It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue, but I'm not insistent on either position.
We (as voters) shouldn't believe everything we are told, especially by someone running for office. Which could have something to do with the mess we're in.
The last decent study I recall reading (in Science a couple years back, IIRC) concluded that at current US marginal tax rates using the most optimistic projections for how tax rates effect growth, each dollar in tax cuts results in at least 60 cents in lost revenue.
Not to mention that there is a problem with the assumption that tax rates can be a useful tool to control economic growth. Interest rates are a far easier tool with which to control growth (although not without their own limits).
When you lower tax rates more money is available for economic activity, that increases growth rates which prompts the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to control growth and avoid inflation. For the average person with significant debt, the rate increase could more than eat the tax reduction. Worse, since the government is the biggest debtor, payments on the federal debt go up. Those increased payments go the those that hold the debt. To some extent that is American companies that hold bonds which could have a positive effect if that makes those companies more likely to invest, but a significant portion goes to foreign creditors, China, Japan, Canada and Great Brittan. Any effect of additional investment by creditors in the US might prompt the Federal Reserve to again increase interest rates.
So to a significant degree any income tax reduction funnels substantial money away from the federal government and towards banks and creditor nations. For the average citizen it's probably a wash. Their taxes go down, but they send more to Citibank to cover their debts.
In the real world there is probably an optimum marginal tax rate that depends upon a huge number of factors. I'm sure economists get into fist fights about what that number is. I can easily prove that it's not 0% and that it's not 100%. Below the optimum rate, reductions in taxes would tend to reduce revenues. Above the optimum rate, increases in taxes would tend to reduce revenues. If the earlier study is correct, that would suggest that our current tax rates might be below the optimum rate.
To temper this a little bit, let me try to inform on the assumption that dems see gun ownership as "immoral". We do not find gun ownership immoral (while unaffiliated, I almost always vote democrat). I'm also an NRA member, and I have enough guns to arm my entire neighborhood, twice over.
I am a Democrat, a fire-breathing liberal, and the owner of many guns. I think the 2nd amendment is there to protect my right to join up with a few million of my closest friends in order to encourage local regime change. I don't think there is necessarily a "right to hunt" in the Constitution.
But I'm a former NRA member. I gave up my NRA membership precisely because the NRA stopped being a gun rights organization and started supporting a broader right wing agenda.
Is there a gun rights organization out there that doesn't proclaim that all liberals are evil? That doesn't care what a candidates views on religion or abortion are? If so, sign me up.
I don't think he meant actual slaves, more like extremely cheap labour.
No, Libertarianism would lead to actual slavery. A Libertarian would say that a person has a right to enter into any contract. If that contract held that someone would be bound to servitude for life in exchange for a straw mat and two bowls of gruel per day, so be it. And once such a contract exists, it would be a violation of libertarian ideals not to allow it to be sold.
Since the other inevitable consequence of Libertarianism is a large fraction of the population living in extreme poverty, I'd guess a lot of people might take that deal.
So what if they are not "performing" artists, but purely "recording" artists such as the Beatles (after, I think, Revolver they stopped performing live until the Get Back session)?
Half the Beatles are dead. What have their heirs done to deserve an income stream from a recording session that took place nearly half a century ago?
I bought the White Album on cassette in 1984.
Then I bought the White Album on CD in 1987. After my CD collection was stolen in 1991, I bought it again. (I didn't have a CD burner at the time, so I didn't have a backup.) I can only listen to one copy of it at a time, so why should I buy it again when I want to listen to it on my computer, or my MP3 player? I've already paid for it three times. Enough already.
Many good artists don't perform much live.
Maybe the would if they needed to in order to make a living. That's their choice.
Sorry for not getting the joke. But since you were wondering, your tax dollars haven't been used. Unless you are a resident of California. Some state taxes were used as matching grants to match corporate donations in the early stages. And no matter whether Arecibo is funded or not, none of those dollars go to SETI@home.
Yes, reading is good. You should try it more often. What makes you think that the government is spending ANY money searching for aliens let alone millions of dollars? Repeat after me: Currently the U.S. government does not fund SETI observations. Say it again. Repeat until it sinks in.
Click on my signature to find out how SETI is really funded.
Create an account on the SETI forum and get to know those guys that run the place. They do squat there for what they're paid. I wish I could take a vacation like those guys. They're biggest decision is "What country do you want to go spend a month at?" Shit I'd be playing WOW all day too! Get to know them before you wish them (mine and your) millions.
Yes, all three of the people who work for SETI@home are billionaires from their SETI salaries. Did you ever try to run a scientific project and a web site visited daily by a few hundred thousand people with a staff of three part time employees? Are you on call for your job every hour of every day?
To be serious, pay at SETI@home is, like typical university pay, about 70% of industry wages for the same work. And given that they aren't getting enough in donations to fund the three employees they have, they are lucky the project hasn't folded.
And the staff members I know personally would rather drown in raw sewage than play WoW. One used to work on an open source flight simulator for a while, however. That was about 15 years ago. I doubt he has much time for gaming now.
What makes you think SETI is being federally funded, or that it represents a significant portion of what Arecibo does?
SETI@home is at the present time entirely funded by donations. Any time SETI@home uses at Arecibo is piggybacked on searching for pulsars or mapping the Galaxy in the 21cm line.
Or are you suggesting that because Arecibo spends any effort on a project you dislike it should be shut down?
I believe "conjecture"... also has a well-established meaning in mathematics...
The established meaning in mathematics is "something I believe is true but am unable to prove because, uh... umm... I have to go pick up my dry cleaning before they close. Maybe you can find a grad student to do it."
Airline passengers were the very wealthy elites, now they're not. High fuel prices will keep the riff-raff out. "You BURNED it? What the fuck were you thinking?"
-- Your grandkids when you tell them what you did with all that petroleum.
Which labs are you talking about? I'm basing this on statements made to me by some bio and chem majors at one of the "lesser" UC campuses. Of course, to me, all of the UC campuses except the one called "The University of California" are "lesser" UC campuses.
Unethical people will continue to be unethical it's true. But it doesn't hurt to be explicit about what is ethical behavior and giving scientists at the beginning of their careers an opportunity to affirm their accord with those ideals. Some of us still try to live by our words. The problem is that otherwise ethical students are being taught to fudge their data in undergraduate labs. They are often told directly by their TAs to find out what the correct answer is and work backwards from there.
If they aren't told that what is "slightly unethical behavior" in an undergraduate lab course is "dangerously unethical and likely criminal" behavior when practiced in the real world, how are they to know?
The punishment for "fudging" lab data as an undergraduate should be failure on the assignment. The punishment for a graduate student TA who suggests that fudging lab data on an assignment is OK should be immediate expulsion.
Mod grandparent down - that article is what we in the real world call a "pile of crap." Others could call it a "political treatise." It is based upon three greatly flawed assumptions. The first assumption is that what we pay in energy cost is somehow related to the true (monetary and environmental) cost of the energy. This is demonstrably false.
The second assumption is that the only thing that effects cost of an item is the energy used to produce the item. Also demonstrably false.
The third is the assumption that energy costs are uniform across the planet and that they do not change with time. Has he ever looked at his power bill?
Don Lancaster needs to take an Introductory Economics course. From this article I gather that the term "informally peer reviewed" means "read by people who agree with me and guess what, they still agree with me."
Pelosi is one of the reasons I can't respect the Democratic Congress. If you think the Democrats are bad, I hope you live in the district of the one (yes one) Republican that voted nay.
Thermodynamics is a law you cannot prove. Whaaaaa???? Thermodynamics isn't a law, although there are rules that are usually called the laws of thermodynamics. The accuracy of these "laws" rely on two things, conservation of energy and mathematical concepts that you CAN prove. So what you are really saying is, you can't prove conservations of energy. Well, maybe not, but we've never seen it violated before, on any scale, from elementary particles to the entire universe.
True, but I've said this before and I'll say it again - the more you try to lock users down, the more they realize that they hate the prison they're being put in. It's only possible to recognize you are in a prison if you've been outside of one. In the U.S. of A., every cell phone is a prison.
Nowadays you lose data because the *disk* dies, almost never because the filesystem gets corrupted (at least not on modern systems). Although the risk does statistically grow with the number of systems. I wish that were the case. Friday, I was doing file backups to a fairly small (4TB) software RAID5 array (md+lvm+ext3) on a commercial file server running a vendor supported Linux distribution prior to dumping them to tape. The system hung hard during one period of high I/O.
Upon reboot two devices in the array came up with bad magic in the superblock and all was lost. The consensus seems to be that filesystem corruption caused enough confusion that the md driver decided to overwrite the superblocks. No hardware failure required, and there probably isn't enough info from the failure to find the bug. The bug is still there, and this will happen again to somebody.
I don't know Canadian law or Brazilian law. In the U.S. (U.S.C. 18 Sec. 2256), child pornography does not require visual depictions of actual children in actual or simulated sexual activity to be present. Child pornography also includes visual depictions of simulated children in sexual activity. You know, that web site you visit with the 18 year old dressed like a school girl? If the government want to press a case against you, that counts as possession of child pornography.
U.S. law also considers anything that advertises itself as containing visual depictions of children in sexual activity to also be child pornography. So if I were to create a link to whitehouse.gov on a web page, and if the web page were to claim the link pointed to pictures of children having sex, that web page would also count as child pornography according to the definitions in the U.S. Code. If you were to have that web page in your cache, you could be prosecuted and convicted of possession of child pornography even though no actual images were involved. The only question is how much the government wants you behind bars. Of course, I could also be prosecuted for creating the page in the first place.
That's how the police state starts.... Make sure everyone has violated enough laws that they can be imprisoned at a moments notice. If everyone is guilty of an imprisonable offense, only people who speak in favor of the government have freedom of speech.
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
I know we all hate taxes, but the above sentence is in Article I Section 9 describing limits of the powers of Congress. It means what it says. It says Congress may not place export taxes on items exported from the states. That clause does not prevent the states from doing so.
A clause that might limit the states is in Article I Section 10, which places limits on the actions of the States.
No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.
It's best to understand the document before basing arguments upon it.
Just because the road's on a county map doesn't make it a county road. The road outside my house shows up on Google, but it's owned and maintained by the neighborhood HOA.
That's why I always drive with a County Plat Book in my car.
And just in case the Plat Book is in error, I always carry a theodolite and two surveyors in the trunk.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue, but I'm not insistent on either position.
We (as voters) shouldn't believe everything we are told, especially by someone running for office. Which could have something to do with the mess we're in.
The last decent study I recall reading (in Science a couple years back, IIRC) concluded that at current US marginal tax rates using the most optimistic projections for how tax rates effect growth, each dollar in tax cuts results in at least 60 cents in lost revenue.
Not to mention that there is a problem with the assumption that tax rates can be a useful tool to control economic growth. Interest rates are a far easier tool with which to control growth (although not without their own limits).
When you lower tax rates more money is available for economic activity, that increases growth rates which prompts the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to control growth and avoid inflation. For the average person with significant debt, the rate increase could more than eat the tax reduction. Worse, since the government is the biggest debtor, payments on the federal debt go up. Those increased payments go the those that hold the debt. To some extent that is American companies that hold bonds which could have a positive effect if that makes those companies more likely to invest, but a significant portion goes to foreign creditors, China, Japan, Canada and Great Brittan. Any effect of additional investment by creditors in the US might prompt the Federal Reserve to again increase interest rates.
So to a significant degree any income tax reduction funnels substantial money away from the federal government and towards banks and creditor nations. For the average citizen it's probably a wash. Their taxes go down, but they send more to Citibank to cover their debts.
In the real world there is probably an optimum marginal tax rate that depends upon a huge number of factors. I'm sure economists get into fist fights about what that number is. I can easily prove that it's not 0% and that it's not 100%. Below the optimum rate, reductions in taxes would tend to reduce revenues. Above the optimum rate, increases in taxes would tend to reduce revenues. If the earlier study is correct, that would suggest that our current tax rates might be below the optimum rate.
To temper this a little bit, let me try to inform on the assumption that dems see gun ownership as "immoral". We do not find gun ownership immoral (while unaffiliated, I almost always vote democrat). I'm also an NRA member, and I have enough guns to arm my entire neighborhood, twice over.
I am a Democrat, a fire-breathing liberal, and the owner of many guns. I think the 2nd amendment is there to protect my right to join up with a few million of my closest friends in order to encourage local regime change. I don't think there is necessarily a "right to hunt" in the Constitution.
But I'm a former NRA member. I gave up my NRA membership precisely because the NRA stopped being a gun rights organization and started supporting a broader right wing agenda.
Is there a gun rights organization out there that doesn't proclaim that all liberals are evil? That doesn't care what a candidates views on religion or abortion are? If so, sign me up.
I don't think he meant actual slaves, more like extremely cheap labour.
No, Libertarianism would lead to actual slavery. A Libertarian would say that a person has a right to enter into any contract. If that contract held that someone would be bound to servitude for life in exchange for a straw mat and two bowls of gruel per day, so be it. And once such a contract exists, it would be a violation of libertarian ideals not to allow it to be sold.
Since the other inevitable consequence of Libertarianism is a large fraction of the population living in extreme poverty, I'd guess a lot of people might take that deal.
Getting the kitten out of a house slipper? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
So what if they are not "performing" artists, but purely "recording" artists such as the Beatles (after, I think, Revolver they stopped performing live until the Get Back session)?
Half the Beatles are dead. What have their heirs done to deserve an income stream from a recording session that took place nearly half a century ago?
I bought the White Album on cassette in 1984. Then I bought the White Album on CD in 1987. After my CD collection was stolen in 1991, I bought it again. (I didn't have a CD burner at the time, so I didn't have a backup.) I can only listen to one copy of it at a time, so why should I buy it again when I want to listen to it on my computer, or my MP3 player? I've already paid for it three times. Enough already.
Many good artists don't perform much live.
Maybe the would if they needed to in order to make a living. That's their choice.
they're nothing hypocritical about saying that the original Pentium 1 was a pretty bad chip, and the Core 2 Duo is a pretty great one.
Have you compared the total length of Pentium errata with the length of the Core 2 Duo errata?
Sorry for not getting the joke. But since you were wondering, your tax dollars haven't been used. Unless you are a resident of California. Some state taxes were used as matching grants to match corporate donations in the early stages. And no matter whether Arecibo is funded or not, none of those dollars go to SETI@home.
No, let's replace Arecibo with "one ten thousandth of the cost of hubble or spitzer"
Yes, reading is good. You should try it more often. What makes you think that the government is spending ANY money searching for aliens let alone millions of dollars? Repeat after me: Currently the U.S. government does not fund SETI observations. Say it again. Repeat until it sinks in.
Click on my signature to find out how SETI is really funded.
Create an account on the SETI forum and get to know those guys that run the place. They do squat there for what they're paid. I wish I could take a vacation like those guys. They're biggest decision is "What country do you want to go spend a month at?" Shit I'd be playing WOW all day too! Get to know them before you wish them (mine and your) millions.
Yes, all three of the people who work for SETI@home are billionaires from their SETI salaries. Did you ever try to run a scientific project and a web site visited daily by a few hundred thousand people with a staff of three part time employees? Are you on call for your job every hour of every day?
To be serious, pay at SETI@home is, like typical university pay, about 70% of industry wages for the same work. And given that they aren't getting enough in donations to fund the three employees they have, they are lucky the project hasn't folded.
And the staff members I know personally would rather drown in raw sewage than play WoW. One used to work on an open source flight simulator for a while, however. That was about 15 years ago. I doubt he has much time for gaming now.
SETI@home is at the present time entirely funded by donations. Any time SETI@home uses at Arecibo is piggybacked on searching for pulsars or mapping the Galaxy in the 21cm line.
Or are you suggesting that because Arecibo spends any effort on a project you dislike it should be shut down?
I believe "conjecture" ... also has a well-established meaning in mathematics...
The established meaning in mathematics is "something I believe is true but am unable to prove because, uh... umm... I have to go pick up my dry cleaning before they close. Maybe you can find a grad student to do it."
At some point we were supposed to stop flinging poo? Nobody told me!
If they aren't told that what is "slightly unethical behavior" in an undergraduate lab course is "dangerously unethical and likely criminal" behavior when practiced in the real world, how are they to know?
The punishment for "fudging" lab data as an undergraduate should be failure on the assignment. The punishment for a graduate student TA who suggests that fudging lab data on an assignment is OK should be immediate expulsion.
The second assumption is that the only thing that effects cost of an item is the energy used to produce the item. Also demonstrably false.
The third is the assumption that energy costs are uniform across the planet and that they do not change with time. Has he ever looked at his power bill?
Don Lancaster needs to take an Introductory Economics course. From this article I gather that the term "informally peer reviewed" means "read by people who agree with me and guess what, they still agree with me."
My representative did vote nay. Quite loudly.
Upon reboot two devices in the array came up with bad magic in the superblock and all was lost. The consensus seems to be that filesystem corruption caused enough confusion that the md driver decided to overwrite the superblocks. No hardware failure required, and there probably isn't enough info from the failure to find the bug. The bug is still there, and this will happen again to somebody.
U.S. law also considers anything that advertises itself as containing visual depictions of children in sexual activity to also be child pornography. So if I were to create a link to whitehouse.gov on a web page, and if the web page were to claim the link pointed to pictures of children having sex, that web page would also count as child pornography according to the definitions in the U.S. Code. If you were to have that web page in your cache, you could be prosecuted and convicted of possession of child pornography even though no actual images were involved. The only question is how much the government wants you behind bars. Of course, I could also be prosecuted for creating the page in the first place.
That's how the police state starts.... Make sure everyone has violated enough laws that they can be imprisoned at a moments notice. If everyone is guilty of an imprisonable offense, only people who speak in favor of the government have freedom of speech.
It doesn't count as "examined" until we can see the source.
A clause that might limit the states is in Article I Section 10, which places limits on the actions of the States.
It's best to understand the document before basing arguments upon it.
And just in case the Plat Book is in error, I always carry a theodolite and two surveyors in the trunk.