Ps. I'm a guy that makes about 11 bucks an hour. I'll succeed and fail on my own hard work, initiative, and ambition. I don't want your entitlements now, and I don't want to compulsorily pay for someone else's entitlements later.
You're already paying for them. In the 1980s the Republicans raised the Social Security payroll tax to be substantially higher than what's needed to pay for existing retirees. Then they massively cut taxes for the wealthy and started spending the extra Social Security tax income to make up for the shortfall. Since SS taxes are only on the first $90k of income, they fall disproportionately on working people, so this is a beautiful way to redistribute wealth from people like you to the wealthiest americans.
Thank god you're not voting Republican this year. Nobody could possibly want that sort of redistribution.
Since Joe's comments have noticeably harmed Obama and/or helped McCain, it's reasonable to assume those doing so were Obama supporters or surrogates hoping to find evidence with which to smear Joe
Reasonable if you're a moron, maybe.
Let's think about it. When Joe made his comments he was just some shmoe. It was McCain's campaign, not Obama's, that decided to make this guy into a walking symbol of tax justice. They've literally been calling their campaign the "Joe the Plumber" tour for a week or two. So prior to this all happening (1) Obama had no reason to think the guy mattered much (2) of course McCain's campaign checked the guy out, they'd be nuts not to.
To elaborate on the second point: imagine the McCain campaign didn't check the guy out before they built a campaign around him. And then, god forbid, he turned out to be a tax evader/child molester/check kiter/whatever. Two weeks before the election the negative press could very well have ended the entire campaign. None of those campaign workers would ever get a job again. So yes, they did check him out. They may not have done it this way (illegally)--- perhaps they hired a PI or did a standard criminal background check. But I give them enough credit to assume that they're not total idiots.
On the other hand, I have to admit there is a legitimate counterpoint to this argument. After all, McCain didn't check Sarah Palin out at all before they built a campaign around her. So maybe they are that stupid.
The whole point of nuclear weapons is to overtly have them
That's the wrong scenario.
If the rest of the world is in a state of nuclear detente and one country overtly holds nuclear weapons, the other countries will simply arm themselves too. The one country holding nukes rapidly loses its unique advantage. The goal of the particular game the GP poster describes is to secretly hold on to your nuclear arsenal and pretend that you too have also disarmed. Then you announce/use them at the last possible moment when the s**t is about to hit the fan.
Bruce has said this dozens of times before this, and he's right. Quantum Cryptography (or alternatively, Quantum Key Distribution) has no commercial application today, outside of (maybe) a few paranoid and high-security government applications. But the latter can hardly be much of a commercial application, since the existence of a large government market would send a strong signal that governments aren't confident in existing cryptographic algorithms. That would be a bad signal to send.
Furthermore, QKD networks have issues including side channel attacks, where the machinery for transmitting/receiving photons actually leaks information via EM emissions, measurable power consumption, or even sound. In fact, one of the big issues they've had in research networks is that historically the transmission machinery has been noisy as hell.
Skip the partisanship. Give the blame where it is due--not with the party that differs with your own viewpoint (whichever party that may be), but the elected officials sitting in the Senate, the House, and Pennsylvania Avenue. Let's be a little more reasonable here, OK?
Unfortunately, our electoral system does not have a "throw the bums out and replace them with good, solid human beings" lever. So, with due respect, your analysis doesn't actually help us do anything about the situation.
Sure, let's say all politicians are to blame. What then? I mean, we can vote against the incumbent in every election, but mostly that just means some other party-supported figure gets in, and that's that. We could try to vote third party (where there are even serious candidates) but it's mostly a losing proposition. This country has a winner-take-all approach to running elections that fundamentally makes it difficult to elect parties outside of the big two.
You're not going to get a perfect outcome no matter what you do, so here are the practical measures I'm taking:
1. I think deregulation has a lot to do with the financial meltdown, so I'm voting for the candidates (and parties) that seem most likely to bring back sane regulation. I'm not expecting perfection (unfortunately), but I'm going to be as pragmatic as I can.
2. Within the national party that I choose, I'm going to contribute to and vote for candidates that even further support that approach.
3. I'm going to strongly work for campaign finance reform laws, because I think that a lot of the compromises we've seen in Washington have been transparent sellouts for campaign contribution.
4. I'm going to try to identify/which/ party really stands behind each piece of bad legislation (i.e., if all members from party A voted for it, and 10% of party B did, then I'm going to identify party B as the one I'm most likely to be able to influence and I'm going to support certain candidates within that party).
I don't think these are going to be perfect, but if enough people take action, I believe we'll make things substantially better. Unfortunately, complaining about "all the bums" in DC is just a great way to make sure they get to keep doing what they're doing.
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is...
With due respect, Reaganomics is whatever Reagan actually accomplished. If he found it politically expedient to reduce taxes without reducing spending to match, then that's Reaganomics. In my view, it's not a particularly successful policy.
Do you have a better suggestion for "someplace safe" than government bonds? The Social Security trust fund earns interest on money borrowed by the government just like anyone else who lends money to the government.
There have been many suggestions, including paying down some of that $10 trillion debt (which would be an implicit investment since we would be removing massive interest payments from our future balance sheet).
However, in this case I think the immediate solution is to improve the accounting. Move the Social Security revenues and expenditures to a separate balance sheet and take them out of the general Federal budget. This will at least make it clear how deeply in the hole the US government is, and make it a lot a lot harder for politicians to promote deficit-worsening policies.**
(** Incidentally, however, I'm not single minded about deficit reduction. I believe there truly are downturns when government should borrow--- right now being one of them. My problem is that we've been consistently deficit spending through the good times and the bad, and that's criminal.)
It's a hell of an interesting story actually. Congress votes for the budgets, but the President submits the first cut, and has a huge bully pulpit to argue for his plan. He also has veto power.
In this particular case, Congress decided not to pass Clinton's proposals--- and he fought back. For a while no budget at all got passed! The end result was a partial shutdown of government, which turned out to be a huge political loser for Congress. Congress eventually knuckled and accepted most of Clinton's proposals (though they got some of their requirements in too.)
While it could go to the employee, doesn't mean it would.
You can hide a tax under the bed, but it still is. Trust me, I'm self employed and pay every penny of that 15.2%. I also have employees, and my share of their payroll tax (7.6%) is a very real consideration when I decide how much I can afford to pay them.
it was only a surplus if you include FICA contributions.
I already posted a reply to this, but it occurs to me that a lot of people may not be clear on what it means.
You see, most working Americans see two kinds of Federal tax on their paystub. The first is plain-old Income Tax, which is probably in the low 20% range for most people with a "decent" full time job. The second is "FICA", which rolls up your contribution to Social Security and Medicare. For most people that tax covers another 7.6% of your income (6.2% Social Security, 1.4% Medicare). However, this number is misleading since the government actually makes your employer pay an equal amount. This is money that could be going to you, so really 15.2% of your salary is going to the government. (If you happen to be self-employed you'll see this directly, since the government makes you pay both halves.)
An important thing to note, however: the Social Security portion of your paycheck only applies to the first $90k or so of your income. So if you make, say $1m/year, your effective Social Security tax will be only a fraction of a percent. Basically it's a tax on the working class.
Now clearly 15.2% of your income is a huge chunk. In fact, considering that most people are probably paying only 20-22% of their income in regular Income Tax, that means you're really giving the Federal government 35-37% of your income! So it's worth knowing where the tax came from and where the money is going.
A bit of history: in the mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea to slash income taxes, particularly for people who were "important" to the economy, i.e., very wealthy. At the time there was some belief on the Republican side that cutting taxes would magically produce new economic activity that would pay for the reduced tax cuts. Unfortunately, that never really happened and the nation started to go deep into debt.
Coincidentally (or not), right around the same time, a Republican chairman of the Federal Reserve came up with the idea to massively increase the Social Security Payroll tax. Recall that this is a tax that only applies to the first $90k of your income (it was less then), so raising it isn't going to have a big impact on high earners. In theory the tax hike was designed to build up a big reserve of cash so that Social Security could operate in the 2020s when the baby boomers started to retire. However--- and this is the really important part of the story--- the same chairman insisted that all this cash should not be put away someplace safe, but should rather be made available as a kind of piggy bank for the government to borrow from.
You can probably figure out the rest of it. Free money. Tax cuts to give. Weapons systems to buy. Amazingly, even after eating up all of the Social Security funds, the government still had to borrow hundreds of billions from the outside throughout the Reagan and Bush years.
So far it's possible to cause this a bipartisan cheat, since Democrats were equally to blame. But then in 1992 a Democrat named Bill Clinton got elected and decided to get serious about reducing those deficits. And over his term he succeeded, through a combination of slightly higher taxes (mostly on the high end of the income scale) and reduced spending (particularly military). The economy also boomed--- many say as a direct result of all of this fiscal responsibility. And so balancing the checkbook begat revenue which meant an even more balanced checkbook.
By 2000, Clinton (and his VP Gore) had cut the deficit all the way back to a "surplus" which means we were still borrowing some from the SS funds, just not from the outside world anymore. Al Gore ran on a campaign of even further deficit reduction, basically saying: let's finish the job, take those SS taxes you're paying, and put them in a special fund ("lockbox") where the government can't spend them. Republicans scoffed, and promised an even bigger round of income tax cuts (focused at the very wea
it was only a surplus if you include FICA contributions.
I seem to recall Al Gore pointing that out in his campaign at some point. Something about putting Social Security contributions into a "lockbox" and balancing the budget without borrowing from those funds. Couldn't really hear it though, cause conservatives were so busy laughing.
Needless to say Bush didn't mention the thing about FICA contributions when he argued that we should "give back" the surplus in the form of tax cuts.
It doesn't say that he plugged it into his production network, just that he plugged it into/some/ network. If I got a great deal on one of these things I (1) wouldn't ever trust it for anything truly sensitive, out of general paranoia, but (2) would probably throw it on a non-sensitive network (e.g., external network outside of my firewall) to play around with it. There's no evidence at all that Mr. Mason did anything differently.
Technically, it's not Nielsen that's restraining speech. The Federal Government passed this law and it (and the state courts) are generally responsible for enforcing it. Thus if the law results in restraints on speech, the government can be held accountable. (Theoretically, of course.)
To some extent you're not supposed to care what the company is selling, since you're probably not in the bulk ink market (or whatever they may be offering). The point of these campaigns is to put the company's name into the heads of millions of motorists, on the off chance that a small fraction happen to make purchase decisions for bulk ink (or processed squid, whatever.)
At that point the purchaser will Google for local vendors, and when faced with a list of a half-dozen unfamiliar companies along with "Sericol" -- which he will implicitly trust because he's heard of them before (somewhere) -- he'll go for the safe choice he's heard of. After all, nobody ever got fired for going with Sericol.
I think it's fairly clever. I too was repulse by the first commercial, but thought the second one was kind of funny (this is the one where they're living in a house with those people). The whole point of those ads was to launch Bill Gates as a warm, cuddly nice-guy mascot for Microsoft --- specifically among the baby-boomer set who will be making purchase decisions for the next decade or so.
Aside from being seen as a really rich, "super-genius", I don't think "fun" has ever been synonymous with Bill's name. Even if they were goofy, these commercials took a little of the edge off. If MS keeps at it, they'll have a good spokesman so nobody ever has to talk about their actual products (think Windows Mojave, ugh.)
Then they're welcome to come up with ways to make that money. Once they've busted their asses in several jobs, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments, and earned their first million, they can suddenely be taxed right back to where they started, because congress thinks they can spend 600,000 of that man's first generated million better than he can.
Welcome to "How to ruin an economy 101: Start by taking away everything from those who know how to make and invest money, then give it to the worst investors you can." The Obama plan!
Now we've been to fantasy world, let's get back to the real one.
As President, George Bush has chosen to make his tax records public, and he's making in the neighborhood of $1m per year. So let's use him as our example.
In 2007 his household made nearly $923,807 and paid $221,635 to the treasury. That's nowhere near a 60% tax rate. It's more like 24%.
Crap, I know guys who work for a living and pay a higher tax rate.
As you said, the radical position is the idea that we should continue the open-ended experiment of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere (an experiment that's going to get massively worse as China and India develop). I would argue that until we have a computer model that convinces us that this is safe, this would be an experiment worth halting. And doing so as soon as possible.
Again, I understand the points you make above (we don't know with certainty, etc.). You just seem to follow them to the wrong conclusion.
So first of all, your original post seems to place a completely different emphasis than your response. Here's what you said, and what I was replying to:
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax... But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions.
Now, we basically agree that even if these "vocal alarm[ists]" (whoever they may be) don't want this, they clearly aren't vocal enough to stop both major political parties from proposing a C&T plan. And yet, clearly these dastardly miscreants hate C&T, so who are they?
Well, they're probably not the Ethanol lobby, who would benefit (at least marginally) from Cap & Trade, insomuch as they can claim something approaching carbon neutrality. They're not the CAFE people (whoever they are), because internalizing carbon costs would certainly make it politically easier to pass higher mileage standards. And they're not the solar cell people, who would also receive an implicit subsidy from C&T. I can't believe that any of these people would find opposition to C&T to be in their interest.
In fact, about the only group I can see really opposing C&T would be fossil fuels, industry, and the (clean) coal folks, since they don't currently have much in the way of carbon capture. And, not surprisingly, that seems to be the way it's going. Sadly these people seem to have gotten hold of John McCain's ear and he's now going around giving speeches about how the mandatory cap won't really be enforced.
So, having raised the specter of these people. Tell me, who are they? How are they opposing C&T? How does your original post --- where you clearly state that they don't want it --- make sense with reference to these people? Perhaps you've changed your argument since the first post, and I respect that. But you should be clear about how your argument has changed before you yell at people for not reading your posts.
What planet are you on? We currently have a vigorous debate on the national policy level --- coinciding with a Presidential election --- that focuses entirely on the sort of cap and trade plans you discuss. There may be some nutbags out there, but all of the serious debate is on exactly the issue you mention.
If you're looking to make a difference here, get informed: both candidates are proposing a cap and trade system. The major difference is whether the permits will be auctioned or just given away. There also appears to be some doubt on the Republican side as to whether the cap will actually be "mandatory". I'll leave it to you to decide how the heck it would possibly work without being mandatory, but whatever...
You erroneously stated he cut funding for all federally funded stem cell research.
No. What I said is that the Republican party instituted "bans on Federally funded stem cell research that have had a massive impact on the research community". I feel that the statement is not only technically accurate, but more than that I stand by the spirit of the statement. While Bush did not ban all funding for all stem cell research, he banned funding for the most promising types of research. This forced researchers to use a collection of severely contaminated existing stem cell lines, and to divert massive resources to the development of new techniques. These new techniques are beginning to bear some fruit, but are several years away from viability. The cost of this action may be huge.
I do apologize, however. In my previous post I should have blockquoted the section of your post that I objected to. My primary objection to your post was the utterly mendacious implication that the Dickey Amendment was the creation of President Clinton, and that Bush was somehow righting Clinton's mistakes. When in fact, the Clinton administration affirmatively sought to fund this research in the face of major Republican opposition. Bush, for his part, only addressed this issue because he was forced to by the process that Clinton had set in motion.
Finally, I do respect your moral objection to the research, though I strongly disagree with the notion that destroying a small bundle of human cells with no differentiated organs is morally equivalent to experimentation on living, breathing, feeling human subject. My real problem with this directive is that it's incoherent: existing stem cell lines can be made, killed, cloned, thrown away. And simultaneously, IVF clinics can legally consign thousands of embryos to the fire. But we're making a great moral stride by permitting this wanton destruction while preventing potentially lifesaving research. But I guess that's a topic for another forum.
It was a bad policy, and I'm well past the point where "it had a rider" is a good enough reason not to veto it. The only reason something like that doesn't get vetoed is when the person is more concerned about getting re-elected than making good policy, and that crap has to stop.
Actually, I think he was more concerned with passing the appropriations bills for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. The Republicans know these bills are critical, and vetoing them would wreak havoc with the operation of government.
The Republicans also knew that a veto over a small rider --- however well deserved --- would probably not force them to remove the language, since it would only take a few "pragmatic" Democrats in Congress to side with them and override the veto. (You're free to infer whatever motives you want about those Democrats. Maybe they're sellouts, maybe they're in vulnerable districts, maybe they don't care about embryonic stem cell research, maybe they just really, really believe that funding the Dept. of Education is critical and not worth fighting a single rider over.)
The thing is, getting things done in our Constitutional democracy is a very tricky business. Sometimes you have no choice but to compromise, especially when the other side has a majority and no qualms about using it.
When you accuse the parent poster of partisanship, it's helpful to make sure your post doesn't smack of the same thing!
As to the Dickey amendment--- that was written by a Republican Congressman and attached to a major appropriations bill (that's what "rider" means). Clinton signed it because there's no line-item veto, and thus a President sometimes has to accept undesirable riders when the alternative is killing an important bill. It is in no way representative of his or the Democratic party's agenda.
Someone reading your post might come away with the mistaken impression that Clinton did not care to fund this research, and therefore Bush should be commended for his flexibility! Surprisingly, that reader would be greatly mistaken. Due to lobbying by scientists, the Clinton/Gore administration actually implemented a plan to fund of this type of research in spite of the amendment. The plan involved a grant deadline of March 2001 and had no restrictions on embryonic research. This is when incoming President (a man named George W. Bush) went ahead and stopped the grant review process and imposed his (and in the opinion of researchers --- quite harmful) Executive Order preventing funding of research on new embryonic lines.
http://www.nrlc.org/news/2001/NRL02/doerside.html
Now, the interesting thing about your post is that it's technically correct on nearly every point, and yet the overall thrust is entirely misleading. Some might even consider that this was deliberate! Now, you have to remember that people read these comments and judge you on the way you make your argument, not just the factoids that you throw out. So if you're going to offer your opinion, I believe that it's important to your cause that the facts fully support your argument. By offering arguments that are technically correct, but lead the reader to a surprisingly false conclusion, you actually do serious harm to your credibility and damage the cause you support.
(If you'll forgive an old man his rambling, I'm inclined to believe that reliance on this sort of "truthiness" is one of the reasons that the conservative brand is experiencing such a terrible backlash right now. You can fool people once, but they get really pissed off when you do it. Or something.)
Embryonic stem cell research is conducted with fertilized embryos from fertility clinics. The first concern here is whether disposing of these is "abortion". The second is --- why prevent research but allow excess embryos to be created by fertility clinics? The third is --- how can we allow them to be disposed of in an incinerator if we won't permit research?
And conversely, on the left, there's a minority of the Democrats that would ban all industrial activity whatsover, because it is bad for mother earth. The point really is that we need to stop framing debates based upon what the radicals of either side of the aisle are telling us to frame them as and to start and think for ourselves. You know, there's enough to go around in both "party planks" to make one want to wretch.
And yet, the Republican party has a history of acting on the whims of its lunatic fringe --- instituting bans on Federally funded stem cell research that have had a massive impact on the research community. Whereas I'm not aware of any Democratic plan to end all industrial activity.
Overall, I'm exhausted by these moronic "slap both parties down" posts. There are huge, meaningful difference between what both parties will accomplish if elected. To analogize, it's as though you have a choice between a full-on uppercut to the chin, or just a gentle tap on the shoulder. I guess both involve blows to your body, so why should you care which one you get?
Of course there's no way to tell legitimate content that you create from 'non-legitimate' content, so this looks like just another nail in the coffin if the Zune.
Well of course there are ways to tell legitimate content from non-legitimate content. They're the same ways that are already being used in the HD-DVD and BluRay specs: the content producers put some kind of watermark into the stuff they sell, and if the player detects that watermark in some piece of non-DRMed content it'll shut down and refuse to play that file.
Of course there's a chance of false positives with this sort of thing. Since the watermarks are usually audio-based, that means there's a potential that the system will be triggered by, say, a home movie where the TV is on in the background. And if it's too sensitive then it might go off whenever it sees random noise.
In any case, I doubt this is going to do too much for the Zune's sales, so one hopes that MS is getting something really swank for doing the deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Ps. I'm a guy that makes about 11 bucks an hour. I'll succeed and fail on my own hard work, initiative, and ambition. I don't want your entitlements now, and I don't want to compulsorily pay for someone else's entitlements later.
You're already paying for them. In the 1980s the Republicans raised the Social Security payroll tax to be substantially higher than what's needed to pay for existing retirees. Then they massively cut taxes for the wealthy and started spending the extra Social Security tax income to make up for the shortfall. Since SS taxes are only on the first $90k of income, they fall disproportionately on working people, so this is a beautiful way to redistribute wealth from people like you to the wealthiest americans.
Thank god you're not voting Republican this year. Nobody could possibly want that sort of redistribution.
Since Joe's comments have noticeably harmed Obama and/or helped McCain, it's reasonable to assume those doing so were Obama supporters or surrogates hoping to find evidence with which to smear Joe
Reasonable if you're a moron, maybe.
Let's think about it. When Joe made his comments he was just some shmoe. It was McCain's campaign, not Obama's, that decided to make this guy into a walking symbol of tax justice. They've literally been calling their campaign the "Joe the Plumber" tour for a week or two. So prior to this all happening (1) Obama had no reason to think the guy mattered much (2) of course McCain's campaign checked the guy out, they'd be nuts not to.
To elaborate on the second point: imagine the McCain campaign didn't check the guy out before they built a campaign around him. And then, god forbid, he turned out to be a tax evader/child molester/check kiter/whatever. Two weeks before the election the negative press could very well have ended the entire campaign. None of those campaign workers would ever get a job again. So yes, they did check him out. They may not have done it this way (illegally)--- perhaps they hired a PI or did a standard criminal background check. But I give them enough credit to assume that they're not total idiots.
On the other hand, I have to admit there is a legitimate counterpoint to this argument. After all, McCain didn't check Sarah Palin out at all before they built a campaign around her. So maybe they are that stupid.
The whole point of nuclear weapons is to overtly have them
That's the wrong scenario.
If the rest of the world is in a state of nuclear detente and one country overtly holds nuclear weapons, the other countries will simply arm themselves too. The one country holding nukes rapidly loses its unique advantage. The goal of the particular game the GP poster describes is to secretly hold on to your nuclear arsenal and pretend that you too have also disarmed. Then you announce/use them at the last possible moment when the s**t is about to hit the fan.
Bruce has said this dozens of times before this, and he's right. Quantum Cryptography (or alternatively, Quantum Key Distribution) has no commercial application today, outside of (maybe) a few paranoid and high-security government applications. But the latter can hardly be much of a commercial application, since the existence of a large government market would send a strong signal that governments aren't confident in existing cryptographic algorithms. That would be a bad signal to send.
Furthermore, QKD networks have issues including side channel attacks, where the machinery for transmitting/receiving photons actually leaks information via EM emissions, measurable power consumption, or even sound. In fact, one of the big issues they've had in research networks is that historically the transmission machinery has been noisy as hell.
Skip the partisanship. Give the blame where it is due--not with the party that differs with your own viewpoint (whichever party that may be), but the elected officials sitting in the Senate, the House, and Pennsylvania Avenue. Let's be a little more reasonable here, OK?
Unfortunately, our electoral system does not have a "throw the bums out and replace them with good, solid human beings" lever. So, with due respect, your analysis doesn't actually help us do anything about the situation.
Sure, let's say all politicians are to blame. What then? I mean, we can vote against the incumbent in every election, but mostly that just means some other party-supported figure gets in, and that's that. We could try to vote third party (where there are even serious candidates) but it's mostly a losing proposition. This country has a winner-take-all approach to running elections that fundamentally makes it difficult to elect parties outside of the big two.
You're not going to get a perfect outcome no matter what you do, so here are the practical measures I'm taking:
1. I think deregulation has a lot to do with the financial meltdown, so I'm voting for the candidates (and parties) that seem most likely to bring back sane regulation. I'm not expecting perfection (unfortunately), but I'm going to be as pragmatic as I can.
2. Within the national party that I choose, I'm going to contribute to and vote for candidates that even further support that approach.
3. I'm going to strongly work for campaign finance reform laws, because I think that a lot of the compromises we've seen in Washington have been transparent sellouts for campaign contribution.
4. I'm going to try to identify /which/ party really stands behind each piece of bad legislation (i.e., if all members from party A voted for it, and 10% of party B did, then I'm going to identify party B as the one I'm most likely to be able to influence and I'm going to support certain candidates within that party).
I don't think these are going to be perfect, but if enough people take action, I believe we'll make things substantially better. Unfortunately, complaining about "all the bums" in DC is just a great way to make sure they get to keep doing what they're doing.
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is...
With due respect, Reaganomics is whatever Reagan actually accomplished. If he found it politically expedient to reduce taxes without reducing spending to match, then that's Reaganomics. In my view, it's not a particularly successful policy.
Do you have a better suggestion for "someplace safe" than government bonds? The Social Security trust fund earns interest on money borrowed by the government just like anyone else who lends money to the government.
There have been many suggestions, including paying down some of that $10 trillion debt (which would be an implicit investment since we would be removing massive interest payments from our future balance sheet).
However, in this case I think the immediate solution is to improve the accounting. Move the Social Security revenues and expenditures to a separate balance sheet and take them out of the general Federal budget. This will at least make it clear how deeply in the hole the US government is, and make it a lot a lot harder for politicians to promote deficit-worsening policies.**
(** Incidentally, however, I'm not single minded about deficit reduction. I believe there truly are downturns when government should borrow--- right now being one of them. My problem is that we've been consistently deficit spending through the good times and the bad, and that's criminal.)
It's a hell of an interesting story actually. Congress votes for the budgets, but the President submits the first cut, and has a huge bully pulpit to argue for his plan. He also has veto power.
In this particular case, Congress decided not to pass Clinton's proposals--- and he fought back. For a while no budget at all got passed! The end result was a partial shutdown of government, which turned out to be a huge political loser for Congress. Congress eventually knuckled and accepted most of Clinton's proposals (though they got some of their requirements in too.)
While it could go to the employee, doesn't mean it would.
You can hide a tax under the bed, but it still is. Trust me, I'm self employed and pay every penny of that 15.2%. I also have employees, and my share of their payroll tax (7.6%) is a very real consideration when I decide how much I can afford to pay them.
it was only a surplus if you include FICA contributions.
I already posted a reply to this, but it occurs to me that a lot of people may not be clear on what it means.
You see, most working Americans see two kinds of Federal tax on their paystub. The first is plain-old Income Tax, which is probably in the low 20% range for most people with a "decent" full time job. The second is "FICA", which rolls up your contribution to Social Security and Medicare. For most people that tax covers another 7.6% of your income (6.2% Social Security, 1.4% Medicare). However, this number is misleading since the government actually makes your employer pay an equal amount. This is money that could be going to you, so really 15.2% of your salary is going to the government. (If you happen to be self-employed you'll see this directly, since the government makes you pay both halves.)
An important thing to note, however: the Social Security portion of your paycheck only applies to the first $90k or so of your income. So if you make, say $1m/year, your effective Social Security tax will be only a fraction of a percent. Basically it's a tax on the working class.
Now clearly 15.2% of your income is a huge chunk. In fact, considering that most people are probably paying only 20-22% of their income in regular Income Tax, that means you're really giving the Federal government 35-37% of your income! So it's worth knowing where the tax came from and where the money is going.
A bit of history: in the mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan came into office with the idea to slash income taxes, particularly for people who were "important" to the economy, i.e., very wealthy. At the time there was some belief on the Republican side that cutting taxes would magically produce new economic activity that would pay for the reduced tax cuts. Unfortunately, that never really happened and the nation started to go deep into debt.
Coincidentally (or not), right around the same time, a Republican chairman of the Federal Reserve came up with the idea to massively increase the Social Security Payroll tax. Recall that this is a tax that only applies to the first $90k of your income (it was less then), so raising it isn't going to have a big impact on high earners. In theory the tax hike was designed to build up a big reserve of cash so that Social Security could operate in the 2020s when the baby boomers started to retire. However--- and this is the really important part of the story--- the same chairman insisted that all this cash should not be put away someplace safe, but should rather be made available as a kind of piggy bank for the government to borrow from.
You can probably figure out the rest of it. Free money. Tax cuts to give. Weapons systems to buy. Amazingly, even after eating up all of the Social Security funds, the government still had to borrow hundreds of billions from the outside throughout the Reagan and Bush years.
So far it's possible to cause this a bipartisan cheat, since Democrats were equally to blame. But then in 1992 a Democrat named Bill Clinton got elected and decided to get serious about reducing those deficits. And over his term he succeeded, through a combination of slightly higher taxes (mostly on the high end of the income scale) and reduced spending (particularly military). The economy also boomed--- many say as a direct result of all of this fiscal responsibility. And so balancing the checkbook begat revenue which meant an even more balanced checkbook.
By 2000, Clinton (and his VP Gore) had cut the deficit all the way back to a "surplus" which means we were still borrowing some from the SS funds, just not from the outside world anymore. Al Gore ran on a campaign of even further deficit reduction, basically saying: let's finish the job, take those SS taxes you're paying, and put them in a special fund ("lockbox") where the government can't spend them. Republicans scoffed, and promised an even bigger round of income tax cuts (focused at the very wea
it was only a surplus if you include FICA contributions.
I seem to recall Al Gore pointing that out in his campaign at some point. Something about putting Social Security contributions into a "lockbox" and balancing the budget without borrowing from those funds. Couldn't really hear it though, cause conservatives were so busy laughing.
Needless to say Bush didn't mention the thing about FICA contributions when he argued that we should "give back" the surplus in the form of tax cuts.
It doesn't say that he plugged it into his production network, just that he plugged it into /some/ network. If I got a great deal on one of these things I (1) wouldn't ever trust it for anything truly sensitive, out of general paranoia, but (2) would probably throw it on a non-sensitive network (e.g., external network outside of my firewall) to play around with it. There's no evidence at all that Mr. Mason did anything differently.
Technically, it's not Nielsen that's restraining speech. The Federal Government passed this law and it (and the state courts) are generally responsible for enforcing it. Thus if the law results in restraints on speech, the government can be held accountable. (Theoretically, of course.)
To some extent you're not supposed to care what the company is selling, since you're probably not in the bulk ink market (or whatever they may be offering). The point of these campaigns is to put the company's name into the heads of millions of motorists, on the off chance that a small fraction happen to make purchase decisions for bulk ink (or processed squid, whatever.)
At that point the purchaser will Google for local vendors, and when faced with a list of a half-dozen unfamiliar companies along with "Sericol" -- which he will implicitly trust because he's heard of them before (somewhere) -- he'll go for the safe choice he's heard of. After all, nobody ever got fired for going with Sericol.
I think it's fairly clever. I too was repulse by the first commercial, but thought the second one was kind of funny (this is the one where they're living in a house with those people). The whole point of those ads was to launch Bill Gates as a warm, cuddly nice-guy mascot for Microsoft --- specifically among the baby-boomer set who will be making purchase decisions for the next decade or so.
Aside from being seen as a really rich, "super-genius", I don't think "fun" has ever been synonymous with Bill's name. Even if they were goofy, these commercials took a little of the edge off. If MS keeps at it, they'll have a good spokesman so nobody ever has to talk about their actual products (think Windows Mojave, ugh.)
Then they're welcome to come up with ways to make that money. Once they've busted their asses in several jobs, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments, and earned their first million, they can suddenely be taxed right back to where they started, because congress thinks they can spend 600,000 of that man's first generated million better than he can. Welcome to "How to ruin an economy 101: Start by taking away everything from those who know how to make and invest money, then give it to the worst investors you can." The Obama plan!
Now we've been to fantasy world, let's get back to the real one.
As President, George Bush has chosen to make his tax records public, and he's making in the neighborhood of $1m per year. So let's use him as our example.
In 2007 his household made nearly $923,807 and paid $221,635 to the treasury. That's nowhere near a 60% tax rate. It's more like 24%.
Crap, I know guys who work for a living and pay a higher tax rate.
As you said, the radical position is the idea that we should continue the open-ended experiment of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere (an experiment that's going to get massively worse as China and India develop). I would argue that until we have a computer model that convinces us that this is safe, this would be an experiment worth halting. And doing so as soon as possible. Again, I understand the points you make above (we don't know with certainty, etc.). You just seem to follow them to the wrong conclusion.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax ... But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions.
Now, we basically agree that even if these "vocal alarm[ists]" (whoever they may be) don't want this, they clearly aren't vocal enough to stop both major political parties from proposing a C&T plan. And yet, clearly these dastardly miscreants hate C&T, so who are they?
Well, they're probably not the Ethanol lobby, who would benefit (at least marginally) from Cap & Trade, insomuch as they can claim something approaching carbon neutrality. They're not the CAFE people (whoever they are), because internalizing carbon costs would certainly make it politically easier to pass higher mileage standards. And they're not the solar cell people, who would also receive an implicit subsidy from C&T. I can't believe that any of these people would find opposition to C&T to be in their interest.
In fact, about the only group I can see really opposing C&T would be fossil fuels, industry, and the (clean) coal folks, since they don't currently have much in the way of carbon capture. And, not surprisingly, that seems to be the way it's going. Sadly these people seem to have gotten hold of John McCain's ear and he's now going around giving speeches about how the mandatory cap won't really be enforced.
So, having raised the specter of these people. Tell me, who are they? How are they opposing C&T? How does your original post --- where you clearly state that they don't want it --- make sense with reference to these people? Perhaps you've changed your argument since the first post, and I respect that. But you should be clear about how your argument has changed before you yell at people for not reading your posts.
What planet are you on? We currently have a vigorous debate on the national policy level --- coinciding with a Presidential election --- that focuses entirely on the sort of cap and trade plans you discuss. There may be some nutbags out there, but all of the serious debate is on exactly the issue you mention.
If you're looking to make a difference here, get informed: both candidates are proposing a cap and trade system. The major difference is whether the permits will be auctioned or just given away. There also appears to be some doubt on the Republican side as to whether the cap will actually be "mandatory". I'll leave it to you to decide how the heck it would possibly work without being mandatory, but whatever...
You erroneously stated he cut funding for all federally funded stem cell research.
No. What I said is that the Republican party instituted "bans on Federally funded stem cell research that have had a massive impact on the research community". I feel that the statement is not only technically accurate, but more than that I stand by the spirit of the statement. While Bush did not ban all funding for all stem cell research, he banned funding for the most promising types of research. This forced researchers to use a collection of severely contaminated existing stem cell lines, and to divert massive resources to the development of new techniques. These new techniques are beginning to bear some fruit, but are several years away from viability. The cost of this action may be huge.
I do apologize, however. In my previous post I should have blockquoted the section of your post that I objected to. My primary objection to your post was the utterly mendacious implication that the Dickey Amendment was the creation of President Clinton, and that Bush was somehow righting Clinton's mistakes. When in fact, the Clinton administration affirmatively sought to fund this research in the face of major Republican opposition. Bush, for his part, only addressed this issue because he was forced to by the process that Clinton had set in motion.
Finally, I do respect your moral objection to the research, though I strongly disagree with the notion that destroying a small bundle of human cells with no differentiated organs is morally equivalent to experimentation on living, breathing, feeling human subject. My real problem with this directive is that it's incoherent: existing stem cell lines can be made, killed, cloned, thrown away. And simultaneously, IVF clinics can legally consign thousands of embryos to the fire. But we're making a great moral stride by permitting this wanton destruction while preventing potentially lifesaving research. But I guess that's a topic for another forum.
It was a bad policy, and I'm well past the point where "it had a rider" is a good enough reason not to veto it. The only reason something like that doesn't get vetoed is when the person is more concerned about getting re-elected than making good policy, and that crap has to stop.
Actually, I think he was more concerned with passing the appropriations bills for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. The Republicans know these bills are critical, and vetoing them would wreak havoc with the operation of government.
The Republicans also knew that a veto over a small rider --- however well deserved --- would probably not force them to remove the language, since it would only take a few "pragmatic" Democrats in Congress to side with them and override the veto. (You're free to infer whatever motives you want about those Democrats. Maybe they're sellouts, maybe they're in vulnerable districts, maybe they don't care about embryonic stem cell research, maybe they just really, really believe that funding the Dept. of Education is critical and not worth fighting a single rider over.)
The thing is, getting things done in our Constitutional democracy is a very tricky business. Sometimes you have no choice but to compromise, especially when the other side has a majority and no qualms about using it.
When you accuse the parent poster of partisanship, it's helpful to make sure your post doesn't smack of the same thing!
As to the Dickey amendment--- that was written by a Republican Congressman and attached to a major appropriations bill (that's what "rider" means). Clinton signed it because there's no line-item veto, and thus a President sometimes has to accept undesirable riders when the alternative is killing an important bill. It is in no way representative of his or the Democratic party's agenda.
Someone reading your post might come away with the mistaken impression that Clinton did not care to fund this research, and therefore Bush should be commended for his flexibility! Surprisingly, that reader would be greatly mistaken. Due to lobbying by scientists, the Clinton/Gore administration actually implemented a plan to fund of this type of research in spite of the amendment. The plan involved a grant deadline of March 2001 and had no restrictions on embryonic research. This is when incoming President (a man named George W. Bush) went ahead and stopped the grant review process and imposed his (and in the opinion of researchers --- quite harmful) Executive Order preventing funding of research on new embryonic lines. http://www.nrlc.org/news/2001/NRL02/doerside.html
Now, the interesting thing about your post is that it's technically correct on nearly every point, and yet the overall thrust is entirely misleading. Some might even consider that this was deliberate! Now, you have to remember that people read these comments and judge you on the way you make your argument, not just the factoids that you throw out. So if you're going to offer your opinion, I believe that it's important to your cause that the facts fully support your argument. By offering arguments that are technically correct, but lead the reader to a surprisingly false conclusion, you actually do serious harm to your credibility and damage the cause you support.
(If you'll forgive an old man his rambling, I'm inclined to believe that reliance on this sort of "truthiness" is one of the reasons that the conservative brand is experiencing such a terrible backlash right now. You can fool people once, but they get really pissed off when you do it. Or something.)
Embryonic stem cell research is conducted with fertilized embryos from fertility clinics. The first concern here is whether disposing of these is "abortion". The second is --- why prevent research but allow excess embryos to be created by fertility clinics? The third is --- how can we allow them to be disposed of in an incinerator if we won't permit research?
And yet, the Republican party has a history of acting on the whims of its lunatic fringe --- instituting bans on Federally funded stem cell research that have had a massive impact on the research community. Whereas I'm not aware of any Democratic plan to end all industrial activity.
Overall, I'm exhausted by these moronic "slap both parties down" posts. There are huge, meaningful difference between what both parties will accomplish if elected. To analogize, it's as though you have a choice between a full-on uppercut to the chin, or just a gentle tap on the shoulder. I guess both involve blows to your body, so why should you care which one you get?
Well of course there are ways to tell legitimate content from non-legitimate content. They're the same ways that are already being used in the HD-DVD and BluRay specs: the content producers put some kind of watermark into the stuff they sell, and if the player detects that watermark in some piece of non-DRMed content it'll shut down and refuse to play that file.
Of course there's a chance of false positives with this sort of thing. Since the watermarks are usually audio-based, that means there's a potential that the system will be triggered by, say, a home movie where the TV is on in the background. And if it's too sensitive then it might go off whenever it sees random noise.
In any case, I doubt this is going to do too much for the Zune's sales, so one hopes that MS is getting something really swank for doing the deal.