Today on/. we find out who doesn't know the difference between subsidies, tax deductions, tax breaks, and taxes.
From the linked CNN article above:
Among other things, the measure killed on Thursday would have ended oil production's categorization under the tax code as a form of domestic manufacturing eligible for a deduction worth 6% of net income, according to New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, the bill's author.
The measure also would have prevented oil companies from claiming foreign royalty payments as a credit against American taxes, and cut the ability of companies to deduct numerous costs associated with the drilling process.
So we have a bunch of tax deductions that literally every company in the country is eligible for, but when the oil industry takes them they become subsidies and are bad.
The entire IRS needs an enema from top to bottom. Gut their mission, strip their power, and reduce them to the few functions we actually need them to do.
Then repeat with the ATF, DEA, DOE (both of them), EPA and FDA.
Welcome to the world of fighting for gun rights, where among other things:
"Children" killed by guns includes people up to age 35 in some studies. "School shootings" includes gang violence that just happens to take place close enough to a school. "People killed by an acquaintance with a gun" includes rival drug dealers who knew each other, one of which kills the other. "Victims of gun violence" include Tamerlan Tsarnaev. "Gun deaths" include suicides, lawful homicide (cop-on-criminal) and lawful self-defense (citizen-on-criminal).
MADD and gun-grabbers have much in common when it comes to creative use of statistics.
Nobody talks about restricting access to guns for your personal health.
The CDC does. It spent much of the 80s and 90s putting out politically motivated research trying to whip people into a frenzy over the dangers of gun ownership. The VA does it too. It's been expanding its definitions of mentally defective, all the way to veterans only having slight sleeping problems from PTSD, in order to then prevent them from owning guns. Hell, not two days ago in Colorado a court upheld the state's 15-round magazine capacity limit under the pretense that it contributes to public safety, only a single thinly veiled step away from claiming it's for your health.
Maybe you're not steeped in the gun rights fight that way I am every day, but that doesn't mean these things simply aren't happening.
There are many ways to obtain a gun in America, with varying levels of records of it being recorded: 1. Buy or transfer a gun through an FFL, in which case a Form 4473 is filled out and kept by the FFL. The ATF, in the course of an investigation can get a copy of this form to see who bought the gun. The ATF cannot legally go around making copies of all 4473s to create a database. The information from the 4473 is required to be kept on file with the FFL for at least 20 years, at which point he can start purging it. If he quits being an FFL before then, he turns it all over to the ATF to keep the records for future investigations. So a few guns that are sold through an FFL will eventually have no record, if he holds the FFL for 20 years after the sale AND decides to destroy the record.
2. Buy a gun in a private sale, assuming your state doesn't require this to go through an FFL (in which case, see #1). Most states require no record keeping for this. Where I live, my only responsibility under the law is to be reasonably sure that the buyer is not prohibited from owning guns. That means I ask, "Are you prohibited?" and if they say no, I can sell it to them with no liability.
3. Receive a gun as a gift. Most places treat this the same as #2.
4. Make your own gun. Most states don't require you to register a gun you made yourself. You must be making it yourself, for yourself. If you later decide you don't want it, you're supposed to transfer it to its new owner via an FFL. Making a gun yourself is much easier than it sounds; I've built an AR15 for myself, it has no serial number on it, there's no 4473 for it anywhere, and it's 100% legal.
So, methods 2,3 and 4 can create new gun owners with no record of it, and method 4 can create new guns with no record of it. Method 1 can make new owners with no record assuming certain rare events: FFL in business long enough to start purging his books, or his store goes up in a fire and the records are destroyed, or thieves steal the records. In this case the ATF can only learn that a gun existed at some point; they have no idea who the original retail owner was, so their information that it existed is useless.
With home made guns, they don't even have that information.
So, NOT every gun in the US has paperwork for it somewhere, and NOT every gun buyer is on paperwork somewhere, and what paperwork does exist for some guns is 100% useless with regard to locating the gun or its owner.
This whole discussion doesn't even touch on the subject of a more important question: What good do records and serialization do when most guns used in crimes are stolen to start with? Despite what you learned by watching CSI, the answer is a resounding, "Not a whole hell of a lot."
States no more have the power to regulate guns than the federal government does. Making that lack of power explicit by incorporating the second amendment under the due process clause deprives the states of nothing. Fundamental rights are fundamental rights, whether it's a state government or the federal government who seeks to take them away from you.
The whole Bill of Rights and the idea of natural rights would all become a silly notion were states in possession of the legitimate power to restrict them. I'm talking political theory here, not practice because we all know in practice the government at all levels shits on your rights without the legitimacy to do so.
Certainly everyone applauding this will agree that similar laws meant to reaffirm second amendment protections are equally necessary, equally valid, and equally worth fighting for!
"The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is very clear. It says the government shall not engage in unreasonable search and seizure," said the bill's author, Democratic State Senator Ted Lieu, of Torrance.
Let's try a little modification....
"The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is very clear. It says the government shall not infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms," said no one in California's legislature, ever.
Just remember, when you erode one part of the Constitution, you erode them all. Feinstein wants ALL of your rights. Buuuuut... let's hear your reasons why this is different.
I didn't see the funding option for, "Donate $500 and we'll pay your electric bill for a decade." If they think they're so close to such a breakthrough they should be offering more than t-shirts and posters.
This is a slippery slope situation and should get folks on both sides of the aisle riled up
Frankly, the sheer number of of illegal things that are slippery slopes and should have had people on both sides of the aisle riled up, that this administration has overseen in the last 5 years is so large that I have no confidence that anything will come of this.
I could name a dozen of them, but I know that for each one I'll be bombarded with responses from drones who can only make excuses for why it was legal, or why the people who died as a result weren't important, or why the president admitting it happened doesn't mean it really happened.
This scandal too, will fall by the wayside as the true believers come to the administration's defense.
Sure there are other possibilities. We're not constrained to only two states: those of an out of control central bureaucracy, or anarchy.
The chief problem we have is people surrendering their power to the government where one of two things then happens: the government abuses that power (ie, recent scandals and abuses at the NSA, CIA, BATFE, IRS, etc), or companies come in and bribe/lobby to gain control of that power and abuse it (ie, the revolving door of executives to administrators, regulatory capture, favorable rules from regulatory agencies; the FCC, EPA, and DOEnergy are big offenders of this type).
If you want to prevent that, you have to stop giving powers to the government. To make an extreme example, let's talk about the IRS targeting of conservative political groups in 2011-2012. How would this have been preventable? Don't have such a labyrinthine tax code that required jumping through flaming hoops. Without a monstrous tax code, there would be no bureaucrats to selectively apply it in order to abuse their enemies.
I don't want to sound flippant, but if you read the constitution you'll see what a limited government looks like. Sadly, two centuries of perversion of the document have brought us where we are today. Congress has surrendered its duty to legislate and instead delegated it to over a million bureaucrats who make rules without votes. The 16th and 17th amendments stripped a lot of the protections we had against an ever-growing and out of control centralized government. The destruction of the commerce clause in Wickard V. Filburn has caused inestimable damage all on its own.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. ; )
1. Implement policies that any Econ 101 student can tell will exacerbate income inequality. 2. Tell people that the income inequality you've created will destroy society. 3. Get people to beg you to fix it. 4. PROFIT!!
The government has become a feedback loop unto itself, fooling people into giving it ever more power to fix the disasters it caused when it used the last round of powers people gave it.
NASA lives on, reaching out to Muslims to make them feel better about themselves, and doing pseudo social science research!
We can't have NASA be the bastion of national pride and accomplishment that it once was. It's now just another government jobs program intended to promote the government.
You are required to keep a record of the transaction with the serial number. If the weapon you sold were used in a crime later, it will be traced back to you. The original retail sale is on record, that person (if not you) will then produce the name of the person he sold it to, which is either you or will lead to you via reiterating the same process. If you cannot produce the weapon or produce a receipt showing who you sold it to, then you're in trouble. But until and unless there is a criminal investigation to justify the intrusion, that information is no one's business.
What state do you live in where that is the law?
In Texas, your only responsibility when conducting a private firearm sale is that you must not have any reason to believe that the buyer is a prohibited person. You don't need to know their name, record anything, get a signature, or any of this.
I've sold in this manner the one time I was seeking to get rid of two handguns I no longer wanted. I took them to the gun show, and before I even got into the convention center a guy approached me and asked what I had in the cases. He looked them over. We haggled on a price for about 2 minutes. I asked if he was a prohibited person, to which he responded no. We exchanged goods and parted ways. The whole transaction took less than 5 minutes. 100% legal.
Heck, even assuming he was the head of a drug cartel, what *I* did was still 100% legal.
As far as what happens if those guns are ever used in a crime: I was the original retail purchaser of them, so the ATF will trace the guns back to me, and probably look and see that I live in a normal middle class neighbor hood in a low crime area, have a nice paying job, no debt, and haven't even had a traffic ticket in 13 years. If they even bother to contact me, I'll give them whatever details I remember about the guy I sold the guns to, and that'll be it.
There's no requirement that I have a record of who I sold to.
China just launched its second aircraft carrier. India just launched its first, is building two more, and is buying 120 Rafales. South Korea is buying Apaches and F-15s (or maybe F-35s). Malaysia and Thailand want to buy AH-1Zs. Thailand is also modernizing its current fleet of western fighter planes. Japan just launched its first helicopter attack ship, is buying V-22s, and is no longer keeping up the pretense of only having a defensive force. The Philippines is begging us to come back and reopen a base in their country. The Norks are rattling the sabers as usual. Taiwan has some truly revolutionary anti-ship missiles. Vietnam is in the process of fielding 6 new submarines. Indonesia is in the middle of a large new naval buildup. In 2012, Singapore spent 24% of its national budget on its military.
The entirety of southeast Asia is in the midst of an arms race the likes of which hasn't been seen since the European interwar period. And similar to that same period, we're cutting our military budget and shrinking the forces, even in the face of what's brewing among our allies.
Is doing that right? Wrong? Who knows? I can't see the future. History tells us it's foolish. Maybe this time will be different.
It's why the government taxes cigarettes, alcohol, and machine guns: because they want less of those things.
If you start taxing college, you'll get fewer people going to college, and fewer people who went will work as hard as they would have otherwise. If you want to fix college tuition problems, then stop underwriting loans with tax dollars. Let private investors determine the proper risk of each student based on GPA, SAT, and the field they want to study.
It's such a daftly basic concept of economics, that it's depressing to see so many smart people trip over their own feet trying to explain why it shouldn't apply. You can rationalize to yourself why this is different all you want, but as Feynman said, "Nature cannot be fooled."
It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail. It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail. It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail. It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail. It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.
The level of law breaking that goes on in the government today is so great that the telling thing is not that a governor illegally closed a bridge as political retribution against a rival. The telling thing will be when we actually put a government official in a jail cell for breaking the law. At best, people who have been responsible for crimes on behalf of the government get fired. Sometimes they're just reassigned or have to move offices. More often, nothing at all happens.
Call the lane closures a "fake controversy." Refuse to let your aides testify, and when they're forced to, have them lie and/or plead the fifth. Bury any inconvenient evidence under executive privilege.
Christie already used Obama's first and most common strategy: claiming ignorance. His only mistakes are not have an adoring press that is willing to unquestioningly parrot his talking points as the truth, and he doesn't control the federal DOJ and have the power to make it completely look the other way.
There's no honest person who can be outraged at Christie's politically motivated law breaking, and content with the last 5 years of the same, time and again, from the president. In a just America, these two men would share a jail cell.
His mistake was saying "Illinois" instead of "Chicago." Similarly, "California" instead of "Los Angeles."
Chicago's murder rate was 15.4 / 100,000 last year. Los Angelos' murder rate was 6.6 / 100,000 last year. Washington DC's murder rate 16.0 / 100,000 last year. The US average was 4.7, for a recent year (not sure which).
These are murder rates, not firearm specific murder rates.
Substantively, what he said was true: a couple of gun control utopias make give us the vast majority of our murders. Technically, what he said was wrong because he adlibbed and choose his geography poorly.
One of the main issues of the Heller decision was whether the government could mandate that you store your guns in a way that makes them not easily accessible for self defense. The Supreme Court ruled that they could not.
of people setting out to the pole at summer, to highlight the damage wrought by global warming, and then getting stuck in the ice, and then their rescuers getting stuck in the ice... it really feels as if over-the-top global warming alarmism has jumped the shark. Right here. And all excuses about how the ice is always still thick this time of year, or it's really just unlucky winds that blew it around the ship, those don't matter. People see global warming fear mongers, trapped in ice, in the summer, in the Antarctic, and their rescuers threatened by the same ice.
We'll look back in 20 years and say, "Remember when that ship got stuck in the ice on their journey to drum up fear about receding ice?"
Hell, I remember when I was in grade school in the '90s, and we were constantly told of the horrors of the hole on the ozone layer that was going to burn us to death, and the rain forests that would be 100% destroyed by 1995, suffocating all the aerobic life of the earth due to lack of oxygen. There's something in the human brain very susceptible to environmental alarmism, and it takes a really magnificent demonstration of stupidity every generation or so to snap people out of it. This is it!
You make the false assumption that we either have to give all our power to the government or to "big business." I advocate neither of those. Reclaim your power as an individual; that's the only place that power comes from to start with.
The next time you're rooting for another new government program that you hope will allow you to shed some more of your personal responsibility, remember this story. When you keep supporting politicians and policies aimed only at growing the size and power of the government, you end up with stories like this, and like the NSA spying, and like the roadside gloveless anal cavity searches, and crashed MRAPs on the I-10.
If you want the madness to stop, you have to start taking responsibility for yourself, and telling the government that you've finally decided that you know how to live your life and take care of yourself better than the government does.
Slashdot Mirror
Today on /. we find out who doesn't know the difference between subsidies, tax deductions, tax breaks, and taxes.
From the linked CNN article above:
Among other things, the measure killed on Thursday would have ended oil production's categorization under the tax code as a form of domestic manufacturing eligible for a deduction worth 6% of net income, according to New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, the bill's author.
The measure also would have prevented oil companies from claiming foreign royalty payments as a credit against American taxes, and cut the ability of companies to deduct numerous costs associated with the drilling process.
So we have a bunch of tax deductions that literally every company in the country is eligible for, but when the oil industry takes them they become subsidies and are bad.
Wow.....
The entire IRS needs an enema from top to bottom. Gut their mission, strip their power, and reduce them to the few functions we actually need them to do.
Then repeat with the ATF, DEA, DOE (both of them), EPA and FDA.
Welcome to the world of fighting for gun rights, where among other things:
"Children" killed by guns includes people up to age 35 in some studies.
"School shootings" includes gang violence that just happens to take place close enough to a school.
"People killed by an acquaintance with a gun" includes rival drug dealers who knew each other, one of which kills the other.
"Victims of gun violence" include Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
"Gun deaths" include suicides, lawful homicide (cop-on-criminal) and lawful self-defense (citizen-on-criminal).
MADD and gun-grabbers have much in common when it comes to creative use of statistics.
Nobody talks about restricting access to guns for your personal health.
The CDC does. It spent much of the 80s and 90s putting out politically motivated research trying to whip people into a frenzy over the dangers of gun ownership.
The VA does it too. It's been expanding its definitions of mentally defective, all the way to veterans only having slight sleeping problems from PTSD, in order to then prevent them from owning guns.
Hell, not two days ago in Colorado a court upheld the state's 15-round magazine capacity limit under the pretense that it contributes to public safety, only a single thinly veiled step away from claiming it's for your health.
Maybe you're not steeped in the gun rights fight that way I am every day, but that doesn't mean these things simply aren't happening.
Bush appointed Lois Lerner.
You laugh, but for the segment of Slashdot still hung up on blaming everything on Bush, this is their go-to response to this whole mess.
Here's one... http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
There are many ways to obtain a gun in America, with varying levels of records of it being recorded:
1. Buy or transfer a gun through an FFL, in which case a Form 4473 is filled out and kept by the FFL. The ATF, in the course of an investigation can get a copy of this form to see who bought the gun. The ATF cannot legally go around making copies of all 4473s to create a database. The information from the 4473 is required to be kept on file with the FFL for at least 20 years, at which point he can start purging it. If he quits being an FFL before then, he turns it all over to the ATF to keep the records for future investigations. So a few guns that are sold through an FFL will eventually have no record, if he holds the FFL for 20 years after the sale AND decides to destroy the record.
2. Buy a gun in a private sale, assuming your state doesn't require this to go through an FFL (in which case, see #1). Most states require no record keeping for this. Where I live, my only responsibility under the law is to be reasonably sure that the buyer is not prohibited from owning guns. That means I ask, "Are you prohibited?" and if they say no, I can sell it to them with no liability.
3. Receive a gun as a gift. Most places treat this the same as #2.
4. Make your own gun. Most states don't require you to register a gun you made yourself. You must be making it yourself, for yourself. If you later decide you don't want it, you're supposed to transfer it to its new owner via an FFL. Making a gun yourself is much easier than it sounds; I've built an AR15 for myself, it has no serial number on it, there's no 4473 for it anywhere, and it's 100% legal.
So, methods 2,3 and 4 can create new gun owners with no record of it, and method 4 can create new guns with no record of it.
Method 1 can make new owners with no record assuming certain rare events: FFL in business long enough to start purging his books, or his store goes up in a fire and the records are destroyed, or thieves steal the records. In this case the ATF can only learn that a gun existed at some point; they have no idea who the original retail owner was, so their information that it existed is useless.
With home made guns, they don't even have that information.
So, NOT every gun in the US has paperwork for it somewhere, and NOT every gun buyer is on paperwork somewhere, and what paperwork does exist for some guns is 100% useless with regard to locating the gun or its owner.
This whole discussion doesn't even touch on the subject of a more important question: What good do records and serialization do when most guns used in crimes are stolen to start with? Despite what you learned by watching CSI, the answer is a resounding, "Not a whole hell of a lot."
States no more have the power to regulate guns than the federal government does. Making that lack of power explicit by incorporating the second amendment under the due process clause deprives the states of nothing. Fundamental rights are fundamental rights, whether it's a state government or the federal government who seeks to take them away from you.
The whole Bill of Rights and the idea of natural rights would all become a silly notion were states in possession of the legitimate power to restrict them. I'm talking political theory here, not practice because we all know in practice the government at all levels shits on your rights without the legitimacy to do so.
McDonald v. Chicago incorporated the second amendment under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment, to apply to the states too.
Certainly everyone applauding this will agree that similar laws meant to reaffirm second amendment protections are equally necessary, equally valid, and equally worth fighting for!
http://firearmsfreedomact.com/
From the article:
"The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is very clear. It says the government shall not engage in unreasonable search and seizure," said the bill's author, Democratic State Senator Ted Lieu, of Torrance.
Let's try a little modification....
"The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is very clear. It says the government shall not infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms," said no one in California's legislature, ever.
Just remember, when you erode one part of the Constitution, you erode them all. Feinstein wants ALL of your rights. Buuuuut... let's hear your reasons why this is different.
I didn't see the funding option for, "Donate $500 and we'll pay your electric bill for a decade." If they think they're so close to such a breakthrough they should be offering more than t-shirts and posters.
All of their customers.
This is a slippery slope situation and should get folks on both sides of the aisle riled up
Frankly, the sheer number of of illegal things that are slippery slopes and should have had people on both sides of the aisle riled up, that this administration has overseen in the last 5 years is so large that I have no confidence that anything will come of this.
I could name a dozen of them, but I know that for each one I'll be bombarded with responses from drones who can only make excuses for why it was legal, or why the people who died as a result weren't important, or why the president admitting it happened doesn't mean it really happened.
This scandal too, will fall by the wayside as the true believers come to the administration's defense.
Sure there are other possibilities. We're not constrained to only two states: those of an out of control central bureaucracy, or anarchy.
The chief problem we have is people surrendering their power to the government where one of two things then happens: the government abuses that power (ie, recent scandals and abuses at the NSA, CIA, BATFE, IRS, etc), or companies come in and bribe/lobby to gain control of that power and abuse it (ie, the revolving door of executives to administrators, regulatory capture, favorable rules from regulatory agencies; the FCC, EPA, and DOEnergy are big offenders of this type).
If you want to prevent that, you have to stop giving powers to the government. To make an extreme example, let's talk about the IRS targeting of conservative political groups in 2011-2012. How would this have been preventable? Don't have such a labyrinthine tax code that required jumping through flaming hoops. Without a monstrous tax code, there would be no bureaucrats to selectively apply it in order to abuse their enemies.
I don't want to sound flippant, but if you read the constitution you'll see what a limited government looks like. Sadly, two centuries of perversion of the document have brought us where we are today. Congress has surrendered its duty to legislate and instead delegated it to over a million bureaucrats who make rules without votes. The 16th and 17th amendments stripped a lot of the protections we had against an ever-growing and out of control centralized government. The destruction of the commerce clause in Wickard V. Filburn has caused inestimable damage all on its own.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. ; )
1. Implement policies that any Econ 101 student can tell will exacerbate income inequality.
2. Tell people that the income inequality you've created will destroy society.
3. Get people to beg you to fix it.
4. PROFIT!!
The government has become a feedback loop unto itself, fooling people into giving it ever more power to fix the disasters it caused when it used the last round of powers people gave it.
Nonsense!
NASA lives on, reaching out to Muslims to make them feel better about themselves, and doing pseudo social science research!
We can't have NASA be the bastion of national pride and accomplishment that it once was. It's now just another government jobs program intended to promote the government.
You are required to keep a record of the transaction with the serial number. If the weapon you sold were used in a crime later, it will be traced back to you. The original retail sale is on record, that person (if not you) will then produce the name of the person he sold it to, which is either you or will lead to you via reiterating the same process. If you cannot produce the weapon or produce a receipt showing who you sold it to, then you're in trouble. But until and unless there is a criminal investigation to justify the intrusion, that information is no one's business.
What state do you live in where that is the law?
In Texas, your only responsibility when conducting a private firearm sale is that you must not have any reason to believe that the buyer is a prohibited person. You don't need to know their name, record anything, get a signature, or any of this.
I've sold in this manner the one time I was seeking to get rid of two handguns I no longer wanted. I took them to the gun show, and before I even got into the convention center a guy approached me and asked what I had in the cases. He looked them over. We haggled on a price for about 2 minutes. I asked if he was a prohibited person, to which he responded no. We exchanged goods and parted ways. The whole transaction took less than 5 minutes. 100% legal.
Heck, even assuming he was the head of a drug cartel, what *I* did was still 100% legal.
As far as what happens if those guns are ever used in a crime: I was the original retail purchaser of them, so the ATF will trace the guns back to me, and probably look and see that I live in a normal middle class neighbor hood in a low crime area, have a nice paying job, no debt, and haven't even had a traffic ticket in 13 years. If they even bother to contact me, I'll give them whatever details I remember about the guy I sold the guns to, and that'll be it.
There's no requirement that I have a record of who I sold to.
Southeast Asia.
China just launched its second aircraft carrier. India just launched its first, is building two more, and is buying 120 Rafales. South Korea is buying Apaches and F-15s (or maybe F-35s). Malaysia and Thailand want to buy AH-1Zs. Thailand is also modernizing its current fleet of western fighter planes. Japan just launched its first helicopter attack ship, is buying V-22s, and is no longer keeping up the pretense of only having a defensive force. The Philippines is begging us to come back and reopen a base in their country. The Norks are rattling the sabers as usual. Taiwan has some truly revolutionary anti-ship missiles. Vietnam is in the process of fielding 6 new submarines. Indonesia is in the middle of a large new naval buildup. In 2012, Singapore spent 24% of its national budget on its military.
The entirety of southeast Asia is in the midst of an arms race the likes of which hasn't been seen since the European interwar period. And similar to that same period, we're cutting our military budget and shrinking the forces, even in the face of what's brewing among our allies.
Is doing that right? Wrong? Who knows? I can't see the future. History tells us it's foolish. Maybe this time will be different.
It's why the government taxes cigarettes, alcohol, and machine guns: because they want less of those things.
If you start taxing college, you'll get fewer people going to college, and fewer people who went will work as hard as they would have otherwise. If you want to fix college tuition problems, then stop underwriting loans with tax dollars. Let private investors determine the proper risk of each student based on GPA, SAT, and the field they want to study.
It's such a daftly basic concept of economics, that it's depressing to see so many smart people trip over their own feet trying to explain why it shouldn't apply. You can rationalize to yourself why this is different all you want, but as Feynman said, "Nature cannot be fooled."
It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.
The level of law breaking that goes on in the government today is so great that the telling thing is not that a governor illegally closed a bridge as political retribution against a rival. The telling thing will be when we actually put a government official in a jail cell for breaking the law. At best, people who have been responsible for crimes on behalf of the government get fired. Sometimes they're just reassigned or have to move offices. More often, nothing at all happens.
...use the president's instead.
Call the lane closures a "fake controversy."
Refuse to let your aides testify, and when they're forced to, have them lie and/or plead the fifth.
Bury any inconvenient evidence under executive privilege.
Christie already used Obama's first and most common strategy: claiming ignorance. His only mistakes are not have an adoring press that is willing to unquestioningly parrot his talking points as the truth, and he doesn't control the federal DOJ and have the power to make it completely look the other way.
There's no honest person who can be outraged at Christie's politically motivated law breaking, and content with the last 5 years of the same, time and again, from the president. In a just America, these two men would share a jail cell.
His mistake was saying "Illinois" instead of "Chicago." Similarly, "California" instead of "Los Angeles."
Chicago's murder rate was 15.4 / 100,000 last year.
Los Angelos' murder rate was 6.6 / 100,000 last year.
Washington DC's murder rate 16.0 / 100,000 last year.
The US average was 4.7, for a recent year (not sure which).
These are murder rates, not firearm specific murder rates.
Substantively, what he said was true: a couple of gun control utopias make give us the vast majority of our murders. Technically, what he said was wrong because he adlibbed and choose his geography poorly.
Maybe Chicago needs to mandate gun safes then.
One of the main issues of the Heller decision was whether the government could mandate that you store your guns in a way that makes them not easily accessible for self defense. The Supreme Court ruled that they could not.
of people setting out to the pole at summer, to highlight the damage wrought by global warming, and then getting stuck in the ice, and then their rescuers getting stuck in the ice... it really feels as if over-the-top global warming alarmism has jumped the shark. Right here. And all excuses about how the ice is always still thick this time of year, or it's really just unlucky winds that blew it around the ship, those don't matter. People see global warming fear mongers, trapped in ice, in the summer, in the Antarctic, and their rescuers threatened by the same ice.
We'll look back in 20 years and say, "Remember when that ship got stuck in the ice on their journey to drum up fear about receding ice?"
Hell, I remember when I was in grade school in the '90s, and we were constantly told of the horrors of the hole on the ozone layer that was going to burn us to death, and the rain forests that would be 100% destroyed by 1995, suffocating all the aerobic life of the earth due to lack of oxygen. There's something in the human brain very susceptible to environmental alarmism, and it takes a really magnificent demonstration of stupidity every generation or so to snap people out of it. This is it!
You make the false assumption that we either have to give all our power to the government or to "big business." I advocate neither of those. Reclaim your power as an individual; that's the only place that power comes from to start with.
The next time you're rooting for another new government program that you hope will allow you to shed some more of your personal responsibility, remember this story. When you keep supporting politicians and policies aimed only at growing the size and power of the government, you end up with stories like this, and like the NSA spying, and like the roadside gloveless anal cavity searches, and crashed MRAPs on the I-10.
If you want the madness to stop, you have to start taking responsibility for yourself, and telling the government that you've finally decided that you know how to live your life and take care of yourself better than the government does.