on the bonds but don't pay the bonds off.
You: You just continue to pay the interest to your employer, never paying down the principle.
To even attempt to do so is not only futile, but counter-productive, as higher taxation would only serve to slow down the recovery.
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No, my point is that increased spending on social programs in not going to be the massive boon to the economy that the original post had implied.
I never meant to imply that social programs would be a "massive boon" to the economy. I was refuting the argument that money put into those programs was wasted. Helping the poor with food stamps increases sales in grocery stores. Paying the government personnel who adminster the food stamp programs gives money to the middle class. And the middle class spends as much money as they make.
All I was saying is that giving the money to social programs is better for the economy than giving it out to the wealthy -- many of whom will invest it overseas. If you want to twiddle the economy with tax cuts, then cut taxes of those in the lower and middle incomes.
Bonds: The rich will buy government bonds. Why is that bad? Because the bonds are used to fund the deficit. So Bush pushes through a tax cut for the wealthy. This runs the deficit up. The government issues bonds. Who has money to buy bonds? The wealthy people who just got a big tax cut. Then they enjoy not only a tax cut, but interest on the money borrowed to fund the tax cut for years to come. And who pays the interest? The U.S. taxpayers, most of whom are not wealthy.
You can make the case that more welfare is a good idea, but not on the grounds that it will end the recession any more quickly.
Sure I can. Without welfare, many unemployed people would lose their houses, rack up debt that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, and probably have more difficulty getting employment (hire any homeless people lately?).
Okay, let's just tax everything over $50,000 a year at a rate of 100% then.
Bad idea. It encourages the wealthy to move overseas, taking their money with them. You want a progressive tax rate so that if they earn more, they keep more.
Sure, nobody will have surplus wealth to invest in the market, but think of all the nifty new government programs we could afford!
Since when have Republicans been concerned about what we can afford? They control the Presidency and both houses of Congress and their own "budget" calls for spending over $300 billion more than they can afford. That's a record for the feds spending more than they take in through taxes -- and, they are still trying to cut the taxes in order to drive that deficit even higher in later years.
Mostly, it hires bureaucrats who don't produce anything.
Just who are these "bureacrats"? I'm tired of that nebulous argument about unnamed, mysterious people. What, specifically, are people at the EPA, BATF, or the Social Security Administration supposed to "produce"? Are they supposed to organize production lines and start producing staplers? Personal computers? VCRs? Cattle feed? Mag wheels? Just what is it that you want them to produce?
That only stimulates consumer spending (assuming that much of the money you are talking about ever gets to those who need it, which is total fantasy.) What the economy needs right now is a stimulus of investment, not just spending.
More idiotic supply-side economics crap. What good does it do for an investor to pour money into a company that can't sell its products? How will it help for an investor to put money into Nike if Nike can't sell the shoes it already makes? And why would an investor put money into a company that has a shrinking market?
What investors are doing in this economy is putting money into overseas currency and corporations. So you give money to an investor in this economy, and it will probably go out of the country more often than not, creating no jobs for Americans and probably help fund companies that compete with American firms.
If your reasoning were rational, it would argue for robbery: After all, what does a robber do with the money he stole from you?
So you want to be the anti-Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to fund tax cuts for the rich?
Taxes are not analogous to theft. Taxes are NECESSARY. They pay for our military. They pay for social programs. They pay for federal law enforcement. They pay for parks and recreation. They even pay the salaries of the people who are pushing for tax cuts (while voting themselves pay raises). The list goes on and on. Robbery contributes nothing to the country. Robbery does not provide for national defense. Robbers don't prosecute companies that pollute. Robbers do not provide unemployment checks to people out of work. You act like we get nothing for the tax dollars that we pay to the federal government. Every program from the Interstate highway system to rural electrification has been paid for by taxes.
You know how Bush kept saying "it's your money"? Well, he was wrong. It's not your money. That's not how government works. You elect representatives and agree to abide by laws that they pass. If they pass a law saying that you will pay income tax, then the tax money that they collect is not yours. It's the government's.
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
You are a vulgar little man, aren't you?
If all the money we are supposedly spending on the poor actually ended up in the hands of the poor, we could put each and every poor family in America into ritsy hotel rooms, complete with room service for their meals.
So what's your point? That we should have no one overseeing the programs and, instead, just leave the money in big baskets in poor neighborhoods? Whether you like it or not, there have to be people that administer and police the programs. Much of the idea of the programs is to provide training and assistance to get people off of the wefare roles. I'd much rather spend the money towards education, career counseling, nutrition counselors, drug awareness programs, etc. than to put people up in ritzy hotels with room service.
Money to purchase goods and services is going to companies that are increasingly outsourcing labor overseas. So a portion of it isn't going to U.S. workers at all, and that portion is steadily growing...
But the federal government gives strong preferential treatment to U.S. businesses. You won't find the government buying fleets of cars from Kia, Hyundai, BMW, or Saab.
Under the Republican tax scheme, the majority of tax cuts would go to the same CEOs that are laying off U.S. workers and shipping their jobs overseas. Those bastards should have their taxes doubled, not cut.
My disposable income, which I most certianly do dispose of, is much higher than what " a lower-income person who is trying to scrape together money for a new windshield in their car, clothes for their kids, a new refrigerator, a new mattress, etc." will spend all year.
So are you saying that you have no savings? That you spend every dollar that you get? Because that's what the lower income people do. They won't spend 60% of a tax cut. They will spend 100% of it. So, for economic stimulation, you give the money to the people who will put it back into the economy.
Your bought the dems line of BS. Try to think aobut how this works for yourself....don't just paraphrase what you've heard from others. "Your" theory just doesn't pan out.
I reasoned that out for myself. I don't have to listen to other people's theories in order to reason things out. It's sound, straight-forward, economics. That others have come to the same conclusion is no surprise to me.
Increased GDP, no shit, that is the whole point. There is a tax sweet spot that maximizes GDP growth.
Paying huge sums of interest on the federal debt hurts the GDP while fiddling with taxation has little to do with economic growth according to most respected economists.
Let's look at this rationally: What does the federal government do with tax dollars? It buys goods and services, primarily from U.S. corporations. That money then goes to U.S. workers who spend it, supporting everyone from salespeople to restaurant workers to truck drivers.
Others will complain about the tax dollars of the rich going to social programs. They may not like it, but who is more likely to spend money that they get: Someone who has a six figure income or a lower-income person who is trying to scrape together money for a new windshield in their car, clothes for their kids, a new refrigerator, a new mattress, etc.? The poor have a whole list of things that they need to buy while the rich want for little. If you want money stimulate the economy, then give it to people who need to spend it.
Clearly you are out of your league here.
Actually, it appears that you are out of your league. The other poster, to whom you were replyings, cited figures and mounted logical arguments in favor of his position. I found them much more compelling than the ad-hominem attack shown above.
It's not just dial-up ISPs with transient IP addressing blocking SMTP, it's DSL and cable modem ISPs with stable IPs also.
I'm painfully aware of that. That is the main reason that I subscribe to a cable modem SOHO business account. When my ISP (Cox) started coming up with more and more port blocking combined with absurd changes to the TOS, I switched from residental to business. Cost about $20 more per month, but completely worth it.
I have no doubt that it will be handled as well as the war on terror, i.e. as soon as they discover they can't get the real culprits they will go after some high profile easy, but unrelated, targets.
What's so hard about going after spammers?
Look, there's no one alive that hates the Bush administration more than I do, but you and I both know that this is not the place to discuss that. I simply was commenting on using some of the same techniques to pressure countries into turning over spammers that we now use to pressure them into turning over suspected terrorists.
the only time I've ever seen a port 25 block was for my ISP...and it seems like they did the exact OPPOSITE of what they claimed.
They sound like a bunch of morons.
Many ISPs, especially dial-up ISPs block port 25 access to everything other than their own mail servers. While I generally despise port blocking, I can see a real rationale for this. It's not practical to run a mail server on a residential dial-up account. No sooner would dial-up user update the DNS records to point to their IP du heure than they would have to reconnect and get a new IP. Also, most dial-up ISPs won't tolerate a user maintaining a 24/7 connection and it's not very practical to have an MX host that's only up part-time.
Maybe we could do a trade?
;-)
Thanks for the offer, but I think I'll pass. The less spam I get, the happier I am -- regardless of whether the spam is relevent or not.