You forgot a simple head tax. One head tax based on your place of residence (or split among localities if you have more than one residence over the tax period based on time spent at each). There'd be one of these for city, county, state, and federal paid once a year.
Have you run the numbers on this?
US government spending, per capita, is $12,101, so the canonical family of four would start off owing $48,400. Roughly half of the population would pay more in taxes than they earn.
Which, aside from value judgments, is going to make it necessary to increase the tax rate since those "takers" won't be paying much. Of course, increasing the tax rate will put more of them in the street, etc.
It does seem to be negatively correlated with economic growth.
What difference does it make to me that someone in Ohio is driving a Rolls Royce while all I have is a Nissan?
That depends, doesn't it, on whether the shift in income from wages to capital kept your income from growing over your working lifetime. If inequality has a net positive sum great enough for "trickle down" to lift all boats rather than just the yachts, well and good. If it's a negative sum (the top gets increases, the bottom loses money) then the picture changes.
This isn't an ideological question, but an empiracal one.
Brilliant idea. That way, instead of spending their money on things that people have to make, the wealthy will invest in owning a larger share of the world by way of financial instruments which produce more income.
This is why we use MPG and why they put big numbers on the speedometer even though that 4 Cylinder would never make it to 120 MPH.
Considering how long Indy racers ran with four-bangers...
Or for that matter, my Subaru with its four-cylinder Boxer is basically an updated version of the car that holds a long list of speed records for distances like 50,000 km -- at sustained average speeds of over 135 mph.
The real reason auto manufacturers put silly speedo ranges on is to keep the most common highway speeds in the upper quadrant of the dial, for quick reading and thus faster times getting your eyes back on the road. And, yes, I've worked with the auto industry on speedometers, albeit long long ago.
The reason it's considered inferior is because it's inverted from what you really care about - what you care about is "how much fuel will it take me to get n miles".
No, what I really care about is, "can I make it to the next fuel stop with what I have in the tank." Which is not a problem in most of Europe, but is very much a problem in large parts of the USA.
And unlike the manufacturers' economy claims, I use the number on a regular basis instead of just when I'm planning to buy a car.
This whole discussion is distorted by the framing around "belief." As long as the result of a scientific inquiry is "belief" it's reasonable (in the "sound reason" sense) to hold the issue open and speculate that Einstein's General Theory (or the current version of Darwin's) might in fact be totally wrong.
But that's where the denialists play word games. They talk about open minds, and how consensus isn't dispositive, etc. and then use that as an argument against teaching evolution in schools or taking steps agains AGW. Or, for that matter, against teaching heliocentrism or plate tectonics.
The "scientific consensus" may not be dispositive in any epistemological sense, but when it comes time to collapse the waveform and make a decision it's certainly the way to bet.
Thanks to a prosthetic knee, I get the "human touch" every time I fly. That's after a trip through the pornscanner and taking out all of my electronics and startingt them up, of course.
As for the kiosks -- if you know what you're doing, the last thing that you need is the kind of condescending "help" that gets in the way of getting your freaking boarding pass.
Yes I know they probably don't....but they "should"
I've been fired for taking off a weekend day that I'd told people about for years (first weekend every November) that suddenly became a "be there" -- announced after I'd already gone out of data reception.
The United States exported about $106 billion worth of such goods last year.
It's one thing to export $106 billion more than you import and quite another to export $106 billion while importing $250 billion.
A good rule of thumb is that if an article doesn't explicitly tell you that it's a net export, it's because it's a puff piece with a bias and the truth would harsh the whole slant.
Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.
States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.
That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.
We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.
Ask yourself: what does the TSA do to detect iron oxide and aluminum? (Much less magnesium! MacBooks, anyone?)
They've known about this for years. They have quite competent "red team" people who think up possible threats, and they're not remotely so stupid as to believe that the Bad Guys can't think up this kind of thing themselves. Ask a classroom of sophomore-level engineering students to come up with ways to get plane-killers aboard and this is one of the first ones -- although it's a very, very long list.
However, stopping thermite from getting onboard is going to be way more of a public inconvenience than their mission statement allows.
Most of the AGW activists are pursuing political agendas that have a limited connection to AGW. Here are some questions to ask yourself - Why are AGW activists not actively pursuing increased hydroelectric power? Why are AGW activists not actively pursuing increased nuclear power?
Mostly because they're not interested in mandating specific aproaches. Instead of the old-fashioned approach of Nixon's EPA, they're going for market-based solutions: putting a price on carbon emissions, for instance. Or a conservative variant on that, George H. W. Bush's cap-and-trade mechanism updated by John McCain for carbon dioxide.
Or the most recent study's proposal: just eliminating taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels would get us halfway to the 2-degree target.
we need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues
I suspect that there are more than a few groups and people with influence who disagree. And from the evidence, they're likely to continue to get their way.
The main reason that trucks replaced rail was because of the
.. enormous subsidy that the USA put into highways starting in the 1950s. It was ostensibly to create a transportation system that would not fold up following a nuclear attack, but like all such things it took on a life of its own.
First off, the ping rate for auto traffic is an enormous number of pulse durations or return times -- the radar will ignore returns coming back more than a couple of microseconds after it sends its last ping, and only needs to ping every few tens of milliseconds. That's a window of less than 0.1%.
If a car detects a return in a "forbidden" time slot, it can just switch to not using that frequency. Or use the kind of random backoff that Ethernet has been using now for forty years.
We already grant that the person wearing the watch has a phone, so why not just keep the watch simple (and thus power-stingy) and slave it to the phone?
That way, if there's a feature you want on the watch, get the phone app to do it.
Give the money to the lawyers, burn it in the street, line it with birdcages, give it to a Colombian drug lord - it's money out of the hands of the entity that screwed over their employees, customers, etc, in the absence of any other action.
If all you want from the case is to punish the conspirators (presumably to discourage them from doing it again) then it would be a good ideat to hit them for at least what they got from screwing the employees. Which, apparently, was something like an order of magnitude larger. $324 million is, like the drug lords put it, just the cost of doing business.
If, on the other hand, there is some remote notion of compensating the people who actually got screwed, a settlement that got them, like, some money might be better. And as other commenters have pointed out, hiring your own lawyer to play Don Quixote against multiple giant corporations is not a winning proposition.
And "Junior" is so cute. I'll have to show that to the grandkids.
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Have you run the numbers on this?
US government spending, per capita, is $12,101, so the canonical family of four would start off owing $48,400. Roughly half of the population would pay more in taxes than they earn.
Which, aside from value judgments, is going to make it necessary to increase the tax rate since those "takers" won't be paying much. Of course, increasing the tax rate will put more of them in the street, etc.
It does seem to be negatively correlated with economic growth.
That depends, doesn't it, on whether the shift in income from wages to capital kept your income from growing over your working lifetime. If inequality has a net positive sum great enough for "trickle down" to lift all boats rather than just the yachts, well and good. If it's a negative sum (the top gets increases, the bottom loses money) then the picture changes.
This isn't an ideological question, but an empiracal one.
Brilliant idea. That way, instead of spending their money on things that people have to make, the wealthy will invest in owning a larger share of the world by way of financial instruments which produce more income.
This will, obviously, reduce inequality.
Please don't confuse measurements with spefications. Nor selection criteria and operational decisions.
This is why we use MPG and why they put big numbers on the speedometer even though that 4 Cylinder would never make it to 120 MPH.
Considering how long Indy racers ran with four-bangers ...
Or for that matter, my Subaru with its four-cylinder Boxer is basically an updated version of the car that holds a long list of speed records for distances like 50,000 km -- at sustained average speeds of over 135 mph.
The real reason auto manufacturers put silly speedo ranges on is to keep the most common highway speeds in the upper quadrant of the dial, for quick reading and thus faster times getting your eyes back on the road. And, yes, I've worked with the auto industry on speedometers, albeit long long ago.
The reason it's considered inferior is because it's inverted from what you really care about - what you care about is "how much fuel will it take me to get n miles".
No, what I really care about is, "can I make it to the next fuel stop with what I have in the tank." Which is not a problem in most of Europe, but is very much a problem in large parts of the USA.
And unlike the manufacturers' economy claims, I use the number on a regular basis instead of just when I'm planning to buy a car.
Text messages aren't reliable enough for any life saving use
That must be why 911 systems are adding text capability.
This whole discussion is distorted by the framing around "belief." As long as the result of a scientific inquiry is "belief" it's reasonable (in the "sound reason" sense) to hold the issue open and speculate that Einstein's General Theory (or the current version of Darwin's) might in fact be totally wrong.
But that's where the denialists play word games. They talk about open minds, and how consensus isn't dispositive, etc. and then use that as an argument against teaching evolution in schools or taking steps agains AGW. Or, for that matter, against teaching heliocentrism or plate tectonics.
The "scientific consensus" may not be dispositive in any epistemological sense, but when it comes time to collapse the waveform and make a decision it's certainly the way to bet.
a European court issues an injunction under the European privacy laws against MS handing over the bits?
Thanks to a prosthetic knee, I get the "human touch" every time I fly. That's after a trip through the pornscanner and taking out all of my electronics and startingt them up, of course.
As for the kiosks -- if you know what you're doing, the last thing that you need is the kind of condescending "help" that gets in the way of getting your freaking boarding pass.
I'd say "marry someone wealthy."
Yes I know they probably don't....but they "should"
I've been fired for taking off a weekend day that I'd told people about for years (first weekend every November) that suddenly became a "be there" -- announced after I'd already gone out of data reception.
So, yeah -- we might as well laugh.
No source -- more of a complaint on TFA. The difference between gross exports and net exports is definitional, so I would hope no source required.
Oh, for mod points to score the parent as "funny."
The United States exported about $106 billion worth of such goods last year.
It's one thing to export $106 billion more than you import and quite another to export $106 billion while importing $250 billion.
A good rule of thumb is that if an article doesn't explicitly tell you that it's a net export, it's because it's a puff piece with a bias and the truth would harsh the whole slant.
Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.
States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.
That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.
We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.
Ask yourself: what does the TSA do to detect iron oxide and aluminum? (Much less magnesium! MacBooks, anyone?)
They've known about this for years. They have quite competent "red team" people who think up possible threats, and they're not remotely so stupid as to believe that the Bad Guys can't think up this kind of thing themselves. Ask a classroom of sophomore-level engineering students to come up with ways to get plane-killers aboard and this is one of the first ones -- although it's a very, very long list.
However, stopping thermite from getting onboard is going to be way more of a public inconvenience than their mission statement allows.
... bring all the thermite, magnesium tape, and calcium carbide you want to on in carry-on luggage.
Most of the AGW activists are pursuing political agendas that have a limited connection to AGW. Here are some questions to ask yourself - Why are AGW activists not actively pursuing increased hydroelectric power? Why are AGW activists not actively pursuing increased nuclear power?
Mostly because they're not interested in mandating specific aproaches. Instead of the old-fashioned approach of Nixon's EPA, they're going for market-based solutions: putting a price on carbon emissions, for instance. Or a conservative variant on that, George H. W. Bush's cap-and-trade mechanism updated by John McCain for carbon dioxide.
Or the most recent study's proposal: just eliminating taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels would get us halfway to the 2-degree target.
we need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues
I suspect that there are more than a few groups and people with influence who disagree. And from the evidence, they're likely to continue to get their way.
The main reason that trucks replaced rail was because of the
.. enormous subsidy that the USA put into highways starting in the 1950s. It was ostensibly to create a transportation system that would not fold up following a nuclear attack, but like all such things it took on a life of its own.
First off, the ping rate for auto traffic is an enormous number of pulse durations or return times -- the radar will ignore returns coming back more than a couple of microseconds after it sends its last ping, and only needs to ping every few tens of milliseconds. That's a window of less than 0.1%.
If a car detects a return in a "forbidden" time slot, it can just switch to not using that frequency. Or use the kind of random backoff that Ethernet has been using now for forty years.
And that's just two solutions.
injecting bogus congestion information into the network.
We already grant that the person wearing the watch has a phone, so why not just keep the watch simple (and thus power-stingy) and slave it to the phone?
That way, if there's a feature you want on the watch, get the phone app to do it.
Give the money to the lawyers, burn it in the street, line it with birdcages, give it to a Colombian drug lord - it's money out of the hands of the entity that screwed over their employees, customers, etc, in the absence of any other action.
If all you want from the case is to punish the conspirators (presumably to discourage them from doing it again) then it would be a good ideat to hit them for at least what they got from screwing the employees. Which, apparently, was something like an order of magnitude larger. $324 million is, like the drug lords put it, just the cost of doing business.
If, on the other hand, there is some remote notion of compensating the people who actually got screwed, a settlement that got them, like, some money might be better. And as other commenters have pointed out, hiring your own lawyer to play Don Quixote against multiple giant corporations is not a winning proposition.
And "Junior" is so cute. I'll have to show that to the grandkids.