The term "cleared the neighborhood" is unfortunately misleading. And purposefully vague, I always thought. When does the neighborhood become cleared? There's a lot of asteroids in our near neighborhood (which result in rather significant accretion events, so to speak).
It is rather odd that such a slipshod definition has been rationalized on scientific grounds. I'm leaning towards that it's retaliation for the long ago act of naming Pluto in such a way that the planet's name contains the initials for the discoverers' former sponsor, Perceval Lowell. I doubt any one takes seriously the claim that in the future school students might be forced to memorize the names of hundreds of planets, merely because potentially hundreds could be found which would fit the existing definition.
And any discussion of gravitational dominance has to explain why there are more than one planet, Jupiter since Jupiter gravitationally dominates the rest of the Solar System of which we know from the Kuiper belt on in, outside of the Sun itself (the Sun has roughly 99% of the mass of the known Solar System, Jupiter has 90% of what's left).
Here's the thing: there's a place for reasoning, there's a place for a logical discussion, and sometimes, there's a place to put the argument in a way that the other party understands.
And I see we use the last case when we don't know how use the others.
Feel free to explain a better way to fight the argument inherent in the original post.
How about reasoning and logical discussion? Give those a try sometime.
You make a strong case for trying things out and seeing what happens. The entertainment value of seeing a lot of people simultaneously blow gaskets is immense.
As I see it, trying stuff out is the way you turn "unforeseeable" problems into foreseeable.
Meanwhile you will be causing a HUGE backup behind you
That hasn't happened in real life. Waves of backed up traffic are far more likely to come from things like accidents and/or idiots who braked suddenly, or merge conditions. And once those are established, that's the dominant traffic dynamics, not the alleged people who are following you.
You also get to enjoy the feeling of people cutting you off suddenly who didn't like how slow you were going, endangering you and them...
Never happened. As I was saying, I just travel a few miles slower. It's not a huge amount and it just works.
Of couse, I haven't been following the story for the past ten years. I'm just pointing out what's actually in the article. Thank you for the elaboration.
Randomly quoting bits from a politician who has been in a position of power for only a tiny fraction of the case is completely irrelevent.
I'll just note her opinion ceases to be irrelevant when she has and uses her power to block extradition. That might not end the saga, but it sure looks he's not going to be extradited ever to the US unless he travels to another country and gets caught and extradited there or someone kidnaps him.
The entire argument is, and always has been that he should be tried in the UK.
From the article:
The home secretary told MPs there was no doubt Mr McKinnon was "seriously ill" and the extradition warrant against him should be withdrawn.
Mrs May said the sole issue she had to consider was his human rights.
She said it was now for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, to decide whether he should face trial in the UK.
Mrs May said: "After careful consideration of all of the relevant material I have concluded that Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights. I have therefore withdrawn the extradition order against Mr McKinnon."
That sounds to me like the extradition has been completely rejected whether or not he is tried in the UK for his alleged activities.
You haven't answered my question. What makes you think you're better qualified to decide what's constitutional and what isn't than the Supreme Court?
It's not a matter of qualification. If I were to get appointed and approved by Congress, then I would be just as qualified as the current justices are. The thing is, I'm qualified enough to read and understand that things are going off the rails.
Yes, four justices agree with you. However, four is smaller than five. A unanimous decision is not required to determine the constitutionality of a law.
No, all citizens of the US have an obligation to respect and uphold the Constitution. Since this law wasn't overturned in the courts, it'll have to be overturned at the ballot box.
Also, you picked a relatively low-cost injury to talk about; what if it was cancer? Millions.
Why should cancer cost millions? I find it odd how many people care about the health care system and not about the outcome.
You remind me of Ford in the 70s, who assigned a dollar value to a person's life.
We all do that. When you take a risk for money, you have decided that the money is worth more than the risk to your life. When you get life insurance, you and the insurance company are explicitly putting a value on your life. In Ford's case, assigning values to human life is a natural consequence of setting public policy. It's not fair to us to create regulations that impose an inordinate burden for a meager gain in lifespan (for example, the EPA's lowering of the threshold for arsenic a few years back).
I'm hoping you're not as callous as you sound.
I'm aware of and understand other peoples' wants and emotions. But I try not to let those rule me. If that's your definition of callous, then I am callous and I see no reason to apologize for it.
And I hope you understand that taking other peoples' money can create suffering of its own. Creating generous and expensive health care causes other problems and costs.
It's worth noting that four justices agree with me.
Are you a legal professional? A law professor? Constitutional scholar? Or are you just someone frustrated with the fact that people disagree with your worldview?
Perhaps you should look at this ruling sometime. It's pretty messed up. For example, they severed a "coercive" part of the medicare expansion which mandated state spending. But the law was intended and written to be unsevereable (that is, that it must be accepted or rejected in total). So five justices decided, unconstitutionally I might add, which part of the law to keep and to reject.
The there's the individual mandate itself. There was considerable disagreement on whether it was a tax or not, with Justice Roberts holding both opinions. A majority ruled that the individual mandate didn't fall under the commerce clause or the necessary and proper clause. Roberts claimed that because capitation taxes (tax per head) were permitted by the Constitution, then taxes such as the individual mandate that penalized those who didn't were like a capitation tax (where I guess one doesn't act either) were constitutional even though regulation that attempted to penalize such inaction wouldn't be.
I don't know what it is about this law, but it seems to me that all branches of the federal government have acted in an unusually unprofessional and rather bizarre manner with respect to this law.
Safe driving is keeping up with traffic and keeping alterations of any variables to a minimum. That means where cars are to any side.
Oh come on. I'm not talking about driving super slow. A few MPH slower than the herd in the slow lane and you'll have a nice safe zone in front of you. I'm sure you can manage that without creating an unsafe situation.
Regardless of how safe you drive, if your vehicle doesn't have the capabilities of ones around it you become a hazard.
That's simply not true. We share roads with bicycles, motorcycles, and farm tractors. They don't magically become hazards (or more accurately, any more hazardous than any other vehicle on the road).
You can interpret the Constitution any way you want; you're entitled to your opinion. But, as corrupt/ideological as they are, they are still the Supreme Court of the United States, and you're not. If they say something is constitutional, then it is. That's the whole point of having SCOTUS in the first place.
And when that court and that government fails to do its duty in this regard, then it's up to the citizen (as it always has been) to uphold the Constitution.
If a surprise $20,000 expense is 'affordable' to you
That's what insurance is for. And saving money.
Stick to your own household, and either go bother to learn about how about 97% of the country lives or shut up.
So 97% of the country can't be bothered to save $20,000 or have insurance? Not only do I just not believe in the least this number you pulled out of nowhere, but why's that a public policy problem rather than a people acting stupid and getting what they deserve problem?
The mitigating factor was that there were simultaneous riots in Egypt that WERE a result of the film, and had nothing to do with 9/11.
Except that they started on 9/11. I think there were a number of instigators (and not just in the Middle East) looking to start something on this day. The arabic version of the offensive film just happens to come a week ahead of these riots. And these riots just happen to start on 9/11.
It didn't take a lot of brain power to be right on this one. An ambassador just happens to die of violence in the Middle East on September 11? But yes, I imagine Fox News didn't think there'd be any consequences to reporting that story wrong.
Where'd all this blather about free market come from? My view is that a huge part of the problem is the high cost of US labor. It simply isn't that valuable compared to Chinese or other labor to justify the premium. I could as is currently being done, just let the currency inflate until US wages are comparable to developing world wages. Or I could find ways to make US labor cheaper by cutting out government-based benefits which aren't really benefits.
For example, Social Security adds about 15% to the cost of a worker. When I last looked, there was a factor of six difference between the cost of a US worker and a Chinese worker. Ten 15% increases accounted for that difference, meaning that elimination of that single tax resulted in a tenth of the way there, logarithmically. Of course, Social Security has some sort of benefits to it, but who really wants less money decades from now rather than money in hand now when they need it?
Then there's cost of living. To that end, I propose the ending of educational loan subsidies altogether, the end of a tax credit for employer health insurance plans (Along with a significant shrinking in required health insurance coverage to medically necessary actions. If you want more coverage, you can still get it, you just pay more for it.), no tax consequences, good or bad for owning, borrowing against, or renting real estate, and elimination of all subsidies in US business and agriculture.
On the regulatory side, there is a vast amount of complexity (as I mentioned elsewhere something like 400k pages of law and regulation out there, plus an endless amount of case law). A persistent trimming back of that regulation would result in just about everything especially employing people being cheaper to do. It's ridiculous how many hurdles the federal government puts in the way of employing people.
Finally, I'd just get rid of the minimum wage altogether. A lot of people are unemployed because they simply aren't worth minimum wage.
However, shortly after its creation, the extreme right-wing movement ripped the wool off the Tea Party sheep and started wearing it, lest they look like the wolves that they are.
That's ok. Anyone is allowed to agree (or for that matter disagree) with the basic tenets of the tea party movement.
They still talk a good game about stopping corruption and lowering taxes, but once you elect a Tea Party-endorsed candidate, they immediately forget all about any of that and instead promote their social agenda.
Then I'll work to get them voted out. I know a lot of people seem unconcerned about whether a candidate will do what they promise (or position), but that's a pretty big deal for me.
Oh, and just to be pedantic, calling the ACA "unconstitutional" is black-letter wrong.
Given that it is a true statement, namely, that the individual mandate truly isn't supported by the Constitution as a valid means of collecting revenue and hence, is unconstitutional, then what's the point of saying otherwise? The Supreme Court can be stacked and was to sufficient degree (the vote was aside from the crazy thing that Justice Roberts did, strictly along ideological lines).
Call it 'inefficient' and 'short-sighted' and 'wasteful' all you want; those arguments can be made (as well as the fact that it doesn't give us what we need, which is a single payer system).
We don't need a single payer system, we need indefinite, healthy lives at moderate cost. For healthy person health care, it's generally pretty cheap. For example, I broke my arm in two places. That cost somewhere around $20,000 to patch up. Kind of high as one would expect in the US system, but affordable.
But for people in their last few years, the costs are expensive no matter what sort of health care system you are in. And there really isn't much value in heroic efforts to prolong one's death.
That's what I'll call here "deathbed theater". I see a significant portion of health care as merely show with little if any benefit for the dying patient. It's only dubious virtue over other ostentatious displays of mourning and grief for the departed is that it is done while the person is still alive.
I think any sort of public health care should be directed at things that have significant, demonstrable benefit such as immunizations, pregnancy care, and young child nutrition programs. Maybe needs based health care for health problems that have a fairly high benefit to cost ratio.
As for dying people, aside from providing a comfortable, pain-free place to die and a nice gravestone, I don't see any necessary duty to provide there. My view is that public health care should be very limited and it should be the choice of the patient how much they're willing to spend for health care. Single payer subverts that and gives patients little incentive to cut their health care consumption. That shows in massive, above inflation growth in health care costs through out the developed world.
Keep in mind that some stories were written down by people with an ax to grind. For example, a number of books were written down during the period of the Babylonian captivity when as I understand it, the upper class of the Kingdom of Judea were forced to move to Babylon (a standard tactic of the Babylonian kingdom was to move potential troublemakers and rivals to Babylon and out of their natural element).
I've heard theories that this period was a key one which transformed the ancient Hebrews into Jews (even to the point where it might have been the period when they finally embraced true monotheism). A lot of books supposed got written (and perhaps rewritten) during this time with an eye to supporting the religious positions of the exiles and preserving their culture.
When one speaks of "culture wars", there's the great one between rural and urban (often cast as "right" versus "left" or "conservative" versus "liberal") which I think overshadows the religious conflicts such as christian/jew versus muslim or hindu versus muslim. It's amazing how much of our culture stems from how many people we pack in a place.
I have to pay a punitive tax to buy cigarettes or beer.
Yes, that is a problem, but that's a legal problem. Excise taxes are legally one of the taxes that the federal government has been allowed to levy from the very beginning.
It's only a matter of semantics whether you reduce taxes for buying something or increase taxes for not buying it.
Not at all! The federal government is limited in how it can levy taxes. For example, it is still illegal to levy taxes on property or other assets. To tax income, they had to get an amendment passed.
But going to your example, it is voluntary to claim an exemption for the tax reduction. It is not voluntary to pay more for not buying something or performing a particular activity. That alone makes it more than semantics.
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The term "cleared the neighborhood" is unfortunately misleading. And purposefully vague, I always thought. When does the neighborhood become cleared? There's a lot of asteroids in our near neighborhood (which result in rather significant accretion events, so to speak).
It is rather odd that such a slipshod definition has been rationalized on scientific grounds. I'm leaning towards that it's retaliation for the long ago act of naming Pluto in such a way that the planet's name contains the initials for the discoverers' former sponsor, Perceval Lowell. I doubt any one takes seriously the claim that in the future school students might be forced to memorize the names of hundreds of planets, merely because potentially hundreds could be found which would fit the existing definition.
And any discussion of gravitational dominance has to explain why there are more than one planet, Jupiter since Jupiter gravitationally dominates the rest of the Solar System of which we know from the Kuiper belt on in, outside of the Sun itself (the Sun has roughly 99% of the mass of the known Solar System, Jupiter has 90% of what's left).
The logical fallacy of "Everything that exists is what is right in front of me".
That's a good start. You're at least trying.
Here's the thing: there's a place for reasoning, there's a place for a logical discussion, and sometimes, there's a place to put the argument in a way that the other party understands.
And I see we use the last case when we don't know how use the others.
Feel free to explain a better way to fight the argument inherent in the original post.
How about reasoning and logical discussion? Give those a try sometime.
You make a strong case for trying things out and seeing what happens. The entertainment value of seeing a lot of people simultaneously blow gaskets is immense.
As I see it, trying stuff out is the way you turn "unforeseeable" problems into foreseeable.
Any other vehicle on the road is hazardous to a similar degree. What makes these vehicles notably more hazardous?
Meanwhile you will be causing a HUGE backup behind you
That hasn't happened in real life. Waves of backed up traffic are far more likely to come from things like accidents and/or idiots who braked suddenly, or merge conditions. And once those are established, that's the dominant traffic dynamics, not the alleged people who are following you.
You also get to enjoy the feeling of people cutting you off suddenly who didn't like how slow you were going, endangering you and them...
Never happened. As I was saying, I just travel a few miles slower. It's not a huge amount and it just works.
Randomly quoting bits from a politician who has been in a position of power for only a tiny fraction of the case is completely irrelevent.
I'll just note her opinion ceases to be irrelevant when she has and uses her power to block extradition. That might not end the saga, but it sure looks he's not going to be extradited ever to the US unless he travels to another country and gets caught and extradited there or someone kidnaps him.
The entire argument is, and always has been that he should be tried in the UK.
From the article:
The home secretary told MPs there was no doubt Mr McKinnon was "seriously ill" and the extradition warrant against him should be withdrawn.
Mrs May said the sole issue she had to consider was his human rights.
She said it was now for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, to decide whether he should face trial in the UK.
Mrs May said: "After careful consideration of all of the relevant material I have concluded that Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights. I have therefore withdrawn the extradition order against Mr McKinnon."
That sounds to me like the extradition has been completely rejected whether or not he is tried in the UK for his alleged activities.
You haven't answered my question. What makes you think you're better qualified to decide what's constitutional and what isn't than the Supreme Court?
It's not a matter of qualification. If I were to get appointed and approved by Congress, then I would be just as qualified as the current justices are. The thing is, I'm qualified enough to read and understand that things are going off the rails.
Yes, four justices agree with you. However, four is smaller than five. A unanimous decision is not required to determine the constitutionality of a law.
No, all citizens of the US have an obligation to respect and uphold the Constitution. Since this law wasn't overturned in the courts, it'll have to be overturned at the ballot box.
You might be referring to The Green Berets which had the abduction of a North Vietnam general as part of the plot.
Also, you picked a relatively low-cost injury to talk about; what if it was cancer? Millions.
Why should cancer cost millions? I find it odd how many people care about the health care system and not about the outcome.
You remind me of Ford in the 70s, who assigned a dollar value to a person's life.
We all do that. When you take a risk for money, you have decided that the money is worth more than the risk to your life. When you get life insurance, you and the insurance company are explicitly putting a value on your life. In Ford's case, assigning values to human life is a natural consequence of setting public policy. It's not fair to us to create regulations that impose an inordinate burden for a meager gain in lifespan (for example, the EPA's lowering of the threshold for arsenic a few years back).
I'm hoping you're not as callous as you sound.
I'm aware of and understand other peoples' wants and emotions. But I try not to let those rule me. If that's your definition of callous, then I am callous and I see no reason to apologize for it.
And I hope you understand that taking other peoples' money can create suffering of its own. Creating generous and expensive health care causes other problems and costs.
Are you a legal professional? A law professor? Constitutional scholar? Or are you just someone frustrated with the fact that people disagree with your worldview?
Perhaps you should look at this ruling sometime. It's pretty messed up. For example, they severed a "coercive" part of the medicare expansion which mandated state spending. But the law was intended and written to be unsevereable (that is, that it must be accepted or rejected in total). So five justices decided, unconstitutionally I might add, which part of the law to keep and to reject.
The there's the individual mandate itself. There was considerable disagreement on whether it was a tax or not, with Justice Roberts holding both opinions. A majority ruled that the individual mandate didn't fall under the commerce clause or the necessary and proper clause. Roberts claimed that because capitation taxes (tax per head) were permitted by the Constitution, then taxes such as the individual mandate that penalized those who didn't were like a capitation tax (where I guess one doesn't act either) were constitutional even though regulation that attempted to penalize such inaction wouldn't be.
I don't know what it is about this law, but it seems to me that all branches of the federal government have acted in an unusually unprofessional and rather bizarre manner with respect to this law.
Safe driving is keeping up with traffic and keeping alterations of any variables to a minimum. That means where cars are to any side.
Oh come on. I'm not talking about driving super slow. A few MPH slower than the herd in the slow lane and you'll have a nice safe zone in front of you. I'm sure you can manage that without creating an unsafe situation.
Regardless of how safe you drive, if your vehicle doesn't have the capabilities of ones around it you become a hazard.
That's simply not true. We share roads with bicycles, motorcycles, and farm tractors. They don't magically become hazards (or more accurately, any more hazardous than any other vehicle on the road).
And then another car goes in front of you, and you lift up again...
Yep. That's how you drive safely. And all those cars getting ahead of you show that most other cars on the road just aren't taking this seriously.
You can interpret the Constitution any way you want; you're entitled to your opinion. But, as corrupt/ideological as they are, they are still the Supreme Court of the United States, and you're not. If they say something is constitutional, then it is. That's the whole point of having SCOTUS in the first place.
And when that court and that government fails to do its duty in this regard, then it's up to the citizen (as it always has been) to uphold the Constitution.
If a surprise $20,000 expense is 'affordable' to you
That's what insurance is for. And saving money.
Stick to your own household, and either go bother to learn about how about 97% of the country lives or shut up.
So 97% of the country can't be bothered to save $20,000 or have insurance? Not only do I just not believe in the least this number you pulled out of nowhere, but why's that a public policy problem rather than a people acting stupid and getting what they deserve problem?
The mitigating factor was that there were simultaneous riots in Egypt that WERE a result of the film, and had nothing to do with 9/11.
Except that they started on 9/11. I think there were a number of instigators (and not just in the Middle East) looking to start something on this day. The arabic version of the offensive film just happens to come a week ahead of these riots. And these riots just happen to start on 9/11.
It didn't take a lot of brain power to be right on this one. An ambassador just happens to die of violence in the Middle East on September 11? But yes, I imagine Fox News didn't think there'd be any consequences to reporting that story wrong.
Where'd all this blather about free market come from? My view is that a huge part of the problem is the high cost of US labor. It simply isn't that valuable compared to Chinese or other labor to justify the premium. I could as is currently being done, just let the currency inflate until US wages are comparable to developing world wages. Or I could find ways to make US labor cheaper by cutting out government-based benefits which aren't really benefits.
For example, Social Security adds about 15% to the cost of a worker. When I last looked, there was a factor of six difference between the cost of a US worker and a Chinese worker. Ten 15% increases accounted for that difference, meaning that elimination of that single tax resulted in a tenth of the way there, logarithmically. Of course, Social Security has some sort of benefits to it, but who really wants less money decades from now rather than money in hand now when they need it?
Then there's cost of living. To that end, I propose the ending of educational loan subsidies altogether, the end of a tax credit for employer health insurance plans (Along with a significant shrinking in required health insurance coverage to medically necessary actions. If you want more coverage, you can still get it, you just pay more for it.), no tax consequences, good or bad for owning, borrowing against, or renting real estate, and elimination of all subsidies in US business and agriculture.
On the regulatory side, there is a vast amount of complexity (as I mentioned elsewhere something like 400k pages of law and regulation out there, plus an endless amount of case law). A persistent trimming back of that regulation would result in just about everything especially employing people being cheaper to do. It's ridiculous how many hurdles the federal government puts in the way of employing people.
Finally, I'd just get rid of the minimum wage altogether. A lot of people are unemployed because they simply aren't worth minimum wage.
However, shortly after its creation, the extreme right-wing movement ripped the wool off the Tea Party sheep and started wearing it, lest they look like the wolves that they are.
That's ok. Anyone is allowed to agree (or for that matter disagree) with the basic tenets of the tea party movement.
They still talk a good game about stopping corruption and lowering taxes, but once you elect a Tea Party-endorsed candidate, they immediately forget all about any of that and instead promote their social agenda.
Then I'll work to get them voted out. I know a lot of people seem unconcerned about whether a candidate will do what they promise (or position), but that's a pretty big deal for me.
Oh, and just to be pedantic, calling the ACA "unconstitutional" is black-letter wrong.
Given that it is a true statement, namely, that the individual mandate truly isn't supported by the Constitution as a valid means of collecting revenue and hence, is unconstitutional, then what's the point of saying otherwise? The Supreme Court can be stacked and was to sufficient degree (the vote was aside from the crazy thing that Justice Roberts did, strictly along ideological lines).
Call it 'inefficient' and 'short-sighted' and 'wasteful' all you want; those arguments can be made (as well as the fact that it doesn't give us what we need, which is a single payer system).
We don't need a single payer system, we need indefinite, healthy lives at moderate cost. For healthy person health care, it's generally pretty cheap. For example, I broke my arm in two places. That cost somewhere around $20,000 to patch up. Kind of high as one would expect in the US system, but affordable.
But for people in their last few years, the costs are expensive no matter what sort of health care system you are in. And there really isn't much value in heroic efforts to prolong one's death.
That's what I'll call here "deathbed theater". I see a significant portion of health care as merely show with little if any benefit for the dying patient. It's only dubious virtue over other ostentatious displays of mourning and grief for the departed is that it is done while the person is still alive.
I think any sort of public health care should be directed at things that have significant, demonstrable benefit such as immunizations, pregnancy care, and young child nutrition programs. Maybe needs based health care for health problems that have a fairly high benefit to cost ratio.
As for dying people, aside from providing a comfortable, pain-free place to die and a nice gravestone, I don't see any necessary duty to provide there. My view is that public health care should be very limited and it should be the choice of the patient how much they're willing to spend for health care. Single payer subverts that and gives patients little incentive to cut their health care consumption. That shows in massive, above inflation growth in health care costs through out the developed world.
Keep in mind that some stories were written down by people with an ax to grind. For example, a number of books were written down during the period of the Babylonian captivity when as I understand it, the upper class of the Kingdom of Judea were forced to move to Babylon (a standard tactic of the Babylonian kingdom was to move potential troublemakers and rivals to Babylon and out of their natural element).
I've heard theories that this period was a key one which transformed the ancient Hebrews into Jews (even to the point where it might have been the period when they finally embraced true monotheism). A lot of books supposed got written (and perhaps rewritten) during this time with an eye to supporting the religious positions of the exiles and preserving their culture.
I actually believe that only persons without beliefs can be real, good humans
Well, then that settles that problem since no one really is and probably can be without beliefs.
When one speaks of "culture wars", there's the great one between rural and urban (often cast as "right" versus "left" or "conservative" versus "liberal") which I think overshadows the religious conflicts such as christian/jew versus muslim or hindu versus muslim. It's amazing how much of our culture stems from how many people we pack in a place.
I have to pay a punitive tax to buy cigarettes or beer.
Yes, that is a problem, but that's a legal problem. Excise taxes are legally one of the taxes that the federal government has been allowed to levy from the very beginning.
It's only a matter of semantics whether you reduce taxes for buying something or increase taxes for not buying it.
Not at all! The federal government is limited in how it can levy taxes. For example, it is still illegal to levy taxes on property or other assets. To tax income, they had to get an amendment passed.
But going to your example, it is voluntary to claim an exemption for the tax reduction. It is not voluntary to pay more for not buying something or performing a particular activity. That alone makes it more than semantics.