. . . that forces states to pay back the money they receive from the Federal government, and puts a harsh salary and compensation cap on politicians in those states who elect to take Federal bailout funds. The likes of California and New York clearly have no concept of what it means to "spend less," and current taxpayers are fleeing by the tens of thousands, causing them to create asinine taxes like the one in TFA and causing even more people and companies to head to more tax-friendly states. A government should be forced to plan its finances like a responsible household, taking into consideration risk, debt and spending just like the rest of us have to in reality land. After all, it's our money they're spending. Why is this so hard to comprehend?
Dogs, for example, will pace around in a circle before they lie down. Most dogs kept as pets have never had to bed down in sharp, tall grass like their wolf ancestors did, nevertheless this behavior has been passed down to them over many generations.
Your state is $41 billion in the hole. When people like you tell the rest of us to "man up" who choose not to live out there, it really pisses us off. We're sick of carrying your broke-ass state every five years because Ahh-nold and the rest of your retard politicians can't quit spending money they don't have and won't stop paying for people who aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place. Learn to balance your budget like the rest of us have to in reality land, and then you'll have a right to talking about "manning up" and paying taxes. It's easy to be loose with someone else's money, isn't it? You do realize that people and companies are fleeingCalifornia by the THOUSANDS (144,000 last year alone) right now because of high taxes and cost of living and shitty quality of life, don't you? I've lived out in California and while I still love to visit occasionally, I'd never EVER live there again, in part because of all of the arrogant folks who think they know what's best for everyone else and our wallets. I got smart and moved far, far away eight years ago, and am considering moving again because my home state of MD is unfortunately headed down the same deep blue, manure-filled path to permanent Federal welfare. Good luck, comrade.
But if you want to argue that the U.S. isn't a pretty good place to live or do business, or if you want to argue that tax contributions to that are negligible, I'm off that boat.
It's not as good as it used to be, and the massive amount of debt we're undertaking is just going to make things worse. If I were stating a new business and weren't restricted on where I had to live by family commitments, Ireland, New Zealand, and several Southeast Asian countries would be at the top of my list.
Again, you're conveniently leaving out state & local taxes, and another 7.65% in social security those of us pay who are self-employed. In NY and NJ, for example, someone who's self-employed and in the top federal and state brackets has a total tax burden of way over 60%. No wonder people are fleeing the tax-crazy Northeast states and California in droves.
God forbid a politician say he is only going to raise taxes on people who make more than $200,000!
But it's not $200k . . . the latest "stimulus" starts to phase out the tax credit for those who make more than $75k a year. If you think $75k / year makes you wealthy, you're gravely mistaken.
But most people don't. Even most business owners don't make a million.
I'm a small business owner, and I'm certainly not a millionaire. Obama's proposed changes to payroll taxes will make me personally pay more into social security by increasing the contribution cap. It will also be more expensive for me to employ people (again, in part, because the social security contrib cap will be raised), so I'm incented to hire fewer people and work the ones that I have harder instead. Or, even better, I can get a bunch of 1099 contracters and work them all part-time at 25 hours / week, so I don't have to pay any benefits at all. How exactly does his plan help small businesses in the US if it's more expensive to have employees?
Having said that, I'd like to cut taxes for everyone, not just the wealthy, and reduce the size and SPEND of Federal and state governments dramatically. Neither party wants to do this, because they don't want to give up their current stranglehold on power. Cutting taxes doesn't work without also reducing spend (Bush II's biggest mistake), and unfortunately you can't spend your way into prosperity -- only debt.
Check your facts. US corporate taxes are the second-highest in the world behind Japan. Personal income tax is in the upper part of the bottom third right now compared to all other countries but that will be changing as the Dems do away with the Bush tax cuts and mess with payroll and capital gains tax in order to "spread the wealth around." Most state taxes are on the rise too in a desparate attempt to allow them to keep spending money (we have both a state and county income tax here in MD, and together they're an extra 6-11% depending on your income). You can call US taxes a lot of things, but "low" is not one of them, especially considering the services what we get from the government in exchange for the taxes we pay. And if you're fortunate enough to be self-employed and have to pay both halves of social security (an extra 7.65%), you really get fucked.
So no, I reject your statement that in the US, our taxes are low.
Now, if the President *wants* to hide, he goes to a secure bunker somewhere where the radio waves don't shine, somewhere that even the sneakiest guy with an antenna can't get within ten miles of.
The Raven Rock AJCC is a Terminator 3-eqsue hollow mountain complex about 60 miles north of DC outside of Emmitsburg, MD -- a little further up the Catoctins from Camp David. Cheney was moved there during the 9/11 attacks, and Bush II was routinely moved through there from time to time as well.
You're right of course, but you'll probably get modded into oblivion here. Not that the Republicans are any better, either. They're as guilty as the Dems for pissing away hundreds of billions in Iraq over the last six years.
Where's the party that wants to reduce the size of government, spend less, and hold people and corporations accountable for their own actions? The one that still believes if you touch a hot stove, it should hurt? I could care less what its name is as long as those things are in its platform. I'd support the Libertarians, but their pro-drug plank makes them un-electable in mainstream America today (regardless of your feelings on the drug war, that's a fact). How do we get the fuckers in Washington to just STOP blowing trillions of our dollars already?
The prices were over valued four years ago. The only thing is that people who bought four years ago are still in the hole. They still need to pay down as fast as they can before they sell or they still owe after selling.
What about those of us who made good decisions and didn't buy a house which was tremendously overpriced? Why is it our responsibility to bail out the greedy and the stupid? Enough is enough. Without consequences, this crap will continue forever, in all industries. You'll have to excuse those of us who live within our means and don't buy overpriced crap if we're more than a little pissed at having to carry all the dead weight.
Progressive metal pioneers Cynic use Auto Tune to purposely give their vocals an aritficial, robotic sound. In their original 1993 release, before Auto Tune, they used a vocoder for an even more artificial effect. I think they refer to it as their "alien" or "android" vocals.
Tell that to the Chinese, or the Saudis. When a good or service becomes commoditized, it's still possible to turn a profit tell it, but the volume one is required to sell to do so goes way up. Also, as everyone on the market is now selling the "same thing," you start to see things like collusion and the formation of cartels.
Jokes aside, there's nothing capitalistic about the top-tier ISPs, who monopolize federal money (including, apparently, "stimulus" money) through the use of strongarm lobbyists to keep a stranglehold on 99%+ of the high speed internet access in the USA -- yet somehow they own the infrastructure built with untold hundreds of billions in government spending. There's no real competition (most areas have two or at the most three high-speed providers to choose from), and therefore no incentive to lower prices or improve service offerings. It's exactly the sort of behavior capitalism seeks to prevent, and if anything, the top-tier ISPs are in practice more like a cartel.
They've kept expanding whose DNA gets included despite protests from privacy advocates (and they're quite proud of that). Here's MD DNA Database's official site. ALL arrestees aren't added (yet) . . . but given MD's track record of expanding this database, it's just a matter of time.
The LAST thing our government wants is accountability -- either for its citizens or itself. There's no fuckup they think they can't solve by throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it, even if the fuckup doesn't really exist. When that's the way you operate, there's no need to hold anyone accountable for their decisions.
Our big friendly goverment decided to give away the boxes you reference, FOR FREE. They did this by issuing coupons worth $50 or so IIRC. Like most things given away by the government for free, lots of people who didn't need them got two or three of these boxes and stuck them on a shelf in their garage, where they're still collecting dust. Of course, the coupons ran out, and now some in our congress are claiming that the program was underfunded. It's a typical Washington clusterfuck -- exactly the sort of thing that happens when bureaucrats decide there's a huge "problem" somewhere and its solution requires spending tens of millions of our tax dollars.
There will always be millions of people who will have problems with the switchover. Most are poor and / or elderly. No amount of delay and / or money thrown at the problem will fix it. Just flip the damn switch already and deal with the small percentage of folks negatively affected. Seriously, this has been in the works for years -- if you don't know about it by now, you won't until your picture turns to a bunch of static.
So, a well-armed populace cannot prevent the scenario you describe.
Absolutely, 100% WRONG. See Iraq, where a group of well-armed citizens armed with only small arms and improvised explosives made life absolutely for the most powerful military on the planet. This is after repeated calls for the Iraqis to turn in their guns, snitch on their neighbors for reward, etc.
BTW, legal gun owners AREN'T the ones "threatening the liberty and health" of those without guns -- that's what violent criminals do who simply ignore any law you pass about using guns, knives, or clubs to rob, rape, or kill someone else. From Wikipedia: "Permit holders are a remarkably law-abiding subclass of the population. Florida, which has issued over 1,408,907 permits in twenty one years, has revoked only 166 for a "crime after licensure involving a firearm," and fewer than 4,500 permits for any reason." Quit restating the myth that legal gun owners pose any substantial threat to those who choose to be without guns -- there's absolutely nothing which backs up that statement, anywhere.
"Now, here's a fellow attempting to ride a bicycle. But he's having some trouble, isn't he? And do you know why? Because he's a Scot!!" -- Buzz Killington
I was thinking more like an avatar of him as a bespectacled fat dude wagging his finger and going, "Nah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word! Nah ah ah!"
Easy there, fella. As you mentioned, it's WWEntertainment, not a sport -- don't take it too seriously.;-)
I think pro wrasslin' is white trash soap opera meets body building. It's like the circus fused with a monster truck rally. I wouldn't put it past those honest folks at WWE headquarters to perhaps sensationalize some of those "injuries," either. I reckon the injuries you mention, if real, were mostly caused when dumb guys take steroids and train for sheer bulk instead of strength, because that's the most important thing in the WWE (besides their costume, anyway -- how big a wrassler looks on TV), and then try to do something dumb like jump twenty feet onto their neck and those huge overdeveloped muscles peel right away from their weak bones and tendons. And most people are willing to put themselves through a lot of abuse for a shot at "making it" -- that's true in anything on TV. But that doesn't make them great athletes, and to suggest that it equates them with, for example, someone like Muhammed Ali, is just silly.
Because with the WWE -- and potentially some real sports e.g. MLB -- it's much more likely that steroid abuse screwed up those guys and killed them. I wouldn't be surprised if the WWE is sanctioning the whole "OMG concussionz" issue to distract from any potential investigations into whether or not their "athletes" are using steroids. The WWE guys are nothing more than glorified bodybuilders jumping up and down on a trampoline -- it'd be quite a stretch to compare them to someone like Muhammed Ali or even Troy Polamalu.
My point is the WWE is viewed by most people as a joke, and you shouldn't have one of their ilk as a spokesperson for such an important issue affecting real athletes. I mean, their whole "sport" is completely fake -- how could you expect anyone coming from their world to be taken seriously at all?
. . . like the prototypical geek who got beat up by the jocks in high school and never got laid. Get over yourself already.
Apparently, you've never been to a Friday night football game to see hundreds of people cheering on a team, or lived in a city with a franchise contending for a championship to see how it can bring people together. Pro athletes donate a lot of time and money to charities, too -- probably a lot more than you ever will. You may not like sports, but most people do and aren't as negative and anti-social as you apparently are.
The guy in the article was a "wrassler," not real wrestler, and before that, apparently played football for those gridiron legends at Harvard. Concussions in real contact sports such as pro football and hockey are a definite problem, but please, CNN, don't make a WWE washout who's trying to sell his book into the poster child for this important issue.
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. . . that forces states to pay back the money they receive from the Federal government, and puts a harsh salary and compensation cap on politicians in those states who elect to take Federal bailout funds. The likes of California and New York clearly have no concept of what it means to "spend less," and current taxpayers are fleeing by the tens of thousands, causing them to create asinine taxes like the one in TFA and causing even more people and companies to head to more tax-friendly states. A government should be forced to plan its finances like a responsible household, taking into consideration risk, debt and spending just like the rest of us have to in reality land. After all, it's our money they're spending. Why is this so hard to comprehend?
are incredibly black, making the comet harder to see than a black cat in a coal cellar. At night with no torch.
Who uses torches in their "coal cellar"? What are you looking for, Frankenstein? ;-)
Dogs, for example, will pace around in a circle before they lie down. Most dogs kept as pets have never had to bed down in sharp, tall grass like their wolf ancestors did, nevertheless this behavior has been passed down to them over many generations.
Your state is $41 billion in the hole. When people like you tell the rest of us to "man up" who choose not to live out there, it really pisses us off. We're sick of carrying your broke-ass state every five years because Ahh-nold and the rest of your retard politicians can't quit spending money they don't have and won't stop paying for people who aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place. Learn to balance your budget like the rest of us have to in reality land, and then you'll have a right to talking about "manning up" and paying taxes. It's easy to be loose with someone else's money, isn't it? You do realize that people and companies are fleeing California by the THOUSANDS (144,000 last year alone) right now because of high taxes and cost of living and shitty quality of life, don't you? I've lived out in California and while I still love to visit occasionally, I'd never EVER live there again, in part because of all of the arrogant folks who think they know what's best for everyone else and our wallets. I got smart and moved far, far away eight years ago, and am considering moving again because my home state of MD is unfortunately headed down the same deep blue, manure-filled path to permanent Federal welfare. Good luck, comrade.
But if you want to argue that the U.S. isn't a pretty good place to live or do business, or if you want to argue that tax contributions to that are negligible, I'm off that boat.
It's not as good as it used to be, and the massive amount of debt we're undertaking is just going to make things worse. If I were stating a new business and weren't restricted on where I had to live by family commitments, Ireland, New Zealand, and several Southeast Asian countries would be at the top of my list.
Now, the top tax bracket is 35%
Again, you're conveniently leaving out state & local taxes, and another 7.65% in social security those of us pay who are self-employed. In NY and NJ, for example, someone who's self-employed and in the top federal and state brackets has a total tax burden of way over 60%. No wonder people are fleeing the tax-crazy Northeast states and California in droves.
God forbid a politician say he is only going to raise taxes on people who make more than $200,000!
But it's not $200k . . . the latest "stimulus" starts to phase out the tax credit for those who make more than $75k a year. If you think $75k / year makes you wealthy, you're gravely mistaken.
But most people don't. Even most business owners don't make a million.
I'm a small business owner, and I'm certainly not a millionaire. Obama's proposed changes to payroll taxes will make me personally pay more into social security by increasing the contribution cap. It will also be more expensive for me to employ people (again, in part, because the social security contrib cap will be raised), so I'm incented to hire fewer people and work the ones that I have harder instead. Or, even better, I can get a bunch of 1099 contracters and work them all part-time at 25 hours / week, so I don't have to pay any benefits at all. How exactly does his plan help small businesses in the US if it's more expensive to have employees?
Having said that, I'd like to cut taxes for everyone, not just the wealthy, and reduce the size and SPEND of Federal and state governments dramatically. Neither party wants to do this, because they don't want to give up their current stranglehold on power. Cutting taxes doesn't work without also reducing spend (Bush II's biggest mistake), and unfortunately you can't spend your way into prosperity -- only debt.
Our taxes are low in the US.
Check your facts. US corporate taxes are the second-highest in the world behind Japan. Personal income tax is in the upper part of the bottom third right now compared to all other countries but that will be changing as the Dems do away with the Bush tax cuts and mess with payroll and capital gains tax in order to "spread the wealth around." Most state taxes are on the rise too in a desparate attempt to allow them to keep spending money (we have both a state and county income tax here in MD, and together they're an extra 6-11% depending on your income). You can call US taxes a lot of things, but "low" is not one of them, especially considering the services what we get from the government in exchange for the taxes we pay. And if you're fortunate enough to be self-employed and have to pay both halves of social security (an extra 7.65%), you really get fucked.
So no, I reject your statement that in the US, our taxes are low.
Now, if the President *wants* to hide, he goes to a secure bunker somewhere where the radio waves don't shine, somewhere that even the sneakiest guy with an antenna can't get within ten miles of.
The Raven Rock AJCC is a Terminator 3-eqsue hollow mountain complex about 60 miles north of DC outside of Emmitsburg, MD -- a little further up the Catoctins from Camp David. Cheney was moved there during the 9/11 attacks, and Bush II was routinely moved through there from time to time as well.
You're right of course, but you'll probably get modded into oblivion here. Not that the Republicans are any better, either. They're as guilty as the Dems for pissing away hundreds of billions in Iraq over the last six years.
Where's the party that wants to reduce the size of government, spend less, and hold people and corporations accountable for their own actions? The one that still believes if you touch a hot stove, it should hurt? I could care less what its name is as long as those things are in its platform. I'd support the Libertarians, but their pro-drug plank makes them un-electable in mainstream America today (regardless of your feelings on the drug war, that's a fact). How do we get the fuckers in Washington to just STOP blowing trillions of our dollars already?
The prices were over valued four years ago. The only thing is that people who bought four years ago are still in the hole. They still need to pay down as fast as they can before they sell or they still owe after selling.
What about those of us who made good decisions and didn't buy a house which was tremendously overpriced? Why is it our responsibility to bail out the greedy and the stupid? Enough is enough. Without consequences, this crap will continue forever, in all industries. You'll have to excuse those of us who live within our means and don't buy overpriced crap if we're more than a little pissed at having to carry all the dead weight.
Progressive metal pioneers Cynic use Auto Tune to purposely give their vocals an aritficial, robotic sound. In their original 1993 release, before Auto Tune, they used a vocoder for an even more artificial effect. I think they refer to it as their "alien" or "android" vocals.
Tell that to the Chinese, or the Saudis. When a good or service becomes commoditized, it's still possible to turn a profit tell it, but the volume one is required to sell to do so goes way up. Also, as everyone on the market is now selling the "same thing," you start to see things like collusion and the formation of cartels.
Jokes aside, there's nothing capitalistic about the top-tier ISPs, who monopolize federal money (including, apparently, "stimulus" money) through the use of strongarm lobbyists to keep a stranglehold on 99%+ of the high speed internet access in the USA -- yet somehow they own the infrastructure built with untold hundreds of billions in government spending. There's no real competition (most areas have two or at the most three high-speed providers to choose from), and therefore no incentive to lower prices or improve service offerings. It's exactly the sort of behavior capitalism seeks to prevent, and if anything, the top-tier ISPs are in practice more like a cartel.
They've kept expanding whose DNA gets included despite protests from privacy advocates (and they're quite proud of that). Here's MD DNA Database's official site. ALL arrestees aren't added (yet) . . . but given MD's track record of expanding this database, it's just a matter of time.
The LAST thing our government wants is accountability -- either for its citizens or itself. There's no fuckup they think they can't solve by throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it, even if the fuckup doesn't really exist. When that's the way you operate, there's no need to hold anyone accountable for their decisions.
Our big friendly goverment decided to give away the boxes you reference, FOR FREE. They did this by issuing coupons worth $50 or so IIRC. Like most things given away by the government for free, lots of people who didn't need them got two or three of these boxes and stuck them on a shelf in their garage, where they're still collecting dust. Of course, the coupons ran out, and now some in our congress are claiming that the program was underfunded. It's a typical Washington clusterfuck -- exactly the sort of thing that happens when bureaucrats decide there's a huge "problem" somewhere and its solution requires spending tens of millions of our tax dollars.
There will always be millions of people who will have problems with the switchover. Most are poor and / or elderly. No amount of delay and / or money thrown at the problem will fix it. Just flip the damn switch already and deal with the small percentage of folks negatively affected. Seriously, this has been in the works for years -- if you don't know about it by now, you won't until your picture turns to a bunch of static.
So, a well-armed populace cannot prevent the scenario you describe.
Absolutely, 100% WRONG. See Iraq, where a group of well-armed citizens armed with only small arms and improvised explosives made life absolutely for the most powerful military on the planet. This is after repeated calls for the Iraqis to turn in their guns, snitch on their neighbors for reward, etc.
BTW, legal gun owners AREN'T the ones "threatening the liberty and health" of those without guns -- that's what violent criminals do who simply ignore any law you pass about using guns, knives, or clubs to rob, rape, or kill someone else. From Wikipedia: "Permit holders are a remarkably law-abiding subclass of the population. Florida, which has issued over 1,408,907 permits in twenty one years, has revoked only 166 for a "crime after licensure involving a firearm," and fewer than 4,500 permits for any reason." Quit restating the myth that legal gun owners pose any substantial threat to those who choose to be without guns -- there's absolutely nothing which backs up that statement, anywhere.
"Now, here's a fellow attempting to ride a bicycle. But he's having some trouble, isn't he? And do you know why? Because he's a Scot!!" -- Buzz Killington
I was thinking more like an avatar of him as a bespectacled fat dude wagging his finger and going, "Nah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word! Nah ah ah!"
Easy there, fella. As you mentioned, it's WWEntertainment, not a sport -- don't take it too seriously. ;-)
I think pro wrasslin' is white trash soap opera meets body building. It's like the circus fused with a monster truck rally. I wouldn't put it past those honest folks at WWE headquarters to perhaps sensationalize some of those "injuries," either. I reckon the injuries you mention, if real, were mostly caused when dumb guys take steroids and train for sheer bulk instead of strength, because that's the most important thing in the WWE (besides their costume, anyway -- how big a wrassler looks on TV), and then try to do something dumb like jump twenty feet onto their neck and those huge overdeveloped muscles peel right away from their weak bones and tendons. And most people are willing to put themselves through a lot of abuse for a shot at "making it" -- that's true in anything on TV. But that doesn't make them great athletes, and to suggest that it equates them with, for example, someone like Muhammed Ali, is just silly.
Because with the WWE -- and potentially some real sports e.g. MLB -- it's much more likely that steroid abuse screwed up those guys and killed them. I wouldn't be surprised if the WWE is sanctioning the whole "OMG concussionz" issue to distract from any potential investigations into whether or not their "athletes" are using steroids. The WWE guys are nothing more than glorified bodybuilders jumping up and down on a trampoline -- it'd be quite a stretch to compare them to someone like Muhammed Ali or even Troy Polamalu.
My point is the WWE is viewed by most people as a joke, and you shouldn't have one of their ilk as a spokesperson for such an important issue affecting real athletes. I mean, their whole "sport" is completely fake -- how could you expect anyone coming from their world to be taken seriously at all?
. . . like the prototypical geek who got beat up by the jocks in high school and never got laid. Get over yourself already.
Apparently, you've never been to a Friday night football game to see hundreds of people cheering on a team, or lived in a city with a franchise contending for a championship to see how it can bring people together. Pro athletes donate a lot of time and money to charities, too -- probably a lot more than you ever will. You may not like sports, but most people do and aren't as negative and anti-social as you apparently are.
The guy in the article was a "wrassler," not real wrestler, and before that, apparently played football for those gridiron legends at Harvard. Concussions in real contact sports such as pro football and hockey are a definite problem, but please, CNN, don't make a WWE washout who's trying to sell his book into the poster child for this important issue.
I couldn't tell. ;-)