So, what exact behavior is our progressive income tax system driving?
Perhaps lowering the cost of entry into a civilized and functional society?
The point of a progressive tax system is that how do you tax someone who only made $100 a year? Do you really take $25 from him? or is the income so low as to be worth more by letting him have the full $100.
The 'value' of money is greatly impacted by how much of it you have. If you only make $40K a year, spending $100 a month is a significant additional expense. If you make $1 million a year, spending that additional $2500 a month is a relative pittance. The price of normal living doesn't scale with income. So you skew your taxes so that the less well off pay a bit less so they can grow. Those that have grown, pay a little more to help those that are still in the lower brackets.
The upper brackets, the small businesses will very much want to have lots more people with a little more money than a few people with a lot more money.
Don't believe the GOP claptrap about how they are fighting for small businesses. Any sane business man would much rather have increased 'demand' rather than lower taxes. The stimulus package increased 'demand' at a time when demand was shrinking. A tax cut to businesses in the face of shrinking demand means they will simply pocket more money since there isn't anyone to buy their product.
Demand drives growth, not tax cuts for the wealthy. Giving tax cuts to the lower economic classes generates more demand because they have to spend money just to survive. The rich have plenty to cover normal life expenses already.
Willingly purchase gas? Exactly how does this economy work without gasoline? We're addicted quite clearly and *still* give the oil industry BILLIONS in subsidies while they make BILLIONS in profit PER MONTH.
No one is saying just tax X for the sake of taxing. There is clear and incontrovertible evidence showing the damage fossil fuels are causing. Renewable sources will solve that problem but will never be as cheap as gas or oil are today.
Yes I said they will never be as cheap as gas or oil are today. Neither will gas or oil. Those will only go up in price (notice the $4/gallon creeping in this week?) while green tech will remain relatively constant in price or even go down as economies of scale are provided.
So we can wait for gas and oil to go up and THEN pay for converting the economy quickly (i.e. expensively) or we can start now and use the taxes on fossil fuels to fund the transitions at a lower more gradual price rise. That's called being economical when faced with a choice. You and the GOP seem to want the more expensive plan...
$40 billion a year is chump change compared to the money the Global Warming industry will get if they manage to push their "tax all carbon/energy" treaties and regulations.
You know what else its chump change compared to? The environment damage that is being caused by use of the fossil fuels in the first place.
Taxing things that are 'bad for us' is a tried and true way to drive behavior where you want it to go *before* the 'market' drives it there. You do this when you know that waiting for the 'market' to catch up will cost orders of magnitude more to fix the problem than fixing it at a more even pace will by starting early.
Since we're talking 'software' here, effectively zero. Digital copies cost nothing to make - which is why piracy works and why trying to compare digital copies to real world physical items is apples vs oranges.
Game emulators are wildly popular because they let you run those old games without the need for the 'dongle'...in this case the entire physical machine and the cartridge with the game on it.
I was under the assumption that what is effective for something that costs $20 a copy can be applied at least in part to something that costs $10,000 a copy.
A relatively invalid assumption. The economics and scale are completely different. If I pay $20 and it annoys me, well I get what I pay for. If I pay $10,000 and it annoys me? I'm going to scream bloody murder at the provider. If I'm buying a 'tool' that costs $10,000 per seat chances are the people using it are paid a pretty high percentage of that amount in salary. If the dongle breaks or my internet is down and they can't 'authenticate', I'm going to be out significant money until a new 'dongle' is shipped. Even a day or two is running into serious money.
But back to support. Playing a 'game' just isn't a complex task. It's a game, it's meant to be fun and enjoyable. Complex tasks like video editing or programming or rocket science software are always going to have a need additional assistance as the number of variables that go into producing the product are staggering. Not everyone will need outside support, but who better to support 'your' tool, than 'you'?
Then it's not a very complex piece of software and therefore not worth the money they are charging.
If something is truly worth $10,000 a copy, it's not going to be point and click stupid easy as it's trying to do things that are by nature aren't 'easy'.
The same growth that completely closed it back in the late 1990s perhaps? Couple that with a return to tax rates that actually tax fairly and you get a lot closer to a gap that is very closeable by growth.
Apparently reading comprehension isn't your strong suit. I didn't say anything of the sort. I said that some investments are worth it even if you can't see the finish line.
By your argument of profitability, we wouldn't have the internet or a national highway system. I don't see that as a plus for society...or the economy.
Yes their fervor to use those agencies for many things is well documented. It's also a prime example of said hypocrisy because they have said time and again that the government can't do anything right and the private sector is much better suited.
All the way from Reagan:
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
To Pawlenty just last year:
If you can find it on Google, the government shouldn't be doing it
Show me a 10 year plan for a nationwide highway system in a country where hardly anyone had cars that could drive very far.
Show me the 10 year plan for a national communication system that covers everybody. By that I mean the Post Office. No private corp would *ever* do that.
Hell show me *any* plan for going to the moon that made financial sense. Yet doing so created massive new industries and things we hadn't even imagined before.
Investment and research is how we move forward as a society. If you waited until it was 'profitable' it would never happen or happen so far down the road as to be non-existent. And no, you don't always know where it's going, but the other option is just sitting still while other countries are plowing money into research and development. The Chinese are spending something like 10x the amount of GDP we are. Are you really sure you want to just wait for them to come up with things?
That's like saying college tuition doesn't pay for your salary after you graduate.
That whole internet economy? Government funded research built it (insert stale Al Gore joke if you must).
Interstate highway system, infrastructure 'investment' without which this country simply wouldn't be a shadow of itself today. And you know how they built it? Using research paid for by the government.
There isn't enough money to balance the budget through cuts. The only way to balance the budget is through growth. And research investment is a tried and proven way to increase growth.
As I said in another post in this discussion, install solar at time of construction and now your 'deaths' are largely absorbed by the already on the roof workers.
Transportation of materials deaths? really? You do realize that absolutely *every* activity has these costs right?
Production of the panels? again, every thing has this.
But more importantly, you are talking about normal 'operational' conditions. Construction, transportation and maintenance. These are not 'potential' scenarios but actual real things that have to happen.
A nuclear disaster doesn't 'have' to happen. That's what 'potential' deaths are. What are the 'potential' deaths should solar panels 'fail'? A wind mill? Don't be within a 1/4 mile when it falls down. etc. How do you deal with a full blown core breach and exposure? You simply can't without quite a few killing people.
Dude, solar on the roof. And even then small wind turbines com in lots of sizes and shapes. Outputs 6 kW hours. Stand a few up in a neighborhood and you've got a significant local source of power with no transmission losses.
Sorry they aren't. Coal has quite a good number of operational deaths in the mining side and on the health effects of emissions side. Those aren't exactly 'potential', those are factually expected given the pollution of the atmosphere and the dangers of mining.
Solar? potential deaths? seriously?
Wind - again, don't stand within a 1/4 mile of a big turbine when it's really windy and there aren't any potential deaths.
Hydro - again, planning for expected scenarios like a dam breaking by restricting housing in the valley downstream solves that problem pretty easily. Or even just making reinforced high ground evacuation sites like they do for tsunamis. No significant 'potential' deaths.
Oil - a harder nut to crack as the effects of spills tend to be less direct and take longer to materialize but I won't say there are huge 'potential' deaths there. As we saw in the Gulf disaster (or rather didn't see), adequate planning can mitigate much of the 'potential' damages.
All of the above are normal and expected operational situations that you can plan for and implement. You simply can't do that for a reactor breach because you can't go into the area. When it fails, it's gone and you simply can't do anything about it without killing quite a few people. Chernobyl's workers paid the ultimate price to save a lot more people. If you don't have that ability...and when it's failed, you don't get to say what you will and will not have to fix it.
Failure scenarios mean that the precautions didn't work. You no longer have backups and have to deal with the full brunt of the disaster. Dams and spills are the only ones you can remotely say fall into this category and both of those only cause damage in a very limited area that you can plan for and mitigate.
Nuclear failure renders 10s or 100s of square miles inhabitable for decades. And everybody in that area is at risk for 'potential' effects. It's the reason nuclear plants cost so much. They simply can not fail. And yet as we've seen...they do.
So you agree that any death estimates associated with nuclear are without reasonable merit. So the death argument should be removed as a reason why it is a good idea.
actual deaths from nuclear power, from mining through to nulcear accident, are so few, that even deaths from people installing wind or solar is comparable.
Ah the converse. If they are so few as to be a reason that nuclear is a good idea, then solar is likewise a good idea for the same reason. Hence it should also be removed as a reason why nuclear is 'better or good'.
Storage is and will be built into any system's cost. You pay for the storage and transportation of coal and gasoline - the difference is the point in the cycle at which the energy is stored. In gas and coal it's stored upon creation of the fuel (millions of years ago). With solar and hydrogen it's stored at the time the 'fuel' is consumed. With nuclear you even get to pay for the post use storage (x 100s of years) - which isn't reflected in its price...
The key difference is that with solar/wind/hydro etc, the 'fuel' is quite literally 'free'. In every other system, you have to pay for the fuel itself as well as the infrastructure.
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So, what exact behavior is our progressive income tax system driving?
Perhaps lowering the cost of entry into a civilized and functional society?
The point of a progressive tax system is that how do you tax someone who only made $100 a year? Do you really take $25 from him? or is the income so low as to be worth more by letting him have the full $100.
The 'value' of money is greatly impacted by how much of it you have. If you only make $40K a year, spending $100 a month is a significant additional expense. If you make $1 million a year, spending that additional $2500 a month is a relative pittance. The price of normal living doesn't scale with income. So you skew your taxes so that the less well off pay a bit less so they can grow. Those that have grown, pay a little more to help those that are still in the lower brackets.
The upper brackets, the small businesses will very much want to have lots more people with a little more money than a few people with a lot more money.
Don't believe the GOP claptrap about how they are fighting for small businesses. Any sane business man would much rather have increased 'demand' rather than lower taxes. The stimulus package increased 'demand' at a time when demand was shrinking. A tax cut to businesses in the face of shrinking demand means they will simply pocket more money since there isn't anyone to buy their product.
Demand drives growth, not tax cuts for the wealthy. Giving tax cuts to the lower economic classes generates more demand because they have to spend money just to survive. The rich have plenty to cover normal life expenses already.
Call me, I'll short you as much of it as you want ;-)
Willingly purchase gas? Exactly how does this economy work without gasoline? We're addicted quite clearly and *still* give the oil industry BILLIONS in subsidies while they make BILLIONS in profit PER MONTH.
No one is saying just tax X for the sake of taxing. There is clear and incontrovertible evidence showing the damage fossil fuels are causing. Renewable sources will solve that problem but will never be as cheap as gas or oil are today.
Yes I said they will never be as cheap as gas or oil are today. Neither will gas or oil. Those will only go up in price (notice the $4/gallon creeping in this week?) while green tech will remain relatively constant in price or even go down as economies of scale are provided.
So we can wait for gas and oil to go up and THEN pay for converting the economy quickly (i.e. expensively) or we can start now and use the taxes on fossil fuels to fund the transitions at a lower more gradual price rise. That's called being economical when faced with a choice. You and the GOP seem to want the more expensive plan...
$40 billion a year is chump change compared to the money the Global Warming industry will get if they manage to push their "tax all carbon/energy" treaties and regulations.
You know what else its chump change compared to? The environment damage that is being caused by use of the fossil fuels in the first place.
Taxing things that are 'bad for us' is a tried and true way to drive behavior where you want it to go *before* the 'market' drives it there. You do this when you know that waiting for the 'market' to catch up will cost orders of magnitude more to fix the problem than fixing it at a more even pace will by starting early.
how much does an arcade cabinet+PCB cost again?
Since we're talking 'software' here, effectively zero. Digital copies cost nothing to make - which is why piracy works and why trying to compare digital copies to real world physical items is apples vs oranges.
Game emulators are wildly popular because they let you run those old games without the need for the 'dongle'...in this case the entire physical machine and the cartridge with the game on it.
I was under the assumption that what is effective for something that costs $20 a copy can be applied at least in part to something that costs $10,000 a copy.
A relatively invalid assumption. The economics and scale are completely different. If I pay $20 and it annoys me, well I get what I pay for. If I pay $10,000 and it annoys me? I'm going to scream bloody murder at the provider. If I'm buying a 'tool' that costs $10,000 per seat chances are the people using it are paid a pretty high percentage of that amount in salary. If the dongle breaks or my internet is down and they can't 'authenticate', I'm going to be out significant money until a new 'dongle' is shipped. Even a day or two is running into serious money.
But back to support. Playing a 'game' just isn't a complex task. It's a game, it's meant to be fun and enjoyable. Complex tasks like video editing or programming or rocket science software are always going to have a need additional assistance as the number of variables that go into producing the product are staggering. Not everyone will need outside support, but who better to support 'your' tool, than 'you'?
Show me a video game that is worth $10,000 a copy. A video game by definition is not a 'hard' thing to use, hence why it won't need support.
Then it's not a very complex piece of software and therefore not worth the money they are charging.
If something is truly worth $10,000 a copy, it's not going to be point and click stupid easy as it's trying to do things that are by nature aren't 'easy'.
Plus you'll annoy customers who'll inevitably lose/break dongles.
Either you build in a workaround that users with broken dongles can use until they get a new one shipped or they are SOL.
Option 1 - you've defeated the purpose of the dongle
Option 2 - Customer gets so pissed off they find a different product that just works.
Uh, the war on drugs is from Reagan. This was instituted to prevent illegal use of the drugs.
Quick googling provides quota history back to at least 2002 so maybe it was Bush.
Personally I'd love to see Limbaugh come out against the quotas on Oxycontin...
Indeed. Such as listening to their brains fry when you ask them this:
So if you believe that the government shouldn't be involved in religion at all...you obviously believe that polygamy should be legal right Mr. Romney?
After neurosurgeons cut a hole in their skulls....A computer was able to reconstruct the original word 80 to 90 percent of the time.
And that word was, I'm guessing...."OWWWW STOP DRILLING IN MY HEAD!!!!!"
The same growth that completely closed it back in the late 1990s perhaps? Couple that with a return to tax rates that actually tax fairly and you get a lot closer to a gap that is very closeable by growth.
Apparently reading comprehension isn't your strong suit. I didn't say anything of the sort. I said that some investments are worth it even if you can't see the finish line.
By your argument of profitability, we wouldn't have the internet or a national highway system. I don't see that as a plus for society...or the economy.
All the way from Reagan:
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
To Pawlenty just last year:
If you can find it on Google, the government shouldn't be doing it
The pattern is quite clear as is their hypocrisy
Since when have Dem's (or Obama) ever said the government is the only way to do things?
The GOP has been saying government is the entire problem with America since at least the Reagan era...
Show me a 10 year plan for a nationwide highway system in a country where hardly anyone had cars that could drive very far.
Show me the 10 year plan for a national communication system that covers everybody. By that I mean the Post Office. No private corp would *ever* do that.
Hell show me *any* plan for going to the moon that made financial sense. Yet doing so created massive new industries and things we hadn't even imagined before.
Investment and research is how we move forward as a society. If you waited until it was 'profitable' it would never happen or happen so far down the road as to be non-existent. And no, you don't always know where it's going, but the other option is just sitting still while other countries are plowing money into research and development. The Chinese are spending something like 10x the amount of GDP we are. Are you really sure you want to just wait for them to come up with things?
Research doesn't balance the budget.
That's like saying college tuition doesn't pay for your salary after you graduate.
That whole internet economy? Government funded research built it (insert stale Al Gore joke if you must).
Interstate highway system, infrastructure 'investment' without which this country simply wouldn't be a shadow of itself today. And you know how they built it? Using research paid for by the government.
There isn't enough money to balance the budget through cuts. The only way to balance the budget is through growth. And research investment is a tried and proven way to increase growth.
How do you sleep at night when we've seen this exact policy from the GOP for the last 4-6 years.
Clearly stated by Senate Minority Leader McConnell (KY):
"Our number one priority is to make Obama a one term President."
It really doesn't get much clearer than that.
Maybe they didn't reply because it's true?
:) Sources for your claims?
Details with actual study references
Or are you just trolling?
As opposed to the uranium refinement and long term waste storage?
Everything has construction costs. Solar and wind don't have failure costs like nuclear does. Period.
As I said in another post in this discussion, install solar at time of construction and now your 'deaths' are largely absorbed by the already on the roof workers.
Transportation of materials deaths? really? You do realize that absolutely *every* activity has these costs right?
Production of the panels? again, every thing has this.
But more importantly, you are talking about normal 'operational' conditions. Construction, transportation and maintenance. These are not 'potential' scenarios but actual real things that have to happen.
A nuclear disaster doesn't 'have' to happen. That's what 'potential' deaths are. What are the 'potential' deaths should solar panels 'fail'? A wind mill? Don't be within a 1/4 mile when it falls down. etc. How do you deal with a full blown core breach and exposure? You simply can't without quite a few killing people.
Dude, solar on the roof. And even then small wind turbines com in lots of sizes and shapes. Outputs 6 kW hours. Stand a few up in a neighborhood and you've got a significant local source of power with no transmission losses.
Or a 6 foot diameter blade tip rotor that estimates 1500 kW/h annually.
Rather than massive big plant, think lots of smaller installations that can provide a good chunk of base load. All using 'free' fuel.
Sorry they aren't. Coal has quite a good number of operational deaths in the mining side and on the health effects of emissions side. Those aren't exactly 'potential', those are factually expected given the pollution of the atmosphere and the dangers of mining.
Solar? potential deaths? seriously?
Wind - again, don't stand within a 1/4 mile of a big turbine when it's really windy and there aren't any potential deaths.
Hydro - again, planning for expected scenarios like a dam breaking by restricting housing in the valley downstream solves that problem pretty easily. Or even just making reinforced high ground evacuation sites like they do for tsunamis. No significant 'potential' deaths.
Oil - a harder nut to crack as the effects of spills tend to be less direct and take longer to materialize but I won't say there are huge 'potential' deaths there. As we saw in the Gulf disaster (or rather didn't see), adequate planning can mitigate much of the 'potential' damages.
All of the above are normal and expected operational situations that you can plan for and implement. You simply can't do that for a reactor breach because you can't go into the area. When it fails, it's gone and you simply can't do anything about it without killing quite a few people. Chernobyl's workers paid the ultimate price to save a lot more people. If you don't have that ability...and when it's failed, you don't get to say what you will and will not have to fix it.
Failure scenarios mean that the precautions didn't work. You no longer have backups and have to deal with the full brunt of the disaster. Dams and spills are the only ones you can remotely say fall into this category and both of those only cause damage in a very limited area that you can plan for and mitigate.
Nuclear failure renders 10s or 100s of square miles inhabitable for decades. And everybody in that area is at risk for 'potential' effects. It's the reason nuclear plants cost so much. They simply can not fail. And yet as we've seen...they do.
Nah, they use very secure Syrian passwords...
And are notoriously exaggerated.
So you agree that any death estimates associated with nuclear are without reasonable merit. So the death argument should be removed as a reason why it is a good idea.
actual deaths from nuclear power, from mining through to nulcear accident, are so few, that even deaths from people installing wind or solar is comparable.
Ah the converse. If they are so few as to be a reason that nuclear is a good idea, then solar is likewise a good idea for the same reason. Hence it should also be removed as a reason why nuclear is 'better or good'.
Storage is and will be built into any system's cost. You pay for the storage and transportation of coal and gasoline - the difference is the point in the cycle at which the energy is stored. In gas and coal it's stored upon creation of the fuel (millions of years ago). With solar and hydrogen it's stored at the time the 'fuel' is consumed. With nuclear you even get to pay for the post use storage (x 100s of years) - which isn't reflected in its price...
The key difference is that with solar/wind/hydro etc, the 'fuel' is quite literally 'free'. In every other system, you have to pay for the fuel itself as well as the infrastructure.