Why? I don't see anyone suggesting all or nothing. Tariffs don't have to be imposed unilaterally. Importing capacitors wouldn't have a tariff while assembled motherboards would for instance.
Not really, two to three cars at the most. Say that's three cars, shipping it once adds $1000 to the price, and they are shipped many places so it goes up from there as they usually have to be placed on trains and then on trucks to the dealers. Transport costs are significant.
For smaller items like computer parts you're right you can ship a lot of product in one but at $3000/container you better have 3000 processors or hard drives in there if you want to contain the costs to something reasonable. Again, that is just shipping it one time.
I think Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai would beg to differ as they've opened manufacturing plants here in the U.S. because it is cheaper than shipping cars all over the world. There's also the fact that while yes, labor does contribute to the cost of a product, in most manufacturing plants it is the materials that costs lots of money. IBM has profitable fabs all over the world including in Burlington Vermont. They also pay a living wage here as well as in Brazil and Russia and lord knows where else.
The iPad wouldn't cost a lot more if it were produced locally. That's also for varying definitions of produced since electronics are manufactured in pieces and then assembled by someone else. Asus for instance doesn't manufacture the capacitors they use, they buy them and then their own workers assemble them. Most of the R&D for the iPad or any Apple product, or Microsoft, or a lot of other companies is done right here in America and that is another huge factor in the costs associated with a product. Where the most capital intensive piece is will depend on individual products and how the companies have arranged themselves. Things like infrastructure can play a huge part in the costs as well.
I'm sorry, what planet are you living on? The Mozilla Foundation? The Apache Foundation?
Of course Linus Torvalds does pretty well for himself and he's far from alone. There's also Ignite Realtime, i9 Technologies, and Digium. Just because you're not involved in the OSS world doesn't mean there aren't companies doing quite well with it. There is in fact no shortage of successful OSS projects. There are plenty of failures too but the same can be said on the commercial side of things. The guys at FreePBX.org are doing fairly well too. On top of all of that, there are tons of companies including RedHat and Oracle that make tons of money on supporting OSS projects. Locally in town there are more than a few generic Linux support shops and a myriad of hosting companies that make bank.
On the hardware engineering level there is the same issue as the software engineering level, there are plenty of successful companies that will only hire people with experience because they think it is somehow cheaper to hire them since they don't have to train them except for the fact that institutional knowledge requires training whether the person has industry experience or not. On top of that someone without a lot of experience but is trained in the field can be brought on an mentored rather cheaply. I did this exactly when it was time for me to step up and manage the department. My new network engineer in training used to make dental molds but he had the aptitude and the desire to learn and has taken way more of the work off my plate than I imagined when I hired him. You gotta give people a chance, some will fail, and some will be wildly successful.
Given that Jobs will still be around as chairman and that the circumstances for Jobs stepping away this time are less ideological it's probably a good bet Apple isn't going to re-enter the death spiral, at least anytime soon.
If Apple history is any indication, tough times are ahead for Apple as they've only been successful in the past under Jobs direction. That might be why it's considered sad news by some. Me, I'm more curious about how things will change with a different CEO.
What teacher in grade school starts out over 25k? Where are you that this is a reality? After 30 years my mother was making decent money as a teacher, but for the first 10 she certainly wasn't breaking the low 30s.
I find it odd that the NEA is so vilified. Given what teachers have to put up with I think they are one of the least corrupt of the unions. Of course I also find it odd that Planned Parenthood is under attack when it's the ONLY source of birth control for a rather large portion of the population. I suppose some people just gotta hate for no reason.
It's curious that you say we have no idea how hard it is for life to form. Just because we don't know every variable doesn't mean we know nothing. We have a lot of ideas about what's needed for life to exist. This is why we start our search of the stars looking for signs of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and compounds like water.
There is also the reality that you can never prove a negative, so it is impossible to state scientifically that there is no life outside this planet until you've seen every star which for the purposes of this conversation is impossible.
Someone saying that only a creator could have made this forest is not inherently unscientific, for instance, humans have created many forests after huge deforestation projects left many towns with landslides. As long as you don't stop your investigation at, only a creator could have done it, then you are scientifically asking questions and looking for ways to test your theory. Currently, there is no testable way to know if some supreme being is practicing divine intervention, until there is you cannot accept it as a wholesale answer. This is why there is no such thing as a scientific fact. A theory is just the best guess we have at the time based on testable observations and at the very least should be open to alternate suggestions based again on testable evidence.
You're willfully ignorant. In fact, you're the one spouting pure FUD. There is plenty of actual scientific evidence that the way fracking is performed in this country is completely irreponsible. Fracking fundimentally can be done safely but in practice it is not. Given the lack of enforcement of existing regulations and the blatent disregard for regulations by the oil and gas industries it's hard to make an honest argument that they won't cause serious environmental harm.
That's cute, you think every senator has a say in every part of the government. Unless they are on a committee they get very little if any say beyond political posturing in the media.
Thanks, that was exactly the piece I was hoping the parent would quote since it paints a very different picture with the CEO of Samsung saying the Galaxy 10.1 wasn't as good as the iPad 2 which invalidates their whole point about copying. Of course then Android 3.1 was released and it now stacks up very well against the iPad 2. I think Acer went for a better approach though going as far as including a full size usb port at the cost of making the device a little thicker. Combined with an SD card slot and its better than the Galaxy in terms of features while being worse in terms of battery life.
Where did you get that bit about the CEO of Samsung? It makes no sense since the majority of functionality found in the Galaxy Tab is just Android which isn't developed by Samsung and kind of refutes your whole point.
You seem very one-sided and willfully ignorant especially with your interpretation of the whole Android debacle. Did you forget the part about the Sun CEO of the time encouraging Google to use Java for free?
All in all it matters little, Samsung is big enough to fight this battle and it will shed further light on ridiculous patents that Apple has become famous for using as a shield. I don't blame Apple for that either, they certainly aren't alone in that strategy. The iPad2 was just a logical extension of the existing iPad with features that everyone screamed it should have had to begin with especially since there was no technical reason it didn't but a marketing and sales driven reason but that's just good business on Apple's part since so many people eat it up.
Samsung has had a great track record of being innovative in the technology sector. They came out with a way better initial offering on the Samsung Apps approach knowing full well Sony was doing the same thing and their product was vastly superior with Sony still trying to play catch up and failing miserably as Sony is only good at the high end.
Given the current quality of AMD's memory offerings I'm wondering how or why you consider people sheeple for buying them. AMD has been a solid memory manufacturer for a decade or more, it carried them through the hard times of the 486 until the first gen Athlon which came along and toppled Intel's performance crown.
They are hardly perfect but one of the things they definitely do well is making memory. I'll certainly give this ram a shot, challenging preconceptions is always a good idea afterall.
I'm confused, do you think AMD is just now entering the memory business? They've been in it for a decade and are one of the largest producers of flash memory. This seems like a logical evolution of their current offerings.
China is the world's largest user of coal and I think they would beg to differ. 100,000 people even in Japan were not permanently relocated. You are correct that nuclear will never be 100% safe, neither will coal, neither will any power generation method that is on any appreciable scale. People were evacuated from the areas surrounding Fukashima not because it was unsafe to be there but specifically because they weren't sure and until they were sure it was better safe than sorry.
Also, given that they did know this was a risk and failed to adequately account for that risk since they raised the backup generators, they just didn't raise them at that plant enough unlike most of the others. In modern designs power is also not required which was the big problem with using older designs.
Using examples of old methods of doing things and calling them unsafe when newer methods exist with 40 years more engineering behind them and you have to be pretty disingenuous to say that it is unsafe especially given the track record. In the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S. there has never been any reason to call it unsafe. When procedures aren't followed you end up with problems, imagine that? By that logic we should ban drilling for oil because it's not safe! In the last year more people died from coal and oil than have died in all of the history of nuclear power except maybe if you include the atomic bombs in the history of nuclear power.
I'll admit, coal feels safer, it's easier to control, it's something you can hold in your hands even if you shouldn't, and its safer to transport, in reality though it's still difficult to control and causes way more radiation to be released while operating normally as opposed to a nuclear power plant.
The former residents of Centralia Pennsylvania might beg to differ. Their town has been uninhabitable since the 60s, the toxic air has killed many. Coal mining is very dangerous and has killed far more people than all nuclear accidents combined.
There are certainly nuclear designs that are far less prone to failure, the fact that many stations have been running for 40 years without major incident is proof that the old designs with known problems are still safer than the current approach to coal.
Your view of history is downright scary but if you were indeed born in the USSR then it would make sense that you have a very incomplete picture of how the USA developed in the 1800s and early 1900s.
As for corporate taxes I laugh as your assertion given that GE paid zero tax dollars and did billions of dollars in business and is by no means unprofitable. On a smaller scale, my company does a few hundred million and again, pays almost no taxes due to loopholes and reinvestment. When you can afford to pay for a tax lawyer you end up paying almost no taxes, this is why GE pays for an army of them.
Rail in America died not because of the interstate system but because of corruption on a massive scale, see the very definition of robber barren.
Fire codes were established because private businesses were building unsafe buildings which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people by the early 1900s. They are very much necessary. Minimum wage effectively ended slavery and serfdom as workers could no longer be taken such advantage of. This is the product of textile mills with their corporation owned towns that paid their workers just enough to pay rent ensuring that they would forever work in the textile mill. There is no reason to think lifting it now would be anything but bad for the people already hit the hardest by the recession. Apprenticeships still exist today so I'm not sure how you think they were destroyed. I myself have an apprentice and many people in my family have gone through the electrical apprenticeship process. It is quite alive and well, you just have to pay people enough to live.
As for Canada as it sounds like that is where you moved to. They have the exact same corruption of their process through monopolies gaining significant power and influence. I give the Canadian people a lot of credit for standing up to some of the more ridiculous proposals brought forth but Canada is headed in the same direction especially if the U.S. defaults on its debt.
Given the success of the American economy immediately after the great infrastructure project of the 30's and 40's I'm not sure how you can claim that it destroyed anything. Rail systems were already on their way out at that time and following it America saw more growth than any country ever before it.
Now for tech history which is always fun, the telcos got packet switching from DARPA, not the other way around. DARP created it, they then worked with universities around the world to establish Arpanet, the world's first packet switched network. TCP/IP followed almost a decade later. DARPA has been responsible for a lot of the technical innovation in use today as are held as THE example of why the government should be involved in the research process.
One last thing, the U.S. in the 1800s was not a creditor nation at all. Until the early 1900s we weren't on the radar of any other nation. Our contributions to WWI set the stage for operating in the world theater but again, we weren't really that special until WW2 when our manufacturing capacity and military allowed us to supply Britain with weapons, ammo, and vehicles. That set the stage for America as a manufacturing powerhouse through the 1990's where outsourcing began heavily shrinking exports and drastically increasing imports which set us down the path we're currently dealing with. Of course corporate greed and unregulated commerce played huge parts in it as well which are arguments why we need the government to do its job.
Sure sounds like you're confused about what caused the great depression and this current recession or depression, whatever you want to call it. High economic growth rates are not sustainable and lead to bubbles. Regulatory burdens as you put it slow the growth down to manageable levels and their lack of action resulted in the housing bubble and resulting collapse. A steady economy with slow sustainable growth is the goal.
If we want to cut spending how bout we slash the TSA budget in half or get rid of it alltogether? Of course that leaves out the simple and obvious fact that we fund things in the past for a reason and unless those reasons have gone away removing funding is exceedingly difficult as you're not going to allow some sort of problem to resurface. This is not a value judgement on the TSA but of funding social programs in general, they exist for a reason and if you cut funding you had better be prepared for the inevitable consequences. That is the reason for the push to raise taxes to minimize all the problems we're going to recreate.
There is a serious lack of historical perspective in this country today and it scares me as some mistakes I am not eager to see repeated.
What are you basing this on? In the 19th century the USA wasn't a super power and wasn't doing all that well with pretty much slave labor camps otherwise known as textile mills just to get started. In the 20th century we became a super power due to massive infrastructure investments giving us our highway system and DARPA helped us build the Internet as we know it today. Sorry, government played a huge part in all of that. Everything from establishing minimal wage to setting fire codes help improve the way of life of every American and not just the robber barrens of the 19th century.
I don't see anyone leaving this country because they feel the government is too oppressive, if they did I'm not sure where they would go since Europe has a lot of the same policies, Asia is even tighter on freedom of expression and Africa is filled with strike. I guess that leaves Australia? While full of nice people and hot aussie chicks, they too have been spying on their citizens and doing the same things as our government including failed regulation leading to a massive oil spill off of their shores. So I guess that leaves Antarctica? Of course there are our dear friends to the north but Canada has its problems too, the grass is always greener on the other side. So I guess I have trouble picturing what a freer nation is. There aren't many nations out there where you will pay less in taxes, usually twice as much and don't forget the artificially low cost of gas here.
The funny thing is you say raising taxes during a recession is a no-no except that its been done before and has always worked as corporations choose to grow their business rather than see their profit taxed. It fails the common sense test and fails the historical test so I'd like to know which Econ 101 you were taking.
I'll agree Obama is fixated on taxing the rich, but that is because incomes for the rich are the only areas that have seen growth. The average income in this country has remained stagnant while the rich have been growing faster and faster. Couple this with that fact that there are far too many loopholes for the upper class and this resentment is not hard to understand. Look at how much Warren Buffet paid in taxes last year and then I think you understand why Obama is fixated on the people that have money right now as opposed to the people that have been losing their jobs and seeing their health premiums eat more and more of their net.
As far as the sustainability of medicare and social security and other social programs geared towards preventing destitution which caused massive violence just a few decades ago.
I also fail to see how raising taxes on the upper classes would affect millions of Americans. As someone that makes a fair amount of money I can assure you that I can afford a couple thousand extra a year in taxes without affecting my lifestyle one bit as opposed to friends of mine where a few hundred extra a year would break them. Given how much more I benefit from society I have no problem paying more to help others avoid destitution.
Of course that is all besides the point as no one is saying we should raise taxes alone, there are of course plenty of areas where we need to cut spending and that is going to hurt people, we minimize the impact of this pain by raising taxes to reduce the amount of cuts necessary all at once. Once you get parity with revenue and spending you can start to think about either reducing taxes or improving social programs to make them harder to abuse while servicing more people or even better, start paying off debts!
That is one of the more intelligent arguments I've seen in this thread. People blind themselves with their ideology. I imagine a day when political parties are gone and politicians actually have to represent their constituents. Until that day I will continue to participate by voting for candidates that represent sane points of view even if it is difficult because I live in Arizona. You gotta start somewhere though.
I agree with you which is why I pay a gas guzzler tax on my sports car. I also pay a luxury tax on it because it is a luxury item. I see no reason corporate jets or private jets should be treated any differently than cars are.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? I don't see anyone suggesting all or nothing. Tariffs don't have to be imposed unilaterally. Importing capacitors wouldn't have a tariff while assembled motherboards would for instance.
Not really, two to three cars at the most. Say that's three cars, shipping it once adds $1000 to the price, and they are shipped many places so it goes up from there as they usually have to be placed on trains and then on trucks to the dealers. Transport costs are significant.
For smaller items like computer parts you're right you can ship a lot of product in one but at $3000/container you better have 3000 processors or hard drives in there if you want to contain the costs to something reasonable. Again, that is just shipping it one time.
I think Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai would beg to differ as they've opened manufacturing plants here in the U.S. because it is cheaper than shipping cars all over the world. There's also the fact that while yes, labor does contribute to the cost of a product, in most manufacturing plants it is the materials that costs lots of money. IBM has profitable fabs all over the world including in Burlington Vermont. They also pay a living wage here as well as in Brazil and Russia and lord knows where else.
The iPad wouldn't cost a lot more if it were produced locally. That's also for varying definitions of produced since electronics are manufactured in pieces and then assembled by someone else. Asus for instance doesn't manufacture the capacitors they use, they buy them and then their own workers assemble them. Most of the R&D for the iPad or any Apple product, or Microsoft, or a lot of other companies is done right here in America and that is another huge factor in the costs associated with a product. Where the most capital intensive piece is will depend on individual products and how the companies have arranged themselves. Things like infrastructure can play a huge part in the costs as well.
I'm sorry, what planet are you living on? The Mozilla Foundation? The Apache Foundation?
Of course Linus Torvalds does pretty well for himself and he's far from alone. There's also Ignite Realtime, i9 Technologies, and Digium. Just because you're not involved in the OSS world doesn't mean there aren't companies doing quite well with it. There is in fact no shortage of successful OSS projects. There are plenty of failures too but the same can be said on the commercial side of things. The guys at FreePBX.org are doing fairly well too. On top of all of that, there are tons of companies including RedHat and Oracle that make tons of money on supporting OSS projects. Locally in town there are more than a few generic Linux support shops and a myriad of hosting companies that make bank.
On the hardware engineering level there is the same issue as the software engineering level, there are plenty of successful companies that will only hire people with experience because they think it is somehow cheaper to hire them since they don't have to train them except for the fact that institutional knowledge requires training whether the person has industry experience or not. On top of that someone without a lot of experience but is trained in the field can be brought on an mentored rather cheaply. I did this exactly when it was time for me to step up and manage the department. My new network engineer in training used to make dental molds but he had the aptitude and the desire to learn and has taken way more of the work off my plate than I imagined when I hired him. You gotta give people a chance, some will fail, and some will be wildly successful.
Given that Jobs will still be around as chairman and that the circumstances for Jobs stepping away this time are less ideological it's probably a good bet Apple isn't going to re-enter the death spiral, at least anytime soon.
If Apple history is any indication, tough times are ahead for Apple as they've only been successful in the past under Jobs direction. That might be why it's considered sad news by some. Me, I'm more curious about how things will change with a different CEO.
Not sure about your bars, but ours have more than one TV, quite easy for a bar to accommodate both.
What teacher in grade school starts out over 25k? Where are you that this is a reality? After 30 years my mother was making decent money as a teacher, but for the first 10 she certainly wasn't breaking the low 30s.
I find it odd that the NEA is so vilified. Given what teachers have to put up with I think they are one of the least corrupt of the unions. Of course I also find it odd that Planned Parenthood is under attack when it's the ONLY source of birth control for a rather large portion of the population. I suppose some people just gotta hate for no reason.
It's curious that you say we have no idea how hard it is for life to form. Just because we don't know every variable doesn't mean we know nothing. We have a lot of ideas about what's needed for life to exist. This is why we start our search of the stars looking for signs of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and compounds like water.
There is also the reality that you can never prove a negative, so it is impossible to state scientifically that there is no life outside this planet until you've seen every star which for the purposes of this conversation is impossible.
Someone saying that only a creator could have made this forest is not inherently unscientific, for instance, humans have created many forests after huge deforestation projects left many towns with landslides. As long as you don't stop your investigation at, only a creator could have done it, then you are scientifically asking questions and looking for ways to test your theory. Currently, there is no testable way to know if some supreme being is practicing divine intervention, until there is you cannot accept it as a wholesale answer. This is why there is no such thing as a scientific fact. A theory is just the best guess we have at the time based on testable observations and at the very least should be open to alternate suggestions based again on testable evidence.
WTF? This is not a Windows default, never has been in the past and certainly isn't now. I'm not sure why any Administrator would do that.
Uhhh... Windows does require them to enter their password unless you're logged in with an admin account.
You're willfully ignorant. In fact, you're the one spouting pure FUD. There is plenty of actual scientific evidence that the way fracking is performed in this country is completely irreponsible. Fracking fundimentally can be done safely but in practice it is not. Given the lack of enforcement of existing regulations and the blatent disregard for regulations by the oil and gas industries it's hard to make an honest argument that they won't cause serious environmental harm.
That's cute, you think every senator has a say in every part of the government. Unless they are on a committee they get very little if any say beyond political posturing in the media.
Thanks, that was exactly the piece I was hoping the parent would quote since it paints a very different picture with the CEO of Samsung saying the Galaxy 10.1 wasn't as good as the iPad 2 which invalidates their whole point about copying. Of course then Android 3.1 was released and it now stacks up very well against the iPad 2. I think Acer went for a better approach though going as far as including a full size usb port at the cost of making the device a little thicker. Combined with an SD card slot and its better than the Galaxy in terms of features while being worse in terms of battery life.
Where did you get that bit about the CEO of Samsung? It makes no sense since the majority of functionality found in the Galaxy Tab is just Android which isn't developed by Samsung and kind of refutes your whole point.
You seem very one-sided and willfully ignorant especially with your interpretation of the whole Android debacle. Did you forget the part about the Sun CEO of the time encouraging Google to use Java for free?
All in all it matters little, Samsung is big enough to fight this battle and it will shed further light on ridiculous patents that Apple has become famous for using as a shield. I don't blame Apple for that either, they certainly aren't alone in that strategy. The iPad2 was just a logical extension of the existing iPad with features that everyone screamed it should have had to begin with especially since there was no technical reason it didn't but a marketing and sales driven reason but that's just good business on Apple's part since so many people eat it up.
Samsung has had a great track record of being innovative in the technology sector. They came out with a way better initial offering on the Samsung Apps approach knowing full well Sony was doing the same thing and their product was vastly superior with Sony still trying to play catch up and failing miserably as Sony is only good at the high end.
Given the current quality of AMD's memory offerings I'm wondering how or why you consider people sheeple for buying them. AMD has been a solid memory manufacturer for a decade or more, it carried them through the hard times of the 486 until the first gen Athlon which came along and toppled Intel's performance crown.
They are hardly perfect but one of the things they definitely do well is making memory. I'll certainly give this ram a shot, challenging preconceptions is always a good idea afterall.
I'm confused, do you think AMD is just now entering the memory business? They've been in it for a decade and are one of the largest producers of flash memory. This seems like a logical evolution of their current offerings.
China is the world's largest user of coal and I think they would beg to differ. 100,000 people even in Japan were not permanently relocated. You are correct that nuclear will never be 100% safe, neither will coal, neither will any power generation method that is on any appreciable scale. People were evacuated from the areas surrounding Fukashima not because it was unsafe to be there but specifically because they weren't sure and until they were sure it was better safe than sorry.
Also, given that they did know this was a risk and failed to adequately account for that risk since they raised the backup generators, they just didn't raise them at that plant enough unlike most of the others. In modern designs power is also not required which was the big problem with using older designs.
Using examples of old methods of doing things and calling them unsafe when newer methods exist with 40 years more engineering behind them and you have to be pretty disingenuous to say that it is unsafe especially given the track record. In the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S. there has never been any reason to call it unsafe. When procedures aren't followed you end up with problems, imagine that? By that logic we should ban drilling for oil because it's not safe! In the last year more people died from coal and oil than have died in all of the history of nuclear power except maybe if you include the atomic bombs in the history of nuclear power.
I'll admit, coal feels safer, it's easier to control, it's something you can hold in your hands even if you shouldn't, and its safer to transport, in reality though it's still difficult to control and causes way more radiation to be released while operating normally as opposed to a nuclear power plant.
The former residents of Centralia Pennsylvania might beg to differ. Their town has been uninhabitable since the 60s, the toxic air has killed many. Coal mining is very dangerous and has killed far more people than all nuclear accidents combined.
There are certainly nuclear designs that are far less prone to failure, the fact that many stations have been running for 40 years without major incident is proof that the old designs with known problems are still safer than the current approach to coal.
Your view of history is downright scary but if you were indeed born in the USSR then it would make sense that you have a very incomplete picture of how the USA developed in the 1800s and early 1900s.
As for corporate taxes I laugh as your assertion given that GE paid zero tax dollars and did billions of dollars in business and is by no means unprofitable. On a smaller scale, my company does a few hundred million and again, pays almost no taxes due to loopholes and reinvestment. When you can afford to pay for a tax lawyer you end up paying almost no taxes, this is why GE pays for an army of them.
Rail in America died not because of the interstate system but because of corruption on a massive scale, see the very definition of robber barren.
Fire codes were established because private businesses were building unsafe buildings which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people by the early 1900s. They are very much necessary. Minimum wage effectively ended slavery and serfdom as workers could no longer be taken such advantage of. This is the product of textile mills with their corporation owned towns that paid their workers just enough to pay rent ensuring that they would forever work in the textile mill. There is no reason to think lifting it now would be anything but bad for the people already hit the hardest by the recession. Apprenticeships still exist today so I'm not sure how you think they were destroyed. I myself have an apprentice and many people in my family have gone through the electrical apprenticeship process. It is quite alive and well, you just have to pay people enough to live.
As for Canada as it sounds like that is where you moved to. They have the exact same corruption of their process through monopolies gaining significant power and influence. I give the Canadian people a lot of credit for standing up to some of the more ridiculous proposals brought forth but Canada is headed in the same direction especially if the U.S. defaults on its debt.
Given the success of the American economy immediately after the great infrastructure project of the 30's and 40's I'm not sure how you can claim that it destroyed anything. Rail systems were already on their way out at that time and following it America saw more growth than any country ever before it.
Now for tech history which is always fun, the telcos got packet switching from DARPA, not the other way around. DARP created it, they then worked with universities around the world to establish Arpanet, the world's first packet switched network. TCP/IP followed almost a decade later. DARPA has been responsible for a lot of the technical innovation in use today as are held as THE example of why the government should be involved in the research process.
One last thing, the U.S. in the 1800s was not a creditor nation at all. Until the early 1900s we weren't on the radar of any other nation. Our contributions to WWI set the stage for operating in the world theater but again, we weren't really that special until WW2 when our manufacturing capacity and military allowed us to supply Britain with weapons, ammo, and vehicles. That set the stage for America as a manufacturing powerhouse through the 1990's where outsourcing began heavily shrinking exports and drastically increasing imports which set us down the path we're currently dealing with. Of course corporate greed and unregulated commerce played huge parts in it as well which are arguments why we need the government to do its job.
Sure sounds like you're confused about what caused the great depression and this current recession or depression, whatever you want to call it. High economic growth rates are not sustainable and lead to bubbles. Regulatory burdens as you put it slow the growth down to manageable levels and their lack of action resulted in the housing bubble and resulting collapse. A steady economy with slow sustainable growth is the goal.
If we want to cut spending how bout we slash the TSA budget in half or get rid of it alltogether? Of course that leaves out the simple and obvious fact that we fund things in the past for a reason and unless those reasons have gone away removing funding is exceedingly difficult as you're not going to allow some sort of problem to resurface. This is not a value judgement on the TSA but of funding social programs in general, they exist for a reason and if you cut funding you had better be prepared for the inevitable consequences. That is the reason for the push to raise taxes to minimize all the problems we're going to recreate.
There is a serious lack of historical perspective in this country today and it scares me as some mistakes I am not eager to see repeated.
What are you basing this on? In the 19th century the USA wasn't a super power and wasn't doing all that well with pretty much slave labor camps otherwise known as textile mills just to get started. In the 20th century we became a super power due to massive infrastructure investments giving us our highway system and DARPA helped us build the Internet as we know it today. Sorry, government played a huge part in all of that. Everything from establishing minimal wage to setting fire codes help improve the way of life of every American and not just the robber barrens of the 19th century.
I don't see anyone leaving this country because they feel the government is too oppressive, if they did I'm not sure where they would go since Europe has a lot of the same policies, Asia is even tighter on freedom of expression and Africa is filled with strike. I guess that leaves Australia? While full of nice people and hot aussie chicks, they too have been spying on their citizens and doing the same things as our government including failed regulation leading to a massive oil spill off of their shores. So I guess that leaves Antarctica? Of course there are our dear friends to the north but Canada has its problems too, the grass is always greener on the other side. So I guess I have trouble picturing what a freer nation is. There aren't many nations out there where you will pay less in taxes, usually twice as much and don't forget the artificially low cost of gas here.
The funny thing is you say raising taxes during a recession is a no-no except that its been done before and has always worked as corporations choose to grow their business rather than see their profit taxed. It fails the common sense test and fails the historical test so I'd like to know which Econ 101 you were taking.
I'll agree Obama is fixated on taxing the rich, but that is because incomes for the rich are the only areas that have seen growth. The average income in this country has remained stagnant while the rich have been growing faster and faster. Couple this with that fact that there are far too many loopholes for the upper class and this resentment is not hard to understand. Look at how much Warren Buffet paid in taxes last year and then I think you understand why Obama is fixated on the people that have money right now as opposed to the people that have been losing their jobs and seeing their health premiums eat more and more of their net.
As far as the sustainability of medicare and social security and other social programs geared towards preventing destitution which caused massive violence just a few decades ago.
I also fail to see how raising taxes on the upper classes would affect millions of Americans. As someone that makes a fair amount of money I can assure you that I can afford a couple thousand extra a year in taxes without affecting my lifestyle one bit as opposed to friends of mine where a few hundred extra a year would break them. Given how much more I benefit from society I have no problem paying more to help others avoid destitution.
Of course that is all besides the point as no one is saying we should raise taxes alone, there are of course plenty of areas where we need to cut spending and that is going to hurt people, we minimize the impact of this pain by raising taxes to reduce the amount of cuts necessary all at once. Once you get parity with revenue and spending you can start to think about either reducing taxes or improving social programs to make them harder to abuse while servicing more people or even better, start paying off debts!
That is one of the more intelligent arguments I've seen in this thread. People blind themselves with their ideology. I imagine a day when political parties are gone and politicians actually have to represent their constituents. Until that day I will continue to participate by voting for candidates that represent sane points of view even if it is difficult because I live in Arizona. You gotta start somewhere though.
I agree with you which is why I pay a gas guzzler tax on my sports car. I also pay a luxury tax on it because it is a luxury item. I see no reason corporate jets or private jets should be treated any differently than cars are.