You've been paying into SS all your life, what do you think that entitles you to you greedy person? Let's see you're 59 so you probably started working in the 70s and 80s. Total combined rates for SS/Medicare were 6.9% - 9.5%. The 15.3% rate we have today started in the 90s. Your generation is full of goddamned ignoramuses who don't know their own history, bitching about "paying into the system" and "getting what we are owed" when in reality you didn't pay your fair share. Not even close.
6.9% / 15.3% = 45%, let's cut your benefits to 45% of what they're supposed to be. Federal budget solved and in the meantime you earned the right to say you paid your fair share.
How's that 401k looking now, you dumb kids?
Good point. Democrats are already talking about getting rid of the tax benefits of 401ks because every dime of money a free man holds onto is "lost revenue" and "tax loopholes" to those shitheads.
It pisses me off that the dimwitted teabaggers want to help the billionaires steal even more of my money.
The worst is when poor people vote democrat because they're too stupid to see through the party lies. Oooo rich people, money, gimme gimme! I just know these smart guys we're electing will make us all millionaires just like the rich people we hate!
and though the blame may primarily lie with the tea party at the moment
Why is the only group that wants to seriously cut spending primarily to blame? Seems like the groups protecting major interests like entitlements and defense are the culprits.
The issue with the national debt stems from the fact that the US can no longer keep up with the banksters interest payments
No that's not true, interest payments are low.
which is why they would like to see the debt ceiling raised
So the bankers want to lend us more money because.. we can't pay them back.. hmm.
If you think your mortgage goes away because you lose your home, check your fine print, you will still owe and your credit goes to the dumps as well.
In most states the loan is secured by the house and taking the house is the only recourse the lender has. But yeah your credit will be in the dumps. So? Planning on buying another house you can't afford?
being able to watch a movie/ tv show within 24 hours of it being released
Can you clarify? Are you saying TWC lets you watch movies on demand within 24 hours of the movies being released in theaters? And sometimes before they're in theaters?
That's really something I would pay for. I canceled Time Warner years ago but maybe it's time to check them out again.
So we can buy the same end products from places that dispose of waste in ways that are not legal here, we just can't compete with them. Anti-environmentalists who talk about regulations killing business are right. The laws don't make any sense.
The study, which examined the costs of air pollution in two areas with the worst levels in the country, also said meeting federal ozone and fine particulate standards could save $28 billion annually in health care costs, school absences, missed work.
Sounds familiar. The opportunity cost of working is being counted as a cost of gasoline. To me that's completely ridiculous, just like saying "If a guy drops out of medical school and starts flipping burgers, he should be charged $9 million to account for 'missed work' that the state could have taxed." And why are medical costs so high? The cost of service is beyond the control of gas producers, so saying "Yeah $300k for a heart attack is a fair price, let's add that to the cost of gas." Hey I believe my time is worth a hundred billion dollars per hour, so the cost to the state of not building a private road for me to drive to work is like trillions of dollars per year.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Does it really? Universal healthcare is cheaper than our private system. My understanding is that Social Security isn't terribly expensive, either (another manufactured crisis).
The only sense in which universal healthcare / Medicare are cheaper (from what I've read) is in the idea of "efficiency" which is totally bogus anyway. The idea is that the overhead of insurers is higher than the overhead of the government in administering healthcare. But the problem is the government's "clients" are old and/or ill with preexisting conditions, which makes their expenses significantly higher than the average person. So "cost of overhead" / "cost of care" is lower, but only because "cost of care" is so much higher on average.
What else have you read that suggests universal healthcare is cheaper?
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
That's best case scenario.
No it's average case. Best case is "I shorted on the way down, then I bought at the low point and made a ton of money on the way up. The financial crisis has been very good to me."
Some how the mutual funds that Joe Blow Don't Know Wall Street thought were just a really good savings account lost a lot more and never recovered.
I'm not sure what you mean. Yeah sure if Joe Blow invested in some weird, exotic mutual fund, he could get seriously screwed. Only an idiot would gamble all his money on something he doesn't know much about. In fact that's exactly what your logic is like. Some people think the lottery should be illegal because some idiot will spend all his money on tickets thinking that buying 1000 tickets means he's guaranteed to be a millionaire by next week. 99% of people will not be idiots to that degree. Screw the 1%.
You can come up with a sob story about anything, even Social Security. Boo, I paid into the system all my life, now I bought a house right before I retired, my mortgage payment doubled after 5 years, now SS isn't enough to pay my mortgage. I thought it would be my safety net!
Tough! You can't protect idiots from themselves.
Imagine that, the guys that spend all day working the numbers screwed over the guys that work all day.
Come on, you think I'm some hot shot Wall Street broker?
This is like anything else. You can choose to spend some time educating yourself and have an advantage, or not. And it's not just crazy Republicans or whoever you think invests in the stock market. This guy is awesome: http://deminvest.wordpress.com/
In today's global capitalistic society, proletarians can count more by investing the few dollars they have in the right stock, than voting. The single vote counts less than a single dollar. Marx's "property of productive means" by proletarians can nowadays happen only trough smart investments
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Yes, this means that we can have universal health care, a social safety net, lower unemployment, *and* eliminate the debt if we want to.
Not if we want to. If we pay for it. The problem is that stuff costs a lot (except lower unemployment, unless you're talking about lowering unemployment through government jobs). Would I rather have a social safety net or be able to keep more than 10% of my income? The latter, please.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
You can have credit without debt, that's the key.
Your problem when you were refused a store credit card was that it was your first financial relationship with someone so they didn't trust you.
Think of it like dating. Debt is bad, like you have a history of beating your girlfriend. Credit with no debt is good, it's like you have friends and people know you're a good guy. No credit and no debt is just unknown. You have no friends, nobody knows you, nobody would say to a female friend "Hey I know a great guy you should go out with."
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Sovereign debt is absolutely nothing like private debt
Really, absolutely nothing, okay.
Families have limited assets that they can mortgage and sell to pay off debts.
Limited assets. Just like countries.
Families have limited incomes and limited options for expanding said income.
Limited income. Just like countries.
Governments do not have these problems.
Hmm. Okay so there are no poor countries in the world because governments don't have the problems of limited assets and limited incomes.
A government can lay taxes and print money.
Hey so can a family. I can print Monopoly money. It just doesn't do me much good. Similarly, Zimbabwe can print money but it doesn't do them much good. I can put a tax on my kids' allowance, but somehow my overall family doesn't get richer from that.
Governments also don't "die."
What does dying have to do with anything? Governments can declare bankruptcy which is a financial death of sorts. Just like a family.
In the long run, a country's "income" (GDP) is always expanding.
So is the average family's.
This means the total debt load is not important, only the ratio of debt to GDP matters.
Oh right. I forgot that with families, income is totally ignored. So the doctor making $300k/year who buys a $200k house is just as stretched financially as the secretary making $25k/year who buys a $200k house
It would be stupid not to borrow as much as you can possibly get away with under terms like that.
Families also benefit by borrowing at lower interest rates. I've done it myself back when credit cards didn't charge balance transfer fees. Made 3% interest in my bank account, paid 0% interest to my credit card company.
Our real problem is being embroiled in a liquidity trap.
So you're saying families never have liquidity problems?
Forgive me if I missed anything, but your initial assertion that "Sovereign debt is absolutely nothing like private debt" was contradicted many times in your own post. Or do you really believe stuff like "debt to income ratio matters for countries but not for families" and "families have limited assets but countries have unlimited assets?"
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Unless you know something about investing...
So learn something about investing.
401Ks are a pile of shit and a huge scam, see what happened to them in 2008.
I'd rather lose 30% in one year and have it recover a few years later than be completely ass fucked by social security where I pay into it my whole life then they permanently cut benefits right before I retire because my generational peers didn't have enough kids and we can't afford it anymore.
Or do you think there's some magic solution where each retiree has only 2 workers to support a nice quality of life, leaving enough money for the workers to enjoy their lives too?
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
You're saying pretty much all companies will keep that extra 6%, which to me implies you don't believe there is competition for labor (one company willing to pay more than another for the same guy).
Can you explain why anybody makes more than the legal minimum wage in your hypothetical environment where every employer is willing to collude to keep wages down?
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
I'll never convince those who are skeptical just with a comment on/. . The best way to understand this, as Buddhists say, is through personal experience.
Even when people attempt to understand the poverty cycle through personal experience they are heavily criticized. There was a guy a few years ago who wrote a book about how he joined a homeless shelter, got a job and worked himself up from nothing in a few months. Of course, people said, he had his education, his health, his youth, etc. There's really no pleasing people.
As for myself, trust me, I'm not rich. I've been a waiter. I've sold stuff to make rent. You know the best tip for getting out of poverty? Get a trustworthy life partner.
Fine, so it's just a game with an agenda.
Exactly. The game is unrealistic. It's designed with a certain outcome in mind and it limits the player's responses so that the outcome is unavoidable.
Someone could make a conservative version of the game where everything works out peachily through hard work and personal responsibility and I bet you anything if I posted it as a "quite faithful" version of the experience of a poor person you'd react too.
Now, can we pay attention to what matters?
What matters is what we do about the situation. Forget the choices in the game and the predestined outcome they programmed into it.
However, burning a fossil fuel and dumping it into the atmosphere is something that coming up with a reasonable approximation of the cost of the externalities is something we can do with current knowledge and current math.
If you read that paper you'll surely agree with me that it's ludicrous. Maybe you have a more rational example in mind.
There are going to be severe problems with any analysis though. If it lumps health care costs into the price of gas, the question becomes "well why are health care costs so high anyway?" If some arbitrary value is attributed to "aesthetic degradation/loss of cultural sites" due to increased suburban sprawl (see linked paper), the question is obviously "uhh, what?"
Most reasonable guesses at this say that gas should cost something like 5 or 6 bucks a gallon once you include these costs. If this is true, that means society as a whole DOES PAY THAT COST even if it doesn't show up at the pump.
That's true, but the question is can that cost truly be tied to gasoline?
Also, is it taking into account the subjective benefits of burning gas? For instance if I say "well I like sprawl, I think adding sprawl adds a trillion dollars per year to my perceived value of this country" then magically the "true cost" of gas plummets. In fact we should be paid for burning gas.
But if you have a paper or something that you can link to I'd like to see where the $5 - $6 cost comes from. Maybe it's not so bad.
Re:Well of course it will be downgraded...
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
What's going to stop them from selling their cheap products to Americans?
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't recommend that game to anybody who starts off skeptical. It seems more like a "preaching to the choir" kind of website.
To me it didn't make sense. I live right next to Durham, NC (the home of the organization that made the game). My rent is less than $800/month and I live closer than 10 miles to downtown. My internet is less than $60/month and I have the top available tier from Uverse.
When the landlord illegally raised rent, where was the option to not pay? And honestly, any apartment around here charging $800/month has an office and corporate backing, it's not some rogue dude who decides he's going to take the law into his own hands.
And there's the premise of the game. Why did I wait until I had been kicked out of my house with almost no savings to take a menial job?
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 2
1. Cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans. That's why, if you're somebody who makes their living off of investments, you pay a 15% capital gains tax, whereas if you make considerably less by working you pay a 25% income tax and a 12% FICA tax.
The 15% tax after all of the other taxes you mentioned are taken out. Companies pay salaries which pay those taxes. Whatever is left goes to investors. If they pay lower salaries and lower taxes, there's more for investors. If you had higher taxes on investors, it would just balance out. You can't magically make everybody rich by fiddling around with numbers!
3. Getting rid of anything that smacks of aid to the poor and downtrodden. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, food stamps, housing assistance, and minimum wages all come under that category.
True but conservatives do push for tax exemptions for charity and religious organizations.
Calling Social Security "aid to the poor" is accurate but very sad. Politicians lied to Americans to get Social Security passed, calling it "insurance" instead of "benefits" or "aid to the poor."
Well as harsh as it is, this is the reality: we're not as rich as we thought. Much of our economy is based on credit and delegating payments to future generations (Social Security being a prime example). Of course, our population isn't growing much and wages are stagnant anyway, so those future generations won't be able to pay our debts. Plus they'll want stuff of their own.
So what happens when you have less money than you thought? You look out for yourself and your family, then your community, then others. It's totally immoral to say "Screw my own children, I'm going to help these other people FIRST!"
I mean you've been on an airplane, right? Read the instructions on the oxygen masks some time. There are good reasons to help yourself first.
The majority of government spending (social security, medicare, defense, and on a state level education) is wasteful because the programs are poorly implemented. It's not "obvious" that anybody's taxes need to go up.
First, we would need to internalize the negative externalities of gasoline usage into the price of gasoline.
Yes but first we need to eliminate welfare, ban insurance "schemes", and completely outlaw gambling. We don't want some people benefiting more than others, which is where the whole "internalizing externalities" idea comes from.
We also need to get started on figuring out the universally accepted way of assigning dollar values to lives, property, and personal decisions. What's the societal cost when someone who is capable of being a doctor decides to be a Blockbuster video clerk??? He has to pay for that. It's outrageous.
What... did you even read his post? He's not using violence first, he's responding to violence with violence.
Using violence first, which is a great idea by the way, is seeking out the pirate bases and destroying them. Don't bother waiting for an attack. It makes a lot of sense and would solve the problem a lot faster.
Slashdot Mirror
You've been paying into SS all your life, what do you think that entitles you to you greedy person? Let's see you're 59 so you probably started working in the 70s and 80s. Total combined rates for SS/Medicare were 6.9% - 9.5%. The 15.3% rate we have today started in the 90s. Your generation is full of goddamned ignoramuses who don't know their own history, bitching about "paying into the system" and "getting what we are owed" when in reality you didn't pay your fair share. Not even close.
6.9% / 15.3% = 45%, let's cut your benefits to 45% of what they're supposed to be. Federal budget solved and in the meantime you earned the right to say you paid your fair share.
How's that 401k looking now, you dumb kids?
Good point. Democrats are already talking about getting rid of the tax benefits of 401ks because every dime of money a free man holds onto is "lost revenue" and "tax loopholes" to those shitheads.
It pisses me off that the dimwitted teabaggers want to help the billionaires steal even more of my money.
The worst is when poor people vote democrat because they're too stupid to see through the party lies. Oooo rich people, money, gimme gimme! I just know these smart guys we're electing will make us all millionaires just like the rich people we hate!
and though the blame may primarily lie with the tea party at the moment
Why is the only group that wants to seriously cut spending primarily to blame? Seems like the groups protecting major interests like entitlements and defense are the culprits.
The issue with the national debt stems from the fact that the US can no longer keep up with the banksters interest payments
No that's not true, interest payments are low.
which is why they would like to see the debt ceiling raised
So the bankers want to lend us more money because.. we can't pay them back.. hmm.
If you think your mortgage goes away because you lose your home, check your fine print, you will still owe and your credit goes to the dumps as well.
In most states the loan is secured by the house and taking the house is the only recourse the lender has. But yeah your credit will be in the dumps. So? Planning on buying another house you can't afford?
before it is out in theaters movie releases.
being able to watch a movie/ tv show within 24 hours of it being released
Can you clarify? Are you saying TWC lets you watch movies on demand within 24 hours of the movies being released in theaters? And sometimes before they're in theaters?
That's really something I would pay for. I canceled Time Warner years ago but maybe it's time to check them out again.
So we can buy the same end products from places that dispose of waste in ways that are not legal here, we just can't compete with them. Anti-environmentalists who talk about regulations killing business are right. The laws don't make any sense.
Okay from the second link I see:
The study, which examined the costs of air pollution in two areas with the worst levels in the country, also said meeting federal ozone and fine particulate standards could save $28 billion annually in health care costs, school absences, missed work.
Sounds familiar. The opportunity cost of working is being counted as a cost of gasoline. To me that's completely ridiculous, just like saying "If a guy drops out of medical school and starts flipping burgers, he should be charged $9 million to account for 'missed work' that the state could have taxed." And why are medical costs so high? The cost of service is beyond the control of gas producers, so saying "Yeah $300k for a heart attack is a fair price, let's add that to the cost of gas." Hey I believe my time is worth a hundred billion dollars per hour, so the cost to the state of not building a private road for me to drive to work is like trillions of dollars per year.
Does it really? Universal healthcare is cheaper than our private system. My understanding is that Social Security isn't terribly expensive, either (another manufactured crisis).
The only sense in which universal healthcare / Medicare are cheaper (from what I've read) is in the idea of "efficiency" which is totally bogus anyway. The idea is that the overhead of insurers is higher than the overhead of the government in administering healthcare. But the problem is the government's "clients" are old and/or ill with preexisting conditions, which makes their expenses significantly higher than the average person. So "cost of overhead" / "cost of care" is lower, but only because "cost of care" is so much higher on average.
What else have you read that suggests universal healthcare is cheaper?
That's best case scenario.
No it's average case. Best case is "I shorted on the way down, then I bought at the low point and made a ton of money on the way up. The financial crisis has been very good to me."
Some how the mutual funds that Joe Blow Don't Know Wall Street thought were just a really good savings account lost a lot more and never recovered.
I'm not sure what you mean. Yeah sure if Joe Blow invested in some weird, exotic mutual fund, he could get seriously screwed. Only an idiot would gamble all his money on something he doesn't know much about. In fact that's exactly what your logic is like. Some people think the lottery should be illegal because some idiot will spend all his money on tickets thinking that buying 1000 tickets means he's guaranteed to be a millionaire by next week. 99% of people will not be idiots to that degree. Screw the 1%.
You can come up with a sob story about anything, even Social Security. Boo, I paid into the system all my life, now I bought a house right before I retired, my mortgage payment doubled after 5 years, now SS isn't enough to pay my mortgage. I thought it would be my safety net!
Tough! You can't protect idiots from themselves.
Imagine that, the guys that spend all day working the numbers screwed over the guys that work all day.
Come on, you think I'm some hot shot Wall Street broker?
This is like anything else. You can choose to spend some time educating yourself and have an advantage, or not. And it's not just crazy Republicans or whoever you think invests in the stock market. This guy is awesome: http://deminvest.wordpress.com/
In today's global capitalistic society, proletarians can count more by investing the few dollars they have in the right stock, than voting. The single vote counts less than a single dollar. Marx's "property of productive means" by proletarians can nowadays happen only trough smart investments
Yes, this means that we can have universal health care, a social safety net, lower unemployment, *and* eliminate the debt if we want to.
Not if we want to. If we pay for it. The problem is that stuff costs a lot (except lower unemployment, unless you're talking about lowering unemployment through government jobs). Would I rather have a social safety net or be able to keep more than 10% of my income? The latter, please.
You can have credit without debt, that's the key.
Your problem when you were refused a store credit card was that it was your first financial relationship with someone so they didn't trust you.
Think of it like dating. Debt is bad, like you have a history of beating your girlfriend. Credit with no debt is good, it's like you have friends and people know you're a good guy. No credit and no debt is just unknown. You have no friends, nobody knows you, nobody would say to a female friend "Hey I know a great guy you should go out with."
Sovereign debt is absolutely nothing like private debt
Really, absolutely nothing, okay.
Families have limited assets that they can mortgage and sell to pay off debts.
Limited assets. Just like countries.
Families have limited incomes and limited options for expanding said income.
Limited income. Just like countries.
Governments do not have these problems.
Hmm. Okay so there are no poor countries in the world because governments don't have the problems of limited assets and limited incomes.
A government can lay taxes and print money.
Hey so can a family. I can print Monopoly money. It just doesn't do me much good. Similarly, Zimbabwe can print money but it doesn't do them much good. I can put a tax on my kids' allowance, but somehow my overall family doesn't get richer from that.
Governments also don't "die."
What does dying have to do with anything? Governments can declare bankruptcy which is a financial death of sorts. Just like a family.
In the long run, a country's "income" (GDP) is always expanding.
So is the average family's.
This means the total debt load is not important, only the ratio of debt to GDP matters.
Oh right. I forgot that with families, income is totally ignored. So the doctor making $300k/year who buys a $200k house is just as stretched financially as the secretary making $25k/year who buys a $200k house
It would be stupid not to borrow as much as you can possibly get away with under terms like that.
Families also benefit by borrowing at lower interest rates. I've done it myself back when credit cards didn't charge balance transfer fees. Made 3% interest in my bank account, paid 0% interest to my credit card company.
Our real problem is being embroiled in a liquidity trap.
So you're saying families never have liquidity problems?
Forgive me if I missed anything, but your initial assertion that "Sovereign debt is absolutely nothing like private debt" was contradicted many times in your own post. Or do you really believe stuff like "debt to income ratio matters for countries but not for families" and "families have limited assets but countries have unlimited assets?"
Unless you know something about investing...
So learn something about investing.
401Ks are a pile of shit and a huge scam, see what happened to them in 2008.
I'd rather lose 30% in one year and have it recover a few years later than be completely ass fucked by social security where I pay into it my whole life then they permanently cut benefits right before I retire because my generational peers didn't have enough kids and we can't afford it anymore.
Or do you think there's some magic solution where each retiree has only 2 workers to support a nice quality of life, leaving enough money for the workers to enjoy their lives too?
You're saying pretty much all companies will keep that extra 6%, which to me implies you don't believe there is competition for labor (one company willing to pay more than another for the same guy).
Can you explain why anybody makes more than the legal minimum wage in your hypothetical environment where every employer is willing to collude to keep wages down?
I'll never convince those who are skeptical just with a comment on /. . The best way to understand this, as Buddhists say, is through personal experience.
Even when people attempt to understand the poverty cycle through personal experience they are heavily criticized. There was a guy a few years ago who wrote a book about how he joined a homeless shelter, got a job and worked himself up from nothing in a few months. Of course, people said, he had his education, his health, his youth, etc. There's really no pleasing people.
As for myself, trust me, I'm not rich. I've been a waiter. I've sold stuff to make rent. You know the best tip for getting out of poverty? Get a trustworthy life partner.
Fine, so it's just a game with an agenda.
Exactly. The game is unrealistic. It's designed with a certain outcome in mind and it limits the player's responses so that the outcome is unavoidable.
Someone could make a conservative version of the game where everything works out peachily through hard work and personal responsibility and I bet you anything if I posted it as a "quite faithful" version of the experience of a poor person you'd react too.
Now, can we pay attention to what matters?
What matters is what we do about the situation. Forget the choices in the game and the predestined outcome they programmed into it.
I'm not being sarcastic.
However, burning a fossil fuel and dumping it into the atmosphere is something that coming up with a reasonable approximation of the cost of the externalities is something we can do with current knowledge and current math.
The methods I've seen for computing the "true cost" of gas vary wildly. Here's an example: http://www.icta.org/doc/Real%20Price%20of%20Gasoline.pdf
If you read that paper you'll surely agree with me that it's ludicrous. Maybe you have a more rational example in mind.
There are going to be severe problems with any analysis though. If it lumps health care costs into the price of gas, the question becomes "well why are health care costs so high anyway?" If some arbitrary value is attributed to "aesthetic degradation/loss of cultural sites" due to increased suburban sprawl (see linked paper), the question is obviously "uhh, what?"
Most reasonable guesses at this say that gas should cost something like 5 or 6 bucks a gallon once you include these costs. If this is true, that means society as a whole DOES PAY THAT COST even if it doesn't show up at the pump.
That's true, but the question is can that cost truly be tied to gasoline?
Also, is it taking into account the subjective benefits of burning gas? For instance if I say "well I like sprawl, I think adding sprawl adds a trillion dollars per year to my perceived value of this country" then magically the "true cost" of gas plummets. In fact we should be paid for burning gas.
But if you have a paper or something that you can link to I'd like to see where the $5 - $6 cost comes from. Maybe it's not so bad.
What's going to stop them from selling their cheap products to Americans?
I wouldn't recommend that game to anybody who starts off skeptical. It seems more like a "preaching to the choir" kind of website.
To me it didn't make sense. I live right next to Durham, NC (the home of the organization that made the game). My rent is less than $800/month and I live closer than 10 miles to downtown. My internet is less than $60/month and I have the top available tier from Uverse.
When the landlord illegally raised rent, where was the option to not pay? And honestly, any apartment around here charging $800/month has an office and corporate backing, it's not some rogue dude who decides he's going to take the law into his own hands.
And there's the premise of the game. Why did I wait until I had been kicked out of my house with almost no savings to take a menial job?
1. Cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans. That's why, if you're somebody who makes their living off of investments, you pay a 15% capital gains tax, whereas if you make considerably less by working you pay a 25% income tax and a 12% FICA tax.
The 15% tax after all of the other taxes you mentioned are taken out. Companies pay salaries which pay those taxes. Whatever is left goes to investors. If they pay lower salaries and lower taxes, there's more for investors. If you had higher taxes on investors, it would just balance out. You can't magically make everybody rich by fiddling around with numbers!
3. Getting rid of anything that smacks of aid to the poor and downtrodden. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, food stamps, housing assistance, and minimum wages all come under that category.
True but conservatives do push for tax exemptions for charity and religious organizations.
Calling Social Security "aid to the poor" is accurate but very sad. Politicians lied to Americans to get Social Security passed, calling it "insurance" instead of "benefits" or "aid to the poor."
Well as harsh as it is, this is the reality: we're not as rich as we thought. Much of our economy is based on credit and delegating payments to future generations (Social Security being a prime example). Of course, our population isn't growing much and wages are stagnant anyway, so those future generations won't be able to pay our debts. Plus they'll want stuff of their own.
So what happens when you have less money than you thought? You look out for yourself and your family, then your community, then others. It's totally immoral to say "Screw my own children, I'm going to help these other people FIRST!"
I mean you've been on an airplane, right? Read the instructions on the oxygen masks some time. There are good reasons to help yourself first.
Fair enough. I generally don't research people before I comment. I should have said "that type" not "your type".
The majority of government spending (social security, medicare, defense, and on a state level education) is wasteful because the programs are poorly implemented. It's not "obvious" that anybody's taxes need to go up.
First, we would need to internalize the negative externalities of gasoline usage into the price of gasoline.
Yes but first we need to eliminate welfare, ban insurance "schemes", and completely outlaw gambling. We don't want some people benefiting more than others, which is where the whole "internalizing externalities" idea comes from.
We also need to get started on figuring out the universally accepted way of assigning dollar values to lives, property, and personal decisions. What's the societal cost when someone who is capable of being a doctor decides to be a Blockbuster video clerk??? He has to pay for that. It's outrageous.
Your type of social engineering is disgusting. Thank god America still has some anti-tax people in it.
The posts are already compiled and available afaik: google
Do you think that the link I just posted is (or should be) illegal?
How about if he publishes a book of his Slashdot posts that he earns money from? Does that suddenly make my link illegal?
What... did you even read his post? He's not using violence first, he's responding to violence with violence.
Using violence first, which is a great idea by the way, is seeking out the pirate bases and destroying them. Don't bother waiting for an attack. It makes a lot of sense and would solve the problem a lot faster.
Which really casts doubt onto the simplistic narrative of "evil corporations" that want to destroy the country and enslave everybody.