Which is great but have we ever correlated redshift to distance or speed with actual observations or just mathematical models? I'm all for mathematical models but when they don't have actual observational support I wonder a tad...
There are a number of techniques for determining distance based on relative luminosity (stars classed Cepheid variables were originally used by Hubble to determine the distance of objects). The technique originally used to determine that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating used Type Ia supernova, which pretty much all have exactly the same luminosity. Since the luminosity of those objects is a known quantity, the distance is easily determined. So, yes, there is plenty of observational evidence, both of the expansion, and that the expansion is getting faster, not slowing.
In your dreams, pal. If it does take over the world and revolutionize technology, we'll know for sure...unless "we" is just a bunch of people who don't know science from apple sauce. But the trouble with just about any technology these days is that environmental activists are going to find a reason why we're supposed to hate it. With anything that's derived from carbon (hey, that's just about everything, isn't it?) that requires lots of combustion and chemical processing, you're going to be on their shit list sooner or later. Best thing to do is find a cave to live in, stick to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and keep a low profile.
Hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Do you want to have PETA against you?:-)
The real irony is that cave-dwelling subsistence living is exactly the lifestyle goal of the [fake] environmentalist movement. The only difference will be that the elite ("expert decision-makers") will be the ones controlling all the resources, rather than allowing people to just go out and gather food themselves.
As someone who as lived in the bottom spectrum that would probably receive prebates. I have never recieved AFDC, TANF, food stamps, or SS. You must have always led a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle and have little idea of how people in lower income groups live.
I came from poverty and lived through it. I worked my way out of it. You must have either not had kids or not been working at all, or you would have gotten AFDC as a tax refund. I did.
I find it hard to believe that enforcing a sales tax would require more draconian enforcement than the IRS currently has. Cigarettes, illicit drugs, and other black markets flourish already, and enforcing those laws hasn't resulted in anywhere near the kind of power grab that the IRS has had.
one more tool to keep a boot on the neck of the poor.
Sounds like that's the point...
More class warfare bullshit. No one has a "boot on the neck of the poor", or anything like it. Helping the poor means getting them out of the cycle of dependence. And the point of the FairTax is to fund the Federal government in a way consistent with liberty. If your premise is based on the propaganda that prosperity is a zero-sum game and always built on the backs of the poor, then you are lost in a delusion anyway. That rhetoric is just used to justify centralizing control and consolidating power.
What we got instead was keynesian predictions proven correct
Hahahah WOOOOO That's rich! What are you, a comedian??
What you call a "myth" is, in fact, the very definition of inflation in a fiat currency system. All the blather from Bernanke and his ilk is just disingenuous bullshit. And posting a chart of "inflation" that excludes most commodities such as energy, gas, food, and industrial metals and anything else that falls into some central banker's definition of "too volatile" is just lying with statistics.
That's not really different than it is now, for income tax. And you're forgetting that everyone gets at least a 8.5% raise (maybe more) since the FairTax would also eliminate payroll taxes, so low income folks would have MORE.
How does teaching people to rely on a prebate shift power away from the authority giving out the prebate?
Because those people ALREADY rely on handouts like AFDC, TANF, food stamps, SS payments, Medicare and Medicaid, etc., etc. But people that don't will no longer be bludgeoned by 10,000 pages of IRS insanity, incentives, deductions, credits, etc.,etc.
The presumption that wealthy people spend 100% of their income is invalid.
That may be your presumption (not sure why you would make it). This provides incentive for saving, which is a good thing. The only other objection that this would cover is if you are just concerned about punishing people for their income.
The presumption that wealthy people would not buy clothing, booze, and other valuables in other lower tax jurisdictions is invalid.
Out of the COUNTRY!?!? They don't do that now, why would they do it under this scheme? Not invalid at all.
I've validated since this was posted that raw food would not be excluded. That is a HUGE tax increase for the poor.
You're missing a lot. NOTHING is excluded - that's part of the fairness. The FairTax actually eliminates and reimburses all federal taxes for those below the poverty line. This is accomplished through the universal prebate and by eliminating the highly regressive FICA payroll tax. Today, low and moderate income Americans pay far more in FICA taxes than income taxes. Those spending at twice the poverty level pay a FairTax of only 11.5 percent -- a rate much lower than the income and payroll tax burden they bear today. Meanwhile, the wealthy pay the 23 percent retail sales tax on their retail purchases.
The fair tax is on spending- not on INCOME. The wealthy do not spend large portions of their income. Hell- I'm not wealthy and I don't spend large portions of my income.
And that's a good thing. Reverses the American habit of spending MORE than they make, encouraging saving. I'm glad you're able to save most of what you make. I'm living paycheck to paycheck myself, and I like this plan MUCH more than the current system.
The "fair tax" is grossly unfair to the middle income and the poor. Once people saw what it really means in practice, it wouldn't survive 30 seconds. It's a massive transfer of taxing from the wealthy to those making less.
That's not justified by any provisions of the tax. It's unfounded hyperbole.
Congressional scholars, and in fact the US supreme court, currently mostly regard the 16th amendment as utterly pointless. I quote the court, 'Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged.'
And yet, from your very (Wikipedia, ahem) link:
The income tax provision was struck down in 1895 by the U.S. Supreme Court case Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 428 (1895). In 1913, the 16th Amendment permitted a federal income tax.
So maybe the 16th amendment isn't as superfluous as you claim.
Fairtax effecitvely cuts taxes massively for the wealthy.
Nope, not true. It eliminates loopholes for the wealthy
it has a lot of good press (aka the best propaganda money can buy) combined with a healthy dose of magical thinking.
Not sure where that's coming from - all I ever see in the press is people like you vilifying the FairTax with falsehoods and misrepresentation (like your post)
A real fair tax needs to address the fact that state taxes typically tax in reverse with the lower income paying 10%+ of their income in taxes while the wealthy pay under 1% of their income in taxes.
That's for the states to do, not the Federal government - state taxation is up to the states.
The best form of a fair tax would be A fixed 20% tax on everyone with no deductions except ignoring all income at and below the poverty line.
That sounds a whole lot like the FairTax (except that it's 26% instead of 20%)
The poor and middle class listen to this nonsense and slit their own throats while the wealthy are turning into an oligarchy and new nobility class.
Better that they just listen to you describing the FairTax as something different than it is, and never give it a chance?
No you didn't. You just shifted the entire burden of taxation onto the poor and middle class with your shitty, extremely regressive tax system that nobody but a few fringe libertarian types wants.
Why not do your own research into the facts instead of just repeating what your socialist comrades claim. They don't like the fair tax because it shifts power and control away from the centralized government, not because it's regressive (it's not).
So one arm of the government sold short-term debt (money) in exchange for longer term debt (treasuries) from another arm of the government, which treasuries mature gradually and orderly - eliminating the 'debt' automatically (unless the Fed decides to sell those treasuries sooner).
The Federal Reserve is not an "arm of the government". There is absolutely no justification or tortured logical argument by which that statement becomes anything but a fabrication.
These two sums net out largely, the difference is miniscule compared to the size of the economy. What the Fed did during QE was mainly not to create new debt, but to convert existing debt into shorter-term (and hopefully more stimulating to the economy) forms of debt.
What they actually did is more accurately described as "monetizing the debt", something that congress expressed concern about the Fed's ability to do, but a power they were assured by Bernanke that they would never exercise. It created huge sums of money out of thin air and used that to buy debt. Increasing the money supply is what causes inflation, and we're facing a huge uptick very soon. To reign that in, the Fed will raise interest rates, and the money the government needs to pay interest on its nearly $15 Trillion in debt will increase massively.
So your '3 trillion dollars debt' phrase is highly misleading and you should know that.
It's only misleading in that it vastly understates the real damage to the overall economy.
Most of the debt is owed to a vast communist country thousands of miles away, which shipped hundreds of millions of metric tons of products to the US, in exchange for the US printing the pictures of dead presidents on a few dozen tons of green paper.
Not sure if you're just being sarcastic, here, but in point of fact while China owns more of the US debt than any other country, they actually own a fraction of the total public debt. The most recent figure I've seen is about $900 billion. That doesn't include what China holds in dollars in foreign exchange reserves, but even including it would only bring the total to around $1.5 Trillion - which is still only about 10% of the total public debt.
The Federal Reserve now holds about double that amount. Think about that a minute - the private bank in control of the money supply now holds $3 Trillion in debt, AND have the ability to raise the interest rate at any time.
So what the US got from the deal was a bunch of cheap crap that will be soon broken and leaching toxins into the soil, and China got factories and infrastructure and a booming industrial base. I don't think it was such a good deal at all.
It will take a leader of vision to sort out the turf battles and get Schmitt's plan rolling.
Well that certainly rules out that idea. They should have put that sentence at the top of the article instead of the bottom - would have saved time reading about it.
A temporarily or formerly "poor person" - or a "not poor person" with common sense - would point out that you can buy a second-hand laptop for $200-$300.
Buy one from where? Actual physical second-hand PC stores are quite rare these days, and an awful lot of poor Americans don't have access to the banking system in order to buy stuff online (even if they did somehow manage to get access to a PC to do it from). Then there are the unbudgeted consequences when your old, out-of-warranty second hand laptop suffers from a hardware fault...
You can go to the local library and find something on CraigsList. Everybody knows how to do that - there's that "free" category where lots of people get stuff.
Okay, so maybe we do agree on the problem, but I think we are far apart on the solutions. To me, "giving regulatory bodies teeth" is simply asking for more abuse, handing over more power to a group that already has a monopoly on violence, and expecting regulation to work better by "bashing more heads". There are simply too many issues to get around if you want to "remove [those in charge] and replace them with people who aren't directly involved in the industries they are regulating." We already have rules that supposedly avoids putting people in charge with "no financial stake", and Obama tried to implement more, but then he provided waivers for many of those. Working in a job for 4-5 years dealing with powerful heads of wealthy corporations always means it's easy to make friends and connections for future career opportunities. Allowing people to regulate industries that they know nothing about can create all kinds of unintended consequences and is bound to do more harm than good.
What it boils down to, for me, is that you have to ask who is being served - the producers or the consumers? Top-down central planning and regulation will always end up focused on producers, which means that the more control you exert, the more businesses will necessarily need to become involved in the regulatory process to survive. In that scenario, the biggest players get the most access, the best lobbyists, the most persuasive argument, and they win out over their smaller competitors. As various issues lead to a need for another regulation, another control, greater authority, businesses focus more on getting the most favorable regulation instead of being the best at meeting consumer needs.
The free market is the best system for working those things out. It puts consumers in charge instead of producers. If a company can't provide what consumers want, they should fail, and if another business can do it better and cheaper, they should succeed. Why is there still a Record Industry that fails to provide what consumers want? Because the government has expanded what was once a 14-year monopoly for works into one that is practically forever, and use of justice department resources to enforce it. Recent FDA rules favor Big Ag over everyone else. What started as an idea for universal health care ended up as nothing but a racket that favors insurance corporations.
I'm not arguing for some total anarchistic "freemarket" theory that has never existed, only that we already have so much regulation that we are micro-managing industries, and it is picking winners and losers and suppressing the ability of entrepreneurs to try new ideas without being crushed by the incumbents.
None of this will end well. All this stuff is sold as "good for society", while trampling any consideration of the individual - it's a road to tyranny.
These days it's pretty easy to find entire online communities that agree with you that Osama Bin Laden was really a CIA operative
That's not so much a theory as there is a significant amount of credible evidence supporting it. You have heard of the Afghan Mujahideen and the US Government's support of it, right? And bin Laden's leadership in that organization? Check out "Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll. Supposedly Obama himself read the book.
The connection didn't start in the US. The Russian publication Demokratizatsiya was the first to make the claim, and here is a BBC article from 2004 mentioning it as well.
Ok, so you think the Democratic Party was going to select out of a pool of qualified candidates the one candidate which would be categorically denied the presidency?
The Democratic Party didn't select Barack Obama - the media did.
That was the point. NO other candidates have ever had to proven themselves born in the USA.
Well Obama was an unusual candidate in many ways - he was an unknown that rose to popularity even faster than Jimmy Carter. This was intentionally done by the media - they liked him, wrote about him, and put him on a pedestal. Other than puff pieces in newsmagazines (and TV newsmagazines), no one really knew much about him.
As far as previous presidents, they made their birth certificates available early in their political careers, just not on the Internet because it either didn't exist or wasn't as widely used as it was in 2007 and 2008. But, for your edification, here is LBJ's BC, Richard Nixon's was filed in 1942, when he was 29. Here is a copy of it online. You can also find Ronald Reagan's birth certificate online, and he was born way back in 1911. Reagan, like many presidents, also served in the military and had honorable careers serving in the national defense, and every president until W. released their military records before or during their campaign. W released many of his in 2000, and the rest were released in 2004, after some fake memos were reported as real by Dan Rather on CBS news.
Frankly I never bought in to any of the birther rhetoric. It seemed stupid and distracting, and I made fun of them for their ridiculous antics. But then when that image was released on the White House web site - well, it's weird. Why would they put up a doctored image like that? I think it's clear he was born in Hawaii, but that image is all manipulated. Why? I just don't get it.
If somebody says "I was ten years old when I found out Santa Claus doesn't exist", nobody nitpicks them on the principle that you can't disprove something entirely. Why the special allowance for God?
Well that's an interesting point. The real insight would have been that "my parents are Santa Claus" - that is, the physical evidence that the child took to confirm his belief in Santa Claus turned out to have an entirely different cause. The following Christmas again came with family, friends, songs, celebrations and... presents Christmas morning! But the source of those things are better understood. So... what about the existence of Santa Claus? For millions, he still exists, but most understand his incarnation as an emergent property of millions of people acting in non-coordinated concert to achieve some "magic".
Does this realization make the Christmas season, and all of the feelings that come with it, any less magical? Those feelings are just as real, just as personally verifiable, but they cannot be "proven" to any other person that "does not believe" in the "magic" of Christmas. So the fraud of Santa Claus serves the purpose of sharing the feelings of Christmas with those to0 simple or naive to understand pleasure and reward derived from selfless giving - "They came from Santa Claus" - until they have matured - "It comes from your heart.".
Religion (spirituality) is similar. The ability to believe in God - in a higher power or purpose - a "oneness" of the universe - is no less real and no less valuable simply because it fails logical tests and empirical evidence. Being able to share the Love of God - an ephemeral presence outside of time and transcendent of ordinary matter - is no less a source of meaning and happiness regardless of the paradoxical nature of the journey, or the cognitive failures in grasping extrasensory concepts.
Never met a government program you didn't like, eh? It doesn't seem to bother you that corporations get handouts and protection from the agencies you think are working for you. The FDA == Monsanto. The FDA is too busy raiding farms and food co-ops to worry about what their corporate bosses are doing. The EPA == GE (which paid no taxes at all last year on $5.1 billion in taxes. OSHA didn't protect me from a painful repetitive stress injury, and wouldn't do anything to help me get reimbursed for the hundreds of dollars in ergonomic office equipment I had to buy out of pocket. The union didn't care, so OSHA didn't either, but I'm sure if the union wanted to bring back child labor, OSHA would be perfectly okay with it.
An example of incremental oppression, yes. While the idea may have been good intentioned when people thought they were getting rat feces with their canned ham, nowadays it's just code for "reducing consumer choice." The little people can't be trusted to not kill themselves by shear stupidity, so we must decide what products they can purchase. Oh, and what a great opportunity to decide which corporations should survive and which ones won't....
Laws keeping powerful corporations from intruding, and interfering, with the lives of normal people are another.
THAT is what the free market does, not some crony bureaucrat or paid-off politician. Do you really think they care about you? Here's a clue for you: The government is the institution with a monopoly on coercion and force. No corporation can make me buy a car, but the government can. No corporation can force me to buy overpriced health insurance that covers things I don't really want or need coverage for, but the government can, and will.
Keep thinking that government will protect you from corporations. The more power you give the government, the more powerful their favored corporations will become. Why do you think they are different entities? Do you know how many Goldman Sachs executives, for instance, are now in charge of the bureaucracies that are supposed to be regulation the financial sector?
If you really fear the power of corporations, you'll check out where they are getting their power: GOVERNMENT!
Or, if we're not parroting more paranoid rhetoric, we look at the rest of the Western world, at countries like Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands, where the horrible curse of "socialism" has produced some of the most successful states in history. The UK, Australia and Canada to a lesser degree, particularly in recent decades, but that's largely because they have followed the US down the path of deregulation and corporate rent-seeking.
Well of course those countries do some amount of central planning, but they are generally mixed economies, not socialist (like North Korea). I suggest you take a closer look at those countries, and try to distinguish between the things run as socialist systems, the financial situations in those countries, and try not to let your ideological filters get in the way. Sweden is a good example of how even in a country full of people with a strong work ethic, high participation in civic duties (it's nearly universal), and trust in government institutions, socialism can work its universally destructive process. It led to some severe economic problems in the 1970's, and the way out in early 1980's was massive deregulation of industry, including cutting taxes and welfare expenditures, abolishing government monopolies, reducing regulation, floating the currency, and permitting more private alternatives in the public sector. High tax rates (on all wage earners) kept the social safety net in place, but after the collapse of the Krona in the 1990's the only fix was to rolled back government control and spending. The central bank was made independent. Austerity measures included spending ceilings for public expenditures. The fact is, Sweden has learned its lesson about runaway government spending, and balances its budget. They are not the bastian of socialism you seem to think they are, and they have a much better handle on their finances than the (broke and failing) US government.
Capitalism is fine, as long as it is a slave to human interests. The, largely mythical, freemarket should be balanced with what leads to the greater good of society. The second it starts working against normal people, it needs to be checked, since human good is the only ends that makes any sense. When working from within a society, this means societal good, not individual benefit at the cost of everyone else (that goes against the basic tenets of the social contract on which our society was based).
WTF? How is that not Marxism? So we should have free markets (which you some how think are mythical, despite the prosperity they have produced throughout history), but the collective "society" should be considered before any individual? "Social contract"? Really? "I've go mine and you've got yours" isn't good enough for you?
Whose ideal of "societal good" should we follow? Yours? Should we set up some dictator to decide for us? Or is it majority rule? So 51% of the people can decided that everything the other 49% owns should be taken and given to someone else? If 99% of the people decide that some people should not be allowed to have food and water is that okay too? Or will some grand ruler make those decisions?
I am a capitalist, it is the only system that has shown itself to work and probably the default state of natural economies. I am not a "freemarketeer" since that is a bit of ideological dogma that people somehow aspire towards; it is a utopia, it isn't based in reality.
Ah, so you are the worst kind of statist. "Capitalism" is okay, because then all capital can be controlled by a central bank and it can be doled out to only the "proper kind" of Corporations. Anyone else must petition the rulers for the privilege of participating in commerce. Yea, we're very close to that kind of crony capitalism already. And it sucks.
It presumes that if somehow the Government walked away the market would work itself out, and magically start working towards the societal good. I am not aware of any historical case when this has actually happened
You never heard of the Renaissance? Yes, government was around, but they totally left the merchants alone. Their only involvement was to draw taxes from the land use and hang the thieves. That's what created the middle class in the first place.
What it comes down to is a respect for private property rights and individual liberty. As these two tenants lose their value, governments take more power and more control and prosperity is lost and poverty increases. And that's bad for society.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is great but have we ever correlated redshift to distance or speed with actual observations or just mathematical models? I'm all for mathematical models but when they don't have actual observational support I wonder a tad...
There are a number of techniques for determining distance based on relative luminosity (stars classed Cepheid variables were originally used by Hubble to determine the distance of objects). The technique originally used to determine that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating used Type Ia supernova, which pretty much all have exactly the same luminosity. Since the luminosity of those objects is a known quantity, the distance is easily determined. So, yes, there is plenty of observational evidence, both of the expansion, and that the expansion is getting faster, not slowing.
OMG No! It already does enough independent decision-making as it is.
In your dreams, pal. If it does take over the world and revolutionize technology, we'll know for sure...unless "we" is just a bunch of people who don't know science from apple sauce. But the trouble with just about any technology these days is that environmental activists are going to find a reason why we're supposed to hate it. With anything that's derived from carbon (hey, that's just about everything, isn't it?) that requires lots of combustion and chemical processing, you're going to be on their shit list sooner or later. Best thing to do is find a cave to live in, stick to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and keep a low profile.
Hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Do you want to have PETA against you? :-)
The real irony is that cave-dwelling subsistence living is exactly the lifestyle goal of the [fake] environmentalist movement. The only difference will be that the elite ("expert decision-makers") will be the ones controlling all the resources, rather than allowing people to just go out and gather food themselves.
As someone who as lived in the bottom spectrum that would probably receive prebates. I have never recieved AFDC, TANF, food stamps, or SS. You must have always led a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle and have little idea of how people in lower income groups live.
I came from poverty and lived through it. I worked my way out of it. You must have either not had kids or not been working at all, or you would have gotten AFDC as a tax refund. I did.
I find it hard to believe that enforcing a sales tax would require more draconian enforcement than the IRS currently has. Cigarettes, illicit drugs, and other black markets flourish already, and enforcing those laws hasn't resulted in anywhere near the kind of power grab that the IRS has had.
one more tool to keep a boot on the neck of the poor. Sounds like that's the point...
More class warfare bullshit. No one has a "boot on the neck of the poor", or anything like it. Helping the poor means getting them out of the cycle of dependence. And the point of the FairTax is to fund the Federal government in a way consistent with liberty. If your premise is based on the propaganda that prosperity is a zero-sum game and always built on the backs of the poor, then you are lost in a delusion anyway. That rhetoric is just used to justify centralizing control and consolidating power.
What we got instead was keynesian predictions proven correct
Hahahah WOOOOO That's rich! What are you, a comedian??
What you call a "myth" is, in fact, the very definition of inflation in a fiat currency system. All the blather from Bernanke and his ilk is just disingenuous bullshit. And posting a chart of "inflation" that excludes most commodities such as energy, gas, food, and industrial metals and anything else that falls into some central banker's definition of "too volatile" is just lying with statistics.
That's not really different than it is now, for income tax. And you're forgetting that everyone gets at least a 8.5% raise (maybe more) since the FairTax would also eliminate payroll taxes, so low income folks would have MORE.
How does teaching people to rely on a prebate shift power away from the authority giving out the prebate?
Because those people ALREADY rely on handouts like AFDC, TANF, food stamps, SS payments, Medicare and Medicaid, etc., etc. But people that don't will no longer be bludgeoned by 10,000 pages of IRS insanity, incentives, deductions, credits, etc.,etc.
The presumption that wealthy people spend 100% of their income is invalid.
That may be your presumption (not sure why you would make it). This provides incentive for saving, which is a good thing. The only other objection that this would cover is if you are just concerned about punishing people for their income.
The presumption that wealthy people would not buy clothing, booze, and other valuables in other lower tax jurisdictions is invalid.
Out of the COUNTRY!?!? They don't do that now, why would they do it under this scheme? Not invalid at all.
I've validated since this was posted that raw food would not be excluded. That is a HUGE tax increase for the poor.
You're missing a lot. NOTHING is excluded - that's part of the fairness. The FairTax actually eliminates and reimburses all federal taxes for those below the poverty line. This is accomplished through the universal prebate and by eliminating the highly regressive FICA payroll tax. Today, low and moderate income Americans pay far more in FICA taxes than income taxes. Those spending at twice the poverty level pay a FairTax of only 11.5 percent -- a rate much lower than the income and payroll tax burden they bear today. Meanwhile, the wealthy pay the 23 percent retail sales tax on their retail purchases.
The fair tax is on spending- not on INCOME. The wealthy do not spend large portions of their income. Hell- I'm not wealthy and I don't spend large portions of my income.
And that's a good thing. Reverses the American habit of spending MORE than they make, encouraging saving. I'm glad you're able to save most of what you make. I'm living paycheck to paycheck myself, and I like this plan MUCH more than the current system.
The "fair tax" is grossly unfair to the middle income and the poor. Once people saw what it really means in practice, it wouldn't survive 30 seconds. It's a massive transfer of taxing from the wealthy to those making less.
That's not justified by any provisions of the tax. It's unfounded hyperbole.
Congressional scholars, and in fact the US supreme court, currently mostly regard the 16th amendment as utterly pointless. I quote the court, 'Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged.'
And yet, from your very (Wikipedia, ahem) link:
So maybe the 16th amendment isn't as superfluous as you claim.
Fairtax effecitvely cuts taxes massively for the wealthy.
Nope, not true. It eliminates loopholes for the wealthy
it has a lot of good press (aka the best propaganda money can buy) combined with a healthy dose of magical thinking.
Not sure where that's coming from - all I ever see in the press is people like you vilifying the FairTax with falsehoods and misrepresentation (like your post)
A real fair tax needs to address the fact that state taxes typically tax in reverse with the lower income paying 10%+ of their income in taxes while the wealthy pay under 1% of their income in taxes.
That's for the states to do, not the Federal government - state taxation is up to the states.
The best form of a fair tax would be A fixed 20% tax on everyone with no deductions except ignoring all income at and below the poverty line.
That sounds a whole lot like the FairTax (except that it's 26% instead of 20%)
The poor and middle class listen to this nonsense and slit their own throats while the wealthy are turning into an oligarchy and new nobility class.
Better that they just listen to you describing the FairTax as something different than it is, and never give it a chance?
No you didn't. You just shifted the entire burden of taxation onto the poor and middle class with your shitty, extremely regressive tax system that nobody but a few fringe libertarian types wants.
Why not do your own research into the facts instead of just repeating what your socialist comrades claim. They don't like the fair tax because it shifts power and control away from the centralized government, not because it's regressive (it's not).
Do Developers Really Need a Second Monitor?
Yes. Do accountants? Maybe. Sometimes. Developers? Yes, absolutely, especially when they have already adjusted their work habits to working with two.
So one arm of the government sold short-term debt (money) in exchange for longer term debt (treasuries) from another arm of the government, which treasuries mature gradually and orderly - eliminating the 'debt' automatically (unless the Fed decides to sell those treasuries sooner).
The Federal Reserve is not an "arm of the government". There is absolutely no justification or tortured logical argument by which that statement becomes anything but a fabrication.
These two sums net out largely, the difference is miniscule compared to the size of the economy. What the Fed did during QE was mainly not to create new debt, but to convert existing debt into shorter-term (and hopefully more stimulating to the economy) forms of debt.
What they actually did is more accurately described as "monetizing the debt", something that congress expressed concern about the Fed's ability to do, but a power they were assured by Bernanke that they would never exercise. It created huge sums of money out of thin air and used that to buy debt. Increasing the money supply is what causes inflation, and we're facing a huge uptick very soon. To reign that in, the Fed will raise interest rates, and the money the government needs to pay interest on its nearly $15 Trillion in debt will increase massively.
So your '3 trillion dollars debt' phrase is highly misleading and you should know that.
It's only misleading in that it vastly understates the real damage to the overall economy.
Most of the debt is owed to a vast communist country thousands of miles away, which shipped hundreds of millions of metric tons of products to the US, in exchange for the US printing the pictures of dead presidents on a few dozen tons of green paper.
Not sure if you're just being sarcastic, here, but in point of fact while China owns more of the US debt than any other country, they actually own a fraction of the total public debt. The most recent figure I've seen is about $900 billion. That doesn't include what China holds in dollars in foreign exchange reserves, but even including it would only bring the total to around $1.5 Trillion - which is still only about 10% of the total public debt.
The Federal Reserve now holds about double that amount. Think about that a minute - the private bank in control of the money supply now holds $3 Trillion in debt, AND have the ability to raise the interest rate at any time.
So what the US got from the deal was a bunch of cheap crap that will be soon broken and leaching toxins into the soil, and China got factories and infrastructure and a booming industrial base. I don't think it was such a good deal at all.
It will take a leader of vision to sort out the turf battles and get Schmitt's plan rolling.
Well that certainly rules out that idea. They should have put that sentence at the top of the article instead of the bottom - would have saved time reading about it.
A temporarily or formerly "poor person" - or a "not poor person" with common sense - would point out that you can buy a second-hand laptop for $200-$300.
Buy one from where? Actual physical second-hand PC stores are quite rare these days, and an awful lot of poor Americans don't have access to the banking system in order to buy stuff online (even if they did somehow manage to get access to a PC to do it from). Then there are the unbudgeted consequences when your old, out-of-warranty second hand laptop suffers from a hardware fault...
You can go to the local library and find something on CraigsList. Everybody knows how to do that - there's that "free" category where lots of people get stuff.
Okay, so maybe we do agree on the problem, but I think we are far apart on the solutions. To me, "giving regulatory bodies teeth" is simply asking for more abuse, handing over more power to a group that already has a monopoly on violence, and expecting regulation to work better by "bashing more heads". There are simply too many issues to get around if you want to "remove [those in charge] and replace them with people who aren't directly involved in the industries they are regulating." We already have rules that supposedly avoids putting people in charge with "no financial stake", and Obama tried to implement more, but then he provided waivers for many of those. Working in a job for 4-5 years dealing with powerful heads of wealthy corporations always means it's easy to make friends and connections for future career opportunities. Allowing people to regulate industries that they know nothing about can create all kinds of unintended consequences and is bound to do more harm than good.
What it boils down to, for me, is that you have to ask who is being served - the producers or the consumers? Top-down central planning and regulation will always end up focused on producers, which means that the more control you exert, the more businesses will necessarily need to become involved in the regulatory process to survive. In that scenario, the biggest players get the most access, the best lobbyists, the most persuasive argument, and they win out over their smaller competitors. As various issues lead to a need for another regulation, another control, greater authority, businesses focus more on getting the most favorable regulation instead of being the best at meeting consumer needs.
The free market is the best system for working those things out. It puts consumers in charge instead of producers. If a company can't provide what consumers want, they should fail, and if another business can do it better and cheaper, they should succeed. Why is there still a Record Industry that fails to provide what consumers want? Because the government has expanded what was once a 14-year monopoly for works into one that is practically forever, and use of justice department resources to enforce it. Recent FDA rules favor Big Ag over everyone else. What started as an idea for universal health care ended up as nothing but a racket that favors insurance corporations.
I'm not arguing for some total anarchistic "freemarket" theory that has never existed, only that we already have so much regulation that we are micro-managing industries, and it is picking winners and losers and suppressing the ability of entrepreneurs to try new ideas without being crushed by the incumbents.
None of this will end well. All this stuff is sold as "good for society", while trampling any consideration of the individual - it's a road to tyranny.
These days it's pretty easy to find entire online communities that agree with you that Osama Bin Laden was really a CIA operative
That's not so much a theory as there is a significant amount of credible evidence supporting it. You have heard of the Afghan Mujahideen and the US Government's support of it, right? And bin Laden's leadership in that organization? Check out "Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll. Supposedly Obama himself read the book.
The connection didn't start in the US. The Russian publication Demokratizatsiya was the first to make the claim, and here is a BBC article from 2004 mentioning it as well.
Ok, so you think the Democratic Party was going to select out of a pool of qualified candidates the one candidate which would be categorically denied the presidency?
The Democratic Party didn't select Barack Obama - the media did.
That was the point. NO other candidates have ever had to proven themselves born in the USA.
Well Obama was an unusual candidate in many ways - he was an unknown that rose to popularity even faster than Jimmy Carter. This was intentionally done by the media - they liked him, wrote about him, and put him on a pedestal. Other than puff pieces in newsmagazines (and TV newsmagazines), no one really knew much about him.
As far as previous presidents, they made their birth certificates available early in their political careers, just not on the Internet because it either didn't exist or wasn't as widely used as it was in 2007 and 2008. But, for your edification, here is LBJ's BC, Richard Nixon's was filed in 1942, when he was 29. Here is a copy of it online. You can also find Ronald Reagan's birth certificate online, and he was born way back in 1911. Reagan, like many presidents, also served in the military and had honorable careers serving in the national defense, and every president until W. released their military records before or during their campaign. W released many of his in 2000, and the rest were released in 2004, after some fake memos were reported as real by Dan Rather on CBS news.
Frankly I never bought in to any of the birther rhetoric. It seemed stupid and distracting, and I made fun of them for their ridiculous antics. But then when that image was released on the White House web site - well, it's weird. Why would they put up a doctored image like that? I think it's clear he was born in Hawaii, but that image is all manipulated. Why? I just don't get it.
If somebody says "I was ten years old when I found out Santa Claus doesn't exist", nobody nitpicks them on the principle that you can't disprove something entirely. Why the special allowance for God?
Well that's an interesting point. The real insight would have been that "my parents are Santa Claus" - that is, the physical evidence that the child took to confirm his belief in Santa Claus turned out to have an entirely different cause. The following Christmas again came with family, friends, songs, celebrations and... presents Christmas morning! But the source of those things are better understood. So... what about the existence of Santa Claus? For millions, he still exists, but most understand his incarnation as an emergent property of millions of people acting in non-coordinated concert to achieve some "magic".
Does this realization make the Christmas season, and all of the feelings that come with it, any less magical? Those feelings are just as real, just as personally verifiable, but they cannot be "proven" to any other person that "does not believe" in the "magic" of Christmas. So the fraud of Santa Claus serves the purpose of sharing the feelings of Christmas with those to0 simple or naive to understand pleasure and reward derived from selfless giving - "They came from Santa Claus" - until they have matured - "It comes from your heart.".
Religion (spirituality) is similar. The ability to believe in God - in a higher power or purpose - a "oneness" of the universe - is no less real and no less valuable simply because it fails logical tests and empirical evidence. Being able to share the Love of God - an ephemeral presence outside of time and transcendent of ordinary matter - is no less a source of meaning and happiness regardless of the paradoxical nature of the journey, or the cognitive failures in grasping extrasensory concepts.
Never met a government program you didn't like, eh? It doesn't seem to bother you that corporations get handouts and protection from the agencies you think are working for you. The FDA == Monsanto. The FDA is too busy raiding farms and food co-ops to worry about what their corporate bosses are doing. The EPA == GE (which paid no taxes at all last year on $5.1 billion in taxes. OSHA didn't protect me from a painful repetitive stress injury, and wouldn't do anything to help me get reimbursed for the hundreds of dollars in ergonomic office equipment I had to buy out of pocket. The union didn't care, so OSHA didn't either, but I'm sure if the union wanted to bring back child labor, OSHA would be perfectly okay with it.
I think your trust is misplaced.
blah, blah, blah SOMALIA blah blah
Go back to sleep. Oh, you still are.
Consumer protection laws are another example.
An example of incremental oppression, yes. While the idea may have been good intentioned when people thought they were getting rat feces with their canned ham, nowadays it's just code for "reducing consumer choice." The little people can't be trusted to not kill themselves by shear stupidity, so we must decide what products they can purchase. Oh, and what a great opportunity to decide which corporations should survive and which ones won't....
Laws keeping powerful corporations from intruding, and interfering, with the lives of normal people are another.
THAT is what the free market does, not some crony bureaucrat or paid-off politician. Do you really think they care about you? Here's a clue for you: The government is the institution with a monopoly on coercion and force. No corporation can make me buy a car, but the government can. No corporation can force me to buy overpriced health insurance that covers things I don't really want or need coverage for, but the government can, and will.
Keep thinking that government will protect you from corporations. The more power you give the government, the more powerful their favored corporations will become. Why do you think they are different entities? Do you know how many Goldman Sachs executives, for instance, are now in charge of the bureaucracies that are supposed to be regulation the financial sector?
If you really fear the power of corporations, you'll check out where they are getting their power: GOVERNMENT!
Or, if we're not parroting more paranoid rhetoric, we look at the rest of the Western world, at countries like Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands, where the horrible curse of "socialism" has produced some of the most successful states in history. The UK, Australia and Canada to a lesser degree, particularly in recent decades, but that's largely because they have followed the US down the path of deregulation and corporate rent-seeking.
Well of course those countries do some amount of central planning, but they are generally mixed economies, not socialist (like North Korea). I suggest you take a closer look at those countries, and try to distinguish between the things run as socialist systems, the financial situations in those countries, and try not to let your ideological filters get in the way. Sweden is a good example of how even in a country full of people with a strong work ethic, high participation in civic duties (it's nearly universal), and trust in government institutions, socialism can work its universally destructive process. It led to some severe economic problems in the 1970's, and the way out in early 1980's was massive deregulation of industry, including cutting taxes and welfare expenditures, abolishing government monopolies, reducing regulation, floating the currency, and permitting more private alternatives in the public sector. High tax rates (on all wage earners) kept the social safety net in place, but after the collapse of the Krona in the 1990's the only fix was to rolled back government control and spending. The central bank was made independent. Austerity measures included spending ceilings for public expenditures. The fact is, Sweden has learned its lesson about runaway government spending, and balances its budget. They are not the bastian of socialism you seem to think they are, and they have a much better handle on their finances than the (broke and failing) US government.
I am not a Marxist, or anti-capitalist,
Oh, okay.
Capitalism is fine, as long as it is a slave to human interests. The, largely mythical, freemarket should be balanced with what leads to the greater good of society. The second it starts working against normal people, it needs to be checked, since human good is the only ends that makes any sense. When working from within a society, this means societal good, not individual benefit at the cost of everyone else (that goes against the basic tenets of the social contract on which our society was based).
WTF? How is that not Marxism? So we should have free markets (which you some how think are mythical, despite the prosperity they have produced throughout history), but the collective "society" should be considered before any individual? "Social contract"? Really? "I've go mine and you've got yours" isn't good enough for you?
Whose ideal of "societal good" should we follow? Yours? Should we set up some dictator to decide for us? Or is it majority rule? So 51% of the people can decided that everything the other 49% owns should be taken and given to someone else? If 99% of the people decide that some people should not be allowed to have food and water is that okay too? Or will some grand ruler make those decisions?
I am a capitalist, it is the only system that has shown itself to work and probably the default state of natural economies. I am not a "freemarketeer" since that is a bit of ideological dogma that people somehow aspire towards; it is a utopia, it isn't based in reality.
Ah, so you are the worst kind of statist. "Capitalism" is okay, because then all capital can be controlled by a central bank and it can be doled out to only the "proper kind" of Corporations. Anyone else must petition the rulers for the privilege of participating in commerce. Yea, we're very close to that kind of crony capitalism already. And it sucks.
It presumes that if somehow the Government walked away the market would work itself out, and magically start working towards the societal good. I am not aware of any historical case when this has actually happened
You never heard of the Renaissance? Yes, government was around, but they totally left the merchants alone. Their only involvement was to draw taxes from the land use and hang the thieves. That's what created the middle class in the first place.
What it comes down to is a respect for private property rights and individual liberty. As these two tenants lose their value, governments take more power and more control and prosperity is lost and poverty increases. And that's bad for society.