Why does a city's laws and codes have to be two fat binders? Perhaps I'm making a wrong assumption (or just have my head up my ass; I'm on my first cup of coffee this morning), but a thick binder where I work is about four inches thick.
Why so many codes and regulations?
Because industrial societies are complex, crowded places in which our actions can affect many people in unanticipated ways.
Depending on what's at the county level and what's at the city level, city codes might include building and zoning codes; health department regulations; regulations about the operation of city services including the fire department, police, schools, water and sewers; policies regarding city employees; transportation-related laws and code regarding the construction and operation of roads and mass transit; business regulations; and local criminal codes.
I've worked on many software projects where the documentation was much thicker than "two fat binders", and I'll bet that running a city is a more complex proposition than most software projects.
I'd like to see a new federal law that says all laws, codes, and ordinances expire after a period of ten years
You want the local traffic laws to expire every ten years? You want murder to become legal in ten years if the state legislature neglects to renew the homicide statutes?
You want civil rights laws to expire? Or the Bill of Rights to lose its authority?
I'm all for simplifying the legal code. But it's overly simpleminded to think that this can be done with some sort of universal sunset provision.
At some point decades ago, when no one was paying attention, driving on a public road was deemed to be privilege, that the state may grant or take away, rather than a right, to limit which the state has to prove its case to a judge (forget jury).
Driving has been a privilege rather than a right for as long as you've needed a government-issued license to drive on the government-built roads.
Driving a motor vehicle on the public roads has never been a right.
This, however, does not justify taking that privilege away without due process. And there's also the large problem that various public policy decisions, such as failure to fund decent mass transit in most areas, have made that privilege a practical necessity.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Yes. But roads, and the privilege to drive on them, are not something you "have" by default and that the big bad gubbmint is coming to take away from you: roads are something that the big bad gubbmint creates and maintains.
Really, lay off the teabagger rhetoric, it's seriously distorting your perceptions.
States don't go to the Federal government for money -- they administer some programs on behalf of the Federal government
Let me introduce you to block grants. Sayeth the wik, "Since the 1980s, the United States government has provided large sums of money through block grants, under a policy that has come to be known as 'devolutionary' or 'new federalism.'"
These days, smaller, more rural states tend to get screwed, as the large states have more recipients for high-dollar programs like Medicare & Medicaid.
Nope. Rural states have plenty of poor people receiving federal benefits, plus of course there are all those farm subsidies. Most "blue states" pay more in taxes then they receive in federal spending. It's the smaller, more rural states -- the "red states" -- that generally take more then they give.
There are exceptions: D.C. and Maryland are quite "blue", but with the federal government right there of course a lot of federal spending happens. Still, the correlation is strong.
but just to set the matter straight, it was the "conservative" Republican party who passed many of the civil rights laws fighting segregation. The "liberal" Democrats in the south were the ones fighting to keep the segregation intact.
Don't confuse "liberal/conservative" with "Democratic/Republican", especially when looking at history going back several decades. The "Dixiecrat" segment of the Democratic Party were social conservatives and economic populists, most of whom would fit right in at a contemporary "tea party" if they just swapped their fear of black people for a fear of brown people; while the Republican Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex that Reagan and his heirs have bloated for decades, gave us a tax plan with a top marginal rate of 90%, forced the integration of the armed forces, increased the minimum wage, and opposed McCarthyism -- today's GOP would call him a pinko communist.
If the Federal tax burden is the lowest level in three decades, how do you explain that projected receipts for 2009 are the highest ever recorded?
Because the population and the economy have grown.
Look at the same chart you cited and see the percentage of GDP that's taken up by taxes. That's your proper measure of the tax burden, because it allows for population growth, economic cycles, and inflation. It's the same index used by the Forbes index I cited previously, so don't even try to dismiss it as some sort of "handwaving".
Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP peaked at 20.9% in 1944 and in 2000. The 2009 estimate is 18.0%.
And no "Per capita" handwaving will cancel out the fact that we're paying more in taxes to the federal government than we ever have. Which is *precisely* what I stated.
It's not "handwaving" to look at the proper statistic.
Your claim was that higher marginal tax rates in the past were offset because "There were many, many deductions you could apply for", so that individually people paid less taxes back then. But if that were the case, the percentage of income going to taxes would be higher today. It's not. You're simply incorrect.
Also, you might want to act like people you disagree with have brains and perhaps valid points
I'm sure you have a brain. It just happens to be filled with misinformation. You have raised no valid points, and have made several statements that are counter-factual.
The vast majority of American capital is owned by the middle class.
No. First, the top 5 percent own more than half -- i.e., the majority -- of all wealth. Second, most of those stocks in middle-class retirement funds are not owned by those middle-class people, they're owned by the Wall Street financial services corporations, and so are controlled by the boards of those corporations. The account holders are customers, not owners.
Nobody controls "economic resources" except the forces of supply and demand.
Uh, no. The resources used for economic production -- land, natural resources, factories, money, ideas (copyrights and patents) -- all are privately owned and controlled.
Presumably, you are whining that only a small minority of people are responsible for very large investments. But nothing is stopping you from joining them.
I'm not "whining" about anything, I'm pointing out that a system of centralized power is good for those who have the power, and not for the rest of us.
But several things are stopping me from being ultra-rich. First, I cannot afford to waste my time collecting dollars: I have little desire to be rich. (Prosperous, yes, of course.) But more than that, as a person of strong ethical character I see few ways to accumulate large amounts of wealth that don't involve unethical behavior. Finally, to become rich in our society it's pretty much necessary to start that way -- the U.S. has very poor intergenerational class mobility.
All they ask is that they get a cut, for their trouble.
What trouble? They provide no labor. They take some risk of not getting their money back, but so do people at the blackjack table. We don't consider them virtuous.
And they take more than a cut: in our capitalist system, the majority of the value created by labor is skimmed off by the investment class.
The U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion. Our workforce is about 150 million people. The average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value a year. Do they receive a salary that reflects that? Nope. Most of that amount goes to interest, dividends, and rents paid to various investors, people who didn't do the work but reap the benefit -- and most of it goes to the aristocracy.
Because conservatives have created the myth that taxes are too high, and so we cut taxes on the aristocracy -- shifting the burden to those who work for a living. Restore those taxes, end the pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can start climbing out of the hole that decades of Republican borrow-and-spend policies have given us.
As the context is discussion of the Republican Party, I mean the American definition of "social conservative". Mostly the "religious nuts" you mention: anti-feminist, pro-death-penalty, against the teaching of evolution, against sex education in the schools, against legal recognition of same-sex marriages, supporting censorship of "indecent" material, and usually in favor of state establishment of religion as long as it's Christianity. The old "Moral Majority" and the "Christian Coalition" would be the exemplars.
It's time to restore taxation on the aristocrats. Raise the top marginal rates, restore the inheritance tax, and tax capital gains the same as earned income.
Who is John Galt?
He's a fictional character in a sophomoric novel that takes place in a fantasy world with less relevance to our own than Tolkien's Middle Earth.
So far, and I think for the rest of the time humanity exists, capitalism is the best economic system we are capable of having.
This is the conservative view on every topic of import: the status quo is the best system possible. (That the capitalist his or her self enjoys some privilege under the status quo is, of course, merely co-incidental.)
"I can't imagine any system better than our slave plantations. It's always been this way and people don't change."
"I can't imagine any system better than keeping women in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. It's always been this way and people don't change."
"I can't imagine any system better the segregation. It's always been this way and people don't change."
This is always the heart of the conservative view -- at least, that of mainstream American conservatism, of the sort that stands athwart history yelling "Stop!". It's always wrong, and always gets bowled over.
I've thought before that the most fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is not over issues of individual freedom vs. authority or progress vs. traditional values, but imagination. Conservatives don't have any. The status quo seems only inevitable and right to them, the natural order of things, and anyone who protests it is an impractical dreamer who should get a job or a malcontent who needs to be medicated. They're incapable of seeing their own historical moment as in any way anomalous or provisional; as Montag's colleagues assure him in Farenheit 451, "Believe me, houses have always been fireproof. Firemen have always burned books." They believe that they deserve their own lives; they can't imagine having been born as someone else. (Empathy, and by extension compassion, is a function of imagination.) They can't imagine what it would be like to be poor, or black, or gay, because, well, they're not, and they suspect that these unfortunate conditions are those people's own faults, a consequence of some moral failing or dereliction. (I always secretly felt this way about old people until I noticed I was aging as well.) Likewise people living in other cultures with different beliefs and customs; they're simply ignorant, deprived of the advantages of Jesus and Wal-Mart. Francis Fukyama, in a book with the straight-line title The End of History, argues that capitalist liberal democracy is the final culmination of all social progress, apparently unable to imagine a more perfect system than the one epitomized by Donald Trump and Kenneth Lay.
The "win" is in the fact that everyone is left free to make his own choices and succeed or fail by them.
No. In capitalism, the aristocrats -- the owners of capital -- are left free to make their own choices, and succeed by them, or be rescued by their cronies. The working classes -- including the professionals, all the folks who actual do productive work rather then skim off the top -- are left to scurry around in the footsteps of the giants, trying not to get crushed.
Neither of those sound very left/right to me, more sanity vs. disturbed.
Since the Republican Party is a collation of the aristocrat class and its lackeys with the Religious Right, left/right very often is sanity vs. disturbed -- or at least, informed versus ignorant. To be socially conservative is, at heart, to be anti-intellectual.
The education system is run by the "left wing" to the extent that teachers are educated people, and socially conservative views are incompatible with education.
If you want to believe men drive around in minivans with kids as much as women, then you're delusional.
That was not the question. The question was "How many men do you see driving minivans or SUVs and constantly turned around screaming at kids...?" I don't see a lot of either, thank goodness.
Mom may be dragging the kids to the grocery store more often, but Dad's usually the one driving on those long trips across country where the little brats are constantly whining "Are there yet?" and poking each other.
It's an obvious fact that a very small minority of women drive crotch rockets, by your own statistic.
By that statistic it's an obvious fact that a large part of the difference in motorcycle ownership is due to non-genetic factors -- i.e. social factors that treat women differently then men, i.e. sexism.
How many men do you see driving minivans or SUVs and constantly turned around screaming at kids in the back instead of paying attention to the road ahead?
No more or less often than I see women doing so.
This isn't sexism, it's a simple fact.
Then please either provide a citation for this "simple fact", or admit that you pulled it out the air.
I'm sure if you did a survey you'd also find that women talk on the phone in their car a lot more than men too.
Again: cite, or STFU.
And how many men apply make-up in their cars while driving? Zero?
And how many women shave while driving? Zero?
There's nothing sexist about noting that people of different sexes act differently.
Except that you haven't noted anything, you have not provided one single fact. You've just expressed your assumptions and prejudices.
How many women drive crotch rockets at insane speeds?
i found out fast that by the end of the semester, what with lugging that notebook around in my backpack, that the first 50+ pages appeared blank by the end of the semester. pencil literally wore off/smudged away from the jostling in the backpack.
What the heck were you writing with, a 10H pencil? Took all my notes in pencil in high school, college, grad school, and massage school, and never saw anything like that.
If something's easy to learn, it has a steep learning curve: your ability rises rapidly over time, repetition or whatever your measure of effort is.
No. The notional "learning curve" people are talking about when they say "steep learning curve" is not a plot of how ability varies over time. It's a plot of how much learning is needed to reach a level of competence. A task with a steep learning curve requires you to learn much (plotted on the y axis) before you can make even the smallest amount of headway (plotted on the x axis).
There is ample evidence that suppressing emotions has negative health outcomes (mental and physical). Therefore, it is rational to accept and embrace emotions, within some limit of course.
"We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way." -- from "Notes on What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What's What", from Aldous Huxley's novel _Island_.
Slashdot Mirror
Or buy too many cold pills.
Because industrial societies are complex, crowded places in which our actions can affect many people in unanticipated ways.
Depending on what's at the county level and what's at the city level, city codes might include building and zoning codes; health department regulations; regulations about the operation of city services including the fire department, police, schools, water and sewers; policies regarding city employees; transportation-related laws and code regarding the construction and operation of roads and mass transit; business regulations; and local criminal codes.
I've worked on many software projects where the documentation was much thicker than "two fat binders", and I'll bet that running a city is a more complex proposition than most software projects.
You want the local traffic laws to expire every ten years? You want murder to become legal in ten years if the state legislature neglects to renew the homicide statutes?
You want civil rights laws to expire? Or the Bill of Rights to lose its authority?
I'm all for simplifying the legal code. But it's overly simpleminded to think that this can be done with some sort of universal sunset provision.
"cat" does not do the same thing as a "show_file" command. "cat" concatenates files: "cat file1 file2 > file3".
Driving has been a privilege rather than a right for as long as you've needed a government-issued license to drive on the government-built roads.
Driving a motor vehicle on the public roads has never been a right.
This, however, does not justify taking that privilege away without due process. And there's also the large problem that various public policy decisions, such as failure to fund decent mass transit in most areas, have made that privilege a practical necessity.
Yes. But roads, and the privilege to drive on them, are not something you "have" by default and that the big bad gubbmint is coming to take away from you: roads are something that the big bad gubbmint creates and maintains.
Really, lay off the teabagger rhetoric, it's seriously distorting your perceptions.
The Japanese were going to surrender anyway; the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about impressing Stalin and justifying the expense of the Manhattan Project, then about ending the war.
Let me introduce you to block grants. Sayeth the wik, "Since the 1980s, the United States government has provided large sums of money through block grants, under a policy that has come to be known as 'devolutionary' or 'new federalism.'"
Nope. Rural states have plenty of poor people receiving federal benefits, plus of course there are all those farm subsidies. Most "blue states" pay more in taxes then they receive in federal spending. It's the smaller, more rural states -- the "red states" -- that generally take more then they give. There are exceptions: D.C. and Maryland are quite "blue", but with the federal government right there of course a lot of federal spending happens. Still, the correlation is strong.
Don't confuse "liberal/conservative" with "Democratic/Republican", especially when looking at history going back several decades. The "Dixiecrat" segment of the Democratic Party were social conservatives and economic populists, most of whom would fit right in at a contemporary "tea party" if they just swapped their fear of black people for a fear of brown people; while the Republican Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex that Reagan and his heirs have bloated for decades, gave us a tax plan with a top marginal rate of 90%, forced the integration of the armed forces, increased the minimum wage, and opposed McCarthyism -- today's GOP would call him a pinko communist.
Because the population and the economy have grown.
Look at the same chart you cited and see the percentage of GDP that's taken up by taxes. That's your proper measure of the tax burden, because it allows for population growth, economic cycles, and inflation. It's the same index used by the Forbes index I cited previously, so don't even try to dismiss it as some sort of "handwaving".
Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP peaked at 20.9% in 1944 and in 2000. The 2009 estimate is 18.0%.
It's not "handwaving" to look at the proper statistic.
Your claim was that higher marginal tax rates in the past were offset because "There were many, many deductions you could apply for", so that individually people paid less taxes back then. But if that were the case, the percentage of income going to taxes would be higher today. It's not. You're simply incorrect.
I'm sure you have a brain. It just happens to be filled with misinformation. You have raised no valid points, and have made several statements that are counter-factual.
No. First, the top 5 percent own more than half -- i.e., the majority -- of all wealth. Second, most of those stocks in middle-class retirement funds are not owned by those middle-class people, they're owned by the Wall Street financial services corporations, and so are controlled by the boards of those corporations. The account holders are customers, not owners.
Uh, no. The resources used for economic production -- land, natural resources, factories, money, ideas (copyrights and patents) -- all are privately owned and controlled.
I'm not "whining" about anything, I'm pointing out that a system of centralized power is good for those who have the power, and not for the rest of us.
But several things are stopping me from being ultra-rich. First, I cannot afford to waste my time collecting dollars: I have little desire to be rich. (Prosperous, yes, of course.) But more than that, as a person of strong ethical character I see few ways to accumulate large amounts of wealth that don't involve unethical behavior. Finally, to become rich in our society it's pretty much necessary to start that way -- the U.S. has very poor intergenerational class mobility.
What trouble? They provide no labor. They take some risk of not getting their money back, but so do people at the blackjack table. We don't consider them virtuous.
And they take more than a cut: in our capitalist system, the majority of the value created by labor is skimmed off by the investment class.
The U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion. Our workforce is about 150 million people. The average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value a year. Do they receive a salary that reflects that? Nope. Most of that amount goes to interest, dividends, and rents paid to various investors, people who didn't do the work but reap the benefit -- and most of it goes to the aristocracy.
No, we are not, not in constant dollars per capita. I suggest you stop getting your tax information from the teabaggers.
Federal income tax burden is near its lowest level in three decades: the average American family pays about 9% of its income in income taxes. The peak was 12% in 1981. Meanwhile state and local tax burden per capita hasn't changed much, and is now slightly lower then its peak.
And Americans are, compared to almost every other industrialized nation, under-taxed. The only countries with comparable standards of living with lower tax burdens are Japan and Switzerland. (Nations with low defense spending that don't try to run empires...)
Because conservatives have created the myth that taxes are too high, and so we cut taxes on the aristocracy -- shifting the burden to those who work for a living. Restore those taxes, end the pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can start climbing out of the hole that decades of Republican borrow-and-spend policies have given us.
As the context is discussion of the Republican Party, I mean the American definition of "social conservative". Mostly the "religious nuts" you mention: anti-feminist, pro-death-penalty, against the teaching of evolution, against sex education in the schools, against legal recognition of same-sex marriages, supporting censorship of "indecent" material, and usually in favor of state establishment of religion as long as it's Christianity. The old "Moral Majority" and the "Christian Coalition" would be the exemplars.
Only in the same sense that anyone who walks in an "athlete".
We live in a society where a small class of aristocrats -- the top of the L-curve -- control the economic resources.
Top marginal tax rates were around 90% during the 1950s, and 50% or higher during most of the 1980s.
The economy, and the nation, survived.
It's time to restore taxation on the aristocrats. Raise the top marginal rates, restore the inheritance tax, and tax capital gains the same as earned income.
He's a fictional character in a sophomoric novel that takes place in a fantasy world with less relevance to our own than Tolkien's Middle Earth.
Well then relax, because government isn't nearly in control of everything. Big business prevails.
Look at the numbers. ExxonMobil reported 2008 revenues of nearly $373 billion and a profit of almost $41 billion. The EPA's 2010 budget is $10.5 billion.
If the EPA devoted itself entirely to policing this one oil company, ExxonMobil could outspend it three to one -- and still turn a profit!
It's not just multi-nationals. United Health projects profit of $5 billion this year. Four states total budget is less than this.
Uh, Reagan was. That's how the system works: the President sends Congress a budget. There's negotiation from there, but it starts with the President.
This is the conservative view on every topic of import: the status quo is the best system possible. (That the capitalist his or her self enjoys some privilege under the status quo is, of course, merely co-incidental.) "I can't imagine any system better than our slave plantations. It's always been this way and people don't change."
"I can't imagine any system better than keeping women in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. It's always been this way and people don't change."
"I can't imagine any system better the segregation. It's always been this way and people don't change."
This is always the heart of the conservative view -- at least, that of mainstream American conservatism, of the sort that stands athwart history yelling "Stop!". It's always wrong, and always gets bowled over.
I suggest Tim Kreider's essay on the subject:
No. In capitalism, the aristocrats -- the owners of capital -- are left free to make their own choices, and succeed by them, or be rescued by their cronies. The working classes -- including the professionals, all the folks who actual do productive work rather then skim off the top -- are left to scurry around in the footsteps of the giants, trying not to get crushed.
Since the Republican Party is a collation of the aristocrat class and its lackeys with the Religious Right, left/right very often is sanity vs. disturbed -- or at least, informed versus ignorant. To be socially conservative is, at heart, to be anti-intellectual.
The education system is run by the "left wing" to the extent that teachers are educated people, and socially conservative views are incompatible with education.
How is it that, after the disaster of the first "CEO president", anyone thinks that being a "businessman" is a qualification to hold office?
That was not the question. The question was "How many men do you see driving minivans or SUVs and constantly turned around screaming at kids...?" I don't see a lot of either, thank goodness.
Mom may be dragging the kids to the grocery store more often, but Dad's usually the one driving on those long trips across country where the little brats are constantly whining "Are there yet?" and poking each other.
By that statistic it's an obvious fact that a large part of the difference in motorcycle ownership is due to non-genetic factors -- i.e. social factors that treat women differently then men, i.e. sexism.
No more or less often than I see women doing so.
Then please either provide a citation for this "simple fact", or admit that you pulled it out the air.
Again: cite, or STFU.
And how many women shave while driving? Zero?
Except that you haven't noted anything, you have not provided one single fact. You've just expressed your assumptions and prejudices.
Don't have crotch rocket numbers, but between 1990 and 2003 the percentage of motorcycle owners who were female went from 4% to 10%. If it were an inherent gender attribute that "guys ride motorcycles, women don't", we would not see a change like that.
What the heck were you writing with, a 10H pencil? Took all my notes in pencil in high school, college, grad school, and massage school, and never saw anything like that.
No. The notional "learning curve" people are talking about when they say "steep learning curve" is not a plot of how ability varies over time. It's a plot of how much learning is needed to reach a level of competence. A task with a steep learning curve requires you to learn much (plotted on the y axis) before you can make even the smallest amount of headway (plotted on the x axis).
A lot of comments (and tags) to that effect on this story.
Remember that story about sexism in the F/OSS world a few weeks back? Remember how many people denied that such a thing could exist? Here's your proof.
"We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way." -- from "Notes on What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What's What", from Aldous Huxley's novel _Island_.