Yeah, Ron Paul is obviously a reliable source of information on tax policy.
Let's take 1995 as the canonical year "in the 90s" since it's dead smack in the middle of them. In 1995, the US federal government spent $1516 billion (source: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42911).
Actual tax revenue for in billions for FY2011 are as follows: (source: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42911)
Individual Corporate Social
Income Income Insurance Excise Estate and Customs Miscellaneous
Taxes Taxes Taxes Taxes Gift Taxes Duties Receipts Total
1,091.5 181.1 818.8 72.4 7.4 29.5 101.8 2,302.5
There are three major things to note about this data with respect to what you said: 1. Your claim is bullshit. Add up the stuff that's not under the "Income Tax" columns and you get $1029.9 billion. Last time I checked, that's less than $1516 billion. The math is a little hard but... YEP. $1029.9 is less than $1516. In fact, it's only about 68%. If you look at the data, you will see that there was not a single year in the 1990s that could have been paid for by the non-income taxes collected in 2011 OR ANY YEAR SINCE 1987.
2. Eliminating the income tax would mean that our taxes would break down as follows:
79.5% from social insurance taxes
7.0% excise taxes
0.7% gift and estate taxes
2.9% customs duties
9.9% everything else
This would be a highly regressive tax system.
3. Adjusted for inflation the bill for the stuff in the 1995 budget would be about $2282 today. (source: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm). That's 2.2X what your non-income taxes collect today.
You'd think Ron Paul would have as much access to the Congressional Budget Office as I do. He's a member of Congress. Or maybe his mouth just doesn't have as much access to the truth.
No, it would be Larmarkian if he claimed you could inherit this characteristic. It has long been known that the brain's wiring depends on how you use it.
The thing about this claim is browsing the web a lot is enough unlike how people have used their brains in the past that it will cause a noticeable difference in how we gather, understand and analyze information.
Myself, I don't think it's all that different than what humans have done for a million years. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as the web. We gathered information by consulting various sources: television, books in the library, magazines, talking to other people and observing things for ourselves. Occasionally, we set out to break new ground and find out things that nobody knew, or that we didn't know somebody knew. People still gather information in all those ways but now they use the web too. The kinds of information a web search dredges up are the same kinds of things we used to draw information from 30 years ago: magazine articles, bloadvertisements, videos (analagous to television programs), blogs (which are journals) and scholarly articles. Although you get the information to your eyes a lot faster, you can't absorb it any faster with the web. And the quality of the information is probably worse, because it's so damn cheap to put up a blog full of bullshit, unchecked facts and misunderstood information. It's left to the searcher to decide what information is relevant, which of conflicting information sources are more accurate or reliable, etc. This is the same problem people always had.
The activity of creating new information -- original research or analysis -- was never easy, and there were never good tools available to most people to help with it. Now, at least there are computers that can assist you in analyzing large volumes of information or carrying out calculations too daunting to do by hand.
So all said, I doubt it will have much effect. People will still need to analyze data, but that has always been an activity for a few who were especially good at it. The rest of us can browse away, just like our apelike ancestors did 4 million years ago. (I bet they said Google, too.)
From the government, which currently pays textbook publishers to make them.
Have University math departments make math texts for grade sxhools. University history departments can make history texts, etc.
The projects could be cooperative among the state governments. And since there would be no profit motive to keep obsolescing old texts you wouldn't have so much churn or so many errors.
And even if they are, why on earth would they have software-configurable speeds or pressures that can range outside of safe parameters? The safety limits should be hard-coded.
In the case of boilers, they're not coded at all. There's a physical pressure relief valve. Jesus Christ! Programmers think hardware designers rely on CODE to make things safe???
Often, x-rays are unnecessary because the doctor is going to prescribe the same course of treatment regardless of what the X-ray tells him. So as a medical consumer, it's always in your interest to ask the doctor what he is looking for, how likely it is that he will find it, how much the diagnostic test will cost and how having the test results will affect the course of treatment.
You owe it to yourself (and if you're insured, to the insurance company) to know these things before you consent to the test.
Actually sir, I have two genetic disorders, Hemophilia and Osteochondroma.
The Hemophilia basically means my blood clotting proteins are ineffective and thus it takes me longer to stop bleeding and then to heal.
The Osteochrondoma causes a variety of non-cancerous bone tumors to grow near joints during the bone growth phase. They can be in many different shapes and sizes.
The groping/padding down can cause a bone tumor to break, which can cause me to bleed to death if it manages to puncture an artery. Chances are I'll be dead before they get me to a hospital.
The radiation from the scanners can cause my bone tumors to become cancerous. If this happens, I'm pretty much sentenced to a long and painful death.
They controlled what roads, what time of day, and weather conditions they would allow the robocar to drive in. I very much doubt their driving conditions closely represented the variety of conditions a production would have to operate in.
We Republicans don't hate all women. We only hate POOR women. And non-white women and non-Christian women. But it's nothing against the women. We hate poor, non-white and non-Christian men as well. What do you think we are, sexists? If anything, we hate non-white men more than we hate non white women because the fact is that some non-white women are hot.
And we don't like middle-income people so much either. Frankly, unless you're in the top 5% of income, you really aren't contributing much to society and the only excuse for you existing at all is so you can work for rich people and make us richer. But we really don't need all of you and it would be best if the rest of you just went somewhere else (like Mexico) and left us the fuck alone.
You people are such a burden. If it wasn't for you parasites in the middle we'd be making 50% of all personal income instead of 35%.
It's our God Given Right as Americans to pay the some of the lowest taxes as a proportion of GDP in the world. There's no possible way we could raise taxes and pay something more in line with what rich people in other countries pay. Seriously, have you SEEN how rich people in Germany and Canada suffer? It's hardly even fair to call them rich. In fact, we shouldn't. It demeans us to use the same word to describe rich Americans and even the wealthiest people in such countries.
I don't see any evidence that life expectancy is still increasing, or if it is, it looks like it's up against an asymptote of about 80 for women and about 78 for men.
and I find it extremely perverse that some people regard increasing life expectancy as a problem
I don't expect life expectancy to be much different in 30 years than it is today. Maybe for minorities. Eventually, their health may catch up with that of white people.
And the demographic apocalypse you're predicting just isn't as bad as you think. If you look at the age of the population at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/age/age_sex_2010.html you will see that up to the age of about 54, there are about the same number of people in each age cohort. Although birth rates surged and then fell off in the 60s, the reduced birth rates were made up for by immigration which allowed the population to come into a more stable condition.
By the time people born in 1960 reach retirement, their retirement age will be 67 years, not the current 65. That moves a whole lot of people into the "still working" category. That will reduce the number of people drawing on Social Security by about 10% and increase the number paying in slightly.
Right now, there are about 4 people of age 20-65 for every person over 65. After 2027, the relevant ages will be 20-67 vs. over 67. The ratio will peak dip to 3.0 and remain there for a long time. So it's worse than the current situation but not as bad as you suggest. Also, there will be somewhat more jobs in the old-age related industries, medical care, senior assistance, etc. Those jobs will attract more people into the work force and somewhat help the working to retired ratio.
The problem for you is that 11,667 is only 11,667. How long would it take them at that rate to get "a HUGE portion of the population?" Well that depends on what you call a "HUGE portion" doesn't it?
The average American's lifetime is about 300 of those 3-month periods. In each of those three month periods, if they were making files at a constant rate, you have a 1 in 27400 chance of being profiled each quarter. So your chance of coming to the FBI's interest in your WHOLE LIFE is on the order of 1 percent.
Does that qualify as a "HUGE portion of the population" to you? It doesn't seem all that huge to me.
I might call 10% a huge portion, although I would know I was exaggerating. And somtime before they got to 10%, I'd become concerned that the FBI is busy with more than just trying to enforce the law.
You don't seem to know you're making an extraordinary claim that's actually refuted by the data you posted. And you probably feel good about it because you were modded up. Well I have news for you. You can be modded as "Interesting" or "Insightful" by the ignoramuses around here even when you're completely wrong, as you are in this case. And people are frequently modded "Troll" for posting facts and challenging unsubstantiated assertions.
The company owes the city, at minimum, a full refund for every machine they sold, because they all have to be scrapped.
But that doesn't go far enough. Since we're relying on them for a critical function, they need guarantees of correct count, after establishing basic ability to meet a minimum quality level.
1. They shouldn't be allowed to be bought at all unless the State qualifies them and it shouldn't be allowed to qualify them unless they can be shown to be more accurate under all circumstances than an audited hand count. Since the purpose of buying voting machines is in part to have more reliable elections, we should require a quality level well beyond what hand counting can meet. 4 PPM (4.5 sigma) would be a worthy criterion. Certainly, it has to be so low as to have almost no chance to turn the results of any election. Since most election results have a margin of more than 1% we could tolerate an error rate (count of undervotes plus count of overvotes divided by votes cast) of as high as 100 PPM.
2. Every election should be audited at a high enough rate to establish whether the machines have exceeded their minimum required error rate and to establish whether a penalty is required.
3. The manufacturer should be forced to post a large bond. Say, $10 per registered voter in the jurisdiction in which they are sold. The reason for this is that if the machines turn out to be unreliable in operation, you need to recover the penalty even though the manufacturer will probably be bankrupted. In 10 years, they get whatever money they didn't pay in penalties back and the warranty expires. They'd be penalized a substantial amount for every undervote and overvote and this would be paid first out of the bond and then out of profits and then they get priority for payment if the company goes into bankruptcy.
Because the Republican bill was a sham. It proposed to pay for it by cutting support for health care for poor women. It was specifically designed for Democrats to kill.
The Democratic plan is for wealthy people who will eventually. benefit from being able to hire a college educated work force to pay for it.
Apple defends it by putting their expensive suits on it and soon racks up $100k in legal fees, so they threaten the little guy that if he doesn't drop the suit, he could lose $300k. He can't afford to lose $300k and Apple has better lawyers.
But to steal the letter out of the box they had to trespass on your property and break a law that could land them in federal prison.
And for a third party to get the information from the mail order company, they had to buy it.
Now, all that information is kept constantly updated and they have WAY more detailed information.
If a person has a wide open profile, you can know their name, age, where they work, who their friends are, what they look like, where they live, their home town, their like and interests, the fact that they habitually visit a certain club on Friday nights, the fact that they are there right now, their religion, their political affiliations, etc., etc.
Nobody ever had that much information on so many people before. And keep in mind, all this information is visible, unless you take precautions, to people you don't even know a little bit and have no reason to trust.
You're naive if you think the OWS protesters do not have FBI files. Shit, the FBI has files on a HUGE portion of the population. Most just don't even know it.
Sure they do. The FBI has nothing to do all day long but assemble files on people who are not suspected of nything.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Ron Paul is obviously a reliable source of information on tax policy.
Let's take 1995 as the canonical year "in the 90s" since it's dead smack in the middle of them. In 1995, the US federal government spent $1516 billion (source: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42911).
Actual tax revenue for in billions for FY2011 are as follows: (source: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42911)
Individual Corporate Social
Income Income Insurance Excise Estate and Customs Miscellaneous
Taxes Taxes Taxes Taxes Gift Taxes Duties Receipts Total
1,091.5 181.1 818.8 72.4 7.4 29.5 101.8 2,302.5
There are three major things to note about this data with respect to what you said:
1. Your claim is bullshit. Add up the stuff that's not under the "Income Tax" columns and you get $1029.9 billion. Last time I checked, that's less than $1516 billion. The math is a little hard but... YEP. $1029.9 is less than $1516. In fact, it's only about 68%. If you look at the data, you will see that there was not a single year in the 1990s that could have been paid for by the non-income taxes collected in 2011 OR ANY YEAR SINCE 1987.
2. Eliminating the income tax would mean that our taxes would break down as follows:
79.5% from social insurance taxes
7.0% excise taxes
0.7% gift and estate taxes
2.9% customs duties
9.9% everything else
This would be a highly regressive tax system.
3. Adjusted for inflation the bill for the stuff in the 1995 budget would be about $2282 today. (source: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm). That's 2.2X what your non-income taxes collect today.
You'd think Ron Paul would have as much access to the Congressional Budget Office as I do. He's a member of Congress. Or maybe his mouth just doesn't have as much access to the truth.
No, it would be Larmarkian if he claimed you could inherit this characteristic. It has long been known that the brain's wiring depends on how you use it.
The thing about this claim is browsing the web a lot is enough unlike how people have used their brains in the past that it will cause a noticeable difference in how we gather, understand and analyze information.
Myself, I don't think it's all that different than what humans have done for a million years. When I was a kid, there was no such thing as the web. We gathered information by consulting various sources: television, books in the library, magazines, talking to other people and observing things for ourselves. Occasionally, we set out to break new ground and find out things that nobody knew, or that we didn't know somebody knew. People still gather information in all those ways but now they use the web too. The kinds of information a web search dredges up are the same kinds of things we used to draw information from 30 years ago: magazine articles, bloadvertisements, videos (analagous to television programs), blogs (which are journals) and scholarly articles. Although you get the information to your eyes a lot faster, you can't absorb it any faster with the web. And the quality of the information is probably worse, because it's so damn cheap to put up a blog full of bullshit, unchecked facts and misunderstood information. It's left to the searcher to decide what information is relevant, which of conflicting information sources are more accurate or reliable, etc. This is the same problem people always had.
The activity of creating new information -- original research or analysis -- was never easy, and there were never good tools available to most people to help with it. Now, at least there are computers that can assist you in analyzing large volumes of information or carrying out calculations too daunting to do by hand.
So all said, I doubt it will have much effect. People will still need to analyze data, but that has always been an activity for a few who were especially good at it. The rest of us can browse away, just like our apelike ancestors did 4 million years ago. (I bet they said Google, too.)
From the government, which currently pays textbook publishers to make them.
Have University math departments make math texts for grade sxhools. University history departments can make history texts, etc.
The projects could be cooperative among the state governments. And since there would be no profit motive to keep obsolescing old texts you wouldn't have so much churn or so many errors.
And even if they are, why on earth would they have software-configurable speeds or pressures that can range outside of safe parameters? The safety limits should be hard-coded.
In the case of boilers, they're not coded at all. There's a physical pressure relief valve. Jesus Christ! Programmers think hardware designers rely on CODE to make things safe???
What kind of idiot would design a boiler without a pressure relief valve? I think that would be only the kind that aren't allowed to design boilers.
Photoshop 6 == Photoshop CS1, the CS is quite important here.
And the CS stands for Compromised Security.
Microsoft sends out security updates for free.
Often, x-rays are unnecessary because the doctor is going to prescribe the same course of treatment regardless of what the X-ray tells him. So as a medical consumer, it's always in your interest to ask the doctor what he is looking for, how likely it is that he will find it, how much the diagnostic test will cost and how having the test results will affect the course of treatment.
You owe it to yourself (and if you're insured, to the insurance company) to know these things before you consent to the test.
Actually sir, I have two genetic disorders, Hemophilia and Osteochondroma.
The Hemophilia basically means my blood clotting proteins are ineffective and thus it takes me longer to stop bleeding and then to heal.
The Osteochrondoma causes a variety of non-cancerous bone tumors to grow near joints during the bone growth phase. They can be in many different shapes and sizes.
The groping/padding down can cause a bone tumor to break, which can cause me to bleed to death if it manages to puncture an artery. Chances are I'll be dead before they get me to a hospital.
The radiation from the scanners can cause my bone tumors to become cancerous. If this happens, I'm pretty much sentenced to a long and painful death.
No, you can still get the pat-down.
Yeah, you heard him right.
They controlled what roads, what time of day, and weather conditions they would allow the robocar to drive in. I very much doubt their driving conditions closely represented the variety of conditions a production would have to operate in.
We Republicans don't hate all women. We only hate POOR women. And non-white women and non-Christian women. But it's nothing against the women. We hate poor, non-white and non-Christian men as well. What do you think we are, sexists? If anything, we hate non-white men more than we hate non white women because the fact is that some non-white women are hot.
And we don't like middle-income people so much either. Frankly, unless you're in the top 5% of income, you really aren't contributing much to society and the only excuse for you existing at all is so you can work for rich people and make us richer. But we really don't need all of you and it would be best if the rest of you just went somewhere else (like Mexico) and left us the fuck alone.
You people are such a burden. If it wasn't for you parasites in the middle we'd be making 50% of all personal income instead of 35%.
It's our God Given Right as Americans to pay the some of the lowest taxes as a proportion of GDP in the world. There's no possible way we could raise taxes and pay something more in line with what rich people in other countries pay. Seriously, have you SEEN how rich people in Germany and Canada suffer? It's hardly even fair to call them rich. In fact, we shouldn't. It demeans us to use the same word to describe rich Americans and even the wealthiest people in such countries.
And it clearly illustrates what both parties find acceptable and what they find unacceptable:
PROPOSALS:
Cut poor women's health programs -- D: Unacceptable; R: Acceptable
Eliminate tax loopholes for rich people -- D: Acceptable; R: Unacceptable
Student loan rates increase -- D:Acceptable; R: Acceptable
I don't see any evidence that life expectancy is still increasing, or if it is, it looks like it's up against an asymptote of about 80 for women and about 78 for men.
and I find it extremely perverse that some people regard increasing life expectancy as a problem
I don't expect life expectancy to be much different in 30 years than it is today. Maybe for minorities. Eventually, their health may catch up with that of white people.
And the demographic apocalypse you're predicting just isn't as bad as you think. If you look at the age of the population at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/age/age_sex_2010.html you will see that up to the age of about 54, there are about the same number of people in each age cohort. Although birth rates surged and then fell off in the 60s, the reduced birth rates were made up for by immigration which allowed the population to come into a more stable condition.
By the time people born in 1960 reach retirement, their retirement age will be 67 years, not the current 65. That moves a whole lot of people into the "still working" category. That will reduce the number of people drawing on Social Security by about 10% and increase the number paying in slightly.
Right now, there are about 4 people of age 20-65 for every person over 65. After 2027, the relevant ages will be 20-67 vs. over 67. The ratio will peak dip to 3.0 and remain there for a long time. So it's worse than the current situation but not as bad as you suggest. Also, there will be somewhat more jobs in the old-age related industries, medical care, senior assistance, etc. Those jobs will attract more people into the work force and somewhat help the working to retired ratio.
The problem for you is that 11,667 is only 11,667. How long would it take them at that rate to get "a HUGE portion of the population?" Well that depends on what you call a "HUGE portion" doesn't it?
The average American's lifetime is about 300 of those 3-month periods. In each of those three month periods, if they were making files at a constant rate,
you have a 1 in 27400 chance of being profiled each quarter. So your chance of coming to the FBI's interest in your WHOLE LIFE is on the order of 1 percent.
Does that qualify as a "HUGE portion of the population" to you? It doesn't seem all that huge to me.
I might call 10% a huge portion, although I would know I was exaggerating. And somtime before they got to 10%, I'd become concerned that the FBI is busy with more than just trying to enforce the law.
You don't seem to know you're making an extraordinary claim that's actually refuted by the data you posted. And you probably feel good about it because you were modded up. Well I have news for you. You can be modded as "Interesting" or "Insightful" by the ignoramuses around here even when you're completely wrong, as you are in this case. And people are frequently modded "Troll" for posting facts and challenging unsubstantiated assertions.
The company owes the city, at minimum, a full refund for every machine they sold, because they all have to be scrapped.
But that doesn't go far enough. Since we're relying on them for a critical function, they need guarantees of correct count, after establishing basic ability to meet a minimum quality level.
1. They shouldn't be allowed to be bought at all unless the State qualifies them and it shouldn't be allowed to qualify them unless they can be shown to be more accurate under all circumstances than an audited hand count. Since the purpose of buying voting machines is in part to have more reliable elections, we should require a quality level well beyond what hand counting can meet. 4 PPM (4.5 sigma) would be a worthy criterion. Certainly, it has to be so low as to have almost no chance to turn the results of any election. Since most election results have a margin of more than 1% we could tolerate an error rate (count of undervotes plus count of overvotes divided by votes cast) of as high as 100 PPM.
2. Every election should be audited at a high enough rate to establish whether the machines have exceeded their minimum required error rate and to establish whether a penalty is required.
3. The manufacturer should be forced to post a large bond. Say, $10 per registered voter in the jurisdiction in which they are sold. The reason for this is that if the machines turn out to be unreliable in operation, you need to recover the penalty even though the manufacturer will probably be bankrupted. In 10 years, they get whatever money they didn't pay in penalties back and the warranty expires. They'd be penalized a substantial amount for every undervote and overvote and this would be paid first out of the bond and then out of profits and then they get priority for payment if the company goes into bankruptcy.
Republicans only support eliminating tax loopholes when they are attaced to a bill they plan to kill.
Because the Republican bill was a sham. It proposed to pay for it by cutting support for health care for poor women.
It was specifically designed for Democrats to kill.
The Democratic plan is for wealthy people who will eventually. benefit from being able to hire a college educated work force to pay for it.
The only way you won't collect Social Security or Medicare is if you don't live long enough or you keep electing guys who want it to go away.
Apple defends it by putting their expensive suits on it and soon racks up $100k in legal fees, so they threaten the little guy that if he doesn't drop the suit, he could lose $300k. He can't afford to lose $300k and Apple has better lawyers.
Under conditions we don't know but they controlled.
But to steal the letter out of the box they had to trespass on your property and break a law that could land them in federal prison.
And for a third party to get the information from the mail order company, they had to buy it.
Now, all that information is kept constantly updated and they have WAY more detailed information.
If a person has a wide open profile, you can know their name, age, where they work, who their friends are, what they look like, where they live, their home town, their like and interests, the fact that they habitually visit a certain club on Friday nights, the fact that they are there right now, their religion, their political affiliations, etc., etc.
Nobody ever had that much information on so many people before. And keep in mind, all this information is visible, unless you take precautions, to people you don't even know a little bit and have no reason to trust.
Yeah that article says they've got 11,667 files. In my book, one in 27,000 doesn't amount to "files on a HUGE portion of the population."
It's not even a huge portion of the PRISON population. Go panic about something that matters.
You're naive if you think the OWS protesters do not have FBI files. Shit, the FBI has files on a HUGE portion of the population. Most just don't even know it.
Sure they do. The FBI has nothing to do all day long but assemble files on people who are not suspected of nything.
Not to mention weed killers and pesticides.