It's the very existence of aggressive militaries that requires a peaceful society to be able to protect itself against them. Stable, wealthy societies do not last long without some sort of military protection, because an unprotected, wealthy society is only all the more appealing to those who would loot it. Of course it would be better if no one had a military, but that is not and never has been the case. And if it were the case, the first people to build a military and use it for aggressive purposes would take us all as slaves.
Institutional violence is necessary to maintain society. Never in world history has there ever been a society that adopted a sort of pacifist anarchy, in which there were absolutely no institutions charged with using physical force to uphold social order.
Further to that, the use of force (or the threat of it) within civil society is not necessarily related to the use of force between nations in wars, so your argument of removing all military and police is really tilting at windmills.
Force is force. Whether you have a small group of people calling themselves a street gang or a large group of people calling themselves the Prussian army is a difference of degree. Whether they rob banks or burn cities is a difference of tactic. Whether you handcuff them and take them prisoner at gunpoint or shoot them in the belly as they cross the border is a difference in response, dictated by the desire to uphold a peaceful society within your own borders. In either case, there exist people who intend to do force against peaceful members of a peaceful society, and a peaceful society must have means of protecting itself against them.
And by that time, Sony will have only an old PS3 to sell, Nintendo could probably develop an HD Wii to better compete, and it'll be close to Microsoft's refresh cycle for the third Xbox anyway. Brilliant.
You know, in the lease for my apartment it's said that I can't drive nails into the wall or paint it without permission, among other things. I'm pretty sure these restrictions are a far cry from "temporary ownership". They're also about as strict as many DRM restrictions, although they don't try to enforce themselves.
Since when do Sony and Microsoft define what "next gen" means? You may define "next gen" as HD graphics, but you'd be wrong--the Wii *is* among the next (or actually current) generation of consoles, and it doesn't have HD graphics.
Science only exists because the militaries of the world exist to do violence against the savages who would destroy it. Like it or not, things like science, technology, civilization, and society only exist because people are willing to protect their existence by means of physical force. Science owes its existence to the military, not the other way around. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but with 6 billion humans on the planet, even if all but one were committed pacifists, the only effect would be to make the last one king. He may have to club 10 pacifists to death before finding one to agree to serve him, but the end effect would be the same. And believe me, the probability of moral failure of the human being is far greater than 1 six-billionth.
Disagree? Let's apply the scientific method. Take a given society, and remove the institutionalized violence within. All the militaries and cops and assorted men with guns, disarmed and assigned to other work. See how long science continues to exist.
I agree with your main point. That said, putting exemptions into the sales tax is already popular enough to get away with, and may be brought on by popular demand itself. Other complications will be easy to hide because sales taxes are calculated entirely by sellers. If the government wanted to do something really complicated like vary the tax rate based upon the price, carbon footprint, etc. of a given product, the end user won't see any of these complications--especially if they went a step further and mandated that the posted price of a given product included the tax (which would be almost necessary for a 20-30% sales tax). At least with income taxes, you have to fill out a form every year.
Haha, no. The stock avatar isn't nearly sexy enough, and you need sexy clothes, sexy skins, sexy hair, sexy faux-genitalia, toys, someplace to do it, animations. A lot of stuff, all of which costs money. Most of the money in SL prostitution are in selling to prostitutes.
Does putting words in other people's mouths work in your usual social circles? I didn't say I wanted to exempt anything, and the FairTax bill is very clear on this. It applies to all retail sales and services of new goods.
Christ, than it's even worse than I had thought. Exemptions for things like housing and food are pretty much universal in state income taxes, and I assumed they would be present in a federal income tax. They would, without a doubt, be introduced should a federal sales tax ever be seriously considered by the Congress, but if you're arguing against them, that only strengthens my point. Do you honestly think making it more difficult to afford groceries is a good thing? (Further, my point was--and I apologize for not making this clear enough--that no matter how simple your initial proposal is, over the years, it is going to get more complicated. That's political reality. If you're proposing we do something to correct that political reality, than you can't argue against our current income tax, either, because that invalidates your previous arguments against it.)
All the research commissioned by the FairTax organization is available at their web site, and I defy you to refute their conclusions.
Isn't that kind of like research commissioned by tobacco companies to prove that tobacco isn't addictive? In any case, point out the study that says a sales tax of whatever percentage FairTax is proposing would push us to a better mix of spending and investment. Go on, do it. You're the one making the argument, so you should go ahead and be the one backing it up.
A flat tax is an improvement, but we started with a flat income tax applied only to rich people, and look where we are now.
I could just as much argue that *you* want to start with a flat sales tax applied only to...well, whatever you want to make exempt--and say that we're going to end up in the same place years from now. (If we're lucky--we might get there as soon as it gets out of committee.)
As long as there's any kind of an income tax, it will be business as usual, as the politicians keep playing the game of bribing us by offering temporary relief to one group or another at everyone else's expense. Manipulating a sales tax is far more obvious, and harder for a politician to rationalize.
But you've opened the door to that the second you start coming up with exemptions. Then it'll become variable rates for "luxury items" and cruft will accumulate just as it did before. The reason state sales taxes don't do that is, first, it's easier to move from state to state to avoid this crap, second, many states function more sanely than the federal government, and third, no one wants to lobby Salem or Boise to have the tax laws altered in their favor as much as they want to lobby Washington.
If you tax people on what they spend, not what they earn, they will save and invest more, and that's something that our economy could use quite a bit more of.
Our economy also needs spending. If you had a serious economic analysis that a sales tax would move us closer to an optimal mix of spending and investment, I might take you seriously, but you're just sort of handwaving. Besides, this also has the effect of increasing the amount of money spent, because you're in effect raising the prices on everything by 30%. That leaves many people with less money left over to save and invest. Many people, who would otherwise go to a movie, buy a clock radio, and take a road trip, while saving what they have left over, would probably instead just go to the movie, buy the clock radio, and take the road trip and save less. Or they pass up on the clock radio, save just as much money, but are just plain poorer. Or maybe they continue their lifestyle and go into debt. Now they're soaking up savings and investment assets that could be applied to something productive. You could avoid this by simply placing a luxury tax on things rich people buy, but that wouldn't raise enough to support the federal government by itself, and it would probably slow the rate of innovation (since many new technologies go into luxury items before they come to the mass market).
They're happier and they earn more. I think if you look at the statistics, married people are slightly less promiscuous, but not as much as you'd think. (Fact: adultery is the norm.)
Yeah, yeah. Well, guess what, most people don't have HDTV's yet, either. The post I was originally replying to tried to say "it's okay that AppleTV only has HDMI, because it's from THE FUTURE!". I was calling bullshit on that, not actually suggesting that storage and bandwidth were viable for HD video downloads by now.
I love rich people--and hey, if anything I hate poor people. In any case, bringing personal motivations into the discussion was a mistake and I apologize for introducing that unpleasantry.
That being said, dealing with income taxes could be just about as trivial as sales taxes, if the income tax system was simplified. Imagine a flat tax, for instance. Every time you produce a paycheck, apply the flat rate, withhold the funds, and remit payment. Doing that would solve the problems you point out while avoiding the myriad problems that a sales tax introduces. Also, there's no guarantee that a federal sales tax would remain that simple--given political realities, the exemptions, variable rates, tax credits, and other cruft would become just as much a headache as income taxes.
Either way, we have to simplify the accounting, and make sure it stays simple, preferably with a constitutional amendment or other legal obstruction. It's just that, that having been done, we'd probably still better be served by some type of income tax.
Further, it's distracting and rather of a straw man to compare some idealistic federal sales tax to the mess of an income tax system we have now. I don't think anyone, other than tax attorneys and accountants, actually likes the tax system we have in place now. If you want to argue the differences between income and sales taxes inherently, that's one thing. But if you're going to take your untarnished-by-political-reality sales tax, it's rather dishonest not to allow me to compare it to an untarnished-by-political-reality flat income tax.
Small businesses have to do paperwork to handle sales taxes, too, if they sell anything. In any case, "let's simplify the accounting for our tax system" is a far cry from "let's fundamentally change the basis of our tax system". That's like saying that instead of eating dirty food you should eat paper. No, you eat clean food.
Inches from a tantrum? I've been indulging yours for days. If it's my "opinion" that small-breasted, narrow-hipped women look like men, I guess it's my "opinion" that all mammals have similar bone structures too. Noticing similarities may not rise above "opinion" in your estimation, but I guess that makes you an intellectual gimp.
I could very well ask you the same question. If you compare sales tax (which is weighted against the poor) against progressive income tax (which is weighted against the rich) or even a flat income tax (which is weighted less drastically against the rich), and consider that people become rich by saving money, putting more of the tax burden on poor people will keep them from becoming rich by preventing them from saving money or forcing them into greater debt. That's not a difficult thing to understand.
It's just that, in context, you could have been seen as defending old Reaganesque conservatives--the moniker aside, you're a well-known enough contributor for your decidedly not Reaganesque views that I found the juxtaposition rather amusing.
I'm working on it too. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be doing nearly as good a job if I had to pay 30% sales tax on everything. That's the entire goddamn point--high sales taxes make upward social mobility artificially difficult. They're sort of a drawbridge where rich people stay that way and don't allow anyone else to join them. Income taxes, on the other hand, don't get in the way of stepping up.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the s at the end of maths is not from a transliteration of a Greek term.
You have no practical need to post on Slashdot. Get back to work!
"BluerAy"? Is that when The Fonz gets a job bluing steel?
It's the very existence of aggressive militaries that requires a peaceful society to be able to protect itself against them. Stable, wealthy societies do not last long without some sort of military protection, because an unprotected, wealthy society is only all the more appealing to those who would loot it. Of course it would be better if no one had a military, but that is not and never has been the case. And if it were the case, the first people to build a military and use it for aggressive purposes would take us all as slaves.
Institutional violence is necessary to maintain society. Never in world history has there ever been a society that adopted a sort of pacifist anarchy, in which there were absolutely no institutions charged with using physical force to uphold social order.
Further to that, the use of force (or the threat of it) within civil society is not necessarily related to the use of force between nations in wars, so your argument of removing all military and police is really tilting at windmills.Force is force. Whether you have a small group of people calling themselves a street gang or a large group of people calling themselves the Prussian army is a difference of degree. Whether they rob banks or burn cities is a difference of tactic. Whether you handcuff them and take them prisoner at gunpoint or shoot them in the belly as they cross the border is a difference in response, dictated by the desire to uphold a peaceful society within your own borders. In either case, there exist people who intend to do force against peaceful members of a peaceful society, and a peaceful society must have means of protecting itself against them.
Or the highest, as the case may be.
And by that time, Sony will have only an old PS3 to sell, Nintendo could probably develop an HD Wii to better compete, and it'll be close to Microsoft's refresh cycle for the third Xbox anyway. Brilliant.
You know, in the lease for my apartment it's said that I can't drive nails into the wall or paint it without permission, among other things. I'm pretty sure these restrictions are a far cry from "temporary ownership". They're also about as strict as many DRM restrictions, although they don't try to enforce themselves.
Since when do Sony and Microsoft define what "next gen" means? You may define "next gen" as HD graphics, but you'd be wrong--the Wii *is* among the next (or actually current) generation of consoles, and it doesn't have HD graphics.
Science only exists because the militaries of the world exist to do violence against the savages who would destroy it. Like it or not, things like science, technology, civilization, and society only exist because people are willing to protect their existence by means of physical force. Science owes its existence to the military, not the other way around. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but with 6 billion humans on the planet, even if all but one were committed pacifists, the only effect would be to make the last one king. He may have to club 10 pacifists to death before finding one to agree to serve him, but the end effect would be the same. And believe me, the probability of moral failure of the human being is far greater than 1 six-billionth.
Disagree? Let's apply the scientific method. Take a given society, and remove the institutionalized violence within. All the militaries and cops and assorted men with guns, disarmed and assigned to other work. See how long science continues to exist.
I agree with your main point. That said, putting exemptions into the sales tax is already popular enough to get away with, and may be brought on by popular demand itself. Other complications will be easy to hide because sales taxes are calculated entirely by sellers. If the government wanted to do something really complicated like vary the tax rate based upon the price, carbon footprint, etc. of a given product, the end user won't see any of these complications--especially if they went a step further and mandated that the posted price of a given product included the tax (which would be almost necessary for a 20-30% sales tax). At least with income taxes, you have to fill out a form every year.
Haha, no. The stock avatar isn't nearly sexy enough, and you need sexy clothes, sexy skins, sexy hair, sexy faux-genitalia, toys, someplace to do it, animations. A lot of stuff, all of which costs money. Most of the money in SL prostitution are in selling to prostitutes.
SL prostitution also needs cash input, but it probably isn't nearly as lucrative.
How old are you? 6?
Christ, than it's even worse than I had thought. Exemptions for things like housing and food are pretty much universal in state income taxes, and I assumed they would be present in a federal income tax. They would, without a doubt, be introduced should a federal sales tax ever be seriously considered by the Congress, but if you're arguing against them, that only strengthens my point. Do you honestly think making it more difficult to afford groceries is a good thing? (Further, my point was--and I apologize for not making this clear enough--that no matter how simple your initial proposal is, over the years, it is going to get more complicated. That's political reality. If you're proposing we do something to correct that political reality, than you can't argue against our current income tax, either, because that invalidates your previous arguments against it.)
All the research commissioned by the FairTax organization is available at their web site, and I defy you to refute their conclusions.Isn't that kind of like research commissioned by tobacco companies to prove that tobacco isn't addictive? In any case, point out the study that says a sales tax of whatever percentage FairTax is proposing would push us to a better mix of spending and investment. Go on, do it. You're the one making the argument, so you should go ahead and be the one backing it up.
I could just as much argue that *you* want to start with a flat sales tax applied only to...well, whatever you want to make exempt--and say that we're going to end up in the same place years from now. (If we're lucky--we might get there as soon as it gets out of committee.)
As long as there's any kind of an income tax, it will be business as usual, as the politicians keep playing the game of bribing us by offering temporary relief to one group or another at everyone else's expense. Manipulating a sales tax is far more obvious, and harder for a politician to rationalize.But you've opened the door to that the second you start coming up with exemptions. Then it'll become variable rates for "luxury items" and cruft will accumulate just as it did before. The reason state sales taxes don't do that is, first, it's easier to move from state to state to avoid this crap, second, many states function more sanely than the federal government, and third, no one wants to lobby Salem or Boise to have the tax laws altered in their favor as much as they want to lobby Washington.
If you tax people on what they spend, not what they earn, they will save and invest more, and that's something that our economy could use quite a bit more of.Our economy also needs spending. If you had a serious economic analysis that a sales tax would move us closer to an optimal mix of spending and investment, I might take you seriously, but you're just sort of handwaving. Besides, this also has the effect of increasing the amount of money spent, because you're in effect raising the prices on everything by 30%. That leaves many people with less money left over to save and invest. Many people, who would otherwise go to a movie, buy a clock radio, and take a road trip, while saving what they have left over, would probably instead just go to the movie, buy the clock radio, and take the road trip and save less. Or they pass up on the clock radio, save just as much money, but are just plain poorer. Or maybe they continue their lifestyle and go into debt. Now they're soaking up savings and investment assets that could be applied to something productive. You could avoid this by simply placing a luxury tax on things rich people buy, but that wouldn't raise enough to support the federal government by itself, and it would probably slow the rate of innovation (since many new technologies go into luxury items before they come to the mass market).
They're happier and they earn more. I think if you look at the statistics, married people are slightly less promiscuous, but not as much as you'd think. (Fact: adultery is the norm.)
Remember, kids. If it doesn't get you high and doesn't taste good, it's not worth smoking. Signed, The Cabal Against Cigarettes (TCAC).
Yeah, yeah. Well, guess what, most people don't have HDTV's yet, either. The post I was originally replying to tried to say "it's okay that AppleTV only has HDMI, because it's from THE FUTURE!". I was calling bullshit on that, not actually suggesting that storage and bandwidth were viable for HD video downloads by now.
I love rich people--and hey, if anything I hate poor people. In any case, bringing personal motivations into the discussion was a mistake and I apologize for introducing that unpleasantry.
That being said, dealing with income taxes could be just about as trivial as sales taxes, if the income tax system was simplified. Imagine a flat tax, for instance. Every time you produce a paycheck, apply the flat rate, withhold the funds, and remit payment. Doing that would solve the problems you point out while avoiding the myriad problems that a sales tax introduces. Also, there's no guarantee that a federal sales tax would remain that simple--given political realities, the exemptions, variable rates, tax credits, and other cruft would become just as much a headache as income taxes.
Either way, we have to simplify the accounting, and make sure it stays simple, preferably with a constitutional amendment or other legal obstruction. It's just that, that having been done, we'd probably still better be served by some type of income tax.
Further, it's distracting and rather of a straw man to compare some idealistic federal sales tax to the mess of an income tax system we have now. I don't think anyone, other than tax attorneys and accountants, actually likes the tax system we have in place now. If you want to argue the differences between income and sales taxes inherently, that's one thing. But if you're going to take your untarnished-by-political-reality sales tax, it's rather dishonest not to allow me to compare it to an untarnished-by-political-reality flat income tax.
Small businesses have to do paperwork to handle sales taxes, too, if they sell anything. In any case, "let's simplify the accounting for our tax system" is a far cry from "let's fundamentally change the basis of our tax system". That's like saying that instead of eating dirty food you should eat paper. No, you eat clean food.
Inches from a tantrum? I've been indulging yours for days. If it's my "opinion" that small-breasted, narrow-hipped women look like men, I guess it's my "opinion" that all mammals have similar bone structures too. Noticing similarities may not rise above "opinion" in your estimation, but I guess that makes you an intellectual gimp.
I could very well ask you the same question. If you compare sales tax (which is weighted against the poor) against progressive income tax (which is weighted against the rich) or even a flat income tax (which is weighted less drastically against the rich), and consider that people become rich by saving money, putting more of the tax burden on poor people will keep them from becoming rich by preventing them from saving money or forcing them into greater debt. That's not a difficult thing to understand.
It's just that, in context, you could have been seen as defending old Reaganesque conservatives--the moniker aside, you're a well-known enough contributor for your decidedly not Reaganesque views that I found the juxtaposition rather amusing.
I'm working on it too. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be doing nearly as good a job if I had to pay 30% sales tax on everything. That's the entire goddamn point--high sales taxes make upward social mobility artificially difficult. They're sort of a drawbridge where rich people stay that way and don't allow anyone else to join them. Income taxes, on the other hand, don't get in the way of stepping up.
Our public education system was already destroyed by the teachers' unions before the Republicans even had a voice in the matter.