I'm also no expert, but wouldn't any salvage belong to the group running the expedition, as opposed to individuals who were sent? For instance, if I mounted a salvage expedition to recover objects from a Spanish galleon, I don't think my crew can just stuff their pockets with doubloons, those would be the property of the expedition. Now, if he were to take his own rocket to the moon, grab things, and bring them back, that'd be different. Also, at the time that he took the camera from the ship, wasn't it still operational? In other words, it wouldn't be salvage *until* it had been released and crashed on the moon, until then he was taking equipment from an operational vehicle that was still in use by NASA.
Better question, if one astronaut killed another on the moon, could he be tried for murder when he got back as they weren't in the U.S. and no local (lunar) laws were violated? (Not on the actual spacecraft where the U.S. probably would have jurisdiction as it's a U.S. vessel, I mean on the moon itself).
There's probably something to be said though about the fairness of letting him profit while the astronauts who didn't bring things back to sell don't. Assuming he wasn't authorized to take it (he claims otherwise, but for the moment assume NASA is right), then it's kind of a slap in the face to all the others who played by the rules and didn't just grab whatever they could carry and bring it back as well. I'd kinda like to see what other astronauts have to say about this actually....
This is a really good point. When you get up to the top of the scale, the chart really climbs incredibly steeply. Yes, at $150k, you're in a high percentile, but really you, me and everyone around the $100k - $200k range are kind of a buffer for the super rich in the million+ range. As long as the tax brackets keep us "lesser rich" in the same boat as the super-rich, we'll be used by them to support tax levels that would impact us massively, but would be the difference between 3 or 5 vacation properties for them. I don't think it's any accident that the highest bracket reaches as low as it does, the people making 7 figure incomes need to keep us in the same "club" as them, but it's not because we're their peers; we're their foot-soldiers. We're the ones who'll actually feel the pinch of increased taxes, so our numbers are used to provide "boots on the ground" to defend ourselves, and them by proxy. I'm in the greater NYC area, and making $100k - $200k doesn't go anywhere near as far as in other places (as you well know being near D.C.), around here a nice little 3 or 4 bedroom cape still goes for over $300k (almost double that before real-estate tanked)....I've seen houses in other parts of the country that go for over $100k less where I could fit my entire house into the kitchen.
Quick on Social Security: there reasonable options between the extremes of "government controls everything" and "people can blow their savings on crazy stuff". Most financial planners will give the same advice, and that advice could be used as guardrails - just like a 401k can't offer just any crazy investment, the "government 401k" could offer still more conservative choices. The point is that the government shouldn't hold the money.
I'd say that what we have now is the place between two extremes. You can invest on your own, and should that not work out as hoped, you won't be left completely penniless. True, a 401k can't just offer any insane thing they like, but if you think they can't (and aren't) manipulated in favor of the traders, you're just being naive. As for the government holding the money, the government is the people. Why do you think that having a private group with a potential profit motive, accountable only to itself is better than a well regulated, not for profit structure that everyone has at least some voice in?
And I think you are missing my point: again it's not all-or-nothing. Yes, there are stil incentives when taxes are higher, but those incentives are smaller.
I'd say your position is closer to all-or-nothing than mine. Nobody is going to choose a minimum wage job over making $5M a year because they only have $2.5M left after taxes. Nobody is going to choose making $100K/year over making $1M/year because they'll only net $500K after taxes. The tax rate can go much higher at those levels than it is now before people seriously say they don't want the "hassle" of being a highly placed executive, with all the perks and extras that go with it.
And why would you sacrifice the good of all on the altar of "fair pay"? Would you seriously be willing eliminate pay you saw as unfair if it meant everyone would suffer?
You keep saying everyone would suffer, but I still don't see it. Someone who makes $1M and has $500K left after taxes is not *suffering*. They're still living better than almost anyone else you'll meet. If that's suffering, sign me up, I'll take one for the team.
(More realistically: how would you like to eliminate pay thta some ruling elite not chosen by you saw as unfair, if it meant everyone would suffer?)
Straw-man, nobody's talking about eliminating pay for anyone in particular, or even at all. A progressive tax system taxes everyone at a given income level similarly.
I don't think a pro sports star works 100 times as hard a a college athelete, but that's not some great moral problem either. The market finds prices that avoid scarcity and glut, not "fair" prices (as judged by... ?).
Indeed, in that case, the ridiculous salaries are due to a glitch in the system, where *somebody* has to get the money, even though what they provide isn't particularly productive or useful. It's irrelevant though, as they have the money, and taxes would be applied to them the same way as if they had made that money in any other occupation. The fact remains that without society to support them (stadiums, audiences, transportation, etc), they wouldn't be making anything at all. That they make such amazingly high amounts is a benefit they reap from being part of society, and therefore it can be argued they owe more back than, say, a hard working longshoremen or cop. Just as there's no guarantee to be rich, I'm aware of no guarantee of unlimited riches to the detriment of everyone else.
when you have increasingly autonomous killbots, disaster becomes a question of "when" not "if."
You say this as if it's a problem. Everybody knows that each Killbot has a preset kill limit. I'll simply send wave after wave of my own men in against them until they hit their limit and then freeze in place. G'uh.
Two years? And what happens after that? The phone stops working?
Well, if that were to happen, and Sprint hasn't said it would, but if it were, your phone would continue to work fine for calls and 3G data. I agree though that this is a little awkward....I was going to be upgrading my phone soon, but now I think I'll be waiting longer to see what happens with LTE models rather than another WiMax one as WiMax buildouts seem to have stalled, and I'll want better network coverage for 4G with my next phone.
During most of that time tax loopholes were many and large, and offshore investments were hide-able from the IRS. The rich weren't paying any higher taxes in reality, and perhaps lower. Under all the tax plans that have been tried for a century, federal revenue ends up at 19-20% of GDP.
I'll abandon this point, only because the issues are complex and I'm simply not prepared or qualified to make a proper counter-argument. I only repost it now so that I don't appear to simply appear to be picking and choosing the points I like.
On social security - it servbes a vital purpoise, but no point at all is served by having the government hold the peoples retirement money (they government just spends it) - let/force people to have their own retirement svaing accounts, no need for government to be involved beyond that requirement.
The fact that a vast number, possibly even a majority of people are incapable of managing long term investments like this simply invites disaster. That doesn't even touch on the fact that we regularly see market corrections that wipe out people's retirement plans, or the predatory schemes that the investment houses can and do engage in. A safety net is required unless you're prepared to see potentially large numbers of indigent elderly people on the streets, and I don't think anyone would be comfortable with that.
On Medicare - it doesn't matter how good/useful it is. We're not even funind it at 10% of what's needed - it can't possibly be paid for as things stand now. And, again, there's probably a solution that involves minimal government.
I agree with your first premise, but not the second. I favour a single-payer universal system, but that's a much larger conversation.
But overlal, you're missing my real point: the economy prospers when the risk/reward matrix is good for wealthy and successful businessmen. The more you up the risk (e.g., with a changing regulatory enorinment) and the more you diminish the reward (by steep taxes) the less the economy will grow, and the less technological progress we'll have, and the worse off everyone will be one generation later.
Oh I'm not missing your point, I'm disagreeing with it. I agree that reward is an integral part of motivation, but not that it's the only one, or that it has to be unlimited. I see the current situation as being dominated by a predatory class of super-wealthy, and I don't agree that it's deserved. Having 1% of the population control 90% of the wealth is simply absurd, do you really believe that their efforts, on the whole, are 90x as important as everyone else? Does an investment banker, who produces nothing aside from paperwork really have more value to society than 100 (or more) teachers? Does a football player or radio talk show host really bring 50 times the value of 100 paramedics to society? And how about all of those "born on third base but act like they just hit a home-run" types like the Hiltons or the Kardashians, who make money simply by being who they are. The average household income in the U.S. is somewhere around $50,000, meaning that it'll take one of those average families 20 years to see $1M in earnings, vs Larry Elison, who will see $1M in earnings (not investments or stock options, just salary) by February each year. No, I don't think the super-rich are justified in their earnings, the numbers are absurd, and it's all a rigged game designed to keep virtually all of the wealth in a small number of hands. And besides, if taxes on the top bracket went up to 50%, do you really think Elison would give up and stop working if he had to pay $3M in taxes a year, because he'd only have $3M left (plus all of his stock options and capital investments)?
Once leadership is replaced and believed to be acting in the best interest of the American People, we will come forward with these Ideas and provide the ideas to Senators or anybody that can make them happen, but until that time, these and many other solutions will remain hidden.
I hope that happens before your parents kick you and your friends out of their basement...
So, I put to you, if you can make a basic living without having to work, then why would you work?
For the same reason that I don't take an exceptionally easy job like stocking shelves in a grocery store, because while I may not die in the streets of starvation stocking shelves, I also would not have the lifestyle I actually want, the sense of accomplishment I get, or the social status I have. Most successful people work to get to that point because they want things that they wouldn't be able to have by taking the easier route.
As far as duration... Back in 1800 if you wrote a book and made money it could easily take you YEARS to get it all around the country. Fully exploiting your creative work was a time consuming process.
It still can, assuming you don't have a PR department and a big publisher pushing you. Even with the Internet, and digital distribution, it's *very* hard for the little guy to get attention unless he pushes at it for a long time, probably years. Not that I disagree with your overall point, I just think it's interesting that the problem (unless you have really big backing) has shifted from "years to get a small number of people spread across a vast geographical area access to your work" to "years to convince a small percentage of a massive number of people for whom geographical location is largely irrelevant to notice you in a huge and growing crowd". Essentially, the end result is similar, even though the starting points are almost polar opposites.
You and I have very different ideas of punishment. Being "punished" by only leaving someone with around $650,000 on every million doesn't sound that uncomfortable to me.
As I see it, America became great because government let success be rewarded with great wealth
And yet during some of the greatest economic expansion that not only the U.S. but the world has ever seen, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the top marginal rates were between 50% and 90%. Using your arguments, those should have been the catastrophically worst years.
Now we just can't stop giving money to people who vote for more money,
And yet, by continually lowering rates on the top bracket, that's what we've been doing. We've been gutting the engine that builds growth and pays for infrastructure, defense and social services, while at the same time disincentivising business growth by making it more attractive to pay smaller numbers of people ever more staggering amounts, rather than nudging them towards putting that money into the businesses.
We desparately need already-wealthly business leaders to take risks
There's no reason for them not to take risks, business losses and expenses don't get taxed. As it is now though, the incentive is to simply amass more and more money, and hold on to it, which does virtually nothing for the economy.
I want to "starve the beast" till government as we have come to know it collapses, and (because we have to) we go back to a federal government that only provides that framework you talk about.
I don't think there's quite as much room for starvation as you think. There's the military, which I'd be in favor of using in less expensive ways (ie: not going off on adventures that have no clear benefit to us), there's Social Security/Medicare, which cutting out would leave us with a large group of impoverished elderly people (although if you cut Medicare I guess they'd die off faster so it's a self-solving problem if you're okay with that), infrastructure, which is already falling apart and is only going to get worse, social services such as food-stamps and welfare, which you could cut but I'd expect a pretty hefty increase in law enforcement expenses if you increase the population of desperate, hungry people with nothing to lose, education, which we could cut if we'd like to give up any pretense at having a workforce that can compete with other first-world nations, and on and on. Simply saying "Cut the spending" is meaningless unless you're prepared to offer a plan to deal with the consequences of those cuts.
"it's worth hurting the economy and even generating less overall tax money, as long as the the rich suffer from the tax system"
The rich are not, and would not be suffering by paying higher taxes. It's not a crushing punishment to have to fly first-class instead of owning a a private jet. If the top marginal tax rate was raised to 50% (still WELL below historic highs), these people would still be holding over $500,000/year in personal income on each million they make, and that only counts their actual salaries, not investments and other capital gains (which is what Buffet was talking about when he said he was taxed lower than his secretary). A person making $40k/year will definitely feel the burn if you tax him at 10%, but someone making millions in salary/bonuses? He's still living a lifestyle that almost nobody else will ever have, and is not worrying about paying for the groceries, even at 50%. Now, if you want to talk about raising the tax brackets, so that the upper middle-class (say, up to around the $350,000 or so range) don't get hit as hard as the guy making $3m, or just creating new brackets that incrementally increase at much higher numbers than they do now, that's a different topic entirely and one that probably has a lot of room for discussion.
There are other goals in life than money, is the point - money helps a lot with happiness, but enjoying what you earn has to be part of it. Just because there is a reward, doesn't mean the reward justifies the opportunity cost.
I believe I addressed that twice though; if you just want to take time off, or do something else, that's great. I'd do that myself given the chance. But if the only motivation is "I'd rather have nothing than pay taxes", I have absolutely no sympathy. Those of us who make more, in some cases far, far more than others do so because the society we live in provides us a framework that enables us to do so. Let me say that part again, enables us to do so. Without that framework, we'd be digging in the dirt and fighting for our lives just like everyone else. I have no problem paying more taxes than someone who makes less; I reap greater rewards from that framework, and therefore I have a responsibility for it's upkeep, and the greater the reward the greater the responsibility. Put another way, would your friend rather live in a mansion or a slum? He'd pay lower taxes living in the slum, but I'd bet he'd be more comfortable living in a mansion. I'd rather see America be a mansion than a slum. Or maybe I just can't imagine being so self-involved that I'd rather have less just to ensure that I don't have to contribute to the well being of others.
Insightful question. After all, the water temperature would only rise a little, why would the frog jump out?
But in that case, the frog will die. Your friend will still benefit from having more money than he would otherwise.
This really seems like an almost perfect case of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. An almost childlike cry of "If I can't have it all, I don't want any!". The person earning the money still, even after paying taxes, benefits from having more money than they did before. If they're satisfied with having less, fine, can't fault someone for that, but doing it solely to avoid taxes and "suffering" to do so just seems petulant.
As for Rand, yes, I read Atlas Shrugged, and I find it cringeworthy. Not sure where this quote comes from, but it nicely sums up my thoughts about it: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs".
You race around in so many different directions, it's nearly impossible to formulate a coherent answer, yet I'll try.
So the last chair of the RNC, Michael Steele is a black man, but republicans are racist. The front runner (today) in the RNC nomination for president is a black man (Cain), but republicans are racist. I show you a throng of evidence that democrats not only have a history of slavery and oppression, the very creators of the Jim Crow laws. Democrats had a actual member of the KKK in office up till 2010... but the republicans, who fought the civil war against democrats to free the slaves - they're the racists.
Firstly, you're trying to create a position that doesn't exist. Nobody's saying that all republicans are racist. The position is that racists are more common in, and more likely to be attracted to the Republican party. You offer up black Republicans as "proof" that Republicans aren't racist, while asserting that Democrats are racist, and yet the current president of the United States is both black and a Democrat. Following your own logic you can't assert that either party is racist due to the presence of black members in each.
Somehow a misattributed quote is going to undo all of that?
The quote is attributed correctly. Read the article again. Kevin Philips did not create the Southern Strategy, but the comments supporting it that I quoted were indeed made by him.
And now republicans are racist when they never were in the past? If republicans are so racist why would they ever have the head of the RNC be a black man? How could they allow for their presidential candidate to be a black man? Doesn't that invalidate what you're saying?
I could ask you the same question, but I'm not saying the presence of black members indemnifies a party against charges of racism. The point remains though, the presence of those members does not have any impact at all on whether Republicans are more likely to be attracted to the Republican party than to the Democrats.
Who's the real racist? The party trying to ignore race, one who was founded to abolish slavery? Or the party that is constantly bringing race into the equation where it does not belong?
Okay, so a black democrat, complaining that Republican strategies having racist undertones (leaving aside whether he's right or wrong), somehow means the Democratic party is racist? I'm not following that logic at all unless your complaint is that the Democrats are racist towards whites, in which case I fail to see how any of your comments about the civil war era Republicans have anything to do with this conversation.
Do you think "cut taxes" is racist?
Personally I wouldn't cast it that way, but I can see the argument being made, which is that cuts in social service due to lack of funding may disproportionately affect minorities who rely on those services.
I for one think that giving special favor to people based on the color of their skin is racist - something that democrats have championed over and over again through race based college admissions, race based hiring, race based taxation, race based everything. Democrats are very interested in the color of your skin.
So your real complaint really is that their policies can be construed to be racist towards white people. Fair enough, but again, stop trying to say the issue has anything to do with their position on black civil rights dating back to the civil war.
Republicans don't care what color your skin is. Republicans want a society that is blind to skin color.
You've made that opinion clear, the problem is that things like The Southern Strategy don't support that.
One group is logical and righteous, the other is a group of resent building
One is a consultant who'd now waiting till next year to start his next contract, having made about $250K already.
How does that make sense? If he's just got enough money and wants to take time off, hell, I'd be on board with that, but for tax purposes? What, the fact that he'll pay a few percent more on everything past what he's already made suddenly makes it not worthwhile? He'd still be getting 65% of everything over $250k, so if he'd gross another $50k, he'd still keep $32,500, which in my world is not an insignificant amount of money....Now, if he thinks that next year he's going to potentially not have that much work, and would rather be taxed on that $50k at the lower rate to make his income for 2012 higher overall, well, that's a different story, and then it'd potentially make sense to put off that contract regardless of what he's being taxed at if he can afford to wait. That's an issue of managing backlog more than anything else though....
Ah, so because long ago something was true, it's obviously still the case today. There's no possibility that over time the two parties changed, and that their views even managed to slowly trade places, is there? There's no such thing as the Southern Strategy, and Nixon's political strategist (Nixon was a Republican, wasn't he?) never ever said: "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats". Nope, all just a part of the big democrat conspiracy.....
Oh I agree with all of that, but I think the problem here though was that Apple delayed (or at least appeared to delay) the release, and that people took that to mean that there was something amazing coming that they needed more time to polish. I'm in that group, I figured that perhaps with Jobs stepping down, the longer than historically expected lag between hardware updates, and the apparent addition of Sprint, that they'd break their pattern and go for the gold. That larger screens have been popular on Android phones also led me to think this. In retrospect, it was all incorrect guessing on my part, but I'm far from alone and I think that, while it's not really Apple's SOP to comment before a launch, they may have made a mistake by not trying to manage expectations at least a little. A 4" screen, NFC and "4G" (yeah, I know WiMax and LTE aren't *really* 4G) really weren't crazy guesses to make. Once people were really married to the idea though the 4S, which is a perfectly good incremental followup to the iPhone 4, was almost guaranteed to...well, not necessarily disappoint, but at least underwhelm.
So it's either let everybody know what you're working on and risk competitors beating you to market, or keep quiet and risk disappointment among the fans when their hyped up assumptions prove wrong.
That's true to a point, but a huge amount of interest was getting focused on the idea of a 4" screen. That's a rumor Apple could have reigned in, in the interest of managing expectations, without giving anything valuable to their competitors. It's not like HTC, Samsung and Moto would then hit the breaks on their popular 4" screen phones in order to be more Apple-like; if anything they're probably pretty happy to see that they still have no Apple competition for customers who prefer that size. Hell, screen size is probably something that competitors had a good idea of anyway, just because there was no surge in demand for larger screens from Apple.
Now is the time to laugh at all the fanboys that had already sold their iPhone 4s to buy iPhone 5s, but now have to buy new iPhone 4S
I kinda doubt anyone did that.....all they were expected to do today was announce the phones, not actually sell them. Why would anyone sell their phone weeks before the one they want becomes available?
I can't say with 100% certainty, but IIRC all public colleges/universities in NJ have actual police departments, meaning that the officers are real cops (although they may supplement a campus PD with security guards in addition to police officers). Keep in mind, at least in NJ, a cop is a cop anywhere in the state, not just within the town/county/campus/institution where they're employed (assumes actual police officers, not security officers). A cop from Mahwah can arrest you if he sees you vandalizing a car in Cape May while he's on vacation without any particular jurisdictional issues (although he'd be turning you over to the local PD once they arrived, and it'd be a pain in the ass for him as he might have to go to court over it), and actually may be obligated to do so (been a while since I was in school for CJ, but my recollection is that an off-duty officer is still obligated to act if he sees a crime in progress anywhere within the state, any Jersey cops/lawyers out there who want to confirm/deny this?).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also no expert, but wouldn't any salvage belong to the group running the expedition, as opposed to individuals who were sent? For instance, if I mounted a salvage expedition to recover objects from a Spanish galleon, I don't think my crew can just stuff their pockets with doubloons, those would be the property of the expedition. Now, if he were to take his own rocket to the moon, grab things, and bring them back, that'd be different. Also, at the time that he took the camera from the ship, wasn't it still operational? In other words, it wouldn't be salvage *until* it had been released and crashed on the moon, until then he was taking equipment from an operational vehicle that was still in use by NASA.
Better question, if one astronaut killed another on the moon, could he be tried for murder when he got back as they weren't in the U.S. and no local (lunar) laws were violated? (Not on the actual spacecraft where the U.S. probably would have jurisdiction as it's a U.S. vessel, I mean on the moon itself).
There's probably something to be said though about the fairness of letting him profit while the astronauts who didn't bring things back to sell don't. Assuming he wasn't authorized to take it (he claims otherwise, but for the moment assume NASA is right), then it's kind of a slap in the face to all the others who played by the rules and didn't just grab whatever they could carry and bring it back as well. I'd kinda like to see what other astronauts have to say about this actually....
This is a really good point. When you get up to the top of the scale, the chart really climbs incredibly steeply. Yes, at $150k, you're in a high percentile, but really you, me and everyone around the $100k - $200k range are kind of a buffer for the super rich in the million+ range. As long as the tax brackets keep us "lesser rich" in the same boat as the super-rich, we'll be used by them to support tax levels that would impact us massively, but would be the difference between 3 or 5 vacation properties for them. I don't think it's any accident that the highest bracket reaches as low as it does, the people making 7 figure incomes need to keep us in the same "club" as them, but it's not because we're their peers; we're their foot-soldiers. We're the ones who'll actually feel the pinch of increased taxes, so our numbers are used to provide "boots on the ground" to defend ourselves, and them by proxy. I'm in the greater NYC area, and making $100k - $200k doesn't go anywhere near as far as in other places (as you well know being near D.C.), around here a nice little 3 or 4 bedroom cape still goes for over $300k (almost double that before real-estate tanked)....I've seen houses in other parts of the country that go for over $100k less where I could fit my entire house into the kitchen.
Sounds fishy to me.....
I'd say that what we have now is the place between two extremes. You can invest on your own, and should that not work out as hoped, you won't be left completely penniless. True, a 401k can't just offer any insane thing they like, but if you think they can't (and aren't) manipulated in favor of the traders, you're just being naive. As for the government holding the money, the government is the people. Why do you think that having a private group with a potential profit motive, accountable only to itself is better than a well regulated, not for profit structure that everyone has at least some voice in?
I'd say your position is closer to all-or-nothing than mine. Nobody is going to choose a minimum wage job over making $5M a year because they only have $2.5M left after taxes. Nobody is going to choose making $100K/year over making $1M/year because they'll only net $500K after taxes. The tax rate can go much higher at those levels than it is now before people seriously say they don't want the "hassle" of being a highly placed executive, with all the perks and extras that go with it.
You keep saying everyone would suffer, but I still don't see it. Someone who makes $1M and has $500K left after taxes is not *suffering*. They're still living better than almost anyone else you'll meet. If that's suffering, sign me up, I'll take one for the team.
Straw-man, nobody's talking about eliminating pay for anyone in particular, or even at all. A progressive tax system taxes everyone at a given income level similarly.
Indeed, in that case, the ridiculous salaries are due to a glitch in the system, where *somebody* has to get the money, even though what they provide isn't particularly productive or useful. It's irrelevant though, as they have the money, and taxes would be applied to them the same way as if they had made that money in any other occupation. The fact remains that without society to support them (stadiums, audiences, transportation, etc), they wouldn't be making anything at all. That they make such amazingly high amounts is a benefit they reap from being part of society, and therefore it can be argued they owe more back than, say, a hard working longshoremen or cop. Just as there's no guarantee to be rich, I'm aware of no guarantee of unlimited riches to the detriment of everyone else.
You say this as if it's a problem. Everybody knows that each Killbot has a preset kill limit. I'll simply send wave after wave of my own men in against them until they hit their limit and then freeze in place. G'uh.
It's not all that big, but it contains an extra-dimensional space, which in turn contains New Zealand.
Well, if that were to happen, and Sprint hasn't said it would, but if it were, your phone would continue to work fine for calls and 3G data. I agree though that this is a little awkward....I was going to be upgrading my phone soon, but now I think I'll be waiting longer to see what happens with LTE models rather than another WiMax one as WiMax buildouts seem to have stalled, and I'll want better network coverage for 4G with my next phone.
I'll abandon this point, only because the issues are complex and I'm simply not prepared or qualified to make a proper counter-argument. I only repost it now so that I don't appear to simply appear to be picking and choosing the points I like.
The fact that a vast number, possibly even a majority of people are incapable of managing long term investments like this simply invites disaster. That doesn't even touch on the fact that we regularly see market corrections that wipe out people's retirement plans, or the predatory schemes that the investment houses can and do engage in. A safety net is required unless you're prepared to see potentially large numbers of indigent elderly people on the streets, and I don't think anyone would be comfortable with that.
I agree with your first premise, but not the second. I favour a single-payer universal system, but that's a much larger conversation.
Oh I'm not missing your point, I'm disagreeing with it. I agree that reward is an integral part of motivation, but not that it's the only one, or that it has to be unlimited. I see the current situation as being dominated by a predatory class of super-wealthy, and I don't agree that it's deserved. Having 1% of the population control 90% of the wealth is simply absurd, do you really believe that their efforts, on the whole, are 90x as important as everyone else? Does an investment banker, who produces nothing aside from paperwork really have more value to society than 100 (or more) teachers? Does a football player or radio talk show host really bring 50 times the value of 100 paramedics to society? And how about all of those "born on third base but act like they just hit a home-run" types like the Hiltons or the Kardashians, who make money simply by being who they are. The average household income in the U.S. is somewhere around $50,000, meaning that it'll take one of those average families 20 years to see $1M in earnings, vs Larry Elison, who will see $1M in earnings (not investments or stock options, just salary) by February each year. No, I don't think the super-rich are justified in their earnings, the numbers are absurd, and it's all a rigged game designed to keep virtually all of the wealth in a small number of hands. And besides, if taxes on the top bracket went up to 50%, do you really think Elison would give up and stop working if he had to pay $3M in taxes a year, because he'd only have $3M left (plus all of his stock options and capital investments)?
I hope that happens before your parents kick you and your friends out of their basement...
For the same reason that I don't take an exceptionally easy job like stocking shelves in a grocery store, because while I may not die in the streets of starvation stocking shelves, I also would not have the lifestyle I actually want, the sense of accomplishment I get, or the social status I have. Most successful people work to get to that point because they want things that they wouldn't be able to have by taking the easier route.
It still can, assuming you don't have a PR department and a big publisher pushing you. Even with the Internet, and digital distribution, it's *very* hard for the little guy to get attention unless he pushes at it for a long time, probably years. Not that I disagree with your overall point, I just think it's interesting that the problem (unless you have really big backing) has shifted from "years to get a small number of people spread across a vast geographical area access to your work" to "years to convince a small percentage of a massive number of people for whom geographical location is largely irrelevant to notice you in a huge and growing crowd". Essentially, the end result is similar, even though the starting points are almost polar opposites.
You and I have very different ideas of punishment. Being "punished" by only leaving someone with around $650,000 on every million doesn't sound that uncomfortable to me.
And yet during some of the greatest economic expansion that not only the U.S. but the world has ever seen, between the 1930s and the 1970s, the top marginal rates were between 50% and 90%. Using your arguments, those should have been the catastrophically worst years.
And yet, by continually lowering rates on the top bracket, that's what we've been doing. We've been gutting the engine that builds growth and pays for infrastructure, defense and social services, while at the same time disincentivising business growth by making it more attractive to pay smaller numbers of people ever more staggering amounts, rather than nudging them towards putting that money into the businesses.
There's no reason for them not to take risks, business losses and expenses don't get taxed. As it is now though, the incentive is to simply amass more and more money, and hold on to it, which does virtually nothing for the economy.
I don't think there's quite as much room for starvation as you think. There's the military, which I'd be in favor of using in less expensive ways (ie: not going off on adventures that have no clear benefit to us), there's Social Security/Medicare, which cutting out would leave us with a large group of impoverished elderly people (although if you cut Medicare I guess they'd die off faster so it's a self-solving problem if you're okay with that), infrastructure, which is already falling apart and is only going to get worse, social services such as food-stamps and welfare, which you could cut but I'd expect a pretty hefty increase in law enforcement expenses if you increase the population of desperate, hungry people with nothing to lose, education, which we could cut if we'd like to give up any pretense at having a workforce that can compete with other first-world nations, and on and on. Simply saying "Cut the spending" is meaningless unless you're prepared to offer a plan to deal with the consequences of those cuts.
The rich are not, and would not be suffering by paying higher taxes. It's not a crushing punishment to have to fly first-class instead of owning a a private jet. If the top marginal tax rate was raised to 50% (still WELL below historic highs), these people would still be holding over $500,000/year in personal income on each million they make, and that only counts their actual salaries, not investments and other capital gains (which is what Buffet was talking about when he said he was taxed lower than his secretary). A person making $40k/year will definitely feel the burn if you tax him at 10%, but someone making millions in salary/bonuses? He's still living a lifestyle that almost nobody else will ever have, and is not worrying about paying for the groceries, even at 50%. Now, if you want to talk about raising the tax brackets, so that the upper middle-class (say, up to around the $350,000 or so range) don't get hit as hard as the guy making $3m, or just creating new brackets that incrementally increase at much higher numbers than they do now, that's a different topic entirely and one that probably has a lot of room for discussion.
I believe I addressed that twice though; if you just want to take time off, or do something else, that's great. I'd do that myself given the chance. But if the only motivation is "I'd rather have nothing than pay taxes", I have absolutely no sympathy. Those of us who make more, in some cases far, far more than others do so because the society we live in provides us a framework that enables us to do so. Let me say that part again, enables us to do so. Without that framework, we'd be digging in the dirt and fighting for our lives just like everyone else. I have no problem paying more taxes than someone who makes less; I reap greater rewards from that framework, and therefore I have a responsibility for it's upkeep, and the greater the reward the greater the responsibility. Put another way, would your friend rather live in a mansion or a slum? He'd pay lower taxes living in the slum, but I'd bet he'd be more comfortable living in a mansion. I'd rather see America be a mansion than a slum. Or maybe I just can't imagine being so self-involved that I'd rather have less just to ensure that I don't have to contribute to the well being of others.
But in that case, the frog will die. Your friend will still benefit from having more money than he would otherwise.
This really seems like an almost perfect case of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. An almost childlike cry of "If I can't have it all, I don't want any!". The person earning the money still, even after paying taxes, benefits from having more money than they did before. If they're satisfied with having less, fine, can't fault someone for that, but doing it solely to avoid taxes and "suffering" to do so just seems petulant.
As for Rand, yes, I read Atlas Shrugged, and I find it cringeworthy. Not sure where this quote comes from, but it nicely sums up my thoughts about it: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs".
You race around in so many different directions, it's nearly impossible to formulate a coherent answer, yet I'll try.
Firstly, you're trying to create a position that doesn't exist. Nobody's saying that all republicans are racist. The position is that racists are more common in, and more likely to be attracted to the Republican party. You offer up black Republicans as "proof" that Republicans aren't racist, while asserting that Democrats are racist, and yet the current president of the United States is both black and a Democrat. Following your own logic you can't assert that either party is racist due to the presence of black members in each.
The quote is attributed correctly. Read the article again. Kevin Philips did not create the Southern Strategy, but the comments supporting it that I quoted were indeed made by him.
I could ask you the same question, but I'm not saying the presence of black members indemnifies a party against charges of racism. The point remains though, the presence of those members does not have any impact at all on whether Republicans are more likely to be attracted to the Republican party than to the Democrats.
Okay, so a black democrat, complaining that Republican strategies having racist undertones (leaving aside whether he's right or wrong), somehow means the Democratic party is racist? I'm not following that logic at all unless your complaint is that the Democrats are racist towards whites, in which case I fail to see how any of your comments about the civil war era Republicans have anything to do with this conversation.
Personally I wouldn't cast it that way, but I can see the argument being made, which is that cuts in social service due to lack of funding may disproportionately affect minorities who rely on those services.
So your real complaint really is that their policies can be construed to be racist towards white people. Fair enough, but again, stop trying to say the issue has anything to do with their position on black civil rights dating back to the civil war.
You've made that opinion clear, the problem is that things like The Southern Strategy don't support that.
How does that make sense? If he's just got enough money and wants to take time off, hell, I'd be on board with that, but for tax purposes? What, the fact that he'll pay a few percent more on everything past what he's already made suddenly makes it not worthwhile? He'd still be getting 65% of everything over $250k, so if he'd gross another $50k, he'd still keep $32,500, which in my world is not an insignificant amount of money....Now, if he thinks that next year he's going to potentially not have that much work, and would rather be taxed on that $50k at the lower rate to make his income for 2012 higher overall, well, that's a different story, and then it'd potentially make sense to put off that contract regardless of what he's being taxed at if he can afford to wait. That's an issue of managing backlog more than anything else though....
Hitler driving a car in Illinois? I hate Illinois Nazis.....
Ah, so because long ago something was true, it's obviously still the case today. There's no possibility that over time the two parties changed, and that their views even managed to slowly trade places, is there? There's no such thing as the Southern Strategy, and Nixon's political strategist (Nixon was a Republican, wasn't he?) never ever said: "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats". Nope, all just a part of the big democrat conspiracy.....
I hate to be citation-needed guy, but I haven't seen any cases of this happening with the ACLJ. What atheist group have they defended?
Oh I agree with all of that, but I think the problem here though was that Apple delayed (or at least appeared to delay) the release, and that people took that to mean that there was something amazing coming that they needed more time to polish. I'm in that group, I figured that perhaps with Jobs stepping down, the longer than historically expected lag between hardware updates, and the apparent addition of Sprint, that they'd break their pattern and go for the gold. That larger screens have been popular on Android phones also led me to think this. In retrospect, it was all incorrect guessing on my part, but I'm far from alone and I think that, while it's not really Apple's SOP to comment before a launch, they may have made a mistake by not trying to manage expectations at least a little. A 4" screen, NFC and "4G" (yeah, I know WiMax and LTE aren't *really* 4G) really weren't crazy guesses to make. Once people were really married to the idea though the 4S, which is a perfectly good incremental followup to the iPhone 4, was almost guaranteed to...well, not necessarily disappoint, but at least underwhelm.
That's true to a point, but a huge amount of interest was getting focused on the idea of a 4" screen. That's a rumor Apple could have reigned in, in the interest of managing expectations, without giving anything valuable to their competitors. It's not like HTC, Samsung and Moto would then hit the breaks on their popular 4" screen phones in order to be more Apple-like; if anything they're probably pretty happy to see that they still have no Apple competition for customers who prefer that size. Hell, screen size is probably something that competitors had a good idea of anyway, just because there was no surge in demand for larger screens from Apple.
I kinda doubt anyone did that.....all they were expected to do today was announce the phones, not actually sell them. Why would anyone sell their phone weeks before the one they want becomes available?
I can't say with 100% certainty, but IIRC all public colleges/universities in NJ have actual police departments, meaning that the officers are real cops (although they may supplement a campus PD with security guards in addition to police officers). Keep in mind, at least in NJ, a cop is a cop anywhere in the state, not just within the town/county/campus/institution where they're employed (assumes actual police officers, not security officers). A cop from Mahwah can arrest you if he sees you vandalizing a car in Cape May while he's on vacation without any particular jurisdictional issues (although he'd be turning you over to the local PD once they arrived, and it'd be a pain in the ass for him as he might have to go to court over it), and actually may be obligated to do so (been a while since I was in school for CJ, but my recollection is that an off-duty officer is still obligated to act if he sees a crime in progress anywhere within the state, any Jersey cops/lawyers out there who want to confirm/deny this?).