These PEOPLE (not animals or machines or figments of our imagination, mind you), are already living hand-to-mouth, because unions are dead and businesses pay less than is needed to survive. These human beings rely on medicaid and food stamps and welfare and the like to survive. You want to take that away, AND add a sales tax to everything they need to buy? They'll die.
Or actually, they won't. People don't lay down and die willingly. They'll kill you, take your food, and live. And they'll be entirely justified in doing so.
Let's see. You consider it moral that people who are already leeching off me, then kill me, just because I stop them from stealing from me. Compared to you, Jack the Ripper was an honorable man.
And if you think unions help anyone but the union leaders, you're living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
There are jobs for everybody capable of providing something that someone else wants as long as the government doesn't make it illegal. Currently, the prominent example of the government making it illegal is called "minimum wage."
4. We need temporary tax increases until we get out of debt.
Learn about the Laffer Curve. It's theoretically valid and verified by experience.
Do not consider the government to be "us". Our total indebtedness as a country is the sum of government debt to foreign entities, personal debt to foreign entities, and business debt to foreign entities. Increasing taxes reduces production and the incentive to produce, and it is only by selling to foreign entities that we receive the money to reduce our foreign debt.
Reducing taxes allows us to produce more, and after we've made good progress slashing foreign debt we can give serious consideration to solving the debt problem between US governments and people and businesses within the US. For similar reasons, high taxes won't fix that problem either.
Then we need to make it illegal for our governments to borrow money except in times of war.
Well, maybe. I'll give you an improvement:
--> Then we need to make it illegal for our governments to borrow money except in times of declared war.
This helps solves several political problems in the US, including the temptation to spend recklessly and the temptation to fight ad hoc wars. Getting Congress to pass a formal Declaration of War has proven to be impossible for the last 71 years.
The ability to control the money supply is critically important. The way we control the money supply is by selling debt or buying it back. Without the ability to borrow we cannot adjust the money supply which makes it very difficult to combat inflation, encourage (or discourage) lending, or deal with volatile tax revenues.
The ability to control the money supply (either directly, or indirectly through the Fed) is a weapon with no good uses. It's the reason that the dollar is worth less than 2% of what it was worth 100 years ago. The best situation is for money to have as near a constant value as freedom allows, which means something like a gold standard (if that sticks in your craw, then consider a mixed basket of valuable metals.)
The idea that without the ability to borrow money it would be difficult to control inflation is the exact opposite of the truth. Look at history; understand history.
The internet was started by the Defense Department, and other government entities expanded it. Eventually it was commercialized, grew greatly, and the government portion of the hardware has become an insignificant portion or decommissioned. The internet's hardware today is almost all paid for by non-tax money.
Semiconductor manufacturing is older than the internet and has always been dominantly commercial. Putting government money into semi mfg today is not seed money, it's "industrial policy" (a part of fascism).
The cases are not similar enough to provide guidance.
By the measure that different structures would have advantages without introducing any disadvantages.
The eyes have already been discussed above. The too-narrow pelvis of human females that results in painful, and sometimes fatal, childbirth. An ad-hoc immune system. Allergies. Baldness. Teeth made of materials that easily decay. Arteries near the surface of the neck vulnerable to fatal slashes. A common tube for food and air, so that choking on food is possible. Common orifices for urination and insemination, leading to multiple problems of both mental and physical health. Defective cellular maintenance that results in aging.
That's ten flaws that I thought of as fast as I could type them. There are many, many other things that could be much better, that would give humans longer, safer, more comfortable, more pleasant, more productive lives.
Your conception of the structure of the human retina is completely wrong. You claim receptors for different colors are on different layers, like a Foveon camera sensor. That is not true. The human retina is more like a Bayer sensor (except that it's a somewhat random pattern), with rods, red cones, green cones, and blue cones all on the same layer.
Thanks for a very nice reference. It looks like the western mountains stop most weather, but the prevailing winds (jet stream?) take storms starting east of the mountains or swept northward from the Gulf of Mexico, eastward across the rest of the US. Florida and the southern parts of the other Gulf states seem mostly to get their weather off the water.
You shouldn't be forced to pay for weather satellites; that should be the responsibility of Accuweather and other similar companies, as you may have intended to imply. Nonetheless, it's not as if you don't benefit - you do eat, don't you?
The Constitution does not forbid a standing army, it just forbids funding it for more than two years at a time. That may not have been the Founder's intent, but the language is quite plain.
Technically (as I understand it) the Marines are a part of the Navy.
The Air Force is a very rare example of technology that developed into something not properly handled by the Constitution; it should have been dealt with by an amendment. However, within the context of today's military, the Air Force is no worse than the rest.
We loose [sic] ten times more people each year in driving accidents than we have in the last decade from terrorists and wars combined; yet we've spent ~10-12 trillion on national defense, plus another 2-3 trillion on two wars... and.. how much to improve driving safety?
There are many things wrong with your castle-in-the-sky comparison. Here are two: national defense is a governmental requirement, safe transportation is not. There's no way to know how many lives have been saved by military or transportation spending, and it's the lives saved, not the lives lost, that are relevant to the cost (I'd argue that military spending has saved 300 million US lives, whereas transportation safety improvements (not all due to gov't) save about 75,000/year.)
Last year 2.5 million Americans died. By your silly implied standard, we ought to be spending well in excess of 2.5 quadrillion ($2.5e15) each year on preventing all deaths in the United States. Over 8 million dollars per person per year. That money would come from where? Ah, Obamalogic.
There are a variety of reasons for the relatively large US military expenditures, some good, some bad. One is that the cost of living and the cost of many materials is higher in the US than elsewhere, so it costs more to do the same this here as elsewhere. Another is that the US bears a large part of the cost of defending (Western) civilization. Another is that keeping at the leading edge of military tech is expensive (the alternative is losing lives.) Among the bad reasons are corruption, waste, not minding our own business, and having the wrong goals when fighting a war.
The statistics on unmarried mothers, both white and non-white, are increasing, appalling, and widely available.
cayenne8 said he saw people sitting around outside, presumably not even in wheelchairs. If they got themselves outside, they're capable of working. Welfare fraud has become an obvious scandal (more so than ever, it's been a scandal for at least 40 years.)
You seem to be interested in finding excuses for irresponsibility located in niches of improbability. Legislators are setting up conditions for parasites to live, parasites are using those conditions, and you are excusing them. Therein lies the nexus of evil in this country, and without all 3 parts it could not succeed. Nice to see you doing your share.
Having liberties not violated requires more than the laws being in place, it requires that the government live by them. Haven't been paying much attention to the news lately, have you? (IRS, Benghazi) Hey Obama, do you know what the penalty for treason is?
Why would they? The government loan was paid off with money received from investors, not from actual profits. For the NYT it's a symbol of environmental success, which they favor, but commercial success, which they don't. Limbaugh has more important issues to deal with, and Tesla paying off a loan with stockholder money is an issue complicated enough not to provide any clear lesson.
It's good that the risk is off the government, i.e. everyone, and onto the shoulders of voluntary investors. Whether the investors will turn out to be suckers is something only time will tell.
The money Solyndra got from the government was not provided by the magic cash fairy, it was stolen (taxed) from others, including venture capital funds, in the first place. The venture capitalists cooperated in this - at gunpoint.
The Solyndra case is particularly egregious because they received hundreds of millions of dollars when it was already obvious that they had failed. The money let executives bleed a little more from the corpse.
Did you actually read the article you cited? If you didn't, you're a moron. If you did, you're one colossal amazing moron. The so-called tax breaks and subsidies are such things as writing down declining assets (which all companies can do) and heating energy gifts to the poor.
Falling for leftist catchphrases unexamined? Deliberately distorting the facts? I don't know what your problem is, but you're not getting away with it this time.
I don't hear anybody complaining about the Fed bailing out GM...
Then you haven't been listening. Conservative commentators have been complaining about it since it was first proposed, and complaining again when GM "paid back" part of its loan with money from another loan. They still complain about it when there isn't some greater disaster to rail against, which (alas) is every day.
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Let's see. You consider it moral that people who are already leeching off me, then kill me, just because I stop them from stealing from me. Compared to you, Jack the Ripper was an honorable man.
And if you think unions help anyone but the union leaders, you're living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
Taxes are the extortion I pay not to be jailed or killed by people legally empowered to use guns against the innocent.
There are jobs for everybody capable of providing something that someone else wants as long as the government doesn't make it illegal. Currently, the prominent example of the government making it illegal is called "minimum wage."
Learn about the Laffer Curve. It's theoretically valid and verified by experience.
Do not consider the government to be "us". Our total indebtedness as a country is the sum of government debt to foreign entities, personal debt to foreign entities, and business debt to foreign entities. Increasing taxes reduces production and the incentive to produce, and it is only by selling to foreign entities that we receive the money to reduce our foreign debt.
Reducing taxes allows us to produce more, and after we've made good progress slashing foreign debt we can give serious consideration to solving the debt problem between US governments and people and businesses within the US. For similar reasons, high taxes won't fix that problem either.
Well, maybe. I'll give you an improvement:
--> Then we need to make it illegal for our governments to borrow money except in times of declared war.
This helps solves several political problems in the US, including the temptation to spend recklessly and the temptation to fight ad hoc wars. Getting Congress to pass a formal Declaration of War has proven to be impossible for the last 71 years.
The ability to control the money supply (either directly, or indirectly through the Fed) is a weapon with no good uses. It's the reason that the dollar is worth less than 2% of what it was worth 100 years ago. The best situation is for money to have as near a constant value as freedom allows, which means something like a gold standard (if that sticks in your craw, then consider a mixed basket of valuable metals.)
The idea that without the ability to borrow money it would be difficult to control inflation is the exact opposite of the truth. Look at history; understand history.
The internet was started by the Defense Department, and other government entities expanded it. Eventually it was commercialized, grew greatly, and the government portion of the hardware has become an insignificant portion or decommissioned. The internet's hardware today is almost all paid for by non-tax money.
Semiconductor manufacturing is older than the internet and has always been dominantly commercial. Putting government money into semi mfg today is not seed money, it's "industrial policy" (a part of fascism).
The cases are not similar enough to provide guidance.
Assuming that's true, how does it help the EU?
One photon of a 1 MHz radio wave is about 500 million times weaker than one photon of visible light.
Roach Motels don't use poison. The inside of the box is sticky. The bait lures them in, they touch the adhesive and can go no further.
By the measure that different structures would have advantages without introducing any disadvantages.
The eyes have already been discussed above. The too-narrow pelvis of human females that results in painful, and sometimes fatal, childbirth. An ad-hoc immune system. Allergies. Baldness. Teeth made of materials that easily decay. Arteries near the surface of the neck vulnerable to fatal slashes. A common tube for food and air, so that choking on food is possible. Common orifices for urination and insemination, leading to multiple problems of both mental and physical health. Defective cellular maintenance that results in aging.
That's ten flaws that I thought of as fast as I could type them. There are many, many other things that could be much better, that would give humans longer, safer, more comfortable, more pleasant, more productive lives.
Your conception of the structure of the human retina is completely wrong. You claim receptors for different colors are on different layers, like a Foveon camera sensor. That is not true. The human retina is more like a Bayer sensor (except that it's a somewhat random pattern), with rods, red cones, green cones, and blue cones all on the same layer.
Thanks for a very nice reference. It looks like the western mountains stop most weather, but the prevailing winds (jet stream?) take storms starting east of the mountains or swept northward from the Gulf of Mexico, eastward across the rest of the US. Florida and the southern parts of the other Gulf states seem mostly to get their weather off the water.
You shouldn't be forced to pay for weather satellites; that should be the responsibility of Accuweather and other similar companies, as you may have intended to imply. Nonetheless, it's not as if you don't benefit - you do eat, don't you?
The Constitution does not forbid a standing army, it just forbids funding it for more than two years at a time. That may not have been the Founder's intent, but the language is quite plain.
Technically (as I understand it) the Marines are a part of the Navy.
The Air Force is a very rare example of technology that developed into something not properly handled by the Constitution; it should have been dealt with by an amendment. However, within the context of today's military, the Air Force is no worse than the rest.
There are many things wrong with your castle-in-the-sky comparison. Here are two: national defense is a governmental requirement, safe transportation is not. There's no way to know how many lives have been saved by military or transportation spending, and it's the lives saved, not the lives lost, that are relevant to the cost (I'd argue that military spending has saved 300 million US lives, whereas transportation safety improvements (not all due to gov't) save about 75,000/year.)
Last year 2.5 million Americans died. By your silly implied standard, we ought to be spending well in excess of 2.5 quadrillion ($2.5e15) each year on preventing all deaths in the United States. Over 8 million dollars per person per year. That money would come from where? Ah, Obamalogic.
There are a variety of reasons for the relatively large US military expenditures, some good, some bad. One is that the cost of living and the cost of many materials is higher in the US than elsewhere, so it costs more to do the same this here as elsewhere. Another is that the US bears a large part of the cost of defending (Western) civilization. Another is that keeping at the leading edge of military tech is expensive (the alternative is losing lives.) Among the bad reasons are corruption, waste, not minding our own business, and having the wrong goals when fighting a war.
To get gov't money as an individual, you have to prove that you're worthless. It helps a lot to claim that you have dependent children.
The statistics on unmarried mothers, both white and non-white, are increasing, appalling, and widely available.
cayenne8 said he saw people sitting around outside, presumably not even in wheelchairs. If they got themselves outside, they're capable of working. Welfare fraud has become an obvious scandal (more so than ever, it's been a scandal for at least 40 years.)
You seem to be interested in finding excuses for irresponsibility located in niches of improbability. Legislators are setting up conditions for parasites to live, parasites are using those conditions, and you are excusing them. Therein lies the nexus of evil in this country, and without all 3 parts it could not succeed. Nice to see you doing your share.
Having liberties not violated requires more than the laws being in place, it requires that the government live by them. Haven't been paying much attention to the news lately, have you? (IRS, Benghazi) Hey Obama, do you know what the penalty for treason is?
That's the funniest thing I've read today.
Hudson's Bay Company? Lowenbrau? I don't think those are real estate or finance businesses.
Disaster Recovery does not imply data center. This could mean food storage, an armory, or a shelter, among many possibilities.
Why would they? The government loan was paid off with money received from investors, not from actual profits. For the NYT it's a symbol of environmental success, which they favor, but commercial success, which they don't. Limbaugh has more important issues to deal with, and Tesla paying off a loan with stockholder money is an issue complicated enough not to provide any clear lesson.
It's good that the risk is off the government, i.e. everyone, and onto the shoulders of voluntary investors. Whether the investors will turn out to be suckers is something only time will tell.
The money Solyndra got from the government was not provided by the magic cash fairy, it was stolen (taxed) from others, including venture capital funds, in the first place. The venture capitalists cooperated in this - at gunpoint.
The Solyndra case is particularly egregious because they received hundreds of millions of dollars when it was already obvious that they had failed. The money let executives bleed a little more from the corpse.
Did you actually read the article you cited? If you didn't, you're a moron. If you did, you're one colossal amazing moron. The so-called tax breaks and subsidies are such things as writing down declining assets (which all companies can do) and heating energy gifts to the poor.
Falling for leftist catchphrases unexamined? Deliberately distorting the facts? I don't know what your problem is, but you're not getting away with it this time.
Then you haven't been listening. Conservative commentators have been complaining about it since it was first proposed, and complaining again when GM "paid back" part of its loan with money from another loan. They still complain about it when there isn't some greater disaster to rail against, which (alas) is every day.