They didn't fight for religious liberty in general, but rather for the right to exercise their particular religion. That's hardly a material difference except in terms of the number of religious groups involved.
They didn't just "fight for their right to exercise their particular religion", they fought for the ability to oppress religions they didn't agree with. Yeah, that's a huge material difference, namely the one between freedom of religion and state-imposed religion.
Half the Protestant religions didn't even exist yet, because people like Calvin and Wesley hadn't even been born yet.
Are you kidding? The 30 Years War ran from 1618-1648; Calvin died in 1564. The vast majority of Christians on this planet today are Catholics, Orthodox, or a member of one of the protestant denominations that predate the 30 Years War.
All of these things had a very real impact on what we think of as a "modern Christian".
My claim wasn't about "modern Christians", it was about "Christians". The "modern" qualifier was an irrelevant straw man put up by KGill for no apparent reason and with no justification.
It isn't all about dogma and theology, though that is part of it. Any such definition must also include the societal evolution brought about by the Protestant Reformation—a change that has taken hundreds of years to reach fruition.
People like to delude themselves into think that 21st century Europe is some gradual social progress, from a violent past to an enlightened modern age, driven by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and technological progress. That's bullshit if you look at actual history, culminating in WWII. The only reason Europeans eventually stopped bashing each others' heads was because they had thoroughly screwed up the continent and there were lots of Russian and US troops stationed there.
Your reasoning for why the CBO report is wrong was the following:
The CBO report is wrong. It purports to consider payroll taxes, but the bottom quintile has average before-tax income of 15,500 or 24,600, however you want to count it, and 500 in Federal taxes. At that income, the payroll taxes on 15,500 alone would be in excess of a thousand.
If fact, it took me about a minute of reflection to figure out where that discrepancy comes from. And it took me another minute to look at the report and verify that. I'll leave it as an exercise to do the same for yourself. You just need to overcome your arrogant disregard for the facts and your prejudices and actually read the details.
I don't have a "hunch" that the CBO report is wrong. I can calculate as well as the next guy, I happen to know something about payroll taxes, and I can do the statistics.
No, obviously you can't, because the CBO report numbers are, in fact, reasonable and consistent, and it is your reasoning that is wrong. In different words, you're jumping to conclusions.
The question of who should reap the benefit for increased productivity is not an economic one.
The term "should" can mean multiple things. I am using it in the sense of "expectation": in a free market and in the presence of automation, the prediction ("should") is that higher productivity doesn't lead to higher wages. Higher productivity only leads to higher wages if the productivity in some sense is due to "better workers". That's why we saw wages climb along with productivity for a few decades and then saw things level off. And, as I mentioned before, the notion that this is due to some underhanded manipulation by "the wealthy" in the US doesn't stand up to scrutiny, because you find the same pattern in Europe.
You seem to be using the word "should" as a value judgment, advocating social and political interference in markets to achieve an outcome in which wages increase with productivity gains. If used as the basis for government policies, it has serious negative economic and social consequences. While you may say that you don't care about that, that is something economics does predict. We know that both from economic theory, and because such preferences and values were the cornerstones of socialist, communist, and fascist economics and they have never worked well in practice.
You're a fool if you think that Democrats are "half-allies". They are at least as bad when it comes to war mongering and crony capitalism, and their taxes are higher.
(As far as "constitutionality", that word is thrown around too much. The Constitution is vague on a good many issues.)
Obama promised to restore constitutionality, and he had a specific agenda; he failed to deliver.
Even in the US, the 1st amendment isn't totally immutable. There are concepts like "fighting words" and the notion that you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. Could Barton have some kind of argument based on these limitations?
"Fighting words" and "shouting fire" are at their core about something other than speech, namely about specific, identifiable injury caused by the speech to another party. That is, both a specific target and injury to that target are generally required.
Even though our legal system isn't 100% consistent, and even though SCOTUS could turn a raven into a writing desk if the mood strikes them, that is generally still the principle that free speech in the US follows.
So, yes, even the US implements free speech only imperfectly. But the current restrictions in the US are minor and don't have significant consequences. In Europe, you can get into serious legal trouble for insulting government officials or saying things about religion or churches that doesn't fit the official party line.
Far more disconcerting are attempts by the US government to manipulate speech through selective funding and propaganda.
Obama and other Democrats got elected in large part on the promise of restoring privacy and constitutionality and limiting government overreach. People got disgusted with them when they not only failed to deliver but ended up worse than the people they replaced.
Payroll taxes start with the first dollar you earn, and continue for a long time. If the median income of a group is [blah blah blah]
Look, that kind of reasoning amounts to a hunch that the CBO numbers might be wrong, but they are not an argument. If you seriously want to claim that the CBO numbers are wrong, I suggest you get the study and dig through it. You will most likely find that your reasoning is wrong.
Capital gains do not include corporate income taxes.
Correct. What I'm pointing out is that it is incorrect to look just at the capital gains rate and compare it to the income tax rate. What you need to look at is the source of the money (profits) and then the overall tax rate that is applied for either wages or investments. For investments, that is the combination of the corporate tax and the capital gains tax (in fact, it's even worse than that because capital gains also tax gains from inflation, which means that the capital gains tax alone can be arbitrarily high).
As far as the wealthy go, you give me a cite presumably saying that they can't dodge taxes, and in your next paragraph you say "...there is no tax policy you could device to get [more money] from them, because the very fact that they have much more money than they need gives them nearly infinite flexibility in how to allocate it." You're contradicting yourself:
I didn't use terms like "dodge"; that's a politically loaded, economically meaningless term. Legally, tax compliance in the US is high. Economically, the top 20% are the only group that pay a bigger share in income taxes than they receive in government benefits. Those are just facts, and they have nothing to do with "dodging".
But what happens if you increase taxes, in particular on the ultra-rich, is that you don't, actually, get a significant increase in tax revenue. That's also just a simple economic fact. And the source of that isn't any kind of deception or fraud, it's simply that people make different choices: they take less money out of their businesses in profits, they create more non-profits, they buy stuff whose value is difficult to assess or track, and, in some cases, they simply emigrate.
What I'm not fine with is the median family income in constant dollars staying flat while the economy booms and worker productivity goes up.
Median family income grew pretty steadily from 1967 (and earlier) to 1999, from about $40k in 1967 to about $52k in 1999 (both in 2009 dollars). (It has stagnated since, but the same is true for the top 1% and top 5%, largely due to the consequences of 9/11, the recession, and poor economic policies.) But it has actually grown more than that: apart from some statistical issues with the numbers people use for these comparisons, demographics have changed, and so have mandatory government benefits. When you take that into account, growth is significantly better. Furthermore, the same pattern is true in other Western countries (Germany, Japan, France, Canada), even ones with much higher tax progressivity and lower inequality.
But your premise that wages should some how reflect "worker productivity" is also wrong. An individual worker can produce more stuff today, but that's largely due to more efficient production methods, not to any additional effort or skill on the worker's part. The gains from such productivity rightfully go to inventors and investors, not workers.
Still, growth in the US is less than it should be, but that's largely due to taxes that are too high and too much regulation.
And we're back to the "free market solves all," except that without regulation, the free market gives you Rockerfellers, Carnegies, and AT&T, and they served everyone so well.
Look, I might understand why you aren't familiar enough with history to understand that that statement is bullshit as far as Rockefeller and Carnegie is concerned, but even if you're totally unfamiliar with US economic history, at least you should know that AT&T was a government created and government regulated monopoly. In fact, the Internet and low-cost phone service only took off once the government reduced its meddling in that market.
That "inefficient" road system, concieved of out of pinko Communism,
Actually, it was conceived out of brownish progressivism: the major US infrastructure and make-work projects of the 1930's were inspired by Europe, in particular Prussia and Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the highway system, like other such infrastructure systems, were motivated by military and defense use.
If you let Arkansas "develop normally" without federally funded roads, utilities, etc., mandated by law and delivered at a net loss, it would be one awesome wildlife park today.
There is no evidence to support that assertion. In fact, it is contradicted by historical precedent.
As to: we can't afford the roads we have, I don't know where you live,
It has nothing to do with where I live. Federal infrastructure spending in the US is increasingly crowded out by non-discretionary spending, and money keeps getting transferred from the general fund to keep the highway trust fund solvent.
They are teaching using Minecraft. The only thing that has to do with Microsoft is that Microsoft bought the company.
And even if there were something Microsoft API specific in this code, who cares? This is a basic introduction; it's not like they are going to spend half their school time memorizing obscure Microsoft APIs.
Just because the alternatives you have seen are worse doesn't mean there aren't better alternatives to what we have.
There are doubtlessly numerous better alternatives. But I don't presume to know them. And unless you are omniscient and can speak on behalf of 330 million Americans, neither do you. You certainly do not speak for me because I don't want what you want.
So, how about we determine the better alternatives through voting? And how about we determine how many votes people get based on the stake and interest they actually have in the outcome? Oh, right: we call that process of voting a "free market" and the votes "dollars".
I don't believe that all regulation leads to petulant price gouging
Did I say anything like that? Regulations actually usually lead to opportunity costs and fairly uniform increases in prices, both of which are imperceptible and insidious effects. That is, with regulations, unlike "price gouging", you usually don't even notice the high price you are paying.
Roads and highways are pretty good in the U.S. it's part of what made our economy strong in the last 70 years.
We are talking about ISPs not roads. But if you do want to use roads as an analogy, they are massively misallocated in the US, with highways in places like the Bay Area perpetually congested, and other highways woefully underutilized. The way highways and roads are funded leads to people settling in faraway places and shifting the burden of paying for their roads to other taxpayers. The fact that roads and highways used to be of fairly nice quality doesn't mean the money was well spent. And we can't even pay for maintaining this poorly conceived highway system anymore because there is no solid business model behind it.
Wouldn't it be nice if we, as consumers, could somehow influence the market to provide a more "flat tax" tariff on us for the services they provide?
Just because the US market doesn't cater to your personal preferences for content doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. And, no, I don't think it "would be nice", I like the market the way it is, because I've seen the alternatives, and they are worse.
Of course anyone can behave rationally. But my context was clear in my use of the term "irrational"; people often act without thinking, they are genetically predisposed to this way of being.
Yes, and I'm saying that you are misdiagnosing the sources of terrorism and mass murder. You're thinking in Freudian terms, in which a rational super-ego imposes morality on an irrational id. But while that view might be generally true for sex (which Freud obsessed over), it's probably not true for killing. Killing is distasteful to most people, and it usually takes reasoning for people to overcome that inhibition. That's why it is very hard for military training around the world to turn teenagers into killing machines.
People don't naturally want to kill each other.
Yes, correct. And in saying that, you implicitly recognize that the inhibition against killing is instinctual and rooted in empathy, rather than reason.
Even after people have taken this step to kill another, the feeling that what they are doing is very badly wrong never goes away and they NEED to justify their actions somehow in order to live with themselves.
Here you say it again: the inhibitions against killing are rooted in feeling, while killing requires the rational process of justification.
It's really very sad. The sooner we can educate ourselves out of religion the better.
I think religion is largely irrelevant to these questions. Christians and Muslims have murdered each other in large numbers, but so have atheists. Atheistic movements like communism function largely like religions. Religion is simply one label for a general mechanism by which people form groups and group identities. The fact that religious dogma is particularly irrational is irrelevant; communism was rooted in something that appeared to be a scientific and rational view of economics at the time, but communists didn't convert en mass to something else when those economic theories turned out to be false.
they can't just let you pay $50/month for broadband and be done with it, no, broadband by itself is $70 a month, but let us give you a $30, 40 or 50 a month bundle including a bunch of other services you don't want / won't use, then at the end of the period jack you back up to $90, 100 or 130 a month. So, with them it's a $240 a year premium to not have to manage their BS
Well, it's basically differential pricing: customers that are price conscious will keep up with them and keep their monthly rates as low as possible, customers who can't be bothered with that BS will simply pay the premium. Is it annoying? You bet. But if you regulate that away, they'll just jack up prices across the board.
In some respects, this is a "golden age" of entertainment [...] I'm most bummed out that I don't have the free time to enjoy half of what's out there, but people keep trying to get me to pay for all of it just to get the little pieces I do want.
Well, that's precisely why people can offer you "unlimited free bandwidth" for something: because they have done the studies and figured out that people won't use it that much. If you demand the kind of simplistic pricing you want, prices won't go down for you, they will stay the same or go up.
on top of rates that are already some of the highest in the world for marginal broadband
I've subscribed to broadband in several countries. In comparison, US broadband is pretty good. It's nominally a bit more expensive than in some other countries, but that's because it's subsidized there; you pay for it through taxes. Conditions, choice of plans, and service in the US are generally better than elsewhere in my experience.
What mattered was that their freedoms were being limited, and they didn't like it.
That's plainly wrong in light of what happened. These people didn't fight for, nor did they achieve, religious liberty in general; what they achieved was a Catholic France, and a patchwork of Catholic and protestant German states.
As such, religion was at best tangential.
That is utterly ludicrous.
Also, the Protestant Reformation is not generally considered to have ended until more than a hundred years after the Thirty Years War. So IMO, neither of those wars can be considered to have been fought among "modern" Christians, because the dust hadn't really settled yet.
Really? And what dogmatic differences made them "not modern"?
that some of us recognize our shortcomings and teach our kids to think critically, considering the consequences of their actions prior to them being made
Religious extremists are often quite rational, it is simply that their world is very different from yours. Your main concerns are likely to do something useful within the economy, advance in your job, advance your career, save for retirement, plan for your next vacation, and don't sound too stupid at cocktail parties. Religious extremists are part of very different social contexts and have very different goals and constraints on them. If you could make a list of propositions about the world and then objectively judge which ones are rational and which ones aren't, you'd likely find that they are rational and correct about at least as many propositions as you are.
I don't think the original post by NostalgiaForInfinity claiming millions of Christians have died at each others hands was useful except as a throw-away statement designed to illicit response.
No, I didn't just claim that "millions of Christians have died at each others hands", I said that Christians killed each other by the millions over Christianity. And whether you find that observation "useful" or not isn't the point. The point is that claims that Christianity is somehow peaceful or moral, or that it is more peaceful than Islam are ludicrous in the light of historical reality.
Personally I'm of the opinion that religious people have been deceived
We live in literate, educated societies. Everybody can read the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran. Secondary schools in the US and Europe teach basic European history, including the numerous wars between Catholics and protestants, the Crusades, the role of churches in colonialism and cultural imperialism, the role of the Catholic and protestant churches in Nazi Germany, and the Islamic empires.
"I have been deceived" is not a valid excuse given all that information and education. If after all that you still choose to call yourself a Catholic, protestant, or Muslim, people have a right to hold you responsible and accountable for your choice of religion and all the history that goes along with it.
I went through your link and I'm not seeing anything from modern history in there.
You put up a straw man by adding the word "modern", without justification or even explanation what you mean by that. That makes your response manipulative and dishonest.
The wars I was referring to were the Thirty Years War and the Huguenot Wars, both of which were wars between Catholic and protestants in their "modern" form. You can add many of the wars in the British Isles to that. And arguably, WWII was also a war between Christians.
I don't see that one-stop shopping precludes competition
No, but the diversity of customer interests probably "precludes" it.
I would think that a truly competitive market would include several one-stop shopping providers, perhaps WalMart and K-Mart and Target - subtly different, but basically bringing you all the same stuff with a little different spin on the marketing.
But Walmart, K-Mart, and Target are not one-stop shopping. For most people, they have maybe 80% of what they need, and for the rest they go somewhere else. And between them, they may have 95% of what people need, and for the rest they still need to go somewhere else. Basically, it's the same situation as with online video, except that there isn't a subscription involved.
What I call the current entertainment mess is subscription lock-in fragmentation, wherein you have to buy not one, but several all subscriptions that each simultaneously give you more and less than you want
But the individual subscriptions are dirt-cheap. And if some of them make special deals with your ISP, they get even cheaper.
The real question is not really why this data has to be entered manually (instead of automatically), but why it is needed at all. You'd think that with all the sensors on an airplane, this sort of thing should be handled via automated control systems, based on actual measurements of how the plane is doing.
It might still be useful to enter the data, but only as a sanity check; that is, to identify when the plane isn't handling the way it should based on the weight that the crew things it actually has.
The CBO report is wrong. It purports to consider payroll taxes, but the bottom quintile has average before-tax income of 15,500 or 24,600, however you want to count it, and 500 in Federal taxes. At that income, the payroll taxes on 15,500 alone would be in excess of a thousand.
Just because the the payroll tax at the average income would be X doesn't mean that the average payroll tax is X.
hat's the most highly taxed income. Go up some from my income and the FICA taxes hit a cap.
I should hope so, since FICA is for capped benefits. FICA taxes already strongly favor low income recipients.
Go up considerably more and we start getting into people who get a lot of their income on capital gains
First of all, capital gains are effectively corporate profits, and the effective rate on that is already higher than your income tax. In addition, there is no logical reason why capital gains should be taxed at the same or higher rate than income.
or at least have enough money to arrange things to owe less in taxes.
If productivity has gone up a lot from 1980, and median family income in constant dollars has been flat, the money's going somewhere, and it isn't into my pockets.
Leaving aside the question of whether that data really means what you seem to think it does, why should it go into your pockets? You are part of the top 20%, you just said so. You contribute to inequality in the US, and if you want to reduce inequality in the US and raise the median family income, the top 20% of income earners are the primary source of people who need to pay more. You aren't going to get that kind of money from "the wealthy"; they don't have enough money, and even if they did, there is no tax policy you could devise to get it from them, because the very fact that they have much more money than they need gives them nearly infinite flexibility in how to allocate it.
I think your comments reveal what really bothers you: you are part of the top 20%, you're educated and skilled, and you look at the billionaire peddlers of soft drinks and Chinese plastic crap, and you think that the world isn't fair and that you deserve better. I understand, I'm part of the top 20% too, and I see your attitude all around me. But the world isn't fair, and attempts to make it fair by means of taxation and government intervention will hurt people like you and me even more. And such policies won't even benefit the remaining 80% of the population that they ostensibly help.
You're missing the point. My point is that it isn't like the market has narrowed down, it has indeed expanded, with many more distributors providing streaming distribution and competing with each other. That is, a lot of stuff you could conveniently get from a single source like Netflix now require you to deal with many distributors.
The point is: you say you want more competition, but you really don't, because real competition means you as a customer have to think for yourself and have to deal with some inconveniences. What you want is the kind of one-stop-shopping convenience that a monopoly on distribution results in with the kind of prices that cut-throat competition results in. Sorry, but that is just not possible.
The definition of "modern" is irrelevant; you added that modifier as a straw man. My original statement was "That hasn't stopped Christians from murdering each other over Christianity by the millions", which is true. And the Reformation certainly represents the kind of Christianity that is practiced today, at least according to the churches themselves.
I only gave those examples because they are the most obvious one. In fact, one of the most devastating religious wars occurred in the 20th century: WWII, which was deeply rooted in Christian conflicts and beliefs. But understanding the roles that the Catholic churches, protestant churches, and Christian ideology played in that conflict require more analysis and historical knowledge than you say you possess.
Wallmart didn't reduce the price - they outsourced their wagebill to the taxpayers, you're paying the difference with your taxes - and all the people who never shop at Wallmart are forced to subsidize your savings.
Whether those kinds of government programs are a good idea or not is another question, but they are not subsidy to Walmart.
If you ever wondered why a 15 dollar inflation-bound minimum wage is a good idea - there it is right there, so companies cannot outsource their wagebills to the taxpayer like Wallmart does.
If you raise the minimum wage to $15/h, Walmart will only hire people that are worth $15/h, and that's not their current set of employees. In addition, they will simply automate more, and much of what they do can be automated; just look at Europe where labor costs are higher and shops and restaurants run with less staff. No matter what the law, the minimum wage is always $0.
Whatever costs they can't control that way will simply be passed on to consumers in higher prices, hurting particularly the lower income groups that shop at Walmart.
In the real world even wallmart would rather make a slightly smaller profit than no profit at all.
What exactly do you imagine Walmart's profit margins to be? Walmart has very low profit margins compared to other corporations:
Walmart can't and won't reduce their profit margin; any increase in operating costs is simply passed on to customers. Since their customers are often lower income, it places an extra burden on them. So, even if your fiction of government aid to Walmart workers keeping prices low were correct, it would simply mean a wealth transfer from rich to poor (since only about 97.2% of income taxes are paid by those making more than median income, 70.2% by the top 10%), which you argue should be eliminated.
But you are right to a degree: the goal of all this hullabaloo over net neutrality and minimum wage is indeed to eliminate low profit margin, low priced, domestic, diverse companies like Walmart into the kind of high profit margin, high priced, outsourcing, privileged upper middle class company like Apple. It's disgusting that you pretend to be doing that in the name of "social justice" or "benefits to taxpayers".
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't just "fight for their right to exercise their particular religion", they fought for the ability to oppress religions they didn't agree with. Yeah, that's a huge material difference, namely the one between freedom of religion and state-imposed religion.
Are you kidding? The 30 Years War ran from 1618-1648; Calvin died in 1564. The vast majority of Christians on this planet today are Catholics, Orthodox, or a member of one of the protestant denominations that predate the 30 Years War.
My claim wasn't about "modern Christians", it was about "Christians". The "modern" qualifier was an irrelevant straw man put up by KGill for no apparent reason and with no justification.
People like to delude themselves into think that 21st century Europe is some gradual social progress, from a violent past to an enlightened modern age, driven by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and technological progress. That's bullshit if you look at actual history, culminating in WWII. The only reason Europeans eventually stopped bashing each others' heads was because they had thoroughly screwed up the continent and there were lots of Russian and US troops stationed there.
Your reasoning for why the CBO report is wrong was the following:
If fact, it took me about a minute of reflection to figure out where that discrepancy comes from. And it took me another minute to look at the report and verify that. I'll leave it as an exercise to do the same for yourself. You just need to overcome your arrogant disregard for the facts and your prejudices and actually read the details.
No, obviously you can't, because the CBO report numbers are, in fact, reasonable and consistent, and it is your reasoning that is wrong. In different words, you're jumping to conclusions.
The term "should" can mean multiple things. I am using it in the sense of "expectation": in a free market and in the presence of automation, the prediction ("should") is that higher productivity doesn't lead to higher wages. Higher productivity only leads to higher wages if the productivity in some sense is due to "better workers". That's why we saw wages climb along with productivity for a few decades and then saw things level off. And, as I mentioned before, the notion that this is due to some underhanded manipulation by "the wealthy" in the US doesn't stand up to scrutiny, because you find the same pattern in Europe.
You seem to be using the word "should" as a value judgment, advocating social and political interference in markets to achieve an outcome in which wages increase with productivity gains. If used as the basis for government policies, it has serious negative economic and social consequences. While you may say that you don't care about that, that is something economics does predict. We know that both from economic theory, and because such preferences and values were the cornerstones of socialist, communist, and fascist economics and they have never worked well in practice.
You're a fool if you think that Democrats are "half-allies". They are at least as bad when it comes to war mongering and crony capitalism, and their taxes are higher.
Obama promised to restore constitutionality, and he had a specific agenda; he failed to deliver.
"Fighting words" and "shouting fire" are at their core about something other than speech, namely about specific, identifiable injury caused by the speech to another party. That is, both a specific target and injury to that target are generally required.
Even though our legal system isn't 100% consistent, and even though SCOTUS could turn a raven into a writing desk if the mood strikes them, that is generally still the principle that free speech in the US follows.
So, yes, even the US implements free speech only imperfectly. But the current restrictions in the US are minor and don't have significant consequences. In Europe, you can get into serious legal trouble for insulting government officials or saying things about religion or churches that doesn't fit the official party line.
Far more disconcerting are attempts by the US government to manipulate speech through selective funding and propaganda.
Obama and other Democrats got elected in large part on the promise of restoring privacy and constitutionality and limiting government overreach. People got disgusted with them when they not only failed to deliver but ended up worse than the people they replaced.
Great idea! Let's start by shutting down:
joebarton.house.gov
twitter.com/RepJoeBarton
I think the guy is spreading fear and terror!
(That was sarcasm, in case you are confused.)
Look, that kind of reasoning amounts to a hunch that the CBO numbers might be wrong, but they are not an argument. If you seriously want to claim that the CBO numbers are wrong, I suggest you get the study and dig through it. You will most likely find that your reasoning is wrong.
Correct. What I'm pointing out is that it is incorrect to look just at the capital gains rate and compare it to the income tax rate. What you need to look at is the source of the money (profits) and then the overall tax rate that is applied for either wages or investments. For investments, that is the combination of the corporate tax and the capital gains tax (in fact, it's even worse than that because capital gains also tax gains from inflation, which means that the capital gains tax alone can be arbitrarily high).
I didn't use terms like "dodge"; that's a politically loaded, economically meaningless term. Legally, tax compliance in the US is high. Economically, the top 20% are the only group that pay a bigger share in income taxes than they receive in government benefits. Those are just facts, and they have nothing to do with "dodging".
But what happens if you increase taxes, in particular on the ultra-rich, is that you don't, actually, get a significant increase in tax revenue. That's also just a simple economic fact. And the source of that isn't any kind of deception or fraud, it's simply that people make different choices: they take less money out of their businesses in profits, they create more non-profits, they buy stuff whose value is difficult to assess or track, and, in some cases, they simply emigrate.
Median family income grew pretty steadily from 1967 (and earlier) to 1999, from about $40k in 1967 to about $52k in 1999 (both in 2009 dollars). (It has stagnated since, but the same is true for the top 1% and top 5%, largely due to the consequences of 9/11, the recession, and poor economic policies.) But it has actually grown more than that: apart from some statistical issues with the numbers people use for these comparisons, demographics have changed, and so have mandatory government benefits. When you take that into account, growth is significantly better. Furthermore, the same pattern is true in other Western countries (Germany, Japan, France, Canada), even ones with much higher tax progressivity and lower inequality.
But your premise that wages should some how reflect "worker productivity" is also wrong. An individual worker can produce more stuff today, but that's largely due to more efficient production methods, not to any additional effort or skill on the worker's part. The gains from such productivity rightfully go to inventors and investors, not workers.
Still, growth in the US is less than it should be, but that's largely due to taxes that are too high and too much regulation.
Look, I might understand why you aren't familiar enough with history to understand that that statement is bullshit as far as Rockefeller and Carnegie is concerned, but even if you're totally unfamiliar with US economic history, at least you should know that AT&T was a government created and government regulated monopoly. In fact, the Internet and low-cost phone service only took off once the government reduced its meddling in that market.
Actually, it was conceived out of brownish progressivism: the major US infrastructure and make-work projects of the 1930's were inspired by Europe, in particular Prussia and Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the highway system, like other such infrastructure systems, were motivated by military and defense use.
There is no evidence to support that assertion. In fact, it is contradicted by historical precedent.
It has nothing to do with where I live. Federal infrastructure spending in the US is increasingly crowded out by non-discretionary spending, and money keeps getting transferred from the general fund to keep the highway trust fund solvent.
They are teaching using Minecraft. The only thing that has to do with Microsoft is that Microsoft bought the company.
And even if there were something Microsoft API specific in this code, who cares? This is a basic introduction; it's not like they are going to spend half their school time memorizing obscure Microsoft APIs.
There are doubtlessly numerous better alternatives. But I don't presume to know them. And unless you are omniscient and can speak on behalf of 330 million Americans, neither do you. You certainly do not speak for me because I don't want what you want.
So, how about we determine the better alternatives through voting? And how about we determine how many votes people get based on the stake and interest they actually have in the outcome? Oh, right: we call that process of voting a "free market" and the votes "dollars".
Did I say anything like that? Regulations actually usually lead to opportunity costs and fairly uniform increases in prices, both of which are imperceptible and insidious effects. That is, with regulations, unlike "price gouging", you usually don't even notice the high price you are paying.
We are talking about ISPs not roads. But if you do want to use roads as an analogy, they are massively misallocated in the US, with highways in places like the Bay Area perpetually congested, and other highways woefully underutilized. The way highways and roads are funded leads to people settling in faraway places and shifting the burden of paying for their roads to other taxpayers. The fact that roads and highways used to be of fairly nice quality doesn't mean the money was well spent. And we can't even pay for maintaining this poorly conceived highway system anymore because there is no solid business model behind it.
Just because the US market doesn't cater to your personal preferences for content doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. And, no, I don't think it "would be nice", I like the market the way it is, because I've seen the alternatives, and they are worse.
Yes, and I'm saying that you are misdiagnosing the sources of terrorism and mass murder. You're thinking in Freudian terms, in which a rational super-ego imposes morality on an irrational id. But while that view might be generally true for sex (which Freud obsessed over), it's probably not true for killing. Killing is distasteful to most people, and it usually takes reasoning for people to overcome that inhibition. That's why it is very hard for military training around the world to turn teenagers into killing machines.
Yes, correct. And in saying that, you implicitly recognize that the inhibition against killing is instinctual and rooted in empathy, rather than reason.
Here you say it again: the inhibitions against killing are rooted in feeling, while killing requires the rational process of justification.
I think religion is largely irrelevant to these questions. Christians and Muslims have murdered each other in large numbers, but so have atheists. Atheistic movements like communism function largely like religions. Religion is simply one label for a general mechanism by which people form groups and group identities. The fact that religious dogma is particularly irrational is irrelevant; communism was rooted in something that appeared to be a scientific and rational view of economics at the time, but communists didn't convert en mass to something else when those economic theories turned out to be false.
Well, it's basically differential pricing: customers that are price conscious will keep up with them and keep their monthly rates as low as possible, customers who can't be bothered with that BS will simply pay the premium. Is it annoying? You bet. But if you regulate that away, they'll just jack up prices across the board.
Well, that's precisely why people can offer you "unlimited free bandwidth" for something: because they have done the studies and figured out that people won't use it that much. If you demand the kind of simplistic pricing you want, prices won't go down for you, they will stay the same or go up.
I've subscribed to broadband in several countries. In comparison, US broadband is pretty good. It's nominally a bit more expensive than in some other countries, but that's because it's subsidized there; you pay for it through taxes. Conditions, choice of plans, and service in the US are generally better than elsewhere in my experience.
That's plainly wrong in light of what happened. These people didn't fight for, nor did they achieve, religious liberty in general; what they achieved was a Catholic France, and a patchwork of Catholic and protestant German states.
That is utterly ludicrous.
Really? And what dogmatic differences made them "not modern"?
No, you didn't quote me "word for word". In fact, you left out an important part of my statement.
Religious extremists are often quite rational, it is simply that their world is very different from yours. Your main concerns are likely to do something useful within the economy, advance in your job, advance your career, save for retirement, plan for your next vacation, and don't sound too stupid at cocktail parties. Religious extremists are part of very different social contexts and have very different goals and constraints on them. If you could make a list of propositions about the world and then objectively judge which ones are rational and which ones aren't, you'd likely find that they are rational and correct about at least as many propositions as you are.
No, I didn't just claim that "millions of Christians have died at each others hands", I said that Christians killed each other by the millions over Christianity. And whether you find that observation "useful" or not isn't the point. The point is that claims that Christianity is somehow peaceful or moral, or that it is more peaceful than Islam are ludicrous in the light of historical reality.
We live in literate, educated societies. Everybody can read the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran. Secondary schools in the US and Europe teach basic European history, including the numerous wars between Catholics and protestants, the Crusades, the role of churches in colonialism and cultural imperialism, the role of the Catholic and protestant churches in Nazi Germany, and the Islamic empires.
"I have been deceived" is not a valid excuse given all that information and education. If after all that you still choose to call yourself a Catholic, protestant, or Muslim, people have a right to hold you responsible and accountable for your choice of religion and all the history that goes along with it.
You put up a straw man by adding the word "modern", without justification or even explanation what you mean by that. That makes your response manipulative and dishonest.
The wars I was referring to were the Thirty Years War and the Huguenot Wars, both of which were wars between Catholic and protestants in their "modern" form. You can add many of the wars in the British Isles to that. And arguably, WWII was also a war between Christians.
No, but the diversity of customer interests probably "precludes" it.
But Walmart, K-Mart, and Target are not one-stop shopping. For most people, they have maybe 80% of what they need, and for the rest they go somewhere else. And between them, they may have 95% of what people need, and for the rest they still need to go somewhere else. Basically, it's the same situation as with online video, except that there isn't a subscription involved.
But the individual subscriptions are dirt-cheap. And if some of them make special deals with your ISP, they get even cheaper.
The real question is not really why this data has to be entered manually (instead of automatically), but why it is needed at all. You'd think that with all the sensors on an airplane, this sort of thing should be handled via automated control systems, based on actual measurements of how the plane is doing.
It might still be useful to enter the data, but only as a sanity check; that is, to identify when the plane isn't handling the way it should based on the weight that the crew things it actually has.
Just because the the payroll tax at the average income would be X doesn't mean that the average payroll tax is X.
I should hope so, since FICA is for capped benefits. FICA taxes already strongly favor low income recipients.
First of all, capital gains are effectively corporate profits, and the effective rate on that is already higher than your income tax. In addition, there is no logical reason why capital gains should be taxed at the same or higher rate than income.
Nice theory, but not really true in practice: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
Leaving aside the question of whether that data really means what you seem to think it does, why should it go into your pockets? You are part of the top 20%, you just said so. You contribute to inequality in the US, and if you want to reduce inequality in the US and raise the median family income, the top 20% of income earners are the primary source of people who need to pay more. You aren't going to get that kind of money from "the wealthy"; they don't have enough money, and even if they did, there is no tax policy you could devise to get it from them, because the very fact that they have much more money than they need gives them nearly infinite flexibility in how to allocate it.
I think your comments reveal what really bothers you: you are part of the top 20%, you're educated and skilled, and you look at the billionaire peddlers of soft drinks and Chinese plastic crap, and you think that the world isn't fair and that you deserve better. I understand, I'm part of the top 20% too, and I see your attitude all around me. But the world isn't fair, and attempts to make it fair by means of taxation and government intervention will hurt people like you and me even more. And such policies won't even benefit the remaining 80% of the population that they ostensibly help.
You're missing the point. My point is that it isn't like the market has narrowed down, it has indeed expanded, with many more distributors providing streaming distribution and competing with each other. That is, a lot of stuff you could conveniently get from a single source like Netflix now require you to deal with many distributors.
The point is: you say you want more competition, but you really don't, because real competition means you as a customer have to think for yourself and have to deal with some inconveniences. What you want is the kind of one-stop-shopping convenience that a monopoly on distribution results in with the kind of prices that cut-throat competition results in. Sorry, but that is just not possible.
The definition of "modern" is irrelevant; you added that modifier as a straw man. My original statement was "That hasn't stopped Christians from murdering each other over Christianity by the millions", which is true. And the Reformation certainly represents the kind of Christianity that is practiced today, at least according to the churches themselves.
I only gave those examples because they are the most obvious one. In fact, one of the most devastating religious wars occurred in the 20th century: WWII, which was deeply rooted in Christian conflicts and beliefs. But understanding the roles that the Catholic churches, protestant churches, and Christian ideology played in that conflict require more analysis and historical knowledge than you say you possess.
Bullshit. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
Whether those kinds of government programs are a good idea or not is another question, but they are not subsidy to Walmart.
If you raise the minimum wage to $15/h, Walmart will only hire people that are worth $15/h, and that's not their current set of employees. In addition, they will simply automate more, and much of what they do can be automated; just look at Europe where labor costs are higher and shops and restaurants run with less staff. No matter what the law, the minimum wage is always $0.
Whatever costs they can't control that way will simply be passed on to consumers in higher prices, hurting particularly the lower income groups that shop at Walmart.
What exactly do you imagine Walmart's profit margins to be? Walmart has very low profit margins compared to other corporations:
https://www.aei.org/publicatio...
Walmart can't and won't reduce their profit margin; any increase in operating costs is simply passed on to customers. Since their customers are often lower income, it places an extra burden on them. So, even if your fiction of government aid to Walmart workers keeping prices low were correct, it would simply mean a wealth transfer from rich to poor (since only about 97.2% of income taxes are paid by those making more than median income, 70.2% by the top 10%), which you argue should be eliminated.
But you are right to a degree: the goal of all this hullabaloo over net neutrality and minimum wage is indeed to eliminate low profit margin, low priced, domestic, diverse companies like Walmart into the kind of high profit margin, high priced, outsourcing, privileged upper middle class company like Apple. It's disgusting that you pretend to be doing that in the name of "social justice" or "benefits to taxpayers".