If Apple makes a deal with AT&T to not count iTunes streaming content against your cap would be a reason to boycott Apple? WTF?
They would be building a walled garden where users will tune into their content rather than get it from elsewhere on the Internet.
Isn't it obvious? The trap works much better if it has been baited... the "doesn't count against your cap" part is the bait.
I believe GP fits my definition of the "sheeple... who are not known for considering the full implications of their actions" (emphasis added). I believe their mentality is this: "is there a short-term gain, maybve some frivolous thing I could easily live without, and a long-term loss like less freedom of choice? Sign me up!"
It's not literally unlimited in the sense that it can indeed be quantified. For all practical purposes, however, it is unlimited in the sense that they will crash the entire economy and completely devalue the currency before they will decide that maybe they should stop doing that.
What do you suppose a treasure security is? The government needs another billion dollars. So it asks the Federal Reserve to create this money. The Federal Reserve then creates a billion dollars. It gives that to the federal government in exchange for a piece of paper created by the federal government called a treasury note. This is what the Federal Reserve calls a securities asset. It's basically an IOU signed by the federal government. The government then spends that billion dollars and one way or another, it enters the economy and increases the money supply by one billion.
This whole discussion would be much simpler if you'd research a few topics, such as the "Federal Reserve" and "fractional reserve banking" and "fiat currency".
You may find this interesting. Back in 1941, a Congressman named Wright Patman wanted to know where the Federal Reserve got the money to purchase two billion dollars worth of government bonds (securities assets) in 1933. These are actual quotes from when he asked that question of Marriner Eccles, who was then Governor of the Federal Reserve System:
Eccles: We created it.
Patman: Out of what?
Eccles: Out of the right to issue credit money.
Patman: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our government's credit?
Eccles: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
Like I said, the Federal Reserve has been amazingly candid about its activities. Political organizations half as powerful usually hide behind platitudes and such.
By the way, whenever you hear the media talk about the "national debt", most of that is what the federal government owes to the Federal Reserve. The majority of it is not foreign debt as you seem to imply. In either case, foreign debt is not why the federal government can obtain nearly unlimited funding through the hidden tax of inflation. Regarding that domestic Federal Reserve debt, at the moment the Federal Reserve creates the money, it lends it to the federal government at interest. Therefore there cannot possibly be enough money in circulation to pay back that debt. This point cannot be emphasized enough.
Regarding your comments about possible deflation of representative currency and the harm it might do to borrowers, I don't consider that a bad thing. Under such a system, saving your money, building wealth over time (much more viable without inflation!), being thrifty, and not going into debt unless absolutely necessary are all rewarded. The current negative savings index of the American people would be strongly discouraged under that system. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Also, a representative currency needs absolutely no mechanism for controlling inflation. You state the lack of such a mechanism as though it were a downside. If you have a gold standard or a silver standard, you cannot have inflation because there is a finite amount of gold and silver on the planet. I already addressed your concerns about deflation by stating that they'd discourage the very behaviors that tend to destabilize an economy, like rampant debt and negative savings.
If you want a bit more edification, research Andrew Jackson's political battle against international bankers who wanted to establish a Federal Reserve type of system back in his day. They wanted to do it for quite some time before they finally managed to do so during the early 20th century. He gave a warning to future generations that we should have heeded.
In fact I'd kindly ask that you not respond until after you have researched that event. Unfortunately we don't have presidents like Jackson anymore who really represent our
Apple has nothing to say that I find worth hearing. Apple has nothing to show that I find worth seeing.
Remember, if you say you like Apple and express interest in their products and services, you are just giving an opinion.
If you say in a non-inflammatory way that you don't like Apple and do not have an interest in their products and services, why then you are "-1, Flamebait".
Yup, nothing hypocritical about that, mods.
I agree with parent, so mod me down too. You know you wanna.
People who don't have liquid assets* aren't affected by inflation
"Those people" constitute an empty set. You are vulnerable to inflation if you have any of the following "liquid" assets:
Cash in your wallet.
A checking or savings account.
A retirement fund.
An employer with any of the above or a payroll.
"The rich" don't care as much about inflation because they can move their investments to a more stable currency. This "capital flight" devastated Latin America when much of the country's wealth left its financial system overnight.
The poor and middle classes, however, are devastated. We generally have:
Wages and salary paid in cash or check.
Savings and checking accounts, also denominated in local currency.
All of those are wiped out by inflation.
Inflation also affects interest rates. A bank might lend $1000 today for $2000 a year from now, but the bank can lose money if inflation makes $2000 of next year's dollars worth less than $1000 of this year's dollars. Movements in interest rates directly affect "the rich" but also make it harder for everyone else to get loans, interest on a savings account, and the like. It slows job growth as financing to expand becomes more costly.
In short, inflation sucks. For everyone, but especially the poor and middle classes.
Thanks for explaining this for me. Economic education in the USA is drastically poor and most people don't understand how our money system actually works and how these things impact them.
Inflation is not something that "just happens". The federal government "prints" (most of it is done by computers actually) money out of thin air to finance much of its budget, which devalues the assets held by every American citizen. That's why it is a hidden tax. Like I said, instead of taking more of your money, they take its value. It ultimately has the same effect, except you won't see it come up as an issue during any campaign.
That's why every country's central bank works to keep inflation reasonable.
The central banks are directly responsible for inflation. Our fiat currency has no basis, is created out of thin air, and is then lent to the federal government by the Federal Reserve at interest. See the problem?
If the only money that exists is created by the Federal Reserve, and all of it eventually has to be paid back with interest, there is not enough money in circulation to pay back all debt. Therefore all the government can do is borrow more money at interest to make payments on interest. Debt can only accumulate. It's built into this system as part of its deliberate design. Do not take my word for this, please. Research it. You will see the same thing.
You have none of these problems if you have a representative currency, an example of which is a gold standard or a silver standard. But then the government has to finance all of its budget through confiscatory tax collection (income, excise, tariffs, etc) and cannot obtain unlimited funding through inflation. That naturally places a check against how large and powerful it may become. I'll ask again: see the problem (for them)?
With net neutrality not an issue, I wonder if AT&T will have its arm twisted into giving "free" passage to any Apple specified content where it doesn't contribute to the cap, while anything from Hulu, YouTube, and other places get charged the metered rates. This way, users end up going to Apple's content because it doesn't cost them anything.
If Apple resorts to this, then that'd be a great reason to avoid Apple's content at all costs as a form of protest against a business practice that needs to be nipped in the bud and discouraged as early in the game as possible. I'm not saying the sheeple will do that, as they are not generally known for considering the full implications of their actions i.e. whether they are encouraging a business practice that is not in their interests. I'm just saying that it's a great reason independent of whether they are capable of appreciating and acting on it.
Tax enforcement [npr.org] ("over the past dozen years, staff at the Internal Revenue Service has shrunk by about 20 percent. That affects the agency's ability to catch people who cheat on their taxes. One estimate of the annual loss in tax revenue is $300 billion.") And before anyone apologist says, "BV-b-but C-C-Clinton!", tell me who ran the House and Senate? That's right, the GOP. [newsweek.com]
It's rather pointless to talk about the IRS and progressive income taxes. Those are hardly sufficient to fund the federal budget and are there mostly for show, to divert attention. It's like that saying about how the President exists not to wield power, but to distract attention away from it.
The biggest tax we all pay is inflation. Instead of taking your money, they take its value. It's the most regressive tax of all, helping to devalue the savings and investments on which upward social mobility depends. How does a poor person become middle-class, or a middle-class person become rich, if they are greatly hindered from working to build wealth over time? Incidentally, the whole mortgage crisis was all about real wealth like real estate and other holdings being transferred to the same banks that participate in that Federal Reserve system because the people could not repay the fiat money the bank created on the spot, out of thin air, in order to become the lienholder. "Fractional Reserve Banking" makes for a great research topic and the Federal Reserve itself has historically been amazingly frank about its activities if you care to investigate how this works.
As I've already pointed out [slashdot.org], when you vote anti-government, you get sabotaged government.
There are not two parties. There is ONE party, the Big Government Party, with separate branches each trying to exert ever-increasing control
over your life.
-- Judge Napolitano, freedomwatch.com
Which candidate from a faction (Democrats or Republicans) of that one party, or if you find that too radical, from the reigning duopoly, would really wish to decrease the power and influence that comes from holding public office? So long as we have career politicians who must have the blessing of the major parties to stand a chance of federal election, what we get is a self-reinforcing system of the fox guarding the henhouse.
So let me take a page out of the right's rhetorical playbook and ask them, "Why do you hate America?"
Because for running America into the ground, they are rewarded with prestige and respect and wealth and power and a media presence that makes them almost larger-than-life. What more could a fevered ego desire? Failing to speak against them, voting for them, looking up to them, taking their lying words and commercials and campaigns at face value, or believing that anyone from parties that are manifestly statist/pro-government (however you wish to say it) really want to reduce the government from which they derive their livelihood serves one purpose: it reinforces them, legitimizes them, supports them, and tells them that they're alright and must be doing a great job since we have such a high incumbency rate. Of course if we had any real variety of political philosophies which all stood a viable chance at winning elections, that incumbency rate would not be the case.
The real problem isn't regressive or progressive nature of a given tax, it's the idea that the government is making value judgments as to who is "rich" and who is "poor."
In the past, many middle-class people have supported Federal and state tax increases that "soak the rich," only to find that, oh, by the way, they are now considered "rich."
That absolutely serves them right. It's what you get when you use an emotional desire to nail other people as your basis for sound public policy. The only bad thing is that as tax law applies to everyone, people with more enlightened points of view are also paying for their shortsightedness.
Apparently, this "revenue neutral" legislation will reduce the taxes on everyone. Either someone's taxes have to go up, or it can't be revenue neutral.
Perhaps everybody who pays taxes now will have their taxes go down, and the scofflaws and low-income people who presently pay no taxes will make up the difference. In other words, it could be a semantic trick: everybody who presently pays taxes WILL have their tax bill go down if the large number of people who pay no taxes start doing so.
There are a large number of people who not only have zero federal income tax liability, but who actually have a negative fed. income tax liability. Their income levels plus various exemptions etc. zeroes out their tax liability and they are still eligible for various credits, particularly the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Of course such people still enjoy the services and protections provided by government. Thus in purely financial terms, they are engaging in parasitism. This is a big step towards the welfare state, the nanny state, or whatever you prefer to call it. It works because there are large enough numbers of these people that their votes can easily sway elections and they vote in uniform blocs with little diversity of opinion among them. The number of adult voters with no federal tax liability was 38% prior to the recent stimulus bill and now sits around 47%. For any election, that's absolutely huge. Any politician who sees something wrong with this and wants to change it would immediately have 47% of the voters against him, so you see how it entrenches itself.
Politically, the purpose of creating and encouraging this class of taxpayers is to engage in class warfare. The game is to get a large percentage of the population dependent on government subsidies for their day-to-day living. Those people will then defend and re-elect the politicians who feed that dependency no matter how unreasonable their policies may be. The fact that the Baby Boomers have largely forgotten how to prepare for their own retirements and are utterly dependent on Social Security (no matter how bankrupt) and the fact that proposing changes to that system is political suicide is a good example of this game.
There is a second benefit to our rulers. The more "rich people" and "poor people" see each other as adversaries the more our politicians can play both sides against one another to entrench their power. It's classic divide-and-conquer.
I live in a state with service taxes on my business (customers, really) and 'use' taxes. Would the Fair Tax trump those?
SB
I'd imagine not. As an example, I pay federal income taxes. The state in which I live also levies state income taxes. They are two entirely separate taxes and I have to pay each of them.
The big advantage of federalism is that if my state income taxes became too much of a burden I could relocate to a state with either lower state income taxes or no state income taxes. There's no such option with the federal government unless you want to emigrate to another country.
And I suppose you don't care that the Fair Tax is a ridiculously regressive tax? Because it taxes buying power, it disproportionately effects those who do not save or invest but, instead, live paycheck to paycheck. So, if you're poor and you have to spend all your income on rent and food, the fair tax hits you hardest.
Another trivially answered objection. See my reply here. Having established with facts you can verify yourself that this is not a regressive tax and in fact has been carefully crafted not to be, I'll reply to some of your other points.
Also, take a look sometime at the USA's negative savings index. As a whole, the adult population is spending more money than they make and are not saving up for the future. We have had rich people and poor people for as long as we have had a country. We have not, however, had a negative savings index until rather recently. While it is not the cause of it, it's rather obvious that attaching a tax penalty to income and savings has an effect on this.
Living paycheck to paycheck is a big mistake; the slightest miscalculation, unanticipated expense, emergency, or disaster will break you if you do this. Cars break down, appliances break down, medical bills happen, and generally this is a problem waiting to happen. Like the negative savings index, it is only relatively recently in our history that so many people have chosen to do this. We should be educating people about why this is a mistake, not looking for ways to make it more comfortable to make this mistake.
If you're rich, and you are able to invest half your income, and you spend the rest, you're only taxed on half your income. Thus, the rich pay a lower real tax rate than the poor. (Add to this the fact that the marginal value of $1 is far less to a rich person than to a poor person to begin with and the system starts to look downright dystopian.)
Two things. First of all, the reason why you invest your income is because you expect a return on your investment. That ROI is more money in the pockets of those who invest. That wealth is ultimately spent by someone, either the investors themselves or their heirs. When it is spent, it is taxed by this sales tax.
Second, do you suppose money just disappears when it is invested? No. If you invest large sums of money in a company by purchasing its stock, the company uses that money to expand its operations, do more business (generating more taxes), hire more workers, etc.
What makes this fail is when companies see our tax code and decide that it's cheaper for them to take those investments and use them for overseas operations. Then that wealth leaves our country and does not return to us in this fashion. As a case in point, do some research about DaimlerChrysler and why they decided to headquarter in Germany, incorporate in Germany, and pay taxes in Germany. Hint: it was not their original intention. You see the same thing on a smaller scale when you look at all of the domestic companies who incorporate in Arizona for tax purposes even when they have no intention of doing business there. They do it because Arizona has no state income tax.
The obvious way to fix this that I've heard some propose, is to allow exemptions for the poor, etc. But now you're getting back where we are now, where individuals have to keep track of their finances and report to uncle sam for their rebates. Except now individuals have to keep track of every single purchase, rather than just their annual income from their employer.
Research the Fair Tax bill. It's a written document consisting of the proposed legislation. Nowhere does it require tracking every purchase in order for the prebate to work. Please don't just make things up and pretend that they are valid objections. If you really want to gain some perspective, lo
A national sales tax (NOT the same as a VAT) has none of these problems, carries no need to track income, is much more difficult to cheat, is paid by foreign nationals who visit this country including illegals, is paid by people who deal drugs and other contraband not currently tracked by the IRS, and has a much lower cost of compliance to businesses than the current ridiculously complex tax code.
And, it's regressive. Thanks for playing.
Another objection trivially answered. See this page in the section called "How does the prebate work?"
A sales tax is actually inherently progressive. It taxes not income nor savings, but consumption. Who do you suppose consumes more, rich people or poor people? Who do you suppose will pay a proportionally higher share?
Someone right at the poverty level will have no net Fair Tax liability because of the prebate. Someone below the poverty level will receive more in prebates than they pay in federal sales taxes. Anyone above either level will pay taxes according to how much they spend.
Like I said for a reason, this is the most well-researched piece of legislation in history. If you can think of an objection in two minutes, it has already been answered.
And this tax is tracked how online? On ebay, for example, is ebay required to collect this tax? or the seller? or does the buyer just record all their purchases and pay up at the end of the year? I'm all for a national sales tax, but it still requires tracking of individuals.
No, it requires tracking of businesses and merchants. Ever buy groceries at (say) a Wal-Mart and then have to file a form with the state for the salex taxes you paid? No? Do you know why? Because that is a matter between Wal-Mart and the state in which that particular store is located. Wal-Mart has to pay sales taxes on its sales volume whether or not they pass them on to you. To keep things simple they pass them onto you on a per-transaction basis. That's why your receipt has line-items detailing your subtotal, the sales tax, and your final total which is the sum of both.
The Fair Tax is designed to be revenue-neutral. That is, the federal government would collect the same amount of taxes under the national sales tax as it does now under the income tax. That means that unlike most state sales taxes, services are taxable because companies that sell no goods but make money from providing services currently pay income taxes. Thus, eBay would pay its own sales tax because providing the storefront and maintaining the Web site is a service and the merchants are its customers.
As a business or a merchant, it would cost less to comply with this simplified tax code than it does to comply with the enormousely complex income tax system we have today. That's partly because it only applies at the retail level; factories and wholesalers and such would not be paying it. Most importantly, it would represent the single largest transfer of power away from politicians and to the people that has ever occurred during my lifetime.
No offense is intended, but to be completely honest with you, your question is uninformed and trivially answered with a Google search. The Fair Tax bill is the most thoroughly researched piece of legislation in the history of the USA and such questions have been exhaustively answered. Really the only reason it has not already become law is not because there are credible objections to it, not because it would do harm, but because politicians do not wish to give up the tremendous and subtle power that the income tax code represents.
it means that they will have to collect your Taxpayer ID number and then validate it.
so no illegal alliens can use E-bay.
Since they will be reporting SSNs to the IRS it will also be interesting if the law enforcement agencies sniff this for fugitives. Supposedly SSNs are not supposed to get used for law enforcement but they are.
I wonder how they will deal with people who claim not to be US citizens.
How to solve all of these problems in one fell swoop: dispose of the income tax, disband the IRS, eliminate the ridiculously lenghty income tax code, and replace all of them with the Fair Tax. A national sales tax (NOT the same as a VAT) has none of these problems, carries no need to track income, is much more difficult to cheat, is paid by foreign nationals who visit this country including illegals, is paid by people who deal drugs and other contraband not currently tracked by the IRS, and has a much lower cost of compliance to businesses than the current ridiculously complex tax code.
Why it won't happen: an income tax has one "advantage" (though not for us) over all other systems of taxation. It makes it very easy to use carrot-and-stick methods to manipulate behavior and to give kickbacks to your special interest buddies. A national sales tax, on the other hand, would apply equally to everyone whether or not they are your buddies and whether or not they behave the way you want them to.
When Americans have backdoors, it's to protect American interests and therefore "good".
It's to protect American governmental interests. The lie or the myth is that those are the same as American interests or the interests of the American people.
A Relief Well isn't for production. So yes, it's not really something you can question...
But that's the point. They can claim it's purely as a precautionary measure, even though it can potentially provide them with profit and a way to avoid the moratorium on new offshore drills.
Just because they call it a relief well, doesn't mean they won't use it for production or that it's only going to be used to releive that pressure. Besides, what did you think they would do with the oil that comes from the relief well, other than sell it?
Mods are on crack again. Why, how dare you hold a contradictory opinion. Clearly you are trolling!
I hope you have karma to burn like I do, that way these petty irritable little egos accomplish nothing except wasting their points.
For what it's worth, I doubt they'd get much oil (if any) from a relief well. Oil is not what it buys them. It's a face-saving investment that helps to secure their future offshort drilling ventures. Simply put, the more capable they are of containing this disaster the less likely it'll be that they are denied such opportunities to drill in the future. At this point, decent damage control is all they can hope for but that's much better than nothing if they want to continue harvesting such sources of oil.
I guess the above paragraph is more trolling on my part. Mod away.
Right, because the relief well doesn't have anything to do with, you know, being a relief well.
Right, because that means their motive for making a relief well is sacrosanct and we cannot question it.
The GP speculated about "why" and you responded by redundantly clarifying "what". You didn't really answer him at all.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Obama only drinks beer for photo-ops aimed at extracting his foot from his mouth. Occasionally he might also chug one back at a bowling alley to show that he's really a common man after all....
While repeating his "Wall Street and Main Street" meme. It's such an empty series of repetition devoid of all meaning, as evidenced by the (radio) commercials I've heard that have adopted it. I think they were local branches of multinational banks and perhaps also financial advisor firms who wanted to capitalize on the latest buzz phrase.
Proof that a moderate such as myself will never be labeled as such.
I'm for offshore drilling because it provides us with the energy source that we currently need today. I'm also in favor of extensively researching and quickly implementing alternative fuels so that we can get away from oil entirely.
With me, it isn't "drill, baby, drill"...it's "drill for now, but not for long". Thanks for your partisan slant though, I appreciate it.
You often see this in discussions. I think the propaganda, demagoguery, invective, and intellectual dishonesty so frequently seen in the media and especially in politics has infected the easily impressionable who derive their mannerisms and actions from the media. You can call them sheeple, mindless automatons who think their behaviors and thoughts are their own original creations, easily impressionable, non-self-aware, unable to carry out introspection, followers, and lots of other things. As for that post to which you replied, what happened there has happened to me several times.
The (lack of) thinking goes something like this: "well, he used certain words or otherwise vaguely sounds a little bit like a cookie-cutter opinion that I have seen before, probably from some pundit, therefore I will refuse to deal with him as an individual and will instead regard him as a member of a school of thought or other group identity, that way I don't have to bother really listening to what he has to say or understanding where he is coming from." You'll notice this is always done to condemn and belittle, for that's how such people obtain their worthless sense of worth. Specifically, it's an attempt to diminish in order to make it easier to condemn. It treats people as members of a system and it's the very opposite of treating others like human beings.
The motivation is that they are not interested in truth. They are interested in feeling "right" or better than someone else at all costs. For them, argumentation is not about testing ideas and increasing understanding. It's about humiliating your opponent and rubbing his nose in it. Thus, they have no interest in dealing with individual human beings for, unlike mindless talking points, there are no automatic ready answers for the points they make. That interferes with their goal of feeling "right" and at the very least makes them work much harder to achieve it.
In closing, a quote from Aristotle:
Hubris: "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for
your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think
that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."
This is NOT a reason to stop offshore drilling. Offshore drilling is an essential part of our current energy use. What this is, however, is a good reason to reinforce laws surrounding safety and preparedness standards...and make sure they are fucking followed.
If you haven't noticed, there are forces in our government that don't want us to be a strong, stable, well-managed, independent country. It would interfere with their desire to undermine our national sovereignty in order to accelerate globalism and all of the financial and political power that goes with it. It's not so much that our leaders are incompetent, it's that their interests do not coincide with ours. If they were merely incompetent then they couldn't do such a great job of increasing their own power and looking after their own interests and the interests of their financial backers.
I fully agree with you about the safety and preparedness standards. Protecting workers from exploitation by their employers is a legitimate function of modern government, especially when we are talking about violations and abuses that result in workers getting killed. It reminds me of that mine collapse that occurred several months ago, killing the miners trapped inside with toxic gases. The mining company had repeatedly violated established safety standards and their negligence resulted in the deaths of miners. The reasonable solution to this is to arrest the executives of that company and put them on trial for manslaughter.
That's what needs to happen here with the oil spill and the workers who died when the rig exploded. Had the company taken all reasonable precautions and made a best-effort to ensure the safety of its workers, then unfortunately tragic events happen and cannot be completely prevented and that's understandable. The moment negligence enters the picture, they are choosing to sacrifice human life for the sake of profit. Prison is where people like that belong. Don't bother fining the company, just put the executives on trial for allowing this to happen. That's how you make sure the standards are followed. So long as management remains untouchable and is never made personally and severely accountable for their actions we will continue to have deliberate abuses like this.
It's not even about being stupid or being dumb but the majority of people is simply clueless.
In isolation, not knowing any better is not stupidity; it is ignorance. Being clueless about a device or system and deciding that you're going to use it for important financial transactions anyway is the stupid part. It's a bit like getting in a car and going to the busiest, highest-speed freeway when you have no knowledge of how to drive. Not knowing how to drive doesn't make someone stupid; it means they just haven't been taught. Not knowing how to drive and doing it anyway in one of the more demanding driving environments makes someone stupid. See the difference?
That's probably one of the more practical definitions of stupidity: not knowing your own limitations when you are about to exceed them, or knowing them and refusing to address them when there is a manifest need to do so.
It's their computer and that's safe by definition. They can't imagine that anything they see in their browser (or other program) they started up themselves could be malicious.
It may be their computer but it isn't their remote web site.
There are 2 kinds of people on this world, those who are stupid and/or gullible and those who take advantage of that.
Third option: there are those who want to make an honest living while at the same time learning as much as possible from the mistakes, idiocy, and bad examples of those around them. I didn't ask a fool to be easily parted from his money, but now that he has done so of his own initiative, I can read about it and understand why he was acting foolishly to make myself much less likely to follow his example.
Unless you possess an inhuman ability to maintain state tables in your head, you could easily assume that "yourbank.scam.com" on browser window 5, tab 15, is the "yourbank.com" that you actually did open, on browser window 7, tab 19.
I had no idea that glancing up at the address bar to check the domain of the URL immediately before actually typing login credentials qualified as "an inhuman ability to maintain state tables in your head." Is this sort of like the way janitors are called "sanitation engineers"?
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple makes a deal with AT&T to not count iTunes streaming content against your cap would be a reason to boycott Apple? WTF?
They would be building a walled garden where users will tune into their content rather than get it from elsewhere on the Internet.
Isn't it obvious? The trap works much better if it has been baited... the "doesn't count against your cap" part is the bait.
I believe GP fits my definition of the "sheeple ... who are not known for considering the full implications of their actions" (emphasis added). I believe their mentality is this: "is there a short-term gain, maybve some frivolous thing I could easily live without, and a long-term loss like less freedom of choice? Sign me up!"
It's not literally unlimited in the sense that it can indeed be quantified. For all practical purposes, however, it is unlimited in the sense that they will crash the entire economy and completely devalue the currency before they will decide that maybe they should stop doing that.
What do you suppose a treasure security is? The government needs another billion dollars. So it asks the Federal Reserve to create this money. The Federal Reserve then creates a billion dollars. It gives that to the federal government in exchange for a piece of paper created by the federal government called a treasury note. This is what the Federal Reserve calls a securities asset. It's basically an IOU signed by the federal government. The government then spends that billion dollars and one way or another, it enters the economy and increases the money supply by one billion.
This whole discussion would be much simpler if you'd research a few topics, such as the "Federal Reserve" and "fractional reserve banking" and "fiat currency".
You may find this interesting. Back in 1941, a Congressman named Wright Patman wanted to know where the Federal Reserve got the money to purchase two billion dollars worth of government bonds (securities assets) in 1933. These are actual quotes from when he asked that question of Marriner Eccles, who was then Governor of the Federal Reserve System:
Eccles: We created it.
Patman: Out of what?
Eccles: Out of the right to issue credit money.
Patman: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our government's credit?
Eccles: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
Like I said, the Federal Reserve has been amazingly candid about its activities. Political organizations half as powerful usually hide behind platitudes and such.
By the way, whenever you hear the media talk about the "national debt", most of that is what the federal government owes to the Federal Reserve. The majority of it is not foreign debt as you seem to imply. In either case, foreign debt is not why the federal government can obtain nearly unlimited funding through the hidden tax of inflation. Regarding that domestic Federal Reserve debt, at the moment the Federal Reserve creates the money, it lends it to the federal government at interest. Therefore there cannot possibly be enough money in circulation to pay back that debt. This point cannot be emphasized enough.
Regarding your comments about possible deflation of representative currency and the harm it might do to borrowers, I don't consider that a bad thing. Under such a system, saving your money, building wealth over time (much more viable without inflation!), being thrifty, and not going into debt unless absolutely necessary are all rewarded. The current negative savings index of the American people would be strongly discouraged under that system. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Also, a representative currency needs absolutely no mechanism for controlling inflation. You state the lack of such a mechanism as though it were a downside. If you have a gold standard or a silver standard, you cannot have inflation because there is a finite amount of gold and silver on the planet. I already addressed your concerns about deflation by stating that they'd discourage the very behaviors that tend to destabilize an economy, like rampant debt and negative savings.
If you want a bit more edification, research Andrew Jackson's political battle against international bankers who wanted to establish a Federal Reserve type of system back in his day. They wanted to do it for quite some time before they finally managed to do so during the early 20th century. He gave a warning to future generations that we should have heeded.
In fact I'd kindly ask that you not respond until after you have researched that event. Unfortunately we don't have presidents like Jackson anymore who really represent our
Apple has nothing to say that I find worth hearing. Apple has nothing to show that I find worth seeing.
Remember, if you say you like Apple and express interest in their products and services, you are just giving an opinion. If you say in a non-inflammatory way that you don't like Apple and do not have an interest in their products and services, why then you are "-1, Flamebait". Yup, nothing hypocritical about that, mods.
I agree with parent, so mod me down too. You know you wanna.
People who don't have liquid assets* aren't affected by inflation
"Those people" constitute an empty set. You are vulnerable to inflation if you have any of the following "liquid" assets:
"The rich" don't care as much about inflation because they can move their investments to a more stable currency. This "capital flight" devastated Latin America when much of the country's wealth left its financial system overnight.
The poor and middle classes, however, are devastated. We generally have:
All of those are wiped out by inflation.
Inflation also affects interest rates. A bank might lend $1000 today for $2000 a year from now, but the bank can lose money if inflation makes $2000 of next year's dollars worth less than $1000 of this year's dollars. Movements in interest rates directly affect "the rich" but also make it harder for everyone else to get loans, interest on a savings account, and the like. It slows job growth as financing to expand becomes more costly.
In short, inflation sucks. For everyone, but especially the poor and middle classes.
Thanks for explaining this for me. Economic education in the USA is drastically poor and most people don't understand how our money system actually works and how these things impact them.
Inflation is not something that "just happens". The federal government "prints" (most of it is done by computers actually) money out of thin air to finance much of its budget, which devalues the assets held by every American citizen. That's why it is a hidden tax. Like I said, instead of taking more of your money, they take its value. It ultimately has the same effect, except you won't see it come up as an issue during any campaign.
The central banks are directly responsible for inflation. Our fiat currency has no basis, is created out of thin air, and is then lent to the federal government by the Federal Reserve at interest. See the problem?
If the only money that exists is created by the Federal Reserve, and all of it eventually has to be paid back with interest, there is not enough money in circulation to pay back all debt. Therefore all the government can do is borrow more money at interest to make payments on interest. Debt can only accumulate. It's built into this system as part of its deliberate design. Do not take my word for this, please. Research it. You will see the same thing.
You have none of these problems if you have a representative currency, an example of which is a gold standard or a silver standard. But then the government has to finance all of its budget through confiscatory tax collection (income, excise, tariffs, etc) and cannot obtain unlimited funding through inflation. That naturally places a check against how large and powerful it may become. I'll ask again: see the problem (for them)?
With net neutrality not an issue, I wonder if AT&T will have its arm twisted into giving "free" passage to any Apple specified content where it doesn't contribute to the cap, while anything from Hulu, YouTube, and other places get charged the metered rates. This way, users end up going to Apple's content because it doesn't cost them anything.
If Apple resorts to this, then that'd be a great reason to avoid Apple's content at all costs as a form of protest against a business practice that needs to be nipped in the bud and discouraged as early in the game as possible. I'm not saying the sheeple will do that, as they are not generally known for considering the full implications of their actions i.e. whether they are encouraging a business practice that is not in their interests. I'm just saying that it's a great reason independent of whether they are capable of appreciating and acting on it.
It's rather pointless to talk about the IRS and progressive income taxes. Those are hardly sufficient to fund the federal budget and are there mostly for show, to divert attention. It's like that saying about how the President exists not to wield power, but to distract attention away from it.
The biggest tax we all pay is inflation. Instead of taking your money, they take its value. It's the most regressive tax of all, helping to devalue the savings and investments on which upward social mobility depends. How does a poor person become middle-class, or a middle-class person become rich, if they are greatly hindered from working to build wealth over time? Incidentally, the whole mortgage crisis was all about real wealth like real estate and other holdings being transferred to the same banks that participate in that Federal Reserve system because the people could not repay the fiat money the bank created on the spot, out of thin air, in order to become the lienholder. "Fractional Reserve Banking" makes for a great research topic and the Federal Reserve itself has historically been amazingly frank about its activities if you care to investigate how this works.
There are not two parties. There is ONE party, the Big Government Party, with separate branches each trying to exert ever-increasing control over your life.
-- Judge Napolitano, freedomwatch.com
Which candidate from a faction (Democrats or Republicans) of that one party, or if you find that too radical, from the reigning duopoly, would really wish to decrease the power and influence that comes from holding public office? So long as we have career politicians who must have the blessing of the major parties to stand a chance of federal election, what we get is a self-reinforcing system of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Because for running America into the ground, they are rewarded with prestige and respect and wealth and power and a media presence that makes them almost larger-than-life. What more could a fevered ego desire? Failing to speak against them, voting for them, looking up to them, taking their lying words and commercials and campaigns at face value, or believing that anyone from parties that are manifestly statist/pro-government (however you wish to say it) really want to reduce the government from which they derive their livelihood serves one purpose: it reinforces them, legitimizes them, supports them, and tells them that they're alright and must be doing a great job since we have such a high incumbency rate. Of course if we had any real variety of political philosophies which all stood a viable chance at winning elections, that incumbency rate would not be the case.
(Did you know you can get 440 wired residential without a permit?)
Yeah, but you need to use an insulated ladder and cable splicer if you don't want to end up on YouTube.
That'd be a lot more likely to end up on Darwin Awards.
Can someone explain the appeal of Zappa to me? Most of his songs seem weird for weirdness' sake, but I'm willing to learn.
Sounds like you wouldn't like Mr. Bungle.
The real problem isn't regressive or progressive nature of a given tax, it's the idea that the government is making value judgments as to who is "rich" and who is "poor."
In the past, many middle-class people have supported Federal and state tax increases that "soak the rich," only to find that, oh, by the way, they are now considered "rich."
That absolutely serves them right. It's what you get when you use an emotional desire to nail other people as your basis for sound public policy. The only bad thing is that as tax law applies to everyone, people with more enlightened points of view are also paying for their shortsightedness.
Apparently, this "revenue neutral" legislation will reduce the taxes on everyone. Either someone's taxes have to go up, or it can't be revenue neutral.
Perhaps everybody who pays taxes now will have their taxes go down, and the scofflaws and low-income people who presently pay no taxes will make up the difference. In other words, it could be a semantic trick: everybody who presently pays taxes WILL have their tax bill go down if the large number of people who pay no taxes start doing so.
There are a large number of people who not only have zero federal income tax liability, but who actually have a negative fed. income tax liability. Their income levels plus various exemptions etc. zeroes out their tax liability and they are still eligible for various credits, particularly the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Of course such people still enjoy the services and protections provided by government. Thus in purely financial terms, they are engaging in parasitism. This is a big step towards the welfare state, the nanny state, or whatever you prefer to call it. It works because there are large enough numbers of these people that their votes can easily sway elections and they vote in uniform blocs with little diversity of opinion among them. The number of adult voters with no federal tax liability was 38% prior to the recent stimulus bill and now sits around 47%. For any election, that's absolutely huge. Any politician who sees something wrong with this and wants to change it would immediately have 47% of the voters against him, so you see how it entrenches itself.
Politically, the purpose of creating and encouraging this class of taxpayers is to engage in class warfare. The game is to get a large percentage of the population dependent on government subsidies for their day-to-day living. Those people will then defend and re-elect the politicians who feed that dependency no matter how unreasonable their policies may be. The fact that the Baby Boomers have largely forgotten how to prepare for their own retirements and are utterly dependent on Social Security (no matter how bankrupt) and the fact that proposing changes to that system is political suicide is a good example of this game.
There is a second benefit to our rulers. The more "rich people" and "poor people" see each other as adversaries the more our politicians can play both sides against one another to entrench their power. It's classic divide-and-conquer.
I live in a state with service taxes on my business (customers, really) and 'use' taxes. Would the Fair Tax trump those?
SB
I'd imagine not. As an example, I pay federal income taxes. The state in which I live also levies state income taxes. They are two entirely separate taxes and I have to pay each of them.
The big advantage of federalism is that if my state income taxes became too much of a burden I could relocate to a state with either lower state income taxes or no state income taxes. There's no such option with the federal government unless you want to emigrate to another country.
Another trivially answered objection. See my reply here. Having established with facts you can verify yourself that this is not a regressive tax and in fact has been carefully crafted not to be, I'll reply to some of your other points.
Also, take a look sometime at the USA's negative savings index. As a whole, the adult population is spending more money than they make and are not saving up for the future. We have had rich people and poor people for as long as we have had a country. We have not, however, had a negative savings index until rather recently. While it is not the cause of it, it's rather obvious that attaching a tax penalty to income and savings has an effect on this.
Living paycheck to paycheck is a big mistake; the slightest miscalculation, unanticipated expense, emergency, or disaster will break you if you do this. Cars break down, appliances break down, medical bills happen, and generally this is a problem waiting to happen. Like the negative savings index, it is only relatively recently in our history that so many people have chosen to do this. We should be educating people about why this is a mistake, not looking for ways to make it more comfortable to make this mistake.
Two things. First of all, the reason why you invest your income is because you expect a return on your investment. That ROI is more money in the pockets of those who invest. That wealth is ultimately spent by someone, either the investors themselves or their heirs. When it is spent, it is taxed by this sales tax.
Second, do you suppose money just disappears when it is invested? No. If you invest large sums of money in a company by purchasing its stock, the company uses that money to expand its operations, do more business (generating more taxes), hire more workers, etc.
What makes this fail is when companies see our tax code and decide that it's cheaper for them to take those investments and use them for overseas operations. Then that wealth leaves our country and does not return to us in this fashion. As a case in point, do some research about DaimlerChrysler and why they decided to headquarter in Germany, incorporate in Germany, and pay taxes in Germany. Hint: it was not their original intention. You see the same thing on a smaller scale when you look at all of the domestic companies who incorporate in Arizona for tax purposes even when they have no intention of doing business there. They do it because Arizona has no state income tax.
Research the Fair Tax bill. It's a written document consisting of the proposed legislation. Nowhere does it require tracking every purchase in order for the prebate to work. Please don't just make things up and pretend that they are valid objections. If you really want to gain some perspective, lo
A national sales tax (NOT the same as a VAT) has none of these problems, carries no need to track income, is much more difficult to cheat, is paid by foreign nationals who visit this country including illegals, is paid by people who deal drugs and other contraband not currently tracked by the IRS, and has a much lower cost of compliance to businesses than the current ridiculously complex tax code.
And, it's regressive. Thanks for playing.
Another objection trivially answered. See this page in the section called "How does the prebate work?"
A sales tax is actually inherently progressive. It taxes not income nor savings, but consumption. Who do you suppose consumes more, rich people or poor people? Who do you suppose will pay a proportionally higher share?
Someone right at the poverty level will have no net Fair Tax liability because of the prebate. Someone below the poverty level will receive more in prebates than they pay in federal sales taxes. Anyone above either level will pay taxes according to how much they spend.
Like I said for a reason, this is the most well-researched piece of legislation in history. If you can think of an objection in two minutes, it has already been answered.
And this tax is tracked how online? On ebay, for example, is ebay required to collect this tax? or the seller? or does the buyer just record all their purchases and pay up at the end of the year? I'm all for a national sales tax, but it still requires tracking of individuals.
No, it requires tracking of businesses and merchants. Ever buy groceries at (say) a Wal-Mart and then have to file a form with the state for the salex taxes you paid? No? Do you know why? Because that is a matter between Wal-Mart and the state in which that particular store is located. Wal-Mart has to pay sales taxes on its sales volume whether or not they pass them on to you. To keep things simple they pass them onto you on a per-transaction basis. That's why your receipt has line-items detailing your subtotal, the sales tax, and your final total which is the sum of both.
The Fair Tax is designed to be revenue-neutral. That is, the federal government would collect the same amount of taxes under the national sales tax as it does now under the income tax. That means that unlike most state sales taxes, services are taxable because companies that sell no goods but make money from providing services currently pay income taxes. Thus, eBay would pay its own sales tax because providing the storefront and maintaining the Web site is a service and the merchants are its customers.
As a business or a merchant, it would cost less to comply with this simplified tax code than it does to comply with the enormousely complex income tax system we have today. That's partly because it only applies at the retail level; factories and wholesalers and such would not be paying it. Most importantly, it would represent the single largest transfer of power away from politicians and to the people that has ever occurred during my lifetime.
No offense is intended, but to be completely honest with you, your question is uninformed and trivially answered with a Google search. The Fair Tax bill is the most thoroughly researched piece of legislation in the history of the USA and such questions have been exhaustively answered. Really the only reason it has not already become law is not because there are credible objections to it, not because it would do harm, but because politicians do not wish to give up the tremendous and subtle power that the income tax code represents.
Only when officials have to make a choice between them.
When they can, they avoid making such a choice. For example, speeding tickets. There they get to enforce the law while also making money.
it means that they will have to collect your Taxpayer ID number and then validate it.
so no illegal alliens can use E-bay.
Since they will be reporting SSNs to the IRS it will also be interesting if the law enforcement agencies sniff this for fugitives. Supposedly SSNs are not supposed to get used for law enforcement but they are.
I wonder how they will deal with people who claim not to be US citizens.
How to solve all of these problems in one fell swoop: dispose of the income tax, disband the IRS, eliminate the ridiculously lenghty income tax code, and replace all of them with the Fair Tax. A national sales tax (NOT the same as a VAT) has none of these problems, carries no need to track income, is much more difficult to cheat, is paid by foreign nationals who visit this country including illegals, is paid by people who deal drugs and other contraband not currently tracked by the IRS, and has a much lower cost of compliance to businesses than the current ridiculously complex tax code.
Why it won't happen: an income tax has one "advantage" (though not for us) over all other systems of taxation. It makes it very easy to use carrot-and-stick methods to manipulate behavior and to give kickbacks to your special interest buddies. A national sales tax, on the other hand, would apply equally to everyone whether or not they are your buddies and whether or not they behave the way you want them to.
It's to protect American governmental interests. The lie or the myth is that those are the same as American interests or the interests of the American people.
google is an h.264/MPEG-LA licensee so they won't be affected if it infringes on that patent set.
They will be affected if such additional usage of patented items requires the payment of further license fees that they did not anticipate.
A Relief Well isn't for production. So yes, it's not really something you can question...
But that's the point. They can claim it's purely as a precautionary measure, even though it can potentially provide them with profit and a way to avoid the moratorium on new offshore drills.
Just because they call it a relief well, doesn't mean they won't use it for production or that it's only going to be used to releive that pressure. Besides, what did you think they would do with the oil that comes from the relief well, other than sell it?
Mods are on crack again. Why, how dare you hold a contradictory opinion. Clearly you are trolling!
I hope you have karma to burn like I do, that way these petty irritable little egos accomplish nothing except wasting their points.
For what it's worth, I doubt they'd get much oil (if any) from a relief well. Oil is not what it buys them. It's a face-saving investment that helps to secure their future offshort drilling ventures. Simply put, the more capable they are of containing this disaster the less likely it'll be that they are denied such opportunities to drill in the future. At this point, decent damage control is all they can hope for but that's much better than nothing if they want to continue harvesting such sources of oil.
I guess the above paragraph is more trolling on my part. Mod away.
Right, because the relief well doesn't have anything to do with, you know, being a relief well.
Right, because that means their motive for making a relief well is sacrosanct and we cannot question it.
The GP speculated about "why" and you responded by redundantly clarifying "what". You didn't really answer him at all.
Obama only drinks beer for photo-ops aimed at extracting his foot from his mouth. Occasionally he might also chug one back at a bowling alley to show that he's really a common man after all....
While repeating his "Wall Street and Main Street" meme. It's such an empty series of repetition devoid of all meaning, as evidenced by the (radio) commercials I've heard that have adopted it. I think they were local branches of multinational banks and perhaps also financial advisor firms who wanted to capitalize on the latest buzz phrase.
Proof that a moderate such as myself will never be labeled as such.
I'm for offshore drilling because it provides us with the energy source that we currently need today. I'm also in favor of extensively researching and quickly implementing alternative fuels so that we can get away from oil entirely.
With me, it isn't "drill, baby, drill"...it's "drill for now, but not for long". Thanks for your partisan slant though, I appreciate it.
You often see this in discussions. I think the propaganda, demagoguery, invective, and intellectual dishonesty so frequently seen in the media and especially in politics has infected the easily impressionable who derive their mannerisms and actions from the media. You can call them sheeple, mindless automatons who think their behaviors and thoughts are their own original creations, easily impressionable, non-self-aware, unable to carry out introspection, followers, and lots of other things. As for that post to which you replied, what happened there has happened to me several times.
The (lack of) thinking goes something like this: "well, he used certain words or otherwise vaguely sounds a little bit like a cookie-cutter opinion that I have seen before, probably from some pundit, therefore I will refuse to deal with him as an individual and will instead regard him as a member of a school of thought or other group identity, that way I don't have to bother really listening to what he has to say or understanding where he is coming from." You'll notice this is always done to condemn and belittle, for that's how such people obtain their worthless sense of worth. Specifically, it's an attempt to diminish in order to make it easier to condemn. It treats people as members of a system and it's the very opposite of treating others like human beings.
The motivation is that they are not interested in truth. They are interested in feeling "right" or better than someone else at all costs. For them, argumentation is not about testing ideas and increasing understanding. It's about humiliating your opponent and rubbing his nose in it. Thus, they have no interest in dealing with individual human beings for, unlike mindless talking points, there are no automatic ready answers for the points they make. That interferes with their goal of feeling "right" and at the very least makes them work much harder to achieve it.
In closing, a quote from Aristotle:
Hubris: "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."
If you haven't noticed, there are forces in our government that don't want us to be a strong, stable, well-managed, independent country. It would interfere with their desire to undermine our national sovereignty in order to accelerate globalism and all of the financial and political power that goes with it. It's not so much that our leaders are incompetent, it's that their interests do not coincide with ours. If they were merely incompetent then they couldn't do such a great job of increasing their own power and looking after their own interests and the interests of their financial backers.
I fully agree with you about the safety and preparedness standards. Protecting workers from exploitation by their employers is a legitimate function of modern government, especially when we are talking about violations and abuses that result in workers getting killed. It reminds me of that mine collapse that occurred several months ago, killing the miners trapped inside with toxic gases. The mining company had repeatedly violated established safety standards and their negligence resulted in the deaths of miners. The reasonable solution to this is to arrest the executives of that company and put them on trial for manslaughter.
That's what needs to happen here with the oil spill and the workers who died when the rig exploded. Had the company taken all reasonable precautions and made a best-effort to ensure the safety of its workers, then unfortunately tragic events happen and cannot be completely prevented and that's understandable. The moment negligence enters the picture, they are choosing to sacrifice human life for the sake of profit. Prison is where people like that belong. Don't bother fining the company, just put the executives on trial for allowing this to happen. That's how you make sure the standards are followed. So long as management remains untouchable and is never made personally and severely accountable for their actions we will continue to have deliberate abuses like this.
In isolation, not knowing any better is not stupidity; it is ignorance. Being clueless about a device or system and deciding that you're going to use it for important financial transactions anyway is the stupid part. It's a bit like getting in a car and going to the busiest, highest-speed freeway when you have no knowledge of how to drive. Not knowing how to drive doesn't make someone stupid; it means they just haven't been taught. Not knowing how to drive and doing it anyway in one of the more demanding driving environments makes someone stupid. See the difference?
That's probably one of the more practical definitions of stupidity: not knowing your own limitations when you are about to exceed them, or knowing them and refusing to address them when there is a manifest need to do so.
It may be their computer but it isn't their remote web site.
Third option: there are those who want to make an honest living while at the same time learning as much as possible from the mistakes, idiocy, and bad examples of those around them. I didn't ask a fool to be easily parted from his money, but now that he has done so of his own initiative, I can read about it and understand why he was acting foolishly to make myself much less likely to follow his example.
I had no idea that glancing up at the address bar to check the domain of the URL immediately before actually typing login credentials qualified as "an inhuman ability to maintain state tables in your head." Is this sort of like the way janitors are called "sanitation engineers"?