I personally pay a federal tax rate of about 29%, double the tax rate paid by Mitt Romney
You're pretending that he didn't already pay the higher income tax rate on the money he earned and then risked in the investments that, if/when then make money, are once again taxed at the capital gains rate.
If you're really paying the rate you say you are, then you're making a tolerable living. Do you really have no investments of any kind? No 401? No IRA? Are you proposing that taxes are raised on such things? Maybe that's a good idea, since most of those dollars come out of your paycheck before you pay taxes, unlike (since you brought up the example) the money that people like Romney invest in various ventures.
As to your initial point: I was talking about income taxes. You're talking about payroll taxes. Great, let's talk about what happens with the taxes other than income taxes: the people on the lower end of the income spectrum end up getting far more back out of such programs than they put into them. Simple as that. It's a welfare system, and they win.
No, they are inherently flat. Or, are you saying that a person who earns $50k a year is going to pay (for example) $1 in sales tax on package of toilet paper, but a rich guy is only going to pay $0.50 when he buys it? Does the rich guy get a discount on his toilet paper sales tax because he just paid a big pile of sales tax when he bought the fancier car, or services from a more expensive wedding photographer?
Or are you thinking of a sales tax as an income tax, and you're calling it "regressive" because that $1 in tax is a higher percentage of a poorer guy's annual income? If that's your take on it, then why aren't you complaining about the fact that vegetable prices are regressive? And that the price on a pair of shoes is regressive? If the fact that the cost of being alive is "regressive," then why aren't you proposing to confiscate the earnings of all people who make more than the next guy, and spreading it around so that each and every product and service (including the cost of running a government, buying some carrots, and going to a soccer game) hits everyone's net bottom line exactly the same at the end of the year? Wouldn't that be more fair? At least a few stupid chumps would still wake up every morning with a work ethic and produce things despite being slaves to such a system, so things shouldn't get too bad.
Or do you see government as something that everyone should get to control through their votes, but which only some people should have to pay to run?
tired of progressive taxes and really would prefer taxes to be regressive
Nice straw man there. No, not regressive. Flat. Telling half the people in the country that they don't need to pay income taxes is no way run a civil society. Not if they still get to vote, anyway.
Why do you make such deliberately nonsensical comparisons? "Unrestricted feudalism" means the opposite of capitalism. Capitalists negotiate and agree on transactions. Feudal lords impose them through violence. Feudal societies have market-like activity, but it is structured around the capricious dictates of people who attain and maintain power through murder. There are no checks and balances beyond the influence of yet another party's violence, or the ability to evade it.
Most people are lazy, and don't want to have to compete. But they resent people who do (or act that way, to mask their laziness), and thus must define someone else's willingness to work hard as somehow being a sure sign of their own victimhood. That twisted bit of whinyness, which stretches wide across the entitlement-minded, Nanny-State-Wanting crowd that makes up much of the professional protest culture now casts market economics as feudalism because even those buffoons are starting to realize how ridiculous they sound calling everyone they don't like a "fascist."
"OMG U R TEH FEUDAL!" is the new "OMG FASCISTS!". Among twelve year olds.
You get what you pay for so think about why your still getting those pop-up porn ad's.
Never mind pop-ups. I want to know which virus it was that yanked out the comma from your first clause, changed "you're" to "your" and turned "ads" into "ad's." These make-me-type-like-a-12-year-old malware infestations have really taken over. Because there's certainly no other explanation.
I don't know! What's it like to make spurious, adolescent ad hominem snarks, knowing that that's your only method of saying anything without actually addressing the substance of the matter? I mean, I appreciate your tacit acknowledgement of the underlying issue, which is the routine submission of thousands of fraudulant voter registrations by activist groups, and the inevitability that some of those are connected to actual fraudulant votes. I'm sure it probably is maddening to you that not everyone hushes up on the subject, since it's kind of embarassing and all. But don't you feel a little childish blaming the messenger? Never mind. If you did, you wouldn't have opened your yap to say it. Carry on. You're not kidding anybody anyway.
You're over-thinking this. The urge by (often conservative) lawmakers to have their local elections only available to legitimately registered, living local people who will only be voting once, as themselves, is a response to large, organized operations by highly politicized (and avowedly left-leaning, we-don't-like-Republicans) groups that have a habit of conducting massive registration fraud. Conducting it, tolerating it, encouraging it, and sometimes getting in deep legal trouble for doing so.
Republicans don't want fewer people voting. They want fewer BS votes, especially in the face of highly organized BS voter registration paperwork submitted, over and over again, by Democrat activist groups. The "real agenda" is simple accountability. And that is why it "polls well." Because people are tired of the lack of it.
Especially when special interests say that even being asked to present a photo ID at your poling place is racist vote suppression. Hard to fight THAT sort of nonsense.
I'm so tired of seeing these ridiculous and obviously made-up damages
Did you even bother to read the summary, let alone the article? They had a lot of work to do in interacting with the feds in advance of busting this guy in person (he was cracking/extorting from Hungary). This involved many employees, corporate lawyers, etc. You tie up those sorts of man-hours, including the time to gather and preserve an unknown until you're done pile of forensic information from a huge IT footprint at a company that size... I'm surprised the cost wasn't higher.
What I'm tired of are people who are so vitriolically anti-business in their mindset that they won't even do the mental work of thinking something like this through, lest it take some of the fund out of Complaining About The Man.
That's the free market in action, dumb-ass... people are voting with their wallet.
No, they're not. Voting with your wallet involves doing things like deciding not to meet Peter Jackson in the entertainment market, and doing what he's asking (via the businesses he's chosen to use and engage with) in order to be entertained by him and thousands of other people when The Hobbit comes out. Just walking away, and doing something else with your entertainment budget is voting with your wallet.
Deciding that you don't like the marketplace and methods that he's chosen, and simply ripping it off, instead, is NOT voting with your wallet. It's deciding to rip off something you don't want to pay for, under the terms that the person offering it is asking. Is deciding that a store's beer prices are high, and electing instead to rip them off "voting with your wallet?" That's not a free market action any more than ripping off the guy whose movie you want to see is.
You're right. It is stupid for millions of people who don't create anything and who have no understanding of creation, production, and covering the costs thereof, to think that ripping off the very people they want creating things for them is sustainable. The sickness is in the sense of entitlement on the consuming side, not the production side. Throw out the extreme outliers on both sides, anecdote-and-attitude-wise, and that fundamental truth is still... true.
A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists... we simply ignore them
And we ignore them because they are ridiculous. The fact that you didn't just succinctly mention a viable, rational one just now shows that you know that's true.
But what's more shocking is that this is done in the name of football
No, it's being done in the names of everyone in the country who actually run legitimate manufacturing and importing operations, and who don't rip other people off. This particular annual event stimulates a predictable wave of scams, thefts, counterfeit goods... and the people who are involved plan for it. The rest of the year, they're doing other crap along the same lines. Busting them is a good thing.
So you expect ME to pay the bill if you don't buy insurance and end up at the hospital?
No. And I especially don't expect you to be legally forced to buy your neighbor viagra, or to finance millions of cases of diabetes in morbidly obese fast food junkies, or to buy a bunch of whiny aging baby boomers $20,000 knee replacements so they can keep playing golf for a while longer. We're talking about health care, here, not got-hit-by-a-bus emergency care. Routine health care is less important than food. Should you be mandated by the federal government to buy everyone food, too? Why not? If you don't, they'll wind up in the hospital, right?
And if you don't pay the tax penalty? The IRS is the agency appointed to collect the money. They have a specific set of procedures if you stiff them on such open items. Garnishments. Property seizures, and as punishment if you persist in not paying what you are mandated to pay, prison. Federal prison. This isn't an "assertion," it's basic reality.
Unless of course you are in the favored groups that aren't asked, as an entire class of voting citizens, to pay for their own existence or their participation in society because other people make more money. They won't have to.
If someone wants to plunk down (presumably) big bucks to fulfill a childhood dream, they should be able to.
Does their childhood dream actually involve having someone else rip off the artist who created the thing about which they've been dreaming? Do they think that the Batmobile they're lusting for was some sort of natural resource that just sprang into existence? Or does the particular design they have in mind perhaps have, you know, a designer who invested the time in making it dream-worthy in the first place?
I can see this being a problem for a mass-produced replica or knock-off toys, but the kind of buyer for this product does not have any other choice than to get one custom made.
So, basically, you've got non-scalable, situational ethics. That's got to be really hard to keep track of.
At least this abuse of the Commerce Clause involves actual economic activity. Obamacare involves garnishing your wages or potentially landing in you federal prison for not participating in interstate commerce with... a health insurance company in your own state. It's a good thing we passed that law so we could see what was in it, Nancy!
If you meant that a huge publicly traded company under enormous scrutiny somehow directly or through arrangements with other people violeted contracts to which you were a party, then, sure. But you don't seem to be saying that. You seem to be saying that the marketplace has changed, and that you wish it hadn't.
Why? Spoken exactly like someone who has never made anything, tried to expand a market, tested new demographics for an eventual business unit, or simply decided to raise a company's profile by using some its revenue to appeal to a broader audience in other areas. You know, brand building. If you're such a dim consumer that you can't understand the motivations, mechanisms, and value to you and the vendor in promotional pricing on certain items, then please go back to being a simple peasant and let someone else decide everything for you.
Why do you care what I do, unlless your complaint is that I'm not doing enough of what you want me to do, for you?
If you're against coercion
You can't run a government without some obligations being placed upon the people who are governed. That's what voting, and constitutional checks and balances are for - to make sure that it's reasonable. What I'm against is it being unreasonable. For example, half the poeple in this country aren't asked to pay any income taxes. But they have the same power, in elections, as the people that they vote into the position of having to do the paying for them. That sort of inequity is slavery. That you'd rather shut up people who point things like that out says a lot about your position on the matter, master.
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I personally pay a federal tax rate of about 29%, double the tax rate paid by Mitt Romney
You're pretending that he didn't already pay the higher income tax rate on the money he earned and then risked in the investments that, if/when then make money, are once again taxed at the capital gains rate.
If you're really paying the rate you say you are, then you're making a tolerable living. Do you really have no investments of any kind? No 401? No IRA? Are you proposing that taxes are raised on such things? Maybe that's a good idea, since most of those dollars come out of your paycheck before you pay taxes, unlike (since you brought up the example) the money that people like Romney invest in various ventures.
As to your initial point: I was talking about income taxes. You're talking about payroll taxes. Great, let's talk about what happens with the taxes other than income taxes: the people on the lower end of the income spectrum end up getting far more back out of such programs than they put into them. Simple as that. It's a welfare system, and they win.
Consumption taxes are inherently regressive
No, they are inherently flat. Or, are you saying that a person who earns $50k a year is going to pay (for example) $1 in sales tax on package of toilet paper, but a rich guy is only going to pay $0.50 when he buys it? Does the rich guy get a discount on his toilet paper sales tax because he just paid a big pile of sales tax when he bought the fancier car, or services from a more expensive wedding photographer?
Or are you thinking of a sales tax as an income tax, and you're calling it "regressive" because that $1 in tax is a higher percentage of a poorer guy's annual income? If that's your take on it, then why aren't you complaining about the fact that vegetable prices are regressive? And that the price on a pair of shoes is regressive? If the fact that the cost of being alive is "regressive," then why aren't you proposing to confiscate the earnings of all people who make more than the next guy, and spreading it around so that each and every product and service (including the cost of running a government, buying some carrots, and going to a soccer game) hits everyone's net bottom line exactly the same at the end of the year? Wouldn't that be more fair? At least a few stupid chumps would still wake up every morning with a work ethic and produce things despite being slaves to such a system, so things shouldn't get too bad.
Or do you see government as something that everyone should get to control through their votes, but which only some people should have to pay to run?
tired of progressive taxes and really would prefer taxes to be regressive
Nice straw man there. No, not regressive. Flat. Telling half the people in the country that they don't need to pay income taxes is no way run a civil society. Not if they still get to vote, anyway.
So, we can detect Higgs but we can't detect multiple typos in the damn summary? Really?
What the hell do you think patents are for?
To protect the patent holder from damage by leeching immitators. Otherwise there's far less incentive to develop new stuff in the first place.
capitalism aka unrestricted feudalism
Why do you make such deliberately nonsensical comparisons? "Unrestricted feudalism" means the opposite of capitalism. Capitalists negotiate and agree on transactions. Feudal lords impose them through violence. Feudal societies have market-like activity, but it is structured around the capricious dictates of people who attain and maintain power through murder. There are no checks and balances beyond the influence of yet another party's violence, or the ability to evade it.
Most people are lazy, and don't want to have to compete. But they resent people who do (or act that way, to mask their laziness), and thus must define someone else's willingness to work hard as somehow being a sure sign of their own victimhood. That twisted bit of whinyness, which stretches wide across the entitlement-minded, Nanny-State-Wanting crowd that makes up much of the professional protest culture now casts market economics as feudalism because even those buffoons are starting to realize how ridiculous they sound calling everyone they don't like a "fascist."
"OMG U R TEH FEUDAL!" is the new "OMG FASCISTS!". Among twelve year olds.
You get what you pay for so think about why your still getting those pop-up porn ad's.
Never mind pop-ups. I want to know which virus it was that yanked out the comma from your first clause, changed "you're" to "your" and turned "ads" into "ad's." These make-me-type-like-a-12-year-old malware infestations have really taken over. Because there's certainly no other explanation.
I wonder if you even fathom the irony in your post.
I don't know! What's it like to make spurious, adolescent ad hominem snarks, knowing that that's your only method of saying anything without actually addressing the substance of the matter? I mean, I appreciate your tacit acknowledgement of the underlying issue, which is the routine submission of thousands of fraudulant voter registrations by activist groups, and the inevitability that some of those are connected to actual fraudulant votes. I'm sure it probably is maddening to you that not everyone hushes up on the subject, since it's kind of embarassing and all. But don't you feel a little childish blaming the messenger? Never mind. If you did, you wouldn't have opened your yap to say it. Carry on. You're not kidding anybody anyway.
You're over-thinking this. The urge by (often conservative) lawmakers to have their local elections only available to legitimately registered, living local people who will only be voting once, as themselves, is a response to large, organized operations by highly politicized (and avowedly left-leaning, we-don't-like-Republicans) groups that have a habit of conducting massive registration fraud. Conducting it, tolerating it, encouraging it, and sometimes getting in deep legal trouble for doing so.
Republicans don't want fewer people voting. They want fewer BS votes, especially in the face of highly organized BS voter registration paperwork submitted, over and over again, by Democrat activist groups. The "real agenda" is simple accountability. And that is why it "polls well." Because people are tired of the lack of it.
and make it difficult to cast a fraudulent vote
Especially when special interests say that even being asked to present a photo ID at your poling place is racist vote suppression. Hard to fight THAT sort of nonsense.
I'm so tired of seeing these ridiculous and obviously made-up damages
Did you even bother to read the summary, let alone the article? They had a lot of work to do in interacting with the feds in advance of busting this guy in person (he was cracking/extorting from Hungary). This involved many employees, corporate lawyers, etc. You tie up those sorts of man-hours, including the time to gather and preserve an unknown until you're done pile of forensic information from a huge IT footprint at a company that size ... I'm surprised the cost wasn't higher.
What I'm tired of are people who are so vitriolically anti-business in their mindset that they won't even do the mental work of thinking something like this through, lest it take some of the fund out of Complaining About The Man.
But the blackmail itself is just a negotiation.
No, it's extortion. And that is a crime.
That's the free market in action, dumb-ass ... people are voting with their wallet.
No, they're not. Voting with your wallet involves doing things like deciding not to meet Peter Jackson in the entertainment market, and doing what he's asking (via the businesses he's chosen to use and engage with) in order to be entertained by him and thousands of other people when The Hobbit comes out. Just walking away, and doing something else with your entertainment budget is voting with your wallet.
Deciding that you don't like the marketplace and methods that he's chosen, and simply ripping it off, instead, is NOT voting with your wallet. It's deciding to rip off something you don't want to pay for, under the terms that the person offering it is asking. Is deciding that a store's beer prices are high, and electing instead to rip them off "voting with your wallet?" That's not a free market action any more than ripping off the guy whose movie you want to see is.
You're right. It is stupid for millions of people who don't create anything and who have no understanding of creation, production, and covering the costs thereof, to think that ripping off the very people they want creating things for them is sustainable. The sickness is in the sense of entitlement on the consuming side, not the production side. Throw out the extreme outliers on both sides, anecdote-and-attitude-wise, and that fundamental truth is still ... true.
A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists ... we simply ignore them
And we ignore them because they are ridiculous. The fact that you didn't just succinctly mention a viable, rational one just now shows that you know that's true.
But what's more shocking is that this is done in the name of football
No, it's being done in the names of everyone in the country who actually run legitimate manufacturing and importing operations, and who don't rip other people off. This particular annual event stimulates a predictable wave of scams, thefts, counterfeit goods ... and the people who are involved plan for it. The rest of the year, they're doing other crap along the same lines. Busting them is a good thing.
So you expect ME to pay the bill if you don't buy insurance and end up at the hospital?
No. And I especially don't expect you to be legally forced to buy your neighbor viagra, or to finance millions of cases of diabetes in morbidly obese fast food junkies, or to buy a bunch of whiny aging baby boomers $20,000 knee replacements so they can keep playing golf for a while longer. We're talking about health care, here, not got-hit-by-a-bus emergency care. Routine health care is less important than food. Should you be mandated by the federal government to buy everyone food, too? Why not? If you don't, they'll wind up in the hospital, right?
You MAY pay a tax penalty
And if you don't pay the tax penalty? The IRS is the agency appointed to collect the money. They have a specific set of procedures if you stiff them on such open items. Garnishments. Property seizures, and as punishment if you persist in not paying what you are mandated to pay, prison. Federal prison. This isn't an "assertion," it's basic reality.
Unless of course you are in the favored groups that aren't asked, as an entire class of voting citizens, to pay for their own existence or their participation in society because other people make more money. They won't have to.
But Americans are attempting to even things out.
It's carbon sequestration in lipids, you insensitive clod.
If someone wants to plunk down (presumably) big bucks to fulfill a childhood dream, they should be able to.
Does their childhood dream actually involve having someone else rip off the artist who created the thing about which they've been dreaming? Do they think that the Batmobile they're lusting for was some sort of natural resource that just sprang into existence? Or does the particular design they have in mind perhaps have, you know, a designer who invested the time in making it dream-worthy in the first place?
I can see this being a problem for a mass-produced replica or knock-off toys, but the kind of buyer for this product does not have any other choice than to get one custom made.
So, basically, you've got non-scalable, situational ethics. That's got to be really hard to keep track of.
At least this abuse of the Commerce Clause involves actual economic activity. Obamacare involves garnishing your wages or potentially landing in you federal prison for not participating in interstate commerce with ... a health insurance company in your own state. It's a good thing we passed that law so we could see what was in it, Nancy!
Duh! That's certainly UNFAIR.
If you meant that a huge publicly traded company under enormous scrutiny somehow directly or through arrangements with other people violeted contracts to which you were a party, then, sure. But you don't seem to be saying that. You seem to be saying that the marketplace has changed, and that you wish it hadn't.
That certainly would be nice, wouldn't it?
Why? Spoken exactly like someone who has never made anything, tried to expand a market, tested new demographics for an eventual business unit, or simply decided to raise a company's profile by using some its revenue to appeal to a broader audience in other areas. You know, brand building. If you're such a dim consumer that you can't understand the motivations, mechanisms, and value to you and the vendor in promotional pricing on certain items, then please go back to being a simple peasant and let someone else decide everything for you.
If you're against coercion
You can't run a government without some obligations being placed upon the people who are governed. That's what voting, and constitutional checks and balances are for - to make sure that it's reasonable. What I'm against is it being unreasonable. For example, half the poeple in this country aren't asked to pay any income taxes. But they have the same power, in elections, as the people that they vote into the position of having to do the paying for them. That sort of inequity is slavery. That you'd rather shut up people who point things like that out says a lot about your position on the matter, master.