Me, I look at this statistic with pride, because it means American laborers get to keep more of the money they sweated to earn.
Taxes are low here mostly because unearned income, income brought in not by sweating but by skimming off the labor of others - or worse yet, by one's ancestors skimming off the labor of other - is lightly taxed.
You say Americans are "undertaxed". I say they are taxed just-right
If we were taxed just right, we wouldn't have a deficit. If we were taxed just right, we wouldn't have crumbling infrastructure, nonfunctional regulatory bodies, and an inability to provide basic government services.
We could be taxed just right at current levels - over even lower ones - if we didn't try to run an empire, if we cut the corporate welfare we call "military spending" by about 50% (still outspending any possible combination of adversaries), and if we stopped spending money locking people in jail for sex and drug "crimes" that are personal choices.
I'd love to see our society change that way. But for the society that we have now, we're undertaxed - we're not paying our way, we're sticking future generations with the bill with the "borrow and spend" ideology introduced by Reagan.
Another silent case we have is the Soviet Block, they never became an industrial powerhouse, not even an agricultural one, after WWII.
Hmmm...a nation which rebuilt itself after suffering enormous devastation in WWII to become the U.S.'s only rival, the first nation to put humans into space, never became an industrial powerhouse? How do you figure?
What about looking at whether it evolves, i.e., adapts to become fitter in their environment? Doesn't apply to fire, nor rocks (which change, but these changes don't make them more likely to survive).
Organisms don't evolve. Populations do.
Populations of rocks evolve. Put a bunch of rocks in a river. Come back a century later. The small ones are gone, washed downstream - i.e., have not survived that environment; the larger ones have adapted, worn smooth, in a way that makes them less subject to the forces of the current and more likely to survive.
Populations of flame evolve. Put a bunch of stuff on fire. Come back a little while later. The bright flames are gone, having burned out their fuel - i.e., have not survived. The embers and coals, the slow burners, are selected.
As the Zen practicioners are indistinguishable from day-dreamers such as my 9 year old son, your refutiation is meaningless.
If your nine year old will, of his own volition, sit still for an hour at a time, you've either heavily medicated him, or have done an extraordinary job of parenting.
Anyway, the mental state of zazen is quite distinct from daydreaming, so Zen practitioners are distinguishable from daydreamers by the descriptions they give of their experiences.
If the people in China weren't willing to accept these cheap jobs, then they wouldn't have them; they'd be either going somewhere else or automating.
The fact that the collusion of government and capital has people so over a barrel that being exploited in this fashion looks like the best alternative, in no way implies that this is not exploitation, or that we ought not to do what we can to break such collusion.
This is not some free market where workers and employers meet with equal power, where we can believe that the outcome represents some sort of optimal solution.
It did in the USA, the UK, and every other country that went through a transition from a mostly agricultural to an industrial economy.
Unfortunately, better working conditions aren't retroactive, and the possibility that things will be better in China in a century or so is of no help to the human beings being fucked over right now.
If you really believe that Democrats spend less than Republicans, I would encourage you join the rest of us in reality.
If the stimulus bill is necessary - an arguable point, to be sure, but let's accept it for the moment - then it's necessary because of poor stewardship of the economy during the Bush years. So it's a debt to be laid at the feet of the GOP and their "just keep giving more to the rich and everything will magically work out" brand of economic policy.
And this Democrat congress is spending like it's going out of style.
First, if you cannot properly use the adjective "Democratic", you disqualify your opinions from serious consideration. Please, you and all the other right-wingers out there who think it's clever to use the less euphonious word - cut it the fsck out already, you sound like idiots. Thank you.
Second, let's not pretend that the Republican Congress of 2001-2007 didn't spend money hand over fist. Problem is they wasted a lot of it in Iraq.
Say that for eight years, instead of doing preventative maintenance on your house, you spend that money on booze and women. No, wait - let's pretend you wasted it, say you blew it at the track.
So the mice get into the walls and chew on the wiring, the basement gets flooded when the sump pump stops, termites get into the walls, and it's a race to see whether your house is going to fall over or burn up first.
You can't say, "well, after spending all that money on the ponies, I guess it's time to tighten the ol' belt!" Nope. You've got to spend the money on the house, even if you have to beg or borrow to come up with it.
I'm certainly willing to consider the proposition that the money is being spend unwisely. But a metric fuckload of money is going to be needed to repair the damage done to our nation by the ridiculous economic policies of the past quarter-century.
So many of them are progressives who seem to think even a healthy distrust of concentrated power (government) is some sort of insanity.
A progressive is one who thinks that a healthy distrust of concentrated power - in the form of concentrated control of economic resources - is only rational.
A (small l) libertarian is one who thinks that a healthy distrust of concentrated power - in the form of government - is only rational.
Note that these are by no means exclusive positions. Libertarian socialists - a.k.a. anarchists - understand that the owning classes get and keep their power through government action. End the government powers and policies that concentrate power into the hands of the wealthy, and there'll be less need for the pittance that gets spent on social welfare programs.
So, we get trillion dollar bailouts no one has actually read, and (here in California) tax increases in the middle of a near depression without a *single* layoff off a government employee.
JFK/LBJ (FY 1962-1969): 18.8%
Nixon/Ford (FY 1970-1977): 19.9%
Carter (FY 1978-1981): 21.2%
Reagan (FY 1982-1989): 22.3%
Bush I (FY 1990-1993): 21.9%
Clinton (FY 1994-2001): 19.6%
That page only has figures for the first two years of Bush II: the average was 19.7%, but of course the average over his whole term would be much higher.
Now can we please stop pretending that the GOP brings about "smaller government"? It was bigger under Nixon/Ford than under JFK/LBJ, and bigger under Reagan (and still under Bush I) than it was under Carter.
Our government should not be in the business of making it more expensive for me to go see my family 100 miles away.
Why should the government be in the business of subsidizing you with cheap roads, cheap gas, and external costs of pollution, so you can live 100 miles away from your family?
Regarding the likelihood of an increase in ridership leading to a rise in violent crime on mass transit, I'd like to seem some data to support that assumption.
Indeed, I think one need only compare the murder rate in the U.S. to that in Japan to put a spike in the "more mass transit means more murders" argument.
I live in just outside Baltimore. We have lousy mass transit, and the second highest a murder rate in the country. The highest rate is in Detroit, which also has lousy mass transit.
Mass transit helps people get to good jobs. People with jobs are less likely to turn to crime.
True, but without the electoral college, the politicians wouldn't even both with the state level. Instead they'd just focus on NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, DC, LA, San Fran, Seattle..... and ignore all the rest of us who don't live in those major cities.
When every vote counts equally, you go where the voters are. 79% of Americans live in urban areas. If candidates aren't focusing their campaigns on population centers - i.e., if they're not going where the voters are - it's a sign that something is broken.
However, you only cite large cities in blue states. (Except Richmond.) In fact, the 10 largest U.S. cites are NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and San Jose. Four are in red states, and San Diego is a Navy town, not exactly a hotbed of liberalism.
But we need to make sure the president represents the whole nation, and doesn't run a campaign based upon securing the East and Pacific while ignoring people in the middle. The Electoral College does that by throwing more weight towards the middle states.
The electoral college system (at least as currently implemented) makes swing states - not middle states, not small states - important. The candidates pretty much ignored deep blue states on coasts and deep red states inside, regardless of size: Maryland, New York, California, Wyoming, Idaho, none of them saw much action after the primaries.
No, the rules of presidential succession don't hold true until after a president is actually elected by the electoral college. Until then, it is entirely in the hands of the electors... although admittedly this is a big constitutional crisis if this were to happen...This situation has never happened on the Presidential level
Actually it has happened with losing candidates. Of the 158 occasions where electors have voted differently than their state legislature asked, 71 were because the candidate died.
In 1872 Horace Greeley died between Election Day and the meeting of the Electoral college; 63 electors changed their votes. And in 1912 James S. Sherman, who had been Taft's VP, died and 8 electors changed their votes.
We are not, and should not be, a democracy. We are a constitutional republic.
We are a democratic constitutional republic. Which is a form of democracy.
China is a republic, too, as is Iran. The USSR was a union of republics. Ain't nothing all that grand about being a republic - just means you aren't a monarchy.
What makes the American experiment interesting are the democratic and constitutional factors. The idea that just government arises from the will of all the people (keeping in mind that it took a while to discover the existence of poor, non-white, and female people...), not just that of a monarch or a minority or aristocrats, has fared pretty well.
The idea of a fixed constitution that strictly limits the powers of government has had a rockier road.
What it means is that candidates for national office will only campaign in a handful of states that will guarantee a popular majority.
So candidates will focus on the areas where there are actually people, instead of on a handful of swing states where accidents of demographics make voters more important.
But, no, they can't focus only a handful of states, because they need a majority of the popular vote everywhere. 51% of the vote in a handful of big states will no longer net them all those states electoral votes; they need 51% nationwide. Single votes in Wyoming or New York or Florida or Ohio will be equally important.
This might be disappointing if you're one of those swing state voters that candidates have been forced to coddle for the past few cycles. But it sounds like sweet democracy to those of us living in deep red or blue states whose votes haven't meant shit.
Electors are chosen by the political parties for their loyalty anyway.
In both cases the purpose of the presiding leader is to represent the States and execute the laws in a balanced fashion
The President has become the "representative" of the people in general. That perhaps wasn't the Founder's plan, but that's been the reality since the days of Andrew Jackson.
How would this make someone from Iowa, or any state adopting this, feel like their vote counts more?
It makes the votes of people who are not in swing states count just as much as deep red or deep blue states. It will make my vote in deep blue Maryland, which right now doesn't mean a damn thing, count just as much as a vote in a swing state.
If this is where we are heading, we may as well drop the whole State charade as it's just one more layer of bureaucracy when all the real power is being consolidated in the Federal government.
This has nothing to do with the balance of power between State and Federal governments. If the electors were chosen by the state legislatures rather than by popular vote in the states, it would; but that has not been the case for a long time.
I am baffled why anyone other than those in the aforementioned population centers would support it.
It has nothing to do with living in a population center, it's about swing states. Presidential campaigns direct all their efforts to that minority of the population, because an additional vote in deep blue Maryland is worth nothing, while an extra vote in purple Virginia can make a difference.
Anyone who doesn't live in a swing state should support it, as it means that that vote of a single person living in a solid red or solid blue state counts as much as a swing state vote.
And any intellectually honest person living in a swing state, who don't think they deserve a louder voice than the rest of us, should support it too.
According to the wik, 24 states have laws binding an elector to vote for the candidate they're told to vote for, and some states have laws that render their elector's ballots void if they don't follow directions. The Supreme Court has upheld these laws.
The electors are party operatives chosen for their loyalty. Attempts to make the office anything but a ceremonial role are very rare.
Slashdot Mirror
Taxes are low here mostly because unearned income, income brought in not by sweating but by skimming off the labor of others - or worse yet, by one's ancestors skimming off the labor of other - is lightly taxed.
If we were taxed just right, we wouldn't have a deficit. If we were taxed just right, we wouldn't have crumbling infrastructure, nonfunctional regulatory bodies, and an inability to provide basic government services.
We could be taxed just right at current levels - over even lower ones - if we didn't try to run an empire, if we cut the corporate welfare we call "military spending" by about 50% (still outspending any possible combination of adversaries), and if we stopped spending money locking people in jail for sex and drug "crimes" that are personal choices.
I'd love to see our society change that way. But for the society that we have now, we're undertaxed - we're not paying our way, we're sticking future generations with the bill with the "borrow and spend" ideology introduced by Reagan.
Hmmm...a nation which rebuilt itself after suffering enormous devastation in WWII to become the U.S.'s only rival, the first nation to put humans into space, never became an industrial powerhouse? How do you figure?
Organisms don't evolve. Populations do.
Populations of rocks evolve. Put a bunch of rocks in a river. Come back a century later. The small ones are gone, washed downstream - i.e., have not survived that environment; the larger ones have adapted, worn smooth, in a way that makes them less subject to the forces of the current and more likely to survive.
Populations of flame evolve. Put a bunch of stuff on fire. Come back a little while later. The bright flames are gone, having burned out their fuel - i.e., have not survived. The embers and coals, the slow burners, are selected.
If your nine year old will, of his own volition, sit still for an hour at a time, you've either heavily medicated him, or have done an extraordinary job of parenting.
Anyway, the mental state of zazen is quite distinct from daydreaming, so Zen practitioners are distinguishable from daydreamers by the descriptions they give of their experiences.
Well, that's a nicely circular definition.
"Life is made of cells." Ok, what's a cell? "The smallest living unit." Oh.
The fact that the collusion of government and capital has people so over a barrel that being exploited in this fashion looks like the best alternative, in no way implies that this is not exploitation, or that we ought not to do what we can to break such collusion.
This is not some free market where workers and employers meet with equal power, where we can believe that the outcome represents some sort of optimal solution.
Unfortunately, better working conditions aren't retroactive, and the possibility that things will be better in China in a century or so is of no help to the human beings being fucked over right now.
If that what it takes to have human rights respected? Yes. We can do without cheap flat-screen TVs.
(Though I don't think an order of magnitude price increase would be necessary.)
If the stimulus bill is necessary - an arguable point, to be sure, but let's accept it for the moment - then it's necessary because of poor stewardship of the economy during the Bush years. So it's a debt to be laid at the feet of the GOP and their "just keep giving more to the rich and everything will magically work out" brand of economic policy.
Anyway, if you look at the numbers, before Bush II the highest spending administrations were Regan and Bush I.
The Budget of the United States Government is a federal document that the President submits to the U.S. Congress. And like any other bill, it must be signed by the President.
First, if you cannot properly use the adjective "Democratic", you disqualify your opinions from serious consideration. Please, you and all the other right-wingers out there who think it's clever to use the less euphonious word - cut it the fsck out already, you sound like idiots. Thank you.
Second, let's not pretend that the Republican Congress of 2001-2007 didn't spend money hand over fist. Problem is they wasted a lot of it in Iraq.
Say that for eight years, instead of doing preventative maintenance on your house, you spend that money on booze and women. No, wait - let's pretend you wasted it, say you blew it at the track.
So the mice get into the walls and chew on the wiring, the basement gets flooded when the sump pump stops, termites get into the walls, and it's a race to see whether your house is going to fall over or burn up first.
You can't say, "well, after spending all that money on the ponies, I guess it's time to tighten the ol' belt!" Nope. You've got to spend the money on the house, even if you have to beg or borrow to come up with it.
I'm certainly willing to consider the proposition that the money is being spend unwisely. But a metric fuckload of money is going to be needed to repair the damage done to our nation by the ridiculous economic policies of the past quarter-century.
A progressive is one who thinks that a healthy distrust of concentrated power - in the form of concentrated control of economic resources - is only rational.
A (small l) libertarian is one who thinks that a healthy distrust of concentrated power - in the form of government - is only rational.
Note that these are by no means exclusive positions. Libertarian socialists - a.k.a. anarchists - understand that the owning classes get and keep their power through government action. End the government powers and policies that concentrate power into the hands of the wealthy, and there'll be less need for the pittance that gets spent on social welfare programs.
If taxes are too low - and Americans are undertaxed compared to almost all other industrialized nations - then raising them is not necessarily bad. The idea that we can tax-cut our way out of any difficulty is what got us in this mess in the first place.
And if the gets weaker as unemployment rises, refraining from making government employees unemployed is not necessarily a bad thing.
Average size of the government, measured by federal spending as a percentage of GDP, during the last few administrations:
JFK/LBJ (FY 1962-1969): 18.8%
Nixon/Ford (FY 1970-1977): 19.9%
Carter (FY 1978-1981): 21.2%
Reagan (FY 1982-1989): 22.3%
Bush I (FY 1990-1993): 21.9%
Clinton (FY 1994-2001): 19.6%
That page only has figures for the first two years of Bush II: the average was 19.7%, but of course the average over his whole term would be much higher.
Now can we please stop pretending that the GOP brings about "smaller government"? It was bigger under Nixon/Ford than under JFK/LBJ, and bigger under Reagan (and still under Bush I) than it was under Carter.
Why should the government be in the business of subsidizing you with cheap roads, cheap gas, and external costs of pollution, so you can live 100 miles away from your family?
Indeed, I think one need only compare the murder rate in the U.S. to that in Japan to put a spike in the "more mass transit means more murders" argument.
I live in just outside Baltimore. We have lousy mass transit, and the second highest a murder rate in the country. The highest rate is in Detroit, which also has lousy mass transit.
Mass transit helps people get to good jobs. People with jobs are less likely to turn to crime.
I don't think Illuminatus! can be described as "in the same fnord" as any other work.
When every vote counts equally, you go where the voters are. 79% of Americans live in urban areas. If candidates aren't focusing their campaigns on population centers - i.e., if they're not going where the voters are - it's a sign that something is broken.
However, you only cite large cities in blue states. (Except Richmond.) In fact, the 10 largest U.S. cites are NYC, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and San Jose. Four are in red states, and San Diego is a Navy town, not exactly a hotbed of liberalism.
The electoral college system (at least as currently implemented) makes swing states - not middle states, not small states - important. The candidates pretty much ignored deep blue states on coasts and deep red states inside, regardless of size: Maryland, New York, California, Wyoming, Idaho, none of them saw much action after the primaries.
Actually it has happened with losing candidates. Of the 158 occasions where electors have voted differently than their state legislature asked, 71 were because the candidate died.
In 1872 Horace Greeley died between Election Day and the meeting of the Electoral college; 63 electors changed their votes. And in 1912 James S. Sherman, who had been Taft's VP, died and 8 electors changed their votes.
We are a democratic constitutional republic. Which is a form of democracy.
China is a republic, too, as is Iran. The USSR was a union of republics. Ain't nothing all that grand about being a republic - just means you aren't a monarchy.
What makes the American experiment interesting are the democratic and constitutional factors. The idea that just government arises from the will of all the people (keeping in mind that it took a while to discover the existence of poor, non-white, and female people...), not just that of a monarch or a minority or aristocrats, has fared pretty well.
The idea of a fixed constitution that strictly limits the powers of government has had a rockier road.
So candidates will focus on the areas where there are actually people, instead of on a handful of swing states where accidents of demographics make voters more important.
But, no, they can't focus only a handful of states, because they need a majority of the popular vote everywhere. 51% of the vote in a handful of big states will no longer net them all those states electoral votes; they need 51% nationwide. Single votes in Wyoming or New York or Florida or Ohio will be equally important.
This might be disappointing if you're one of those swing state voters that candidates have been forced to coddle for the past few cycles. But it sounds like sweet democracy to those of us living in deep red or blue states whose votes haven't meant shit.
No. Several states have laws that punish "faithless electors", and the Supreme Court has upheld these laws. A few have laws that invalidate tsuch ballots.
Electors are chosen by the political parties for their loyalty anyway.
The President has become the "representative" of the people in general. That perhaps wasn't the Founder's plan, but that's been the reality since the days of Andrew Jackson.
It makes the votes of people who are not in swing states count just as much as deep red or deep blue states. It will make my vote in deep blue Maryland, which right now doesn't mean a damn thing, count just as much as a vote in a swing state.
This has nothing to do with the balance of power between State and Federal governments. If the electors were chosen by the state legislatures rather than by popular vote in the states, it would; but that has not been the case for a long time.
The "big population centers" are generally the ones paying the taxes that support rural areas.
It has nothing to do with living in a population center, it's about swing states. Presidential campaigns direct all their efforts to that minority of the population, because an additional vote in deep blue Maryland is worth nothing, while an extra vote in purple Virginia can make a difference.
Anyone who doesn't live in a swing state should support it, as it means that that vote of a single person living in a solid red or solid blue state counts as much as a swing state vote.
And any intellectually honest person living in a swing state, who don't think they deserve a louder voice than the rest of us, should support it too.
According to the wik, 24 states have laws binding an elector to vote for the candidate they're told to vote for, and some states have laws that render their elector's ballots void if they don't follow directions. The Supreme Court has upheld these laws.
The electors are party operatives chosen for their loyalty. Attempts to make the office anything but a ceremonial role are very rare.
Statements are only actionable if they damage someone's reputation.
Statements can only damage someone's reputation if a reasonable person would lend them credence.
No reasonable person lends anonymous statements on a web forum credence.
Therefore, statements comments on a web forum are not actionable.