which suggests that their productivity is very low
Why not just look at productivity numbers instead of making shit up? The numbers are not low. The high unemployment was started by outsourcing which then led to less demand and then led to more unemployment.
Unless your point is to just continue to run those kind of deficits today and for the next few years and then try to pay for them with tax increases five or ten years from now?
Even the president's commission realized that it makes sense to wait until the economy recovers before you start massive cuts.
Right now debt as a percent of GDP is higher than it has been since the end of WWII
And what happened after WWII? Forty years of economic boom!
This is just accounting shenanigans. If there was a cut in social security or medicare then the tax money currently going to those programs could be spent in reducing the deficit. The fact that you would, as a matter of accounting, end up reducing the social security tax and raising the general income tax by an equivalent amount in order to bring it about changes nothing about the actual impact of the change: Money distributed in social security checks is money that isn't, and could be, spent covering the deficit.
How many people die as a result of your cuts to SS and medicare? What were their lives worth?
SS doesn't contribute to the deficit, so we should leave it alone, IMHO. It's apples and oranges. In addition, all the SS cut proposals I have heard want to cut it more now than the 20% we would have to cut benefits when it runs out of surplus in 2037 or whenever. The cure is worse than the disease! You'd actually have to cut it less if you just do nothing and let it run out of money. How is cutting more now better?
But I beleive you could tax the current tax-paying Americans at _100%_ and we still wouldn't be out of the mess we're in. _That's_ how bad it has gotten.
Well perhaps because you say, "tax-paying Americans" and many companies and individuals are not paying. Also, though I heard someone on CNBC say something like the deficit is only like 1/3 of total household net worth in the US, which is why people are still willing to loan us money.
Show me a plan that balances the budget THIS YEAR.
On the revenue side, return to Eisenhower era tax rates. Capital gains taxed as normal income. All companies and individuals pay. No loopholes. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Make oil companies pay market value for taking oil on public lands rather than cents on the dollar. Start prosecuting speculators and the Wall St bozos that caused the financial meltdown. Real regulation for insurance companies to prevent them from draining so much money out of health care that costs go up astronomically just to pay insurance CEOs salaries. I'm sure there are billions out there in waste, fraud, and abuse alone.
On the cuts side, stop sending billions of dollars in foreign aid to other countries if we can't afford it. Stop subsidizing the oil companies. DOD says they can take cuts.
You seriously can't find anyone taking a realistic look at the so called, "fair tax", and finding it wanting?
Google is your friend.
Ever heard of Brad DeLong (a professor of Economics and chair of the Political Economy major at the University of California, Berkeley)? Wow, that took like 15 seconds...
I suppose he is an idiot too because he doesn't agree with you...
I've read a lot about it. It's just one more plan to make the rich pay less and everyone else pay more...
Where in TFAs does it say that MS is abandoning UIA?
I see it saying that they didn't implement it in the phone OS (probably to get it to market faster), but I don't see anything saying that MS is abandoning all future work on UIA in Windows in favor of IA2 from MSAA. There doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence from TFAs to draw that conclusion.
Just because the Chinese have learned the right way to make money and enhancing their competitiveness, It doesn't give you any right to bitch about it.
More angry that the politicians over the last 30 years have dismantled the system that created this economy over the last 200 years. The Chinese then went and implemented our system.
The system is from Alexander Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures (1791). From here:
"Those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen and, after more than 200 successful years, were abandoned only during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton (and remain abandoned to this day). Modern-day China, however, implemented most of Hamilton’s plan and has brought about a remarkable transformation of its nation in a single generation."
When what's good for business is not what is good for the country, the job of government is to step in and ensure we do what is good for the country. Government has become too enamored of business and has lost its way.
We can win..just let loose the market forces and we will see wonders.
Sounds like a religious statement. I don't subscribe to your religion on that one. Over the last 30 years we have tried that and it hasn't worked. All it has done is shipped jobs overseas, made the richer, pushed the middle class downward, and made the poor poorer. There is data that shows this hasn't worked. Look at the data and stop believing in fairy tales.
There are few patriots in the CxO class. As long as Wall Street is only interested in short term gains, that's all these guys are interested in too. So, we indeed sell the Chinese the rope they will use to hang us. The Darwinian capitalism you are recommending just eats itself.
If you have to spend 100% of your paycheck just to keep from starving to death, 100% of your income is taxed. The richer you are the less of a percentage of your income you will pay because as we've seen time and time again, the rich don't spend as high a percentage of their income as the middle class does. Taxed at 100% of income vs. taxed at less than 100% of income equals not fair.
A flat percentage of all compensation (rather than the limited legal definition of "income") would be fair.
That's why Obama is not interested in giving a tax cut to the rich. For the economy to improve people need to spend. If you look at the outcomes from previous tax cuts, the rich put the money in the bank. The middle class and poor spent it. Tax cuts for the rich are a bad return on investment.
It's not disingenuous when the rich are being "paid" in stocks so that they can be taxed at 15% as capital gains when the rest of us are paying more than 15% because we don't have the ability to hide our "compensation" as something other than "income".
Another BS argument to hide the truth in legal semantics.
Typical obfuscation argument I hear all the time. Total BS!
It's about percentage of income not about total dollars. In the US, the rich guy pays 15% of his income. I pay 25%. How is that fair exactly?
That's why people are pissed. The rich are not paying their fair share. All I want is for them to pay the same percentage that I pay.
That's why consumption taxes like the “Fair Tax” are also BS. If I live paycheck to paycheck and spend 100% of my income, 100% of my income is taxed. If I'm rich enough that I don't need to live paycheck to paycheck less than 100% of my income is taxed.
When did you ever see the R's screw around for months trying to get the D's support on anything like the D's did trying to get R support on healthcare?
If D's hadn't screwed around trying to get R support for the healthcare bill they would have passed it months earlier. That would be pushing it through. As it turns out they spent months talking to R's.
Deemed as passed is just confirmation of something that has already passed, so I don't see that as much of a trick since the thing passed the house in the first place.
I've seen a lot of, "You're very good, get excellent reviews (i.e. you get credit), but the executives make more money if they offshore the jobs and those folks are good enough, so there's no point in giving you a raise. If you leave we'll just hire more overseas."
The difference is that the R's are ruthless and push stuff through using every trick they can find, the other party be damned. The D's are not ruthless and try to be above board and bipartisan.
The whole reason the tax cuts are on the table again is that R's used parliamentary procedures to push them through and those procedures prevented them from being permanent.
Less people working (or working for less money) means less customers for the company's products which typically means less money for the company. That was Henry Ford's great insight that drove the US economy for most of the 20th century.
Ya know, the companies would have even more money if they paid in the CEOs less. Oh wait, they can't do that because CEOs are magic and without them making 2000 times what everyone else makes, all companies would fail. Of course you could never outsource CEO jobs because, they are magic. The folks these jobs have been outsourced to now know how the technology they are dealing with works and have been trained by us. How long will it be before China and India decide they don't need US companies running the show anymore and just start their own companies using the training and technology they have received from us and cut out the US entirely? I don't doubt that it will happen. Hopefully the folks that let it happen will finally be seen as the traitors that they are.
Surprisingly, the role of government is to regulate when the actions of businesses are detrimental to the country as a whole.
This ridiculous notion that, "what is good for business is good for the country", has been proven to be wrong. It's not good for the country for jobs to be shipped overseas, and really, it's not good for the long term viability of many businesses either, but US business are all about year to year earnings. Some other poor bastard CEO in the future is going to have to deal with the bad decisions made by the current crop to make those Y2Y numbers by selling out the company's future. These guys will be gone by then. Not their problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Last night, Anderson Cooper interviewed the guy from S&P who made the decision and he most certainly DID day that! I saw it live!
Indeed. Personally I like this article. If Congress just went away for 10 years the deficit would solve itself!
Why not just look at productivity numbers instead of making shit up? The numbers are not low. The high unemployment was started by outsourcing which then led to less demand and then led to more unemployment.
What inflation?
Indeed. I have Puppy on an ancient laptop and it's way more tolerable / faster than WinXP on the same machine.
... no friends, fake personal info, just filled with links to one of the Goatse mirrors...
... and how many people die when you take away SS?
Unless your point is to just continue to run those kind of deficits today and for the next few years and then try to pay for them with tax increases five or ten years from now?
Even the president's commission realized that it makes sense to wait until the economy recovers before you start massive cuts.
Right now debt as a percent of GDP is higher than it has been since the end of WWII
And what happened after WWII? Forty years of economic boom!
This is just accounting shenanigans. If there was a cut in social security or medicare then the tax money currently going to those programs could be spent in reducing the deficit. The fact that you would, as a matter of accounting, end up reducing the social security tax and raising the general income tax by an equivalent amount in order to bring it about changes nothing about the actual impact of the change: Money distributed in social security checks is money that isn't, and could be, spent covering the deficit.
How many people die as a result of your cuts to SS and medicare? What were their lives worth?
SS doesn't contribute to the deficit, so we should leave it alone, IMHO. It's apples and oranges. In addition, all the SS cut proposals I have heard want to cut it more now than the 20% we would have to cut benefits when it runs out of surplus in 2037 or whenever. The cure is worse than the disease! You'd actually have to cut it less if you just do nothing and let it run out of money. How is cutting more now better?
But I beleive you could tax the current tax-paying Americans at _100%_ and we still wouldn't be out of the mess we're in. _That's_ how bad it has gotten.
Well perhaps because you say, "tax-paying Americans" and many companies and individuals are not paying. Also, though I heard someone on CNBC say something like the deficit is only like 1/3 of total household net worth in the US, which is why people are still willing to loan us money.
Show me a plan that balances the budget THIS YEAR.
On the revenue side, return to Eisenhower era tax rates. Capital gains taxed as normal income. All companies and individuals pay. No loopholes. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Make oil companies pay market value for taking oil on public lands rather than cents on the dollar. Start prosecuting speculators and the Wall St bozos that caused the financial meltdown. Real regulation for insurance companies to prevent them from draining so much money out of health care that costs go up astronomically just to pay insurance CEOs salaries. I'm sure there are billions out there in waste, fraud, and abuse alone.
On the cuts side, stop sending billions of dollars in foreign aid to other countries if we can't afford it. Stop subsidizing the oil companies. DOD says they can take cuts.
How about you prove your side?
You seriously can't find anyone taking a realistic look at the so called, "fair tax", and finding it wanting?
Google is your friend.
Ever heard of Brad DeLong (a professor of Economics and chair of the Political Economy major at the University of California, Berkeley)? Wow, that took like 15 seconds...
I suppose he is an idiot too because he doesn't agree with you...
I've read a lot about it. It's just one more plan to make the rich pay less and everyone else pay more...
Have you ever seen a conservative on Olbermann?
Yes. More than once.
Where in TFAs does it say that MS is abandoning UIA?
I see it saying that they didn't implement it in the phone OS (probably to get it to market faster), but I don't see anything saying that MS is abandoning all future work on UIA in Windows in favor of IA2 from MSAA. There doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence from TFAs to draw that conclusion.
Did I miss something?
This guy has a good historical take on it.
Just because the Chinese have learned the right way to make money and enhancing their competitiveness, It doesn't give you any right to bitch about it.
More angry that the politicians over the last 30 years have dismantled the system that created this economy over the last 200 years. The Chinese then went and implemented our system.
The system is from Alexander Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures (1791). From here:
When what's good for business is not what is good for the country, the job of government is to step in and ensure we do what is good for the country. Government has become too enamored of business and has lost its way.
We can win..just let loose the market forces and we will see wonders.
Sounds like a religious statement. I don't subscribe to your religion on that one. Over the last 30 years we have tried that and it hasn't worked. All it has done is shipped jobs overseas, made the richer, pushed the middle class downward, and made the poor poorer. There is data that shows this hasn't worked. Look at the data and stop believing in fairy tales.
There are few patriots in the CxO class. As long as Wall Street is only interested in short term gains, that's all these guys are interested in too. So, we indeed sell the Chinese the rope they will use to hang us. The Darwinian capitalism you are recommending just eats itself.
I use the Microsoft Natural and added a pair of SmartGlove and the pain is gone.
No consumption tax can be fair. Period.
If you have to spend 100% of your paycheck just to keep from starving to death, 100% of your income is taxed. The richer you are the less of a percentage of your income you will pay because as we've seen time and time again, the rich don't spend as high a percentage of their income as the middle class does. Taxed at 100% of income vs. taxed at less than 100% of income equals not fair.
A flat percentage of all compensation (rather than the limited legal definition of "income") would be fair.
That's why Obama is not interested in giving a tax cut to the rich. For the economy to improve people need to spend. If you look at the outcomes from previous tax cuts, the rich put the money in the bank. The middle class and poor spent it. Tax cuts for the rich are a bad return on investment.
Exactly!
It's not disingenuous when the rich are being "paid" in stocks so that they can be taxed at 15% as capital gains when the rest of us are paying more than 15% because we don't have the ability to hide our "compensation" as something other than "income".
Another BS argument to hide the truth in legal semantics.
Typical obfuscation argument I hear all the time. Total BS!
It's about percentage of income not about total dollars. In the US, the rich guy pays 15% of his income. I pay 25%. How is that fair exactly?
That's why people are pissed. The rich are not paying their fair share. All I want is for them to pay the same percentage that I pay.
That's why consumption taxes like the “Fair Tax” are also BS. If I live paycheck to paycheck and spend 100% of my income, 100% of my income is taxed. If I'm rich enough that I don't need to live paycheck to paycheck less than 100% of my income is taxed.
Does it still use the broken Windows Crypto API for SSL on Windows? If so, not interested.
When did you ever see the R's screw around for months trying to get the D's support on anything like the D's did trying to get R support on healthcare?
If D's hadn't screwed around trying to get R support for the healthcare bill they would have passed it months earlier. That would be pushing it through. As it turns out they spent months talking to R's.
Deemed as passed is just confirmation of something that has already passed, so I don't see that as much of a trick since the thing passed the house in the first place.
I've seen a lot of, "You're very good, get excellent reviews (i.e. you get credit), but the executives make more money if they offshore the jobs and those folks are good enough, so there's no point in giving you a raise. If you leave we'll just hire more overseas."
The difference is that the R's are ruthless and push stuff through using every trick they can find, the other party be damned. The D's are not ruthless and try to be above board and bipartisan.
The whole reason the tax cuts are on the table again is that R's used parliamentary procedures to push them through and those procedures prevented them from being permanent.
Just an observation.
Less people working (or working for less money) means less customers for the company's products which typically means less money for the company. That was Henry Ford's great insight that drove the US economy for most of the 20th century.
Ya know, the companies would have even more money if they paid in the CEOs less. Oh wait, they can't do that because CEOs are magic and without them making 2000 times what everyone else makes, all companies would fail. Of course you could never outsource CEO jobs because, they are magic. The folks these jobs have been outsourced to now know how the technology they are dealing with works and have been trained by us. How long will it be before China and India decide they don't need US companies running the show anymore and just start their own companies using the training and technology they have received from us and cut out the US entirely? I don't doubt that it will happen. Hopefully the folks that let it happen will finally be seen as the traitors that they are.
Surprisingly, the role of government is to regulate when the actions of businesses are detrimental to the country as a whole.
This ridiculous notion that, "what is good for business is good for the country", has been proven to be wrong. It's not good for the country for jobs to be shipped overseas, and really, it's not good for the long term viability of many businesses either, but US business are all about year to year earnings. Some other poor bastard CEO in the future is going to have to deal with the bad decisions made by the current crop to make those Y2Y numbers by selling out the company's future. These guys will be gone by then. Not their problem.
Finally someone got it right!