Quite simply, Yes. The author is a proffesional PR man for the nuke/mining/biotech/etc. industries. He had a brief assosciation with Greenpeace a long time ago, and since has been calling himself a "Founder of Greenpeace" while selling his advocacy to anyone with anti-envrioment image problems big enough to pay him. His "conversion" isn't news; it happened a long time ago in the presence of a big check.
Patrick Moore is not a modern environmentalist, he is a paid lobbyist for the energy industry.
He consistently presents himself as a "founder of Green Peace"; while he may have been an early member, "founder" is, as far as I can tell, a stretch. It is rather disingenous of him to keep mentioning his now quite distant association with the enviromental movement, without ever mentioning who's paying his salary today.
Mind you, he's welcome to express whatever views he has, and I don't even necessarily disagree about nuclear power. But the news outlets that continue to identify him as "Patric Moore, founder of Greenpeace" instead of "Patrick Moore, Exxon-Mobil shill" need a lesson in journalism.
Greenpeace got too political, so he left to become a lobbyist? Right. He found out what side of the debate paid better.
"You do realize that 'chicks' can be 'hot' even with their clothes on, right?"
Absolutely. My problem is with expecting others to classify that picture as NSFW at all. Plenty of pictures of fully clothed women ought to be considered less "safe for work" than the picture linked to. Of all the pictures the words "hot chick" have ever been linked to, that has got to be in the bottom 1% of objectionability.
Actually, my problem is with expecting others to classify links as NSFW at all. If there is any picture at all that will get you fired if it appears on your screen long enough for you to say "woops" and hit the back button, then for you, the Internet is NSFW. If the picture in that wikipedia article is not safe for your work, I'd be worried what deeper mental problems your employer has that are manifesting as such an irationally over-the-top fear of breasts.
If someone goes to Wikipedia wondering what a reference to a "Page 3 Girl" is about, it would be a major PITA if the article had to try to describe the style of photography involved without just showing an example just because we're all expected to buy into this weirdness.
It's fine to be reading slashdot.
It's fine to look at whatever you expected the words "hot chick" to link to.
You're going to get fired if your screen displays a wikipedia article that includes a grainy scan of a 36 year old newspaper picture, because if you look close, there's a boobie!
If your employers are truly that irrational, quit. Asking others who don't even work there to worry about such insanity is crazy.
"does this mean that laws made in Britain prior to the US Constitution are binding now in the USA"
They always have been, more or less. Keep in mind, this only applies to "common law", which chiefly deals with the details of stuff we all assume we just understand without needing to get into the details, like "What is a contract?" You can be sued, but not arrested, for violating the common law. Once a legislative body writes out the details, it becomes statutory law, not common law. Also note that a fantastic amount of detail about what is a contract has in fact been spelled out by US legislatures.
We had a revolution, created a new country, established a legal system, etc. But at no point in there did the meaning of what a contract is evaporate and all existing contracts become null and void. We said, OK, until American legislatures or courts say otherwise everything that's settled about what a contract is still stands. So if you've got some technical question about what a contract is, and no American court or legislature has dealt with it, but some British court did back before the revolution, that's a valid precedent. Unless of course you're dealing with a Louisiana state court, in which case you get French common law... No, I'm not kidding.
In any case, if a modern US court were dealing with the same issue, the original british law might be on point, but the ruling of a modern british court about that law would not, though the judge would probably want to read it.
Why in hell would you design the weapon around an infared laser? Nevermind, I don't want to know. This whole conversation is stupid, because they are not talking about bouncing the beam off satelites. They are talking about firing it directly at the missle from a plane that would need to already be on-station. Possibly quite some distance away, but "half a world away" was just stupid hyperbole, so it's just silly to be constructing elaborate scenarios to pretend it was precise technical data. I was asking why put it in a plane rhetorically; the reason they are puitting it in a plane is obvious: due to the curvature of the earth, they need to fire from a high altitude in order to have reasonable range, because they are not bouncing it off anything, because that would be stupid. Not, mind you that the actual system, as planned, is not stupid. It is; but it's not that stupid.
Depending where you mount it on the vehicle, it's that area of space (without going through the vehicle) that can be shot at by a radar guided shotgun. Because that's what it is. Oh, sorry, a *mysterious* radar-guided shotgun.
There is certainly a variety, but I'm not sure the top is what you think. Of all the software engineers I've known, the most over-stressed, under-paid and under-appreciated were "Game company project manager". The work was, at best, not much different from non-game coding, but the deadlines were more unreasonable; the hordes of others willing to do the job for less because it sounded cool were ever-present; and the corporate politics were triple-nasty. The only real advantage was that the end product (a game) might be really cool, but the odds very heavily favored the project getting shut down before completion and the team canned.
"I run my own successful software business" could certainly be good if you like running a business, but it's not software engineering.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with my job - fairly senior developer at a successful small software company. The software we make isn't sexy or cool like games, but that doesn't make much difference to the day-to-day work. It is probably a bonus for my paycheck; certainly for my job security. Other people run the business, and if we keep going as well as we have been they'll get stinky rich and I'll just be quite well off. That's OK, I wouldn't be any good at running a business; and at the end of the day, they keep thinking about work and I don't.
Considering there isn't any mention of it whatsoever; that it would in fact be "too hard"; and that there would, in that case, be no reason whatsoever to put the laser on board a plane in the first place, I'm thinking you don't know what you're talking about.
One could debate whether it's a free market, or whether that is automatically good, however:
If Walmart tells game publishers they won't carry certain types of games, and game publishers therefore don't make that type of game, and someone writes an article decrying this situation, and I read that article, and conclude that that sucks, and I'm not going to shop at Walmart because of it... That too is the free market.
So my response to your poinitng out "It's the free market" is "So what?". If the article were claiming what Walmart is doing was illegal, "but that's just the free market" might be a relevant, if debateably accurate, thing to say. But it's not saying what Walmart is doing is illegal and they should be prosecuted. It's saying it's sucky, and they should be hated. Surely taking an action in a free market does not preclude that action from sucking?
Scientific theories could be contradicted by some possible evidence. You can imagine a piece of evidence that would tend to undercut them. Newton had this theory called "Universal Gravitation" that predicted that the course of comets would follow parabolas and not straight lines (as they were understood to). Closer observations were made, and it was found the course of comets were parabolas, which supported the theory. But we could imagine the possibility that it had turned out that comets followed straight lines, and the theory of gravity would have been in trouble.
It is not possible to imagine anything we could observe that would suggest ID was wrong. ID cannot add anything to our understanding of the world, because it never predicts things will turn out one way, and not the other. You are correct that ID and evolution are not even related. One is a well supported scientific theory that has made countless accurate predictions, the other is pointless solipsistic wanking.
Criminals - I think everyone can get behind that, but I don't think there is all that much money there.
"Special interests and income tax loophole exploiters" - sounds good, but who exactly are we talking about? Which loopholes? There's lots of ways to get tax advantages- spending money on education or giving to charity for example. Is that who pays more, college students and the generous? It seems to me criminals are just going to evade your sales tax (as some of them do with existing sales taxes alredy). Heck I can think of a dozen ways to avoid your sales tax that you aren't going to stop without a massive and expensive enforcement agency, and wasn't "abolish the IRS" one of the big advantages?
As far as loophole-exploiters, we could deal with them by closing the loopholes, assuming they are bad loopholes. Whether to convert from income to sales tax is an entirely seperate issue.
Who pays more via a sales tax vs an income tax is widely understood to be the lower end of net worth. The author of your website clearly understands this, they are sure to put out lots of stuff about how this is good for the low-income folks, and they get right out their labeling the current system "regressive" and theirs "progressive", because they know people like me are going to point out that, in fact, sales taxes are regressive as compared to income taxes.
I think the exemption up to the poverty line is insufficient because it will still leave the merely low income, if not actually poor, with much more of the tax burden than they currently have. After all, our current system has exemptions for people under or near the poverty line.
"'For the record, I'm old and loaded' In that case, you may find #5 more interesting." No, that's about why it's good for the elderly and poor. Overall, the proponents of this plan seem to spend a lot of time trying to talk about why this will be good for low-income people... I can't imagine why. Oh, except of course for the fact that anyione who made it beyond econ 101 can tell it's not.
"As for why is this a good idea- because it's fair." Naming it that does not make it so. Pretending for a moment we could all agree on what was fair, the fairest tax policy is not necessarily the best.
"Oh I see, in this hypothetical you were assuming that I'd be inheriting my granny's money. An understandable mistake, but an incorrect assumption nonetheless."
I constructed a hypothetical for the purpose discussing the inheritance tax, and I'm wrong that I intended there to be inheriting going on? Right, pointlessly difficult it is.
"So it's not enough for you that under the FairTax, they spend more and thus would be paying more taxes while the poor are completely relieved of any tax burden up to the poverty line. No, for the FairTax to work, the rich must spend as much as they make- from each according to their ability and all that, eh?"
You said the FairTax taxes wealth. For that to be the case, we would have to assume the rich were going to spend not just what they made, but everything they had, which obviously wouldn't be good, and which obviously they won't. The FairTax taxes consumption.
"Fine, I'll do the digging for you: [link, link, link...]"
Yes, those are the pages I was reffering to that say the fair tax is good. There is no indication of their authorship, though nearby are links to the top-level home pages of prestigious universities. I see no suggestion that any particular Harvard or MIT economist supports the FairTax. Nor would I be convinced if one did. Your choice of authorities to weild was particularly amusing to me; haveing myself spent some time hanging around the Harvard Economics department, I know you can find people there to support all manner of crackpot schemes ("From each according to his means..." for example.) Still, even with 11 links instead of just one, I don't see that they found one to support the FairTax.
"Start with #6-it should be particularly interesting to you" #6: 'Why the FairTax is good for young and low-income failies' For the record, I'm old and loaded. If my analisys of the fair tax is correct, I would personally benefit enormously from it in the short term (in the long term, I think our economy would collapse, and thus it would be worse for me overall)
"I take you haven't heard about the prebate part of the plan that removes all tax liability up to the poverty level?" Yes, I heard that part. I think it's insufficient, and that the FairTax would still move the tax burden down the income scale relative to the current scheme.
While this back and forth bickering is fun and all, it's not going to convince me the FairTax is worth considering. If you actually want to convince people to consider your ideas, you need to answer their questions. My questions are "Who pays more?" and "Why is that a good idea?" Your website has many papers about why the Fair tax will be good for various classes of people; i.e. why they will pay less. It also claims it is revenue neutral. Well, if it's revenue neutral, and anyone pays less, someone must pay more. Who is it? My not very deep analysis suggests lower-middle class workers pay more, the rich pay less, and the very rich, much less. Now, I've actually talked to people who though this was a good idea, and while I disagree and think historical examples back me up, at least they were claiming this was desirable. You, and the website you are so fond of, seem to be instead claiming it's not the case.
Well, OK, we could discuss that, but I'd really like to know: In your anaysis, under the FairTax, who pays more than they do under our current system, and why is that a good idea?
"You really don't inderstand ID then. If by God you mean a being above ourselves, then maybe, but then again ID doesn't mean said being, just made it that way"
ID requires an intelligent designer. Where did that designer come from? Did natural processes give rise to a being capable of designing things that could not be the result of natural processes? I can't even make that sound like it makes sense. Could be a previous designer I guess, but you've got to start somewhere. I don't know what you mean by "above us"; I'd call that first designer "God", but we can call him the Great Oogly-Boogly if you'd prefer. In any case, even if you want to pretrend the Great Oogly-Boogly isn't required, it doesn't matter. "It just is that way" is the heart and extent of the "theory". Go find an observation about the world, I'll wait.... Got one? Great, here's my explanation: "It just is that way". Is your understanding increased? You see how I didn't even need to know what your observation was, and it fit with my "theory"? This science stuff is easy! Go try an experiment! no, nevermind, no point: "It just is that way!"
"Does the concept that something, someone or someones made intellegent efforts to 'evolve' life change the basis of evolution?" Yes, definitely. The theory of evolution, in a nutshell, is that natural selection is a completely sufficient explanation for the variety of species we observe today.
"Can the two not opperate together? I think they can. I don't think one can cancel out the possibility of the other" Sure they can! Nothing whatsoever could ever possibly cancel out the possibility of the "It just is that way" theory, that's the whole problem with it.
"It just is that way" can't be right and can't be wrong because it doesn't say anything. Evolution says lots, it could be wrong, but it isn't.
Scientific theories make predictions. We can imagine a peice of evidence that if it turns out one way, will support the theory, and if it turns out the other way will undermine it. ID, or as I prefer, "God made it that way", is not a theory. There is no possible piece of evidence that could contradict it if it were different. No matter what you observe, "Yup, God made it that way" has got you covered. I can't prove ID wrong, because wrongness implies meaning, ID not only isn't right, it isn't even wrong. "God made it that way" adds nothing to our understanding of the world.
"Claiming there are 'vast mountains of evidence' is like a magician waving his wand to distract the audience from the sleight of hand about to occur."
It could be. In this case though it's shorthand; for the long version with all the evidence listed out, please go to a good library, find the biology section, and read everything there. That will get you started, after that, dive into all those books bibliographies. Next you'll no doubt have a list of a million or so experiments you'd like to reproduce yourself, and quite a few observations of the world to collect. The mountains of evidence are in fact, vast, and examining it all will take considerably longer than your lifetime, so you may at some point be tempted to rely on the opinions of others who have spent their entire lives figuring this stuff out. You'll find that they argue vehemently about all sorts of stuff, like whether a certain species evolved certain features to cope with living out of water or with living in rapidly flowing water. As to whether evolution is real, I beleive you'll find widespread agreement, but note you don't need to take their word for it; they are convinced of this because of evidence you can personally verify.
Yes, but that's meaningless, so I ignored that part in an effort to be charitable. I was taking issue with the "educated guess" part. The theory of evolution does not address the origins of life, or attempt to. Any attack on evolution based on origins is pointless, except as an unwitting admission of ignorance by the attacker.
That's not a tectonic plate, that's a crack in the ground, that we have observed moving every once in a while. I could come up with dozens of (mostly silly) explanations for it. In casse it's not clear, I beleive Plate Tectonics is real. My point is, nobody spends much time doubting plate tectonics, though is is just as indirectly discovered as evolution.
"This is a joke, right?" No, it's a test. I always include at least one gramatical error in every post to see if people will seize upon irrelevancies.
Saying "I want to sock it to you" is mostly a joke. I'm just pointing out why I think the inheritance tax is particularly fair, as taxes go.
"And how do you know I didn't?" How do I know you didn't earn your rich grandma's money that you stand to inherit? Am I misunderstanding your question, or are you being pointlessly difficult?
"Got any figures to back that up?" Yes. I do demographics for a living, and have a large number of figures to back that up. For non-luxury expenditures, households in the 95th percentile of net worth spend on average about twice as much as households at the poverty line, despite making 5+ times as much. Luxury expenditures add a bit to that, but still don't come close to making up the difference. This is easy to see by the fact that poverty-line households spend all their money; while wealthy households clearly do not.
"While you were skimming the site, did you happen upon the figures from the MIT and Harvard economists?" No, nor does your link lead to any I can find. There are some links to university websites right near some other stuff that asserts the FairTax is good, it looked to me like I was supposed to assume some connection. Doesn't matter though, I'm not impressed by appeals to authority, and several of the economists I knew at Harvard were crackpots in any case. Give me a realistic theory why a sales tax doesn't move the tax burden away from the wealthy toward the working class, like it is pretty universally understood to do, or forget it. And then explain why all those other economists, including many at those fine institutions, got that wrong. Alternatively, you could argue why such a move of the tax burden is a good idea, in which case I'll probably disagree, but at least it would be interesting.
"let me know when you're more read up on what you're talking about." Sure, bucko. You question my suggestion that consumption is not proportional to wealth, and I'm the one that needs to read up more. No matter how many times your web site calls it "Fair" and even "Progressive", sales taxes put more of the tax burden on lower-income earners than our current system, or even flat income taxes. Even most people who argue for them understand this.
"Evolution on a cosmic level has never been observed and it's not much more than an educated guess"
Horseshit. It's a well constructed theory supported by vast mountains of evidence. It is the foundation of the entire science of biology. Every biologist in modern times has spent their career testing it, and found it solid. If it's an "educated guess" then plate tectonics is a wild shot in the dark.
I don't want to sock it to your rich grandma, she may have earned the money; I want to sock it to you, who I know didn't!
Anyway, I skimmed that site, and conclude I am rightly suspicious of anything that calls itself the "FairTax", though I aleready knew from you "wealth (consumption)". Wealth is not consumption. Wealthy people do not consume more proportional to their greater net worth, not even close. A national sales tax wouldn't sock it to your rich grandma; she probably doesn't spend any more than twice as much as my poor grandma.
I do like that their first point about what they are going to do is "Abolish the IRS". Because the "Department Administering the Fair Tax" will be better...
Switching from our current patchwork of various taxes to just a national sales tax would be disasterous. It would garauntee the very problem I was alluding to the inheritance tax helping with: Those who are sufficiently wealthy could sit on their buts, using the interest on their wealth to support themselves and their descendants while becoming steadily wealthier, forever. Well, until those who aren't rich get fed up with it and change things by vote or violence.
You mean, we, as a society, will want to tax your inheretance after the first 1.5 million dollars if you don't qualify for any of the exceptions protecting family farms and other family run small businesses? Awfully sorry about that, but yeah, we want to tax that. Just because your parents are crazy rich doesn't mean you and your descendents get to sit on your asses forever.
Slashdot Mirror
"Was this article written by the nuke PR folks?"
Quite simply, Yes. The author is a proffesional PR man for the nuke/mining/biotech/etc. industries. He had a brief assosciation with Greenpeace a long time ago, and since has been calling himself a "Founder of Greenpeace" while selling his advocacy to anyone with anti-envrioment image problems big enough to pay him. His "conversion" isn't news; it happened a long time ago in the presence of a big check.
Patrick Moore is not a modern environmentalist, he is a paid lobbyist for the energy industry.
He consistently presents himself as a "founder of Green Peace"; while he may have been an early member, "founder" is, as far as I can tell, a stretch. It is rather disingenous of him to keep mentioning his now quite distant association with the enviromental movement, without ever mentioning who's paying his salary today.
Mind you, he's welcome to express whatever views he has, and I don't even necessarily disagree about nuclear power. But the news outlets that continue to identify him as "Patric Moore, founder of Greenpeace" instead of "Patrick Moore, Exxon-Mobil shill" need a lesson in journalism.
Greenpeace got too political, so he left to become a lobbyist? Right. He found out what side of the debate paid better.
"You do realize that 'chicks' can be 'hot' even with their clothes on, right?"
Absolutely. My problem is with expecting others to classify that picture as NSFW at all. Plenty of pictures of fully clothed women ought to be considered less "safe for work" than the picture linked to. Of all the pictures the words "hot chick" have ever been linked to, that has got to be in the bottom 1% of objectionability.
Actually, my problem is with expecting others to classify links as NSFW at all. If there is any picture at all that will get you fired if it appears on your screen long enough for you to say "woops" and hit the back button, then for you, the Internet is NSFW. If the picture in that wikipedia article is not safe for your work, I'd be worried what deeper mental problems your employer has that are manifesting as such an irationally over-the-top fear of breasts.
If someone goes to Wikipedia wondering what a reference to a "Page 3 Girl" is about, it would be a major PITA if the article had to try to describe the style of photography involved without just showing an example just because we're all expected to buy into this weirdness.
"they can melt metal"
As can lasers of higher frequencies, and more efficiently.
You've got to be kidding. So where you work:
It's fine to be reading slashdot.
It's fine to look at whatever you expected the words "hot chick" to link to.
You're going to get fired if your screen displays a wikipedia article that includes a grainy scan of a 36 year old newspaper picture, because if you look close, there's a boobie!
If your employers are truly that irrational, quit. Asking others who don't even work there to worry about such insanity is crazy.
"does this mean that laws made in Britain prior to the US Constitution are binding now in the USA"
They always have been, more or less. Keep in mind, this only applies to "common law", which chiefly deals with the details of stuff we all assume we just understand without needing to get into the details, like "What is a contract?" You can be sued, but not arrested, for violating the common law. Once a legislative body writes out the details, it becomes statutory law, not common law. Also note that a fantastic amount of detail about what is a contract has in fact been spelled out by US legislatures.
We had a revolution, created a new country, established a legal system, etc. But at no point in there did the meaning of what a contract is evaporate and all existing contracts become null and void. We said, OK, until American legislatures or courts say otherwise everything that's settled about what a contract is still stands. So if you've got some technical question about what a contract is, and no American court or legislature has dealt with it, but some British court did back before the revolution, that's a valid precedent. Unless of course you're dealing with a Louisiana state court, in which case you get French common law... No, I'm not kidding.
In any case, if a modern US court were dealing with the same issue, the original british law might be on point, but the ruling of a modern british court about that law would not, though the judge would probably want to read it.
Why in hell would you design the weapon around an infared laser?
Nevermind, I don't want to know. This whole conversation is stupid, because they are not talking about bouncing the beam off satelites. They are talking about firing it directly at the missle from a plane that would need to already be on-station. Possibly quite some distance away, but "half a world away" was just stupid hyperbole, so it's just silly to be constructing elaborate scenarios to pretend it was precise technical data. I was asking why put it in a plane rhetorically; the reason they are puitting it in a plane is obvious: due to the curvature of the earth, they need to fire from a high altitude in order to have reasonable range, because they are not bouncing it off anything, because that would be stupid. Not, mind you that the actual system, as planned, is not stupid. It is; but it's not that stupid.
Depending where you mount it on the vehicle, it's that area of space (without going through the vehicle) that can be shot at by a radar guided shotgun. Because that's what it is. Oh, sorry, a *mysterious* radar-guided shotgun.
There is certainly a variety, but I'm not sure the top is what you think. Of all the software engineers I've known, the most over-stressed, under-paid and under-appreciated were "Game company project manager". The work was, at best, not much different from non-game coding, but the deadlines were more unreasonable; the hordes of others willing to do the job for less because it sounded cool were ever-present; and the corporate politics were triple-nasty. The only real advantage was that the end product (a game) might be really cool, but the odds very heavily favored the project getting shut down before completion and the team canned.
"I run my own successful software business" could certainly be good if you like running a business, but it's not software engineering.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with my job - fairly senior developer at a successful small software company. The software we make isn't sexy or cool like games, but that doesn't make much difference to the day-to-day work. It is probably a bonus for my paycheck; certainly for my job security. Other people run the business, and if we keep going as well as we have been they'll get stinky rich and I'll just be quite well off. That's OK, I wouldn't be any good at running a business; and at the end of the day, they keep thinking about work and I don't.
"You can choose not to shop at Wal*Mart if you like. Ironically, that's part of the free market as well."
Wow, that's insightful, I wish I'd said that. Oh, wait, I did!
"And, eh, I'll point out what I like"
Feel free; and when it's irrelevant, I'll point that out.
Considering there isn't any mention of it whatsoever; that it would in fact be "too hard"; and that there would, in that case, be no reason whatsoever to put the laser on board a plane in the first place, I'm thinking you don't know what you're talking about.
One could debate whether it's a free market, or whether that is automatically good, however:
If Walmart tells game publishers they won't carry certain types of games, and game publishers therefore don't make that type of game, and someone writes an article decrying this situation, and I read that article, and conclude that that sucks, and I'm not going to shop at Walmart because of it... That too is the free market.
So my response to your poinitng out "It's the free market" is "So what?". If the article were claiming what Walmart is doing was illegal, "but that's just the free market" might be a relevant, if debateably accurate, thing to say. But it's not saying what Walmart is doing is illegal and they should be prosecuted. It's saying it's sucky, and they should be hated. Surely taking an action in a free market does not preclude that action from sucking?
ID is theology; theology is not science.
Scientific theories could be contradicted by some possible evidence. You can imagine a piece of evidence that would tend to undercut them. Newton had this theory called "Universal Gravitation" that predicted that the course of comets would follow parabolas and not straight lines (as they were understood to). Closer observations were made, and it was found the course of comets were parabolas, which supported the theory. But we could imagine the possibility that it had turned out that comets followed straight lines, and the theory of gravity would have been in trouble.
It is not possible to imagine anything we could observe that would suggest ID was wrong. ID cannot add anything to our understanding of the world, because it never predicts things will turn out one way, and not the other. You are correct that ID and evolution are not even related. One is a well supported scientific theory that has made countless accurate predictions, the other is pointless solipsistic wanking.
So "Who pays more?" is:
Criminals - I think everyone can get behind that, but I don't think there is all that much money there.
"Special interests and income tax loophole exploiters" - sounds good, but who exactly are we talking about? Which loopholes? There's lots of ways to get tax advantages- spending money on education or giving to charity for example. Is that who pays more, college students and the generous?
It seems to me criminals are just going to evade your sales tax (as some of them do with existing sales taxes alredy). Heck I can think of a dozen ways to avoid your sales tax that you aren't going to stop without a massive and expensive enforcement agency, and wasn't "abolish the IRS" one of the big advantages?
As far as loophole-exploiters, we could deal with them by closing the loopholes, assuming they are bad loopholes. Whether to convert from income to sales tax is an entirely seperate issue.
Who pays more via a sales tax vs an income tax is widely understood to be the lower end of net worth. The author of your website clearly understands this, they are sure to put out lots of stuff about how this is good for the low-income folks, and they get right out their labeling the current system "regressive" and theirs "progressive", because they know people like me are going to point out that, in fact, sales taxes are regressive as compared to income taxes.
I think the exemption up to the poverty line is insufficient because it will still leave the merely low income, if not actually poor, with much more of the tax burden than they currently have. After all, our current system has exemptions for people under or near the poverty line.
"'For the record, I'm old and loaded'
In that case, you may find #5 more interesting."
No, that's about why it's good for the elderly and poor. Overall, the proponents of this plan seem to spend a lot of time trying to talk about why this will be good for low-income people... I can't imagine why. Oh, except of course for the fact that anyione who made it beyond econ 101 can tell it's not.
"As for why is this a good idea- because it's fair."
Naming it that does not make it so. Pretending for a moment we could all agree on what was fair, the fairest tax policy is not necessarily the best.
"Oh I see, in this hypothetical you were assuming that I'd be inheriting my granny's money. An understandable mistake, but an incorrect assumption nonetheless."
...]"
I constructed a hypothetical for the purpose discussing the inheritance tax, and I'm wrong that I intended there to be inheriting going on? Right, pointlessly difficult it is.
"So it's not enough for you that under the FairTax, they spend more and thus would be paying more taxes while the poor are completely relieved of any tax burden up to the poverty line. No, for the FairTax to work, the rich must spend as much as they make- from each according to their ability and all that, eh?"
You said the FairTax taxes wealth. For that to be the case, we would have to assume the rich were going to spend not just what they made, but everything they had, which obviously wouldn't be good, and which obviously they won't. The FairTax taxes consumption.
"Fine, I'll do the digging for you: [link, link, link
Yes, those are the pages I was reffering to that say the fair tax is good. There is no indication of their authorship, though nearby are links to the top-level home pages of prestigious universities. I see no suggestion that any particular Harvard or MIT economist supports the FairTax. Nor would I be convinced if one did. Your choice of authorities to weild was particularly amusing to me; haveing myself spent some time hanging around the Harvard Economics department, I know you can find people there to support all manner of crackpot schemes ("From each according to his means..." for example.) Still, even with 11 links instead of just one, I don't see that they found one to support the FairTax.
"Start with #6-it should be particularly interesting to you"
#6: 'Why the FairTax is good for young and low-income failies' For the record, I'm old and loaded. If my analisys of the fair tax is correct, I would personally benefit enormously from it in the short term (in the long term, I think our economy would collapse, and thus it would be worse for me overall)
"I take you haven't heard about the prebate part of the plan that removes all tax liability up to the poverty level?"
Yes, I heard that part. I think it's insufficient, and that the FairTax would still move the tax burden down the income scale relative to the current scheme.
While this back and forth bickering is fun and all, it's not going to convince me the FairTax is worth considering. If you actually want to convince people to consider your ideas, you need to answer their questions. My questions are "Who pays more?" and "Why is that a good idea?"
Your website has many papers about why the Fair tax will be good for various classes of people; i.e. why they will pay less. It also claims it is revenue neutral. Well, if it's revenue neutral, and anyone pays less, someone must pay more. Who is it? My not very deep analysis suggests lower-middle class workers pay more, the rich pay less, and the very rich, much less. Now, I've actually talked to people who though this was a good idea, and while I disagree and think historical examples back me up, at least they were claiming this was desirable. You, and the website you are so fond of, seem to be instead claiming it's not the case.
Well, OK, we could discuss that, but I'd really like to know: In your anaysis, under the FairTax, who pays more than they do under our current system, and why is that a good idea?
"You really don't inderstand ID then. If by God you mean a being above ourselves, then maybe, but then again ID doesn't mean said being, just made it that way"
ID requires an intelligent designer. Where did that designer come from? Did natural processes give rise to a being capable of designing things that could not be the result of natural processes? I can't even make that sound like it makes sense. Could be a previous designer I guess, but you've got to start somewhere. I don't know what you mean by "above us"; I'd call that first designer "God", but we can call him the Great Oogly-Boogly if you'd prefer. In any case, even if you want to pretrend the Great Oogly-Boogly isn't required, it doesn't matter. "It just is that way" is the heart and extent of the "theory". Go find an observation about the world, I'll wait.... Got one? Great, here's my explanation: "It just is that way". Is your understanding increased? You see how I didn't even need to know what your observation was, and it fit with my "theory"? This science stuff is easy! Go try an experiment! no, nevermind, no point: "It just is that way!"
"Does the concept that something, someone or someones made intellegent efforts to 'evolve' life change the basis of evolution?"
Yes, definitely. The theory of evolution, in a nutshell, is that natural selection is a completely sufficient explanation for the variety of species we observe today.
"Can the two not opperate together? I think they can. I don't think one can cancel out the possibility of the other"
Sure they can! Nothing whatsoever could ever possibly cancel out the possibility of the "It just is that way" theory, that's the whole problem with it.
"It just is that way" can't be right and can't be wrong because it doesn't say anything. Evolution says lots, it could be wrong, but it isn't.
Scientific theories make predictions. We can imagine a peice of evidence that if it turns out one way, will support the theory, and if it turns out the other way will undermine it. ID, or as I prefer, "God made it that way", is not a theory. There is no possible piece of evidence that could contradict it if it were different. No matter what you observe, "Yup, God made it that way" has got you covered. I can't prove ID wrong, because wrongness implies meaning, ID not only isn't right, it isn't even wrong. "God made it that way" adds nothing to our understanding of the world.
"Claiming there are 'vast mountains of evidence' is like a magician waving his wand to distract the audience from the sleight of hand about to occur."
It could be. In this case though it's shorthand; for the long version with all the evidence listed out, please go to a good library, find the biology section, and read everything there. That will get you started, after that, dive into all those books bibliographies. Next you'll no doubt have a list of a million or so experiments you'd like to reproduce yourself, and quite a few observations of the world to collect. The mountains of evidence are in fact, vast, and examining it all will take considerably longer than your lifetime, so you may at some point be tempted to rely on the opinions of others who have spent their entire lives figuring this stuff out. You'll find that they argue vehemently about all sorts of stuff, like whether a certain species evolved certain features to cope with living out of water or with living in rapidly flowing water. As to whether evolution is real, I beleive you'll find widespread agreement, but note you don't need to take their word for it; they are convinced of this because of evidence you can personally verify.
"He said evolution on a cosmic level"
Yes, but that's meaningless, so I ignored that part in an effort to be charitable. I was taking issue with the "educated guess" part. The theory of evolution does not address the origins of life, or attempt to. Any attack on evolution based on origins is pointless, except as an unwitting admission of ignorance by the attacker.
That's not a tectonic plate, that's a crack in the ground, that we have observed moving every once in a while. I could come up with dozens of (mostly silly) explanations for it. In casse it's not clear, I beleive Plate Tectonics is real. My point is, nobody spends much time doubting plate tectonics, though is is just as indirectly discovered as evolution.
"This is a joke, right?"
No, it's a test. I always include at least one gramatical error in every post to see if people will seize upon irrelevancies.
Saying "I want to sock it to you" is mostly a joke. I'm just pointing out why I think the inheritance tax is particularly fair, as taxes go.
"And how do you know I didn't?"
How do I know you didn't earn your rich grandma's money that you stand to inherit? Am I misunderstanding your question, or are you being pointlessly difficult?
"Got any figures to back that up?"
Yes. I do demographics for a living, and have a large number of figures to back that up. For non-luxury expenditures, households in the 95th percentile of net worth spend on average about twice as much as households at the poverty line, despite making 5+ times as much. Luxury expenditures add a bit to that, but still don't come close to making up the difference. This is easy to see by the fact that poverty-line households spend all their money; while wealthy households clearly do not.
"While you were skimming the site, did you happen upon the figures from the MIT and Harvard economists?"
No, nor does your link lead to any I can find. There are some links to university websites right near some other stuff that asserts the FairTax is good, it looked to me like I was supposed to assume some connection. Doesn't matter though, I'm not impressed by appeals to authority, and several of the economists I knew at Harvard were crackpots in any case. Give me a realistic theory why a sales tax doesn't move the tax burden away from the wealthy toward the working class, like it is pretty universally understood to do, or forget it. And then explain why all those other economists, including many at those fine institutions, got that wrong. Alternatively, you could argue why such a move of the tax burden is a good idea, in which case I'll probably disagree, but at least it would be interesting.
"let me know when you're more read up on what you're talking about."
Sure, bucko. You question my suggestion that consumption is not proportional to wealth, and I'm the one that needs to read up more. No matter how many times your web site calls it "Fair" and even "Progressive", sales taxes put more of the tax burden on lower-income earners than our current system, or even flat income taxes. Even most people who argue for them understand this.
"Evolution on a cosmic level has never been observed and it's not much more than an educated guess"
Horseshit. It's a well constructed theory supported by vast mountains of evidence. It is the foundation of the entire science of biology. Every biologist in modern times has spent their career testing it, and found it solid. If it's an "educated guess" then plate tectonics is a wild shot in the dark.
At least someone spotted the acronym...
I don't want to sock it to your rich grandma, she may have earned the money; I want to sock it to you, who I know didn't!
Anyway, I skimmed that site, and conclude I am rightly suspicious of anything that calls itself the "FairTax", though I aleready knew from you "wealth (consumption)". Wealth is not consumption. Wealthy people do not consume more proportional to their greater net worth, not even close. A national sales tax wouldn't sock it to your rich grandma; she probably doesn't spend any more than twice as much as my poor grandma.
I do like that their first point about what they are going to do is "Abolish the IRS". Because the "Department Administering the Fair Tax" will be better...
Switching from our current patchwork of various taxes to just a national sales tax would be disasterous. It would garauntee the very problem I was alluding to the inheritance tax helping with: Those who are sufficiently wealthy could sit on their buts, using the interest on their wealth to support themselves and their descendants while becoming steadily wealthier, forever. Well, until those who aren't rich get fed up with it and change things by vote or violence.
You mean, we, as a society, will want to tax your inheretance after the first 1.5 million dollars if you don't qualify for any of the exceptions protecting family farms and other family run small businesses? Awfully sorry about that, but yeah, we want to tax that. Just because your parents are crazy rich doesn't mean you and your descendents get to sit on your asses forever.