Yes, but multiply that times ten, since they are calculating the cost of the tax cut over ten years.
the military budget is currently about 18% of our federal budget IIRC.
So how much is this really costing us?
672/3423=.19
so.19*.18 = about 3.4 percent of the federal budget, and that is generous.
Tax changes do have a direct effect on the economy greater than the amount of money recieved due to the multiplier effect. That 5000 gets spent many times over. So the net benefit to the economy is greater than 5000. You forget that the economy is not static, its about circulation, not quantity.
The business cycle is a short run effect, it doesnt determine long run demand, the money supply does, thats why monetary policy is good at fighting inflation, but its not so easy to prime the economy using monetary policy. Consumer confidence is a product of many things, but i think having more cash in the pocket would make most ppl more optimistic.
Now technically, you are cutting the tax rate, not taxes. A change in tax rates is only part of what determines the total amount of taxes collected, the other is economic activity. Because tax revenue is proportional to income/GDP and the tax rate, the effect on tax revenue is partially offsetting, the degree of which may be hotly debated, but it is established. It is true that increased growth wont, in the short run, entirely offset lost tax revenue. But over the long run, lower taxes are a net benefit, presuming we dont run in the red permanently, because crowding out does become an issue at some point, but it isnt right now, just look at interest rates. (Of course i could also argue that reduced unemployment will reduce demand for social services too, but ill kindly leave that out of the "tax cut cost" debate) To be fair, supply-side isnt just about taxes, its about things like tort reform (which is a big reason that government provided healthcare is touted as being so much cheeper) and regulation and other barriers to doing business. The idea is to reduce costs and increase supply, not just stimulate demand and create inflation. Yes, large changes in marginal tax rates to have an effect on the economy, its not voodoo. Obviously you can't just elmininate all taxes, and i dont think anyone is suggesting that, but Bushes tax cut is hardly that big, especially considering that it is spread out over ten years and amounts to about 2% of the federal budget IIRC.
And i dont buy the argument that america is headed down the crapper. Our wages, adjusted for inflation, contiune to rise, not as fast as they did right after WWII, but they still have been rising for years, not just for the rich either. But trade does tend to equalize wages worldwide. It's just that rising productivity and education allow us to pay higher wages. In fact, rising productivity is what raises our living standard, fundamentally. Economics just sorts out how our scare resources get distributed, including all the money you are saving. You save and invest, dont you? Cause if you do, then you are part of the "rich some people" that you talk about.
The Browser and the widget set are two different things. They are using the Khtml rendering engine used by konq. as opposed to the gecko engine used by mozilla and its derivatives. No one is suggesting that apple use GTK+ or XUL for their gecko based browser, they are asking why they used the khtml engine instead of gecko. I think everyone assumes that apple with use an Aqua compliant GUI.
NO they cant be provided for free. Cause people finally got wise and realized that banner ads arent worth paying crazy amounts of money for. Most sites are either subsidized by a profitable company, run as a hobby, or used to provide information for a company in lieu of having to do it the dead tree or phone support way. (eg. a company makes a financial statement downloadable instead of having to print and distrubute 10000 of them to the shareholders)
The web does make publishing information cheeper, but there is still a cost in terms of bandwith and the time required to produce and maintain a relevant site. So its not really free.
You know, im getting kinda sick of this attitude, the "we have it so bad" attitude" you bunch of ungrateful wheps. Why must you dramatize everything in a chicken little fashion. Im not just picking on you here either, the media is just as bad. I mean we have a "health care crisis, social security crisis, crisis crisis crisis" the media screams. Sure we have problems, (Eg. the patriot act, DMCA, CFR) but sense of proportion would be appreciated. Reasonable people can disagree about what is and is not constitutional. We elect (we being people, because no matter how much money a company has, it can't punch the chad or fill in the blank) people to represent us, or vote them out of office. We have courts that have protected the constitution, on balance, because judges are human too, they dont get them all right. I guess it's just easier to stick to simple steriotypes than to engage in legitimate debate. Sayeth one slashdotter, "We're always on the brink of destruction because it sells. When was the last time you read an article with the title: 'Congratulations! We're still not glowing!' hell, this could be a great Onion Piece."
He wasnt complaining about all lawsuits.
Even conservatives dont want to get rid of your "right to sue." His complaint is about the huge cost of the legal system. Defending against lawsuits and other legal action is expensive and is extremely common, even for companies that may not have done anything wrong. There is also the the huge increase in punitive damages, way out of proportion to compensatory damages. The US, unlike Britain, does not have a loser pays system, so getting sued costs big money.
But i think you got this in your third point, when you talked about the complexity and the legal morass of laws that we have. Can't we just enforce some simple laws. Copyright infringement was illegal before the DMCA, did we really need to add another 100 pages to US law to make it more illegal?
the replacement of the shuttle what proposed by dan quale's "white house space council" back during the first Bush's presidency. To quote quale "NASA didnt mind having us help fight its budget battles with OMB and on the hill, but they wanted to make up those budgets themselves." and "after the meeting, Darman told Albrecht that this made watergate look small" (on NASA giving congress one timeline and cost, but actually not planning to launch until 2003 instead of 1999 and at a much higher final cost). Anyways, my point is that space exploration is a natural technological investment, the same way we spend money on the military and other blue sky research. But that maybe the current structure sucks, the shuttle is horribly expensive to maintain etc etc..
Actually that is a good idea, except that the secret service should stick around as an elite organization, since you would want a separate branch handling presidential detail and stuff like corruption in the FBI. If you let the Secret Serivce stay, then you have to let the run counterfitting, since that was their original purpose. But other than that, i would like to see the FBI run civil law enforcement, and a (new?) branch of the military that would manage our "international security" like border control, etc. The DEA, ATF, INS etc all seem like one more layer of bureaucracy. Keeping the secret service around makes sense, but the rest are really a duplication of effort.
my parents VCR died a number of years ago, after 15 years of service. They bought a 50 dollar panasonic and its worked for a good 5 years now. Yeah, lots of the cheep stuff is crap, but some of it works, its just that QC isnt worth it on really cheep stuff. And technology has made this stuff cheep, plus all the manufacturing done overseas.
The US has always been full of guns. But gun crime hasnt always been this bad.
It used to be the case, when everyone grew up in the country, and guns were a right of passage, that parents taugh their kids basic values and life lessons. Respect for guns was just one part of that. We have serious social problems, like poor education in the inner city and kids without responsible parents. Problems that afterschool programs dont solve. No school, no matter how well funded, can teach kids if their parents wont support them. That is the biggest problem we have today.
Why else would all these companies hand equal amounts of soft money to BOTH parties? [commoncause.org] ] Two words, PROTECTION MONEY.
Whats that, you dont want heavy new regulations, then we want $$? So they end up paying money to the group they support, and money to the other party "just in case" so they dont get shafted if the group they support looses.
In case you missed it, the Montreal Protocol banned Production of Freeon in 1990.
Most cooling units built today use a non-ozone depleting chemical relative of Freeon. Actually there are a couple of them. So while it might be "cool" and "SUPERDOOPERLOUD", its a solution looking for a problem.
The problem is that if you make recycling too expensive for companies, it becomes a serious enforcement problem. It would actually be better for the environment if state and local governments just rolled it into the cost of waste disposal. Ideally the consumer would pay when they throw it away, that makes it their responsibility, as it should be. What this does is pass the buck to the manufacturers, since the govt finds it easier to regulate them. But this means more paperwork and cost for the little guy, which is harder on him, since HP can probably have a unit devoted to just disposal, unlike a mom-and-pop store. Im all for internalizing costs, but nonpoint pollution is a real SOB to enforce, thats why the public sector exists, because even though we didnt do the pollution ourself (well not neccessarily) we all benefitted from it, and it hurts all of us, so why shouldnt we share the cost of it (at least the pollution that has already taken place). Besides, you cant retroactively charge for the computers already sold now can you? So who gets saddled with disposing them?
you do realize that the tax cut isnt just for the top 1% dont you. their percentage cut in actually much smaller. However, the bottom 1/3 of americans dont pay any income taxes after deductions, so it makes it kinda hard to cut their taxes, unless you take it out of their soc security and medicare taxes, which is supposed to be a separate sort of thing
LOL
You want to know why the US isnt competive in sugar production...Environmental regulations.
Most US sugar growers (at least in ND where i live) think they could compete without subsidies, if the developing world had the kind of environmental regulation that we have in the US. The polution controls on sugar refining cost big $$$. So on one hand, many of you slashdot types are all antisubsidy, but then you blame america when these places have poor environmental policy. Lots of ppl in our govt WANT them to have tighter policies, because it makes us more competitive. (there has to be a pretty big disparity in cost of pollution controls for a company to move solely for that reason, usually its labor cost, not lax pollution controls that cause industry to build in china or mexico.)
Im very free trade BTW. And i agree that protectionism sucks, but the world isnt a perfect place. I guess i agree with what you said, except i think the US could compete in the sugar market (well most farmers could, not all). Protectionism of domestic markets drives the world price down. Which ends up costing the tax payers of every country. If we all had similar ag policy (laws, subsidies and all) it would solve a lot of disputes about protectionism and trade.
yeah we did, because its been open policy for years, population reduction that is. Because massive population growth makes it really hard to raise living standards. Most highly developed countries have the opposite problem. But tradition in most most these countries, of large families due to high death rates, makes it very difficult to raise living standards. Its not some conspiracy to poison the "third world" and i dont think kissinger's plan to control population involved poisoning them with old electronics. It seems that blaming "the man" is the convenient excuse for what happens, not the guy in china or thier government, which probably has laws against this sort of thing. I doubt that poisoning china is a public policy goal. Its the law of unintended consequences.
Its the pesky last mile thing Laying competing physical infrastructure to the last mile is not very cost effective. Wireless OTOH doesnt have this problem. what if there were 5 phone/cable companies in every city running lines into every house. What you have is a situation where there are high fixed costs, and in the long run, one provider (who has the most market share) wins out. Wireless eliminates that problem in all but the most sparcely populated areas.
actually the bit about ashcroft and the statues is one of those tales that isnt true, but people keep repeating it because it fits the steriotype that he has as this buttoned down southern religious conservative type.
Google around and hear was ashcroft himself has to say about the whole thing.
You may not like him, but he is honest about what he thinks, whether you agree with him or not.
Should public money be used to subsidize my online porn habit?? Obviously the public, for the most part, says no. Now filtering is bad, inefficient, and i tell that to parents and teachers. Better to know exactly where your kids go than to rely on faulty software to "guide" them. Its one thing to say porn is protected speech, which you may or may not agree with, but its another to say that its your "right" to use public money to view it. If the community (or whoever is funding the library, in this case, they are getting federal dollars) then they should have a say in how that money is spent.
Hey, now i listen to Rush and read slashdot, i'll bet you find that difficult to stomach. Yeah, sometimes he goes over the top to make his point. You have to learn to distinguish. quote: So it is not so remarkable that a noted conservative lawyer would see perfect reason for action to be brought against Microsoft for the transgressions we have all witnessed and experienced over the years; what is remarkable is that people would find such a position at all unusual. It is unfortunate that some conservative commentators have sided with Microsoft, which to me is the same kind of knee-jerk response that I find so repugnant when it comes from the other side of the political spectrum. Part of the reason it so repels me is that it leaves the impression that conservatives hold the view that companies can do no wrong -- which is as foolish as believing that individuals can do no wrong, or that government can do no wrong. There's little justification in becoming yet another political sheep in yet another political herd.--robert h bork.
While i dont agree with the dmca, your chacteriation of the economy as a zero sum game is incorrect. Such a statement is laughable for anyone who has ever taken any kind of course in the realm of economics.
Like many other stupid laws, instead of just enforcing the existing laws against the infringers, we pass yet another law, as if that will stop them. So they end up breaking two laws instead of one. Meanwhile, the illconsidered parts of the new laws create havoc and further complicate life. Most of the laws on the books today are totally redundant. All because congress needs to "do something" so people can "feel good."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but multiply that times ten, since they are calculating the cost of the tax cut over ten years. the military budget is currently about 18% of our federal budget IIRC. So how much is this really costing us? 672/3423= .19
so .19*.18 = about 3.4 percent of the federal budget, and that is generous.
Tax changes do have a direct effect on the economy greater than the amount of money recieved due to the multiplier effect. That 5000 gets spent many times over. So the net benefit to the economy is greater than 5000. You forget that the economy is not static, its about circulation, not quantity.
The business cycle is a short run effect, it doesnt determine long run demand, the money supply does, thats why monetary policy is good at fighting inflation, but its not so easy to prime the economy using monetary policy.
Consumer confidence is a product of many things, but i think having more cash in the pocket would make most ppl more optimistic.
Now technically, you are cutting the tax rate, not taxes. A change in tax rates is only part of what determines the total amount of taxes collected, the other is economic activity. Because tax revenue is proportional to income/GDP and the tax rate, the effect on tax revenue is partially offsetting, the degree of which may be hotly debated, but it is established. It is true that increased growth wont, in the short run, entirely offset lost tax revenue. But over the long run, lower taxes are a net benefit, presuming we dont run in the red permanently, because crowding out does become an issue at some point, but it isnt right now, just look at interest rates. (Of course i could also argue that reduced unemployment will reduce demand for social services too, but ill kindly leave that out of the "tax cut cost" debate)
To be fair, supply-side isnt just about taxes, its about things like tort reform (which is a big reason that government provided healthcare is touted as being so much cheeper) and regulation and other barriers to doing business. The idea is to reduce costs and increase supply, not just stimulate demand and create inflation. Yes, large changes in marginal tax rates to have an effect on the economy, its not voodoo. Obviously you can't just elmininate all taxes, and i dont think anyone is suggesting that, but Bushes tax cut is hardly that big, especially considering that it is spread out over ten years and amounts to about 2% of the federal budget IIRC.
And i dont buy the argument that america is headed down the crapper. Our wages, adjusted for inflation, contiune to rise, not as fast as they did right after WWII, but they still have been rising for years, not just for the rich either.
But trade does tend to equalize wages worldwide.
It's just that rising productivity and education allow us to pay higher wages.
In fact, rising productivity is what raises our living standard, fundamentally. Economics just sorts out how our scare resources get distributed, including all the money you are saving. You save and invest, dont you? Cause if you do, then you are part of the "rich some people" that you talk about.
The Browser and the widget set are two different things. They are using the Khtml rendering engine used by konq. as opposed to the gecko engine used by mozilla and its derivatives. No one is suggesting that apple use GTK+ or XUL for their gecko based browser, they are asking why they used the khtml engine instead of gecko. I think everyone assumes that apple with use an Aqua compliant GUI.
NO they cant be provided for free.
Cause people finally got wise and realized that banner ads arent worth paying crazy amounts of money for. Most sites are either subsidized by a profitable company, run as a hobby, or used to provide information for a company in lieu of having to do it the dead tree or phone support way. (eg. a company makes a financial statement downloadable instead of having to print and distrubute 10000 of them to the shareholders)
The web does make publishing information cheeper, but there is still a cost in terms of bandwith and the time required to produce and maintain a relevant site. So its not really free.
"software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry."
You know, im getting kinda sick of this attitude, the "we have it so bad" attitude" you bunch of ungrateful wheps.
Why must you dramatize everything in a chicken little fashion. Im not just picking on you here either, the media is just as bad. I mean we have a "health care crisis, social security crisis, crisis crisis crisis" the media screams. Sure we have problems, (Eg. the patriot act, DMCA, CFR) but sense of proportion would be appreciated. Reasonable people can disagree about what is and is not constitutional.
We elect (we being people, because no matter how much money a company has, it can't punch the chad or fill in the blank) people to represent us, or vote them out of office. We have courts that have protected the constitution, on balance, because judges are human too, they dont get them all right.
I guess it's just easier to stick to simple steriotypes than to engage in legitimate debate.
Sayeth one slashdotter, "We're always on the brink of destruction because it sells. When was the last time you read an article with the title:
'Congratulations! We're still not glowing!'
hell, this could be a great Onion Piece."
that pushed against a national id card? Sounds dyslexic
He wasnt complaining about all lawsuits. Even conservatives dont want to get rid of your "right to sue." His complaint is about the huge cost of the legal system. Defending against lawsuits and other legal action is expensive and is extremely common, even for companies that may not have done anything wrong. There is also the the huge increase in punitive damages, way out of proportion to compensatory damages. The US, unlike Britain, does not have a loser pays system, so getting sued costs big money. But i think you got this in your third point, when you talked about the complexity and the legal morass of laws that we have. Can't we just enforce some simple laws. Copyright infringement was illegal before the DMCA, did we really need to add another 100 pages to US law to make it more illegal?
the replacement of the shuttle what proposed by dan quale's "white house space council" back during the first Bush's presidency.
To quote quale "NASA didnt mind having us help fight its budget battles with OMB and on the hill, but they wanted to make up those budgets themselves."
and "after the meeting, Darman told Albrecht that this made watergate look small" (on NASA giving congress one timeline and cost, but actually not planning to launch until 2003 instead of 1999 and at a much higher final cost).
Anyways, my point is that space exploration is a natural technological investment, the same way we spend money on the military and other blue sky research. But that maybe the current structure sucks, the shuttle is horribly expensive to maintain etc etc..
Actually that is a good idea, except that the secret service should stick around as an elite organization, since you would want a separate branch handling presidential detail and stuff like corruption in the FBI. If you let the Secret Serivce stay, then you have to let the run counterfitting, since that was their original purpose.
But other than that, i would like to see the FBI run civil law enforcement, and a (new?) branch of the military that would manage our "international security" like border control, etc.
The DEA, ATF, INS etc all seem like one more layer of bureaucracy. Keeping the secret service around makes sense, but the rest are really a duplication of effort.
my parents VCR died a number of years ago, after 15 years of service. They bought a 50 dollar panasonic
and its worked for a good 5 years now. Yeah, lots of the cheep stuff is crap, but some of it works, its just that QC isnt worth it on really cheep stuff. And technology has made this stuff cheep, plus all the manufacturing done overseas.
The US has always been full of guns. But gun crime hasnt always been this bad.
It used to be the case, when everyone grew up in the country, and guns were a right of passage, that parents taugh their kids basic values and life lessons. Respect for guns was just one part of that. We have serious social problems, like poor education in the inner city and kids without responsible parents. Problems that afterschool programs dont solve. No school, no matter how well funded, can teach kids if their parents wont support them. That is the biggest problem we have today.
Why else would all these companies hand equal amounts of soft money to BOTH parties? [commoncause.org] ]
Two words, PROTECTION MONEY.
Whats that, you dont want heavy new regulations, then we want $$? So they end up paying money to the group they support, and money to the other party "just in case" so they dont get shafted if the group they support looses.
Does anyone here have any exp with ami-ide raid on iwill mobos?
In case you missed it, the Montreal Protocol banned Production of Freeon in 1990. Most cooling units built today use a non-ozone depleting chemical relative of Freeon. Actually there are a couple of them. So while it might be "cool" and "SUPERDOOPERLOUD", its a solution looking for a problem.
The problem is that if you make recycling too expensive for companies, it becomes a serious enforcement problem. It would actually be better for the environment if state and local governments just rolled it into the cost of waste disposal. Ideally the consumer would pay when they throw it away, that makes it their responsibility, as it should be. What this does is pass the buck to the manufacturers, since the govt finds it easier to regulate them. But this means more paperwork and cost for the little guy, which is harder on him, since HP can probably have a unit devoted to just disposal, unlike a mom-and-pop store.
Im all for internalizing costs, but nonpoint pollution is a real SOB to enforce, thats why the public sector exists, because even though we didnt do the pollution ourself (well not neccessarily) we all benefitted from it, and it hurts all of us, so why shouldnt we share the cost of it (at least the pollution that has already taken place). Besides, you cant retroactively charge for the computers already sold now can you? So who gets saddled with disposing them?
you do realize that the tax cut isnt just for the top 1% dont you.
their percentage cut in actually much smaller. However, the bottom 1/3 of americans dont pay any income taxes after deductions, so it makes it kinda hard to cut their taxes, unless you take it out of their soc security and medicare taxes, which is supposed to be a separate sort of thing
LOL You want to know why the US isnt competive in sugar production...Environmental regulations. Most US sugar growers (at least in ND where i live) think they could compete without subsidies, if the developing world had the kind of environmental regulation that we have in the US. The polution controls on sugar refining cost big $$$. So on one hand, many of you slashdot types are all antisubsidy, but then you blame america when these places have poor environmental policy. Lots of ppl in our govt WANT them to have tighter policies, because it makes us more competitive. (there has to be a pretty big disparity in cost of pollution controls for a company to move solely for that reason, usually its labor cost, not lax pollution controls that cause industry to build in china or mexico.) Im very free trade BTW. And i agree that protectionism sucks, but the world isnt a perfect place. I guess i agree with what you said, except i think the US could compete in the sugar market (well most farmers could, not all). Protectionism of domestic markets drives the world price down. Which ends up costing the tax payers of every country. If we all had similar ag policy (laws, subsidies and all) it would solve a lot of disputes about protectionism and trade.
yeah we did,
because its been open policy for years, population reduction that is. Because massive population growth makes it really hard to raise living standards. Most highly developed countries have the opposite problem. But tradition in most most these countries, of large families due to high death rates, makes it very difficult to raise living standards. Its not some conspiracy to poison the "third world" and i dont think kissinger's plan to control population involved poisoning them with old electronics.
It seems that blaming "the man" is the convenient excuse for what happens, not the guy in china or thier government, which probably has laws against this sort of thing. I doubt that poisoning china is a public policy goal.
Its the law of unintended consequences.
Its the pesky last mile thing
Laying competing physical infrastructure to the last mile is not very cost effective. Wireless OTOH doesnt have this problem. what if there were 5 phone/cable companies in every city running lines into every house.
What you have is a situation where there are high fixed costs, and in the long run, one provider (who has the most market share) wins out. Wireless eliminates that problem in all but the most sparcely populated areas.
actually the bit about ashcroft and the statues is one of those tales that isnt true, but people keep repeating it because it fits the steriotype that he has as this buttoned down southern religious conservative type. Google around and hear was ashcroft himself has to say about the whole thing. You may not like him, but he is honest about what he thinks, whether you agree with him or not.
Should public money be used to subsidize my online porn habit??
Obviously the public, for the most part, says no.
Now filtering is bad, inefficient, and i tell that to parents and teachers. Better to know exactly where your kids go than to rely on faulty software to "guide" them.
Its one thing to say porn is protected speech, which you may or may not agree with, but its another to say that its your "right" to use public money to view it. If the community (or whoever is funding the library, in this case, they are getting federal dollars) then they should have a say in how that money is spent.
Hey, now i listen to Rush and read slashdot, i'll bet you find that difficult to stomach. Yeah, sometimes he goes over the top to make his point. You have to learn to distinguish.
quote:
So it is not so remarkable that a noted conservative lawyer would see perfect reason for action to be brought against Microsoft for the transgressions we have all witnessed and experienced over the years; what is remarkable is that people would find such a position at all unusual. It is unfortunate that some conservative commentators have sided with Microsoft, which to me is the same kind of knee-jerk response that I find so repugnant when it comes from the other side of the political spectrum. Part of the reason it so repels me is that it leaves the impression that conservatives hold the view that companies can do no wrong -- which is as foolish as believing that individuals can do no wrong, or that government can do no wrong. There's little justification in becoming yet another political sheep in yet another political herd.--robert h bork.
Well, i see the flamers are out in force today
While i dont agree with the dmca,
your chacteriation of the economy as a zero sum game is incorrect. Such a statement is laughable for anyone who has ever taken any kind of course in the realm of economics.
Like many other stupid laws, instead of just enforcing the existing laws against the infringers, we pass yet another law, as if that will stop them. So they end up breaking two laws instead of one. Meanwhile, the illconsidered parts of the new laws create havoc and further complicate life. Most of the laws on the books today are totally redundant. All because congress needs to "do something" so people can "feel good."