So, what you're saying is that you have evidence that a drug manufacturer's advertisement is criminally fraudulent, and therefore we should not allow anyone in that line of work to spend money promoting their businesses, and instead they should put all of their money into research on new drugs until they run out of money, at which some other person who knows you won't allow them to advertise will of course invest billions of dollars in the same area because even though they're smart enough to come up with new drugs that you personally can't produce, they're too dumb to realize you want them to fail, financially. Do you even listen to yourself?
So let me get this straight. You think that if five people get together and mow lawns for a living, it's perfectly OK if they (or just one of them) appears before their local government to explain why some pending rule or law about fertilizer use is a bad thing. It's probably also OK with you if all five of them say to the politician proposing the new law that if it gets passed, they're never going to vote for or support that person again, and will actively support their opponents. Is that corrupt, to you? No?
OK, what if ONE of those five delivers that exact same message, and tells the politician that he's speaking on behalf of five people. Is it corrupt then? No?
OK, what if those five people realize that it makes a lot more sense for them to incorporate their business. And as business owners, they recognize that the politician's proposed new law is going to severely damage their business's prospects. Are you saying that they, as the owners of the business, have lost the first amendment's protections of their free speech because they are before their elected representative as a business that operates in that politician's jurisdiction? Is that corrupt, then? Why? In what way have those five people, speaking as one to preserve their business, suddenly become corrupt? Be specific.
That's twice you have made an ass of yourself on this topic.
And here you are, unable to address the substance of the matter and instead relying on lazy, juvenile ad hominem. And pretending that you can't grasp that getting together to form an association (say, with the purpose of forwarding the interests of the association's members, including as matters that the association's members care about become subject to new legislation or regulation) isn't EXACTLY the sort of thing the nation's founders sought to protect when they prohibited the government from infringing on the forming of such groups in the First Amendment. Or did you think they only meant that you were free to assemble into a mob in the street?
Only in your labyrinthine mind does freedom of assembly have anything whatever to do with lobbying, aka subversion and corruption.
You don't actually understand what lobbyists do, do you? You don't even understand why (for example) twenty software companies or twenty bakeries or twenty dog breeders might find it more useful to send someone to talk to the chair of some senate committee and say, "I'm here on behalf of 20 people who all agree that you need to look at this bill from a different point of view..." instead of all twenty of those busy people each doing it on their own. If you can't muster the intellectual honesty to understand that, assume it's 20,000 people who all agree about something, and want their point of view represented to key regulators and lawmakers and executives. Should all 20,000 individually camp outside congressional hearings, demanded to talk? Or might it make more sense to have someone do that for them, explaining who they are and why?
Your idea of "corruption" is "people I don't like assembling into groups and expressing their wishes." How does that become corruption? Is it NOT corruption if a software developer manages to get 10 minutes of a congressman's time to explain encryption issues, but it somehow IS corruption if that very same person is there having the same conversation on behalf of 200 software companies who all have the same issues? Why? Be specific about at which point the corruption actually takes place.
It is well known that the US is not a democracy but a plutocracy
No it's not well known, but it is frequently asserted by people who want to spin things that way.
I don't care how you spin it, anything against the public interest is clearly IMMORAL.
So, people used to argue that abolishing slavery was against the public interest, as it would damage the economy, ruin long-held family estates, etc. Would you consider abolishing slavery to be immoral? No? I see.
So it comes down to what you think is "in the public interest." I, for example, don't think it's in the public interest to establish and maintain a dependency-creating welfare state. So, you think I should be silenced by the government if I and other people who agree with me were to (so that we could go about our daily work, because we do work) pool our resources and send a person to talk to legislators on our behalf? You really think it's immoral for me to express my opinion, or enlist someone to help me do so? Or is it only immoral if I make more than $50k a year? Or does it become immoral when I make $150k a year? At which point, in your world view, are people suddenly evil an immoral when they seek to persuade legislators to see things their way? When they own four televisions, or only three?
How do you propose that they gather sufficient funding to be persuasive without corporate backing?
Do you think that the NAACP or the AARP or the Sierra Club or PETA etc are all funded by corporate backing? If you can't persuade enough people to agree with you (if a loopy aging hippy socialist from New England can raise millions and millions of dollars from starry-eyed individual donors, why is it you think this isn't possible?), you could always simply persuade a wealthy person (say, an Al Gore, or a George Soros) to throw - as they already do - millions of dollars into things they think should be more visible. This is happening right in front of your eyes every day - why does it seem unlikely to you?
That's nice. So what about the money they spend on advertising and marketing?
What about it? Do you own a business, or work for one? Have you considered how well you'd fare if nobody was allowed to promote your business or try to find new customers, or remind people why your product or service is a good alternative to something else? Do you understand that private companies have to actually generate revenue or they can't do anything, because they'll be bankrupt?
Actually, Medicare is a financing program that pays private providers, not a health care provider itself.
Except in order to use that financing program, you have to find doctors and facilities that are willing (usually at a financial loss) to conduct their operations and even their patient-by-patient, case-by-case decision making and prioritization according to Medicare's rules. That generally results in doctors losing money, which brings us to...
However, in terms of overhead, it's quite as good as any number of private providers of insurance and better than many.
No, it's not. It's rife with fraud and waste. Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth.
But the VA? For all the complaints about it, it has high satisfaction rates when it comes to care
Once you GET care. Or IF you get care.
IOW, good stewardship of your tax dollars. Do you want to change that?
Good stewardship of my tax dollars would have seen at least ONE person lose their job over the truly terrible conditions and processes exposed year after year as third parties and the VA itself review how awfully run the agency is. Vets waiting months and years to be seen. Do you understand that?
It's more cost effective to get Bill Gates to stop.
Yeah, better to just let all of that medical care and education grind to a halt. You hate him so much you'd rather see other people suffer than see them enjoy a shred of improvement through the billions of dollars his foundation spends on helping people. If the goal is to express your hatred, then yes, it might indeed be more efficient to let a lot of people die or go without education just to give you the satisfaction of shutting him down. In the meantime, why aren't YOU providing health care and education through your own foundation? Be specific.
The rest of the world calls it corruption.
The US calls it 'lobbying'.
No, the US calls it "freedom of assembly and speech," and it's protected under the very first amendment of the constitution. Let me guess, you'd like to reserve the right to get a few of your like-minded friends together and perhaps send one of them to talk to a committee chair about some piece of pending tech- or science-related legislation so they can avoid screwing it up... but you'd like to silence other people that you don't like from doing exactly the same thing.
Or would you prefer that nobody gets to talk to legislators? Or that you only get to talk to them if millions of people also get to, simultaneously? There's a reason that it makes sense to form groups (like, say, The Association Of Concerned Scientists or the League Of Open Source Protector Justice Warriors or the Sierra Club, or the NAACP or the NRA or whatever) to allow lots of people to pool their resources and speak with one voice when it suits them to do so. You want corruption? Ban the free speech and free association that allows such groups to exist and lobby for what's important to them - watch what happens then.
There are actually quite a few layers of separation between votes and federal law.
Yes, by design. That's the whole point. Otherwise it's mob rule. Look at what direct democracy (by way of ballot initiatives) has done to California. The people who wrote the constitution were very smart to put in the checks and balances we have, and to structure the legislative branch as the bicameral institution that it is. If you don't like that a large organization is able to sit across the table from a legislator and persuade them that a bill is a bad idea, do what everyone else does: gather your like-minded friends and send someone of your OWN to meet with the same legislator and persuade her that she's misunderstanding the pros and cons of some piece of pending legislation. Or are you against the constitution's protections for your right (and everyone else's) to assemble as they see fit and express themselves as they see fit (say, through the offices of a lobbyist who know which people to talk to about which topic)? You can't have it both ways.
Maybe you should check in with someone who dies because he can't afford medication, because Bill Gates conditioned his aid on IP protections for drugs.
Maybe you should consider the people who don't die because the drugs exist in the first place, which in most cases wouldn't happen without the private sector spending billions on the highly regulated, generally money-losing, years-long process of putting new drugs into the hands of doctors. I know, you think that all of the companies that spend that money should do it as a donation, and they should instead earn money selling t-shirts at their bar performances, just like musicians who shouldn't be allowed to have copyrights. Hopefully you won't ever suffer from a life-threatening disease that can only be treated with an exotic drug it cost hundreds of people hundreds of millions of dollars to create, handle, store, and train your doctor to employ.
I know, let's disband all private companies that do such research, and just use the tax dollars we collect from the minority of people who actually pay most of the income taxes, and establish a gigantic new federal bureaucracy to handle all drug research, production, distribution, and administration. We can model it after the Veterans Administration or Medicare, since those work so well.
The negative aspects of Gates' donations result in people dying who are every bit as real as the people with malaria.
So why aren't YOU buying shiploads of medical supplies and paying small armies of personnel to go to malaria-infested places and save all of the lives that Bill Gates is choosing to destroy with his evil charity? Please be specific.
First, the biggest problem in rainforest removal today is lumbering, cattle-ranching, and export agriculture.
Right. All agricultural activities, and poorly planned and executed. That's exactly the point. Moving away from subsistence agriculture to more viable, productive, commercial-grade agriculture DOES benefit from the expertise of people who come from places where it's done well and very efficiently. Unlike the way it's practiced in places where those poor decisions are made.
Second, actually, the methods used in the west require a lot of energy inputs, like fertilizer and mechanization, or even just pumping water from place to place.
Yup, a lot of energy. Just a lot LESS energy than poorly executed, stone-age carve-into-the-jungle agriculture that barely feeds the people doing it.
except the aid workers aren't farmers and don't know how to farm, especially given local climates
Yeah, the local habit of chopping down all the rain forest for one-shot, poor use of the acreage for farming - that's a sure sign that native farming instincts are wildly superior to the methods used in more advanced economies, where far, far more food is produced per acre, with far less energy used.
That's odd, everything I've heard about his donations has been negative.
That's called confirmation bias. You hate him, so you only seek, find, remember, and pass along information that allows you to feel good about that position. Maybe you should check with someone who doesn't have malaria, but otherwise would. Or someone in a developing country that has unprecedented education opportunities they'd otherwise have missed out on. They'd question your priorities. Ask someone in Cameroon, who literally went from rural village life to being a well paid consultant in a rapidly growing tech-centric urban economy if they'd rather the Gates Foundation had closed up shop. I know, you think it's either apocryphal, or that whatever strings are attached are too onerous. Having had just such a formerly impoverished rural boy from Cameroon move in as the young man next door, and watch him, over the course of just a few years, buy three houses in the neighborhood for his extended family (the children of which rotate through schools in Europe and trips back to Africa to further broaden their horizons), I think your smug disdain for the Gates Foundation is a bit of Shakespearean protesting too much. What's the problem, really? Just frustrated that it's not the Clinton Foundation that my Cameroonian friend praises for wildly improving the lives of nearly everyone in his large family?
And now it is announced that people on the terrorist watchdog list may be barred from flying on an airplane but they can still legally purchase firearms.
That's because being on a terrorist watch list isn't a criminal conviction. You can't take away someone's constitutionally protected rights just because someone, without any due process or any of the other protections guaranteed in the constitution, says they seem suspicious. All sorts of people who've had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism or any Islamist leanings have wound up on the no-fly list, and had to fight for months or years to be removed. Would you support removing their freedom of speech, too? No? Why not?
Sure, if you want to include suicides, and choose to consider the severe gang problem in specific areas of three or four specific cities that have some of the most harsh gun laws and which have been run at the legislative and executive level by liberal politicians for decades. If you took just Chicago out of the numbers, it would put countries like France and Germany and especially places like Russia WAY above the US in violence involving guns, and of course that's if you still choose to exclude all sorts of developed countries that it's convenient to call "undeveloped" because including them takes all the fun out of the stats being pushed.
Cake have many uses, sustaining life being one of them, most violent one is actually fun. Rifle has only one. Your argument is invalid.
I've used a rifle to provide a meal during which we also served cake. How are you that uninformed? I've also used a firearm to prevent someone from harming my wife and myself. Are you still foggy on the concept? No?
There's already a pistol emoji. There's no reason not to add a rifle emoji for completeness sake.
And there's already an apple emoji, too. Why did they have to add the banana? Oh, I get it - because those aren't the same things. Just like the half a dozen types of trucks they show. Or multiple types of trees and flowers. Or however many dozens of different groups of multicultural heads with different hair colors. A person is a person, right? Right? No? I see.
Compared to the rest of the developed world, gun violence in the USA is still at appalling levels
I encourage you to stop into, say, a university or a research lab in Mexico and tell them that they aren't part of the developed world. Or most of Central and South America. Or nations in Africa where high tech factories, mobile devices, etc., are routine... undeveloped! It's so fun when you get to call brown people undeveloped so you can rule them out of your statistics just like you do suicides, since that helps you to make your spurious, inaccurate non-point.
Documenting that some portion of your revenue is not, per the tax code, taxable income is not the same as asking the government to give you some of the money someone else spent the day making. How are you not clear on this?
You have no inalienable rights to whatever complex set of tax deductions you'd like.
No, but you do have the tax code as it's written. When you file your taxes, you document the fact that some number of the dollars you brought in is, per the tax code, not taxable, or taxed at the established rate for that kind of income. Documenting that information is not the same as applying to be given money that someone else made.
They aren't being drug tested for filing their taxes, only for applying for their tax breaks and tax credits. They could just take the standard deduction to avoid the whole thing.
Nobody "applies" for deductions and tax credits. They are defined in the tax code, and if they apply to your situation (say, you're running a small business and have paid contractors), the standard deduction makes no provision for that reduction in your income from your revenue. You're not "applying" for the deduction, you're documenting the fact of that money's non-taxable nature, in keeping with the tax code. How are you not clear on this?
No, at best he only has paid for a very tiny fraction. So therefore he's not worthy of respect.
And, at most, he only USES a very tiny fraction. And since nearly half of the people in the county pay no income taxes (and many get cash "back" on the taxes they don't pay), he has paid more towards the costs of those things than his share of their use. That's exactly who should be getting respect. You're proposing... what, that the people who don't pay are more worthy of recognition than the people who do?
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So, what you're saying is that you have evidence that a drug manufacturer's advertisement is criminally fraudulent, and therefore we should not allow anyone in that line of work to spend money promoting their businesses, and instead they should put all of their money into research on new drugs until they run out of money, at which some other person who knows you won't allow them to advertise will of course invest billions of dollars in the same area because even though they're smart enough to come up with new drugs that you personally can't produce, they're too dumb to realize you want them to fail, financially. Do you even listen to yourself?
So let me get this straight. You think that if five people get together and mow lawns for a living, it's perfectly OK if they (or just one of them) appears before their local government to explain why some pending rule or law about fertilizer use is a bad thing. It's probably also OK with you if all five of them say to the politician proposing the new law that if it gets passed, they're never going to vote for or support that person again, and will actively support their opponents. Is that corrupt, to you? No?
OK, what if ONE of those five delivers that exact same message, and tells the politician that he's speaking on behalf of five people. Is it corrupt then? No?
OK, what if those five people realize that it makes a lot more sense for them to incorporate their business. And as business owners, they recognize that the politician's proposed new law is going to severely damage their business's prospects. Are you saying that they, as the owners of the business, have lost the first amendment's protections of their free speech because they are before their elected representative as a business that operates in that politician's jurisdiction? Is that corrupt, then? Why? In what way have those five people, speaking as one to preserve their business, suddenly become corrupt? Be specific.
That's twice you have made an ass of yourself on this topic.
And here you are, unable to address the substance of the matter and instead relying on lazy, juvenile ad hominem. And pretending that you can't grasp that getting together to form an association (say, with the purpose of forwarding the interests of the association's members, including as matters that the association's members care about become subject to new legislation or regulation) isn't EXACTLY the sort of thing the nation's founders sought to protect when they prohibited the government from infringing on the forming of such groups in the First Amendment. Or did you think they only meant that you were free to assemble into a mob in the street?
Only in your labyrinthine mind does freedom of assembly have anything whatever to do with lobbying, aka subversion and corruption.
You don't actually understand what lobbyists do, do you? You don't even understand why (for example) twenty software companies or twenty bakeries or twenty dog breeders might find it more useful to send someone to talk to the chair of some senate committee and say, "I'm here on behalf of 20 people who all agree that you need to look at this bill from a different point of view..." instead of all twenty of those busy people each doing it on their own. If you can't muster the intellectual honesty to understand that, assume it's 20,000 people who all agree about something, and want their point of view represented to key regulators and lawmakers and executives. Should all 20,000 individually camp outside congressional hearings, demanded to talk? Or might it make more sense to have someone do that for them, explaining who they are and why?
Your idea of "corruption" is "people I don't like assembling into groups and expressing their wishes." How does that become corruption? Is it NOT corruption if a software developer manages to get 10 minutes of a congressman's time to explain encryption issues, but it somehow IS corruption if that very same person is there having the same conversation on behalf of 200 software companies who all have the same issues? Why? Be specific about at which point the corruption actually takes place.
It is well known that the US is not a democracy but a plutocracy
No it's not well known, but it is frequently asserted by people who want to spin things that way.
I don't care how you spin it, anything against the public interest is clearly IMMORAL.
So, people used to argue that abolishing slavery was against the public interest, as it would damage the economy, ruin long-held family estates, etc. Would you consider abolishing slavery to be immoral? No? I see.
So it comes down to what you think is "in the public interest." I, for example, don't think it's in the public interest to establish and maintain a dependency-creating welfare state. So, you think I should be silenced by the government if I and other people who agree with me were to (so that we could go about our daily work, because we do work) pool our resources and send a person to talk to legislators on our behalf? You really think it's immoral for me to express my opinion, or enlist someone to help me do so? Or is it only immoral if I make more than $50k a year? Or does it become immoral when I make $150k a year? At which point, in your world view, are people suddenly evil an immoral when they seek to persuade legislators to see things their way? When they own four televisions, or only three?
How do you propose that they gather sufficient funding to be persuasive without corporate backing?
Do you think that the NAACP or the AARP or the Sierra Club or PETA etc are all funded by corporate backing? If you can't persuade enough people to agree with you (if a loopy aging hippy socialist from New England can raise millions and millions of dollars from starry-eyed individual donors, why is it you think this isn't possible?), you could always simply persuade a wealthy person (say, an Al Gore, or a George Soros) to throw - as they already do - millions of dollars into things they think should be more visible. This is happening right in front of your eyes every day - why does it seem unlikely to you?
That's nice. So what about the money they spend on advertising and marketing?
What about it? Do you own a business, or work for one? Have you considered how well you'd fare if nobody was allowed to promote your business or try to find new customers, or remind people why your product or service is a good alternative to something else? Do you understand that private companies have to actually generate revenue or they can't do anything, because they'll be bankrupt?
Actually, Medicare is a financing program that pays private providers, not a health care provider itself.
Except in order to use that financing program, you have to find doctors and facilities that are willing (usually at a financial loss) to conduct their operations and even their patient-by-patient, case-by-case decision making and prioritization according to Medicare's rules. That generally results in doctors losing money, which brings us to...
However, in terms of overhead, it's quite as good as any number of private providers of insurance and better than many.
No, it's not. It's rife with fraud and waste. Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth.
But the VA? For all the complaints about it, it has high satisfaction rates when it comes to care
Once you GET care. Or IF you get care.
IOW, good stewardship of your tax dollars. Do you want to change that?
Good stewardship of my tax dollars would have seen at least ONE person lose their job over the truly terrible conditions and processes exposed year after year as third parties and the VA itself review how awfully run the agency is. Vets waiting months and years to be seen. Do you understand that?
It's more cost effective to get Bill Gates to stop.
Yeah, better to just let all of that medical care and education grind to a halt. You hate him so much you'd rather see other people suffer than see them enjoy a shred of improvement through the billions of dollars his foundation spends on helping people. If the goal is to express your hatred, then yes, it might indeed be more efficient to let a lot of people die or go without education just to give you the satisfaction of shutting him down. In the meantime, why aren't YOU providing health care and education through your own foundation? Be specific.
The rest of the world calls it corruption.
The US calls it 'lobbying'.
No, the US calls it "freedom of assembly and speech," and it's protected under the very first amendment of the constitution. Let me guess, you'd like to reserve the right to get a few of your like-minded friends together and perhaps send one of them to talk to a committee chair about some piece of pending tech- or science-related legislation so they can avoid screwing it up ... but you'd like to silence other people that you don't like from doing exactly the same thing.
Or would you prefer that nobody gets to talk to legislators? Or that you only get to talk to them if millions of people also get to, simultaneously? There's a reason that it makes sense to form groups (like, say, The Association Of Concerned Scientists or the League Of Open Source Protector Justice Warriors or the Sierra Club, or the NAACP or the NRA or whatever) to allow lots of people to pool their resources and speak with one voice when it suits them to do so. You want corruption? Ban the free speech and free association that allows such groups to exist and lobby for what's important to them - watch what happens then.
This is correct.
There are actually quite a few layers of separation between votes and federal law.
Yes, by design. That's the whole point. Otherwise it's mob rule. Look at what direct democracy (by way of ballot initiatives) has done to California. The people who wrote the constitution were very smart to put in the checks and balances we have, and to structure the legislative branch as the bicameral institution that it is. If you don't like that a large organization is able to sit across the table from a legislator and persuade them that a bill is a bad idea, do what everyone else does: gather your like-minded friends and send someone of your OWN to meet with the same legislator and persuade her that she's misunderstanding the pros and cons of some piece of pending legislation. Or are you against the constitution's protections for your right (and everyone else's) to assemble as they see fit and express themselves as they see fit (say, through the offices of a lobbyist who know which people to talk to about which topic)? You can't have it both ways.
Maybe you should check in with someone who dies because he can't afford medication, because Bill Gates conditioned his aid on IP protections for drugs.
Maybe you should consider the people who don't die because the drugs exist in the first place, which in most cases wouldn't happen without the private sector spending billions on the highly regulated, generally money-losing, years-long process of putting new drugs into the hands of doctors. I know, you think that all of the companies that spend that money should do it as a donation, and they should instead earn money selling t-shirts at their bar performances, just like musicians who shouldn't be allowed to have copyrights. Hopefully you won't ever suffer from a life-threatening disease that can only be treated with an exotic drug it cost hundreds of people hundreds of millions of dollars to create, handle, store, and train your doctor to employ.
I know, let's disband all private companies that do such research, and just use the tax dollars we collect from the minority of people who actually pay most of the income taxes, and establish a gigantic new federal bureaucracy to handle all drug research, production, distribution, and administration. We can model it after the Veterans Administration or Medicare, since those work so well.
The negative aspects of Gates' donations result in people dying who are every bit as real as the people with malaria.
So why aren't YOU buying shiploads of medical supplies and paying small armies of personnel to go to malaria-infested places and save all of the lives that Bill Gates is choosing to destroy with his evil charity? Please be specific.
First, the biggest problem in rainforest removal today is lumbering, cattle-ranching, and export agriculture.
Right. All agricultural activities, and poorly planned and executed. That's exactly the point. Moving away from subsistence agriculture to more viable, productive, commercial-grade agriculture DOES benefit from the expertise of people who come from places where it's done well and very efficiently. Unlike the way it's practiced in places where those poor decisions are made.
Second, actually, the methods used in the west require a lot of energy inputs, like fertilizer and mechanization, or even just pumping water from place to place.
Yup, a lot of energy. Just a lot LESS energy than poorly executed, stone-age carve-into-the-jungle agriculture that barely feeds the people doing it.
except the aid workers aren't farmers and don't know how to farm, especially given local climates
Yeah, the local habit of chopping down all the rain forest for one-shot, poor use of the acreage for farming - that's a sure sign that native farming instincts are wildly superior to the methods used in more advanced economies, where far, far more food is produced per acre, with far less energy used.
That's odd, everything I've heard about his donations has been negative.
That's called confirmation bias. You hate him, so you only seek, find, remember, and pass along information that allows you to feel good about that position. Maybe you should check with someone who doesn't have malaria, but otherwise would. Or someone in a developing country that has unprecedented education opportunities they'd otherwise have missed out on. They'd question your priorities. Ask someone in Cameroon, who literally went from rural village life to being a well paid consultant in a rapidly growing tech-centric urban economy if they'd rather the Gates Foundation had closed up shop. I know, you think it's either apocryphal, or that whatever strings are attached are too onerous. Having had just such a formerly impoverished rural boy from Cameroon move in as the young man next door, and watch him, over the course of just a few years, buy three houses in the neighborhood for his extended family (the children of which rotate through schools in Europe and trips back to Africa to further broaden their horizons), I think your smug disdain for the Gates Foundation is a bit of Shakespearean protesting too much. What's the problem, really? Just frustrated that it's not the Clinton Foundation that my Cameroonian friend praises for wildly improving the lives of nearly everyone in his large family?
Those who do most often shoot the wrong way and kill others instead.
Really? What percentage? Please offer some citation for that sweeping assertion.
And now it is announced that people on the terrorist watchdog list may be barred from flying on an airplane but they can still legally purchase firearms.
That's because being on a terrorist watch list isn't a criminal conviction. You can't take away someone's constitutionally protected rights just because someone, without any due process or any of the other protections guaranteed in the constitution, says they seem suspicious. All sorts of people who've had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism or any Islamist leanings have wound up on the no-fly list, and had to fight for months or years to be removed. Would you support removing their freedom of speech, too? No? Why not?
Sure, if you want to include suicides, and choose to consider the severe gang problem in specific areas of three or four specific cities that have some of the most harsh gun laws and which have been run at the legislative and executive level by liberal politicians for decades. If you took just Chicago out of the numbers, it would put countries like France and Germany and especially places like Russia WAY above the US in violence involving guns, and of course that's if you still choose to exclude all sorts of developed countries that it's convenient to call "undeveloped" because including them takes all the fun out of the stats being pushed.
Or, you could have compared it to, say, Norway, which had a LOT more students recently killed by a guy who used a gun. Norway, Somalia, whatever.
Cake have many uses, sustaining life being one of them, most violent one is actually fun. Rifle has only one. Your argument is invalid.
I've used a rifle to provide a meal during which we also served cake. How are you that uninformed? I've also used a firearm to prevent someone from harming my wife and myself. Are you still foggy on the concept? No?
There's already a pistol emoji. There's no reason not to add a rifle emoji for completeness sake.
And there's already an apple emoji, too. Why did they have to add the banana? Oh, I get it - because those aren't the same things. Just like the half a dozen types of trucks they show. Or multiple types of trees and flowers. Or however many dozens of different groups of multicultural heads with different hair colors. A person is a person, right? Right? No? I see.
Compared to the rest of the developed world, gun violence in the USA is still at appalling levels
I encourage you to stop into, say, a university or a research lab in Mexico and tell them that they aren't part of the developed world. Or most of Central and South America. Or nations in Africa where high tech factories, mobile devices, etc., are routine ... undeveloped! It's so fun when you get to call brown people undeveloped so you can rule them out of your statistics just like you do suicides, since that helps you to make your spurious, inaccurate non-point.
Right. Just wanted to be clear that her perspective is complete BS.
That's exactly where she's coming from.
Documenting that some portion of your revenue is not, per the tax code, taxable income is not the same as asking the government to give you some of the money someone else spent the day making. How are you not clear on this?
You have no inalienable rights to whatever complex set of tax deductions you'd like.
No, but you do have the tax code as it's written. When you file your taxes, you document the fact that some number of the dollars you brought in is, per the tax code, not taxable, or taxed at the established rate for that kind of income. Documenting that information is not the same as applying to be given money that someone else made.
They aren't being drug tested for filing their taxes, only for applying for their tax breaks and tax credits. They could just take the standard deduction to avoid the whole thing.
Nobody "applies" for deductions and tax credits. They are defined in the tax code, and if they apply to your situation (say, you're running a small business and have paid contractors), the standard deduction makes no provision for that reduction in your income from your revenue. You're not "applying" for the deduction, you're documenting the fact of that money's non-taxable nature, in keeping with the tax code. How are you not clear on this?
No, at best he only has paid for a very tiny fraction. So therefore he's not worthy of respect.
And, at most, he only USES a very tiny fraction. And since nearly half of the people in the county pay no income taxes (and many get cash "back" on the taxes they don't pay), he has paid more towards the costs of those things than his share of their use. That's exactly who should be getting respect. You're proposing ... what, that the people who don't pay are more worthy of recognition than the people who do?