Ambassador Andrei Lysenko: There is another matter... one I'm reluctant to... Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: Please. Ambassador Andrei Lysenko: One of our submarines, an Alfa, was last reported in the area of the Grand Banks. We have not heard from her for some time. Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: Andrei... you've lost another submarine?
There's been a lot of hubbub lately with G+ and the the nymwars where they want to expose everyone to public scrutiny by using their real names.
What's your take on Google's stance ("go somewhere else if you want privacy") with it being an identity service as it pertains both to individual privacy and changes in how pretexting crimes will occur?
It pissed off the customer, and then usually the store ends up losing more money because of people who demand to be compensated for the time they spent bring the computer back to the store.
Can you elaborate on the process of compensation for time spent?
I am sure there are a lot of other people here who would want to know how to exploit this with their own hourly rates.:)
If they snapped a photo of you while you were walking down the street, deal with it because that is a public space and anyone could have done that.
The problem here is how people will deal with it: a) The native American who doesn't want their soul stolen. b) The wanna-be fashion diva who claims you didn't get their release, and you are stealing their IP, livelihood, etc. c) Or the guy who just wants to kick your ass because he doesn't want photos around that he didn't consent.
People in general have a reasonable expectation of privacy everywhere they go despite what all of the social media douchebags think. When you click that photo, you best be sure you know how to defend yourself, because you do not know how people are going to react.
No, I didn't forget ME. I decided to ignore regressions in development.
For everyone that seems to poo poo ME it seems that a lot of people forget that System Restore was the most important technical feature to come along to Windows since 95.
NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2008 amounts to $471.23 billion dollars—an average of $9.06 billion per year. "Medicare & Medicaid ($793B or 23%), Social Security ($701B or 20%), Defense Department ($689B or 20%), non-defense discretionary ($660B or 19%), other ($416B or 12%) and interest ($197B or 6%)." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget")
The $18.69B spent by NASA in 2010 is a far cry from the $1.5 trillion in social programs we are wasting money on. Please keep your misguided mathematics to yourself. NASA isn't what is making America broke.
The impact NASA has is like a stick of gum in a grocery bag full of caviar, lobster tails and prime rib.
Your use of Crockford's explanation to explain your position is a bit confounding. Crockford is seen as one of the most respected experts on the language and its modern use.
said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
Pick the product, I mean it doesn't matter what it is anything thing from your car, house, cell phone, kids bicycle, toilet paper, laptop pick the damn product.
You had me until toilet paper. Metal toilet paper -- a very bad idea. Given the choice of metal or plastic...plastic just sounds softer.
What's driving this I have no idea... less formal CS training? Looser languages? Web-centric apps? Lower end standards? Higher demand = more crappy resources?
There are a lot of possibilities as to what is driving this idea. Below is my attempt at addressing them.
1. Software development has its various schools of thought including (but not limited to) ad-hoc and hero style programmers, waterfall, Agile, Scrum, TDD, and iterative. For the most part, real world software development processes are not taught in schools, and in some ways are similar to fad diets. There are two very different mindsets involved for coding the software and testing the software -- and if you test the same code you write, you are more likely to miss bugs. This is precisely why it is good to have other people test the code (and review it) than those who are writing it. There will always be blind spots. While some developers may be familiar with the basics of a debugger, most probably don't know how to use disassemblers, decompilers, and static analysis tools. There is no One True Standard Way to do things.
2. Going the distance with solid code, including unit, peer, and system level testing requires a level of discipline that most are not familiar with and not trained/taught at schools. Schools do not turn out software artisans, they merely turn out logical thinkers. There's an adage in software development that you can get it fast, good, or cheap: pick two. Most developers want to do it good, but that is often a luxury that conflicts with stated business goals. Most commercial software starts off as a badly coded prototype, and most developers are expected to shine that turd so long as it makes the business money. Most of the time the codebase is held together like chicken wire and bubblegum.
3. Perhaps there are interpersonal/social problems at play with your team, and the groups they interact with.
- Do you treat your developers as professionals, or do you treat them as technicians, fix-it people, and common laborers?
- Do your developers have clear expectations on how they are expected to work with QA?
- Do your developers have any experience working with UE and QA?
- Are your UE and QA people confrontational?
- Does your team have a clear picture of your expectations?
It sounds like you are seeing the culmination of multiple problems, not entirely the fault of your team. I encourage you to look at these areas described.
Fine, but that means I can't read what it coming in and prioritize. Right now I can see something and say "This is important, and easy to solve, so I should shelve what I'm doing and go take care of it."
Perhaps you and your clients/customers/peers have e-mail confused with bug tracking or other CRM software. This is an altogether different problem.
I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to keep messages unread just so people weren't harassing me to do things since I "wasn't busy."
This is where you need to put people in their place. However, I can sympathize. More often than not people are starting to use e-mail as if it were tweets/ status posts, which amounts to an overflowing inbox. Every now and then they can use a good scolding for sending too much e-mail. If they are new web socialites using FB and Twitter, perhaps you can suggest to them that you will look at their streams for updates (and never follow up on that suggestion because you know that its a complete waste of time).
Others (like today) something critical is down and I'm spending all day working on it so even though I'm reading e-mail, I can't go and help with anything else.
Especially when they require a detailed response and your response back was tl;dr.
The other (greedy) Middle Eastern countries are bullies to Israel. Its about size. Saudi Arabia is 103.75x bigger than Israel. Syria is 8.9x bigger than Israel. Jordan (a Palestinian state) is 4.3x bigger than Israel.
No, they should not be carving up any of the little land they have for the Palestinians or anyone else. You can save your sympathies. Rachel Corrie knew what she was doing when she put herself in harm's way and made herself a martyr. She deserved to die. Nobody (Muslim Arabs) wants the Palestinians in their countries so they picked the smallest target. http://gentwarrior.blogspot.com/2009/07/nobody-wants-them.html [blogspot.com]
"The funds for my travel to Israel are coming from Palestinians who invited me to give talks for them."
Only RMS would jump right into the middle of such a hot mess. Perhaps he can ask the Syrian government for a free bus trip to the Israeli border like the "Nabka Day" protesters.
The company management seeing a contract coming in with your suggestion should be prepared to be shown the door. This makes the contractor look like a free-loader: "gimme gimme whats in it for Meeeee?"
It's those low rungs on the IT ladder - those jobs that have gone offshore," said e-skills UK's Lux. As a result, she said the organisation is focusing on initiatives aimed at fostering "project-based learning" skills, so a new generation of tech workers can gain broader skills and plug into the UK IT job market as project managers.
Yep, make them all managers...because we all know the local the battle hardened industry veterans at the company are just as eager to take orders from the "new kid" as the off-shore team is...Riiiiight.
Let's see, your base your premise and conclusion with an ad hominem attack
Inane commentary omitted.
The point that you completely missed is that no one agrees what it means to be "rich" and sooner or later the bar will get lowered enough so that everyone will get punished.
It doesn't matter. The point of taxing the rich isn't to punish them; it's because they are the most able to afford it.
You have almost an intelligent thought here, if you are implying that taxation should be based on need. Implying that the needs of carrying the poor on the backs of the rich is a good thing. Cute.
A poor person may not be able to afford the bare necessities of life, much less endure taxation. Trying to tax them would be like trying to wring blood from a stone.
When a poor person bounces a check, they get smacked with a fee twice. When a rich person has plenty of money in the bank we expand their line of credit. We regularly try to wring blood from a stone. By doing this we punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. Is it just? YMMV. But when someone comes along with "tax the rich, tax the rich", the implication is a tendency towards the mean. To make everyone poor / everyone suffer, and this should be watched with vigilance.
A rich person, OTOH, has money to spare; we could tax him quite heavily before it put the merest dent in his lifestyle, much less caused him any actual harm.
For a given government budget to be funded by taxation, our tax policy should basically just be to allocate taxes in such a way that it causes the least amount of financial 'pain' possible for as many people as possible.
There are fewer people in the rich end of the spectrum than the poor end, and they are better able to bear the burden. There's no cruelty involved.
So long as what we define to be rich is not a "moving target" and isn't approaching what the majority is, I think we can agree on this point.
What's actually flawed about them? America was tremendously prosperous in the 1950's and 1960's when rates were far higher than the 1980's or later. If they were so bad, where were the bad effects? I'm not saying that higher rates would necessarily cause everything to be sweetness and light, but I have no problems with a low level of income inequality.
Since the 1940s we've seen an unprecedented expansion in government and since the mid 1960s a declining level of taxation. We were also in a post war (you know, the real declared kind) economy and in a Cold War arms race. Some people want the taxes to return to the high levels so the rate of expansion can increase. Others want to decrease the size of government so that it can fit within a model of lower (overall, not just the rich) taxation. The "bad" is the cumulative effect of increasing government size while decreasing revenue taken in, (additionally social justice doled out by government regulation changes).
Oh, it's not thievery. Taxes -- and a progressive tax structure -- are the cost of government.
It's not thievery when the government does it, eh? The country did without a Federal income tax for 137 years and coincidentally survived the rise and fall of two national banks. The size and scope of government will always be debated.
If you have no government, then you are alone and vulnerable; you have no protection from everyone else, and they have the advantage of numbers and strength and organization.
I don't think either of us is suggesting no government (anarchy). The 10th Amendment clearly defines the intent of limited government. This does not include entitlements, healthcare, or cradle-to-the-grave nannying.
As the lady said, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. The benefits of a government -- of having your fellow citizens help
In 1961, the Federal Income Tax rate was 91% of all income over $400,000. That's right, 91% of ALL income over $400,000 went to the government.
Now, did we have rich people in 1961? Yes. Did we have jobs in 1961? Again, yes.
Did we have 7 fewer organizations in 1961? Yes. (Housing and Urban Development, Dept. of Transportation, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Education, VA, EPA, and Homeland Security all didn't exist)
Currently the rate is 35%, but effectively it's about 12% with all of the credits, cuts, and so on.
12%... vs. 91%. So don't tell me that eliminating a few tax cuts for the richest 2% of the individuals in our country is going to have dire repercussions or a major impact on businesses and corporations providing jobs.
You need to stop and smell what you're shoveling...
We had an insane tax rate from 1944-1963 but it was to pay for the WWII war effort. In 1913 the top marginal rate was %7. I am all for equal (and fair) taxation under the law.
Are you talking income or money in the bank? In terms of income, 40k doesn't get all that far even in middle America. 250k is certainly plenty of money for people to live without sacrificing anything (unless they've got 10 kids or something). 1 million is enough to live very well, even in New York City. 5 million is a ridiculous amount.
The point isn't the value, its the lack of consensus on what value it ("rich") is. It's a moving target and one day depending on whose definition gets used, it can and will effect you directly.
You don't really understand how tax brackets work, do you?
I do, but you clearly cannot see the forest for the trees.
Either way, thanks to financial games and tax loopholes, a lot of companies get away with paying very, very low taxes (unfortunately it's usually the biggest ones that pay the lowest rates).
Thanks for the refresher. I have 2 LLCs.
There's no federal sales tax on general goods (there's a gas tax, some excise taxes, and a few other specific taxes) and some states and localities don't have sales taxes.
There are 5 states without sales tax. However, the majority of states do, but its still not all tax-free. For example NH has a %9 prepared food tax. Any which way an individual turns it is likely they are going to contribute to the government in some form or another.
What? No, I mean seriously, this doesn't make sense in context.
The burden of paying the tax is not on the company, but on the individual making the purchase. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of Use Tax?
Corporations pay taxes on profits (in theory, if they're not abusing loopholes). Is that hard to understand? Or are you complaining about them needing to collect sales taxes? I can certainly agree that sales taxes are needlessly complicated.
There's nothing complicated about them. We just do not agree on who should take the burden. If you are an internet retailer without a physical presence in some states, should you be adhering to the whims of the state rules of all 50 (plus the small number of US territories), and violating the Commerce Clause.
How much do you want to punish them? How badly do you want to bring them down to your level?
Why do people keep repeating the "taxes are punishment for doing good!" meme? Excessive taxation is not good. I am not making any judgment of whether or not being rich is good either. We should all be treated equally under the law and taxation is no exception.
The government is providing services. Those services need to be paid for. Income for the bottom 90% has barely grown in the last 40 years, despite rapidly increasing costs of education and medicine, yet somehow the top 1% has tripled. The top 1% has a third of the net worth in the country. The top 10% has 3/4. The top 1% makes 20% of the income. The next 19% make 40%. The next 80% make the rest.
On one extreme some people wanted limited government. On the other extreme people want a welfare state. Since you want to talk about what has happened in the last 40 years, I'll throw out the key pieces, but include a little bit before as well.
1966 - Dept. of Transportation 1967 - Dept. of Energy 1979 - Dept. of Education 1987 - Veteran Affairs 1990 - EPA 2002 - Homeland Security and now we are looking for some new organizations being created out of the healthcare bill.
The rate of expansion of these government services is skyrocketing. Government is trying to provide more services than the economy and tax base can susta
I have never understood this. If taxes are increased for you you're not going to be able to increase your total take home by reducing your tax bracket. For example say they increase the tax on income over $250,000. You still pay the same in tax rate as everyone else under $250,000 on your first $250,000 but now on income over that amount you pay an additional tax.
You're still going to take home more than if you were under $250,000, just not quite as much as before.
And rich people don't create jobs just because they have money sitting around to spend.
Correct, but burdening the wealthy individual with higher taxes in the form of blanket panaceas of "tax the rich" doesn't solve the OP's implication that Amazon, and the "rich" aren't being taxed enough. There are some rich people at Amazon. They are paying their individual income taxes. The company is hiring many people. Hiring people, creating jobs for people to provide for themselves is the greater good (and coincidentally putting money into the system).
Jobs are created by demand for products and services. It does no good to be rich as can be if there are no people with enough disposable income of their own to buy the stuff you produce. The US economy is something like 70% consumer spending and when you increasingly polarize the income disparity it further reduces the ability of those on the lower end of the scale to spend which doesn't help the situation.
Are you asking Amazon to be a charity, in addition to the already blatant role of government-as-a-charity? I'm genuinely curious where you are going with this -- who do you think should be responsible for correcting the income disparity?
Slashdot Mirror
Effective Java, by Josh Bloch.
Ambassador Andrei Lysenko: There is another matter... one I'm reluctant to...
Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: Please.
Ambassador Andrei Lysenko: One of our submarines, an Alfa, was last reported in the area of the Grand Banks. We have not heard from her for some time.
Dr. Jeffrey Pelt: Andrei... you've lost another submarine?
It's based on AtheOS, a new OS from scratch
You seem confused. Atheos was started in 1994, and released to the world in 2000.
It isn't exactly new.
There's been a lot of hubbub lately with G+ and the the nymwars where they want to expose everyone to public scrutiny by using their real names.
What's your take on Google's stance ("go somewhere else if you want privacy") with it being an identity service as it pertains both to individual privacy and changes in how pretexting crimes will occur?
It pissed off the customer, and then usually the store ends up losing more money because of people who demand to be compensated for the time they spent bring the computer back to the store.
Can you elaborate on the process of compensation for time spent? :)
I am sure there are a lot of other people here who would want to know how to exploit this with their own hourly rates.
If they snapped a photo of you while you were walking down the street, deal with it because that is a public space and anyone could have done that.
The problem here is how people will deal with it:
a) The native American who doesn't want their soul stolen.
b) The wanna-be fashion diva who claims you didn't get their release, and you are stealing their IP, livelihood, etc.
c) Or the guy who just wants to kick your ass because he doesn't want photos around that he didn't consent.
People in general have a reasonable expectation of privacy everywhere they go despite what all of the social media douchebags think. When you click that photo, you best be sure you know how to defend yourself, because you do not know how people are going to react.
No, I didn't forget ME. I decided to ignore regressions in development.
For everyone that seems to poo poo ME it seems that a lot of people forget that System Restore was the most important technical feature to come along to Windows since 95.
NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2008 amounts to $471.23 billion dollars—an average of $9.06 billion per year. "Medicare & Medicaid ($793B or 23%), Social Security ($701B or 20%), Defense Department ($689B or 20%), non-defense discretionary ($660B or 19%), other ($416B or 12%) and interest ($197B or 6%)."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget")
The $18.69B spent by NASA in 2010 is a far cry from the $1.5 trillion in social programs we are wasting money on.
Please keep your misguided mathematics to yourself. NASA isn't what is making America broke.
The impact NASA has is like a stick of gum in a grocery bag full of caviar, lobster tails and prime rib.
Your use of Crockford's explanation to explain your position is a bit confounding.
Crockford is seen as one of the most respected experts on the language and its modern use.
said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
Pick the product, I mean it doesn't matter what it is anything thing from your car, house, cell phone, kids bicycle, toilet paper, laptop pick the damn product.
You had me until toilet paper. Metal toilet paper -- a very bad idea.
Given the choice of metal or plastic...plastic just sounds softer.
Let's not forget about the $24-40 trillion in health-care-for-all program that the current administration has signed us up for over the next 10 years.
What's driving this I have no idea... less formal CS training? Looser languages? Web-centric apps? Lower end standards? Higher demand = more crappy resources?
There are a lot of possibilities as to what is driving this idea. Below is my attempt at addressing them.
1. Software development has its various schools of thought including (but not limited to) ad-hoc and hero style programmers, waterfall, Agile, Scrum, TDD, and iterative. For the most part, real world software development processes are not taught in schools, and in some ways are similar to fad diets. There are two very different mindsets involved for coding the software and testing the software -- and if you test the same code you write, you are more likely to miss bugs. This is precisely why it is good to have other people test the code (and review it) than those who are writing it. There will always be blind spots. While some developers may be familiar with the basics of a debugger, most probably don't know how to use disassemblers, decompilers, and static analysis tools. There is no One True Standard Way to do things.
2. Going the distance with solid code, including unit, peer, and system level testing requires a level of discipline that most are not familiar with and not trained/taught at schools. Schools do not turn out software artisans, they merely turn out logical thinkers. There's an adage in software development that you can get it fast, good, or cheap: pick two. Most developers want to do it good, but that is often a luxury that conflicts with stated business goals. Most commercial software starts off as a badly coded prototype, and most developers are expected to shine that turd so long as it makes the business money. Most of the time the codebase is held together like chicken wire and bubblegum.
3. Perhaps there are interpersonal/social problems at play with your team, and the groups they interact with.
- Do you treat your developers as professionals, or do you treat them as technicians, fix-it people, and common laborers?
- Do your developers have clear expectations on how they are expected to work with QA?
- Do your developers have any experience working with UE and QA?
- Are your UE and QA people confrontational?
- Does your team have a clear picture of your expectations?
It sounds like you are seeing the culmination of multiple problems, not entirely the fault of your team. I encourage you to look at these areas described.
2003 called and they want their N-Gage back.
No one expects the zombie inquisition!
Fine, but that means I can't read what it coming in and prioritize. Right now I can see something and say "This is important, and easy to solve, so I should shelve what I'm doing and go take care of it."
Perhaps you and your clients/customers/peers have e-mail confused with bug tracking or other CRM software. This is an altogether different problem.
I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to keep messages unread just so people weren't harassing me to do things since I "wasn't busy."
This is where you need to put people in their place. However, I can sympathize. More often than not people are starting to use e-mail as if it were tweets/ status posts, which amounts to an overflowing inbox. Every now and then they can use a good scolding for sending too much e-mail. If they are new web socialites using FB and Twitter, perhaps you can suggest to them that you will look at their streams for updates (and never follow up on that suggestion because you know that its a complete waste of time).
Others (like today) something critical is down and I'm spending all day working on it so even though I'm reading e-mail, I can't go and help with anything else.
Especially when they require a detailed response and your response back was tl;dr.
The other (greedy) Middle Eastern countries are bullies to Israel. Its about size.
Saudi Arabia is 103.75x bigger than Israel.
Syria is 8.9x bigger than Israel.
Jordan (a Palestinian state) is 4.3x bigger than Israel.
No, they should not be carving up any of the little land they have for the Palestinians or anyone else.
You can save your sympathies. Rachel Corrie knew what she was doing when she put herself in harm's way and made herself a martyr. She deserved to die.
Nobody (Muslim Arabs) wants the Palestinians in their countries so they picked the smallest target. http://gentwarrior.blogspot.com/2009/07/nobody-wants-them.html [blogspot.com]
"The funds for my travel to Israel are coming from Palestinians who invited me to give talks for them."
Only RMS would jump right into the middle of such a hot mess. Perhaps he can ask the Syrian government for a free bus trip to the Israeli border like the "Nabka Day" protesters.
Four killed on Israel's border with Syria
Israeli-Palestinian violence marks "Nabka" day
Um yeah....isn't there some free software you could like...video stream the lectures to everyone?
If there is reason to believe that the water was trapped as a result of volcanic activity, should we be looking for geodes under the surface?
The company management seeing a contract coming in with your suggestion should be prepared to be shown the door.
This makes the contractor look like a free-loader: "gimme gimme whats in it for Meeeee?"
It's those low rungs on the IT ladder - those jobs that have gone offshore," said e-skills UK's Lux. As a result, she said the organisation is focusing on initiatives aimed at fostering "project-based learning" skills, so a new generation of tech workers can gain broader skills and plug into the UK IT job market as project managers.
Yep, make them all managers...because we all know the local the battle hardened industry veterans at the company are just as eager to take orders from the "new kid" as the off-shore team is...Riiiiight.
This should be a civil, not a criminal matter.
Thanks for placing this on par with murderers, rapists, and violent crimes.
Let's see, your base your premise and conclusion with an ad hominem attack
Inane commentary omitted.
The point that you completely missed is that no one agrees what it means to be "rich" and sooner or later the bar will get lowered enough so that everyone will get punished.
It doesn't matter. The point of taxing the rich isn't to punish them; it's because they are the most able to afford it.
You have almost an intelligent thought here, if you are implying that taxation should be based on need. Implying that the needs of carrying the poor on the backs of the rich is a good thing. Cute.
A poor person may not be able to afford the bare necessities of life, much less endure taxation. Trying to tax them would be like trying to wring blood from a stone.
When a poor person bounces a check, they get smacked with a fee twice. When a rich person has plenty of money in the bank we expand their line of credit. We regularly try to wring blood from a stone. By doing this we punish bad behavior and reward good behavior. Is it just? YMMV. But when someone comes along with "tax the rich, tax the rich", the implication is a tendency towards the mean. To make everyone poor / everyone suffer, and this should be watched with vigilance.
A rich person, OTOH, has money to spare; we could tax him quite heavily before it put the merest dent in his lifestyle, much less caused him any actual harm.
For a given government budget to be funded by taxation, our tax policy should basically just be to allocate taxes in such a way that it causes the least amount of financial 'pain' possible for as many people as possible.
There are fewer people in the rich end of the spectrum than the poor end, and they are better able to bear the burden. There's no cruelty involved.
So long as what we define to be rich is not a "moving target" and isn't approaching what the majority is, I think we can agree on this point.
What's actually flawed about them? America was tremendously prosperous in the 1950's and 1960's when rates were far higher than the 1980's or later. If they were so bad, where were the bad effects? I'm not saying that higher rates would necessarily cause everything to be sweetness and light, but I have no problems with a low level of income inequality.
Since the 1940s we've seen an unprecedented expansion in government and since the mid 1960s a declining level of taxation. We were also in a post war (you know, the real declared kind) economy and in a Cold War arms race. Some people want the taxes to return to the high levels so the rate of expansion can increase. Others want to decrease the size of government so that it can fit within a model of lower (overall, not just the rich) taxation. The "bad" is the cumulative effect of increasing government size while decreasing revenue taken in, (additionally social justice doled out by government regulation changes).
Oh, it's not thievery. Taxes -- and a progressive tax structure -- are the cost of government.
It's not thievery when the government does it, eh? The country did without a Federal income tax for 137 years and coincidentally survived the rise and fall of two national banks. The size and scope of government will always be debated.
If you have no government, then you are alone and vulnerable; you have no protection from everyone else, and they have the advantage of numbers and strength and organization.
I don't think either of us is suggesting no government (anarchy). The 10th Amendment clearly defines the intent of limited government. This does not include entitlements, healthcare, or cradle-to-the-grave nannying.
As the lady said, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. The benefits of a government -- of having your fellow citizens help
In 1961, the Federal Income Tax rate was 91% of all income over $400,000. That's right, 91% of ALL income over $400,000 went to the government.
Now, did we have rich people in 1961? Yes. Did we have jobs in 1961? Again, yes.
Did we have 7 fewer organizations in 1961? Yes.
(Housing and Urban Development, Dept. of Transportation, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Education, VA, EPA, and Homeland Security all didn't exist)
Currently the rate is 35%, but effectively it's about 12% with all of the credits, cuts, and so on.
12%... vs. 91%. So don't tell me that eliminating a few tax cuts for the richest 2% of the individuals in our country is going to have dire repercussions or a major impact on businesses and corporations providing jobs.
You need to stop and smell what you're shoveling...
We had an insane tax rate from 1944-1963 but it was to pay for the WWII war effort.
In 1913 the top marginal rate was %7. I am all for equal (and fair) taxation under the law.
Are you talking income or money in the bank? In terms of income, 40k doesn't get all that far even in middle America. 250k is certainly plenty of money for people to live without sacrificing anything (unless they've got 10 kids or something). 1 million is enough to live very well, even in New York City. 5 million is a ridiculous amount.
The point isn't the value, its the lack of consensus on what value it ("rich") is. It's a moving target and one day depending on whose definition gets used, it can and will effect you directly.
You don't really understand how tax brackets work, do you?
I do, but you clearly cannot see the forest for the trees.
Either way, thanks to financial games and tax loopholes, a lot of companies get away with paying very, very low taxes (unfortunately it's usually the biggest ones that pay the lowest rates).
Thanks for the refresher. I have 2 LLCs.
There's no federal sales tax on general goods (there's a gas tax, some excise taxes, and a few other specific taxes) and some states and localities don't have sales taxes.
There are 5 states without sales tax. However, the majority of states do, but its still not all tax-free. For example NH has a %9 prepared food tax. Any which way an individual turns it is likely they are going to contribute to the government in some form or another.
What? No, I mean seriously, this doesn't make sense in context.
Of course it does. In MA, people who have made out of state purchases are required to declare on their state taxes.
Use Tax Due on Out-of-State Purchases Worksheet
The burden of paying the tax is not on the company, but on the individual making the purchase.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of Use Tax?
Corporations pay taxes on profits (in theory, if they're not abusing loopholes). Is that hard to understand? Or are you complaining about them needing to collect sales taxes? I can certainly agree that sales taxes are needlessly complicated.
There's nothing complicated about them. We just do not agree on who should take the burden. If you are an internet retailer without a physical presence in some states, should you be adhering to the whims of the state rules of all 50 (plus the small number of US territories), and violating the Commerce Clause.
How much do you want to punish them? How badly do you want to bring them down to your level?
Why do people keep repeating the "taxes are punishment for doing good!" meme?
Excessive taxation is not good. I am not making any judgment of whether or not being rich is good either. We should all be treated equally under the law and taxation is no exception.
The government is providing services. Those services need to be paid for. Income for the bottom 90% has barely grown in the last 40 years, despite rapidly increasing costs of education and medicine, yet somehow the top 1% has tripled. The top 1% has a third of the net worth in the country. The top 10% has 3/4. The top 1% makes 20% of the income. The next 19% make 40%. The next 80% make the rest.
On one extreme some people wanted limited government. On the other extreme people want a welfare state. Since you want to talk about what has happened in the last 40 years, I'll throw out the key pieces, but include a little bit before as well.
1966 - Dept. of Transportation
1967 - Dept. of Energy
1979 - Dept. of Education
1987 - Veteran Affairs
1990 - EPA
2002 - Homeland Security
and now we are looking for some new organizations being created out of the healthcare bill.
The rate of expansion of these government services is skyrocketing. Government is trying to provide more services than the economy and tax base can susta
I have never understood this. If taxes are increased for you you're not going to be able to increase your total take home by reducing your tax bracket. For example say they increase the tax on income over $250,000. You still pay the same in tax rate as everyone else under $250,000 on your first $250,000 but now on income over that amount you pay an additional tax.
http://www.fairmark.com/reference/2010reference.htm
Consult the table. Its %x over $y. People on the top end are paying %10 more than in that bracket.
You're still going to take home more than if you were under $250,000, just not quite as much as before.
And rich people don't create jobs just because they have money sitting around to spend.
Correct, but burdening the wealthy individual with higher taxes in the form of blanket panaceas of "tax the rich" doesn't solve the OP's implication that Amazon, and the "rich" aren't being taxed enough. There are some rich people at Amazon. They are paying their individual income taxes. The company is hiring many people. Hiring people, creating jobs for people to provide for themselves is the greater good (and coincidentally putting money into the system).
Jobs are created by demand for products and services. It does no good to be rich as can be if there are no people with enough disposable income of their own to buy the stuff you produce. The US economy is something like 70% consumer spending and when you increasingly polarize the income disparity it further reduces the ability of those on the lower end of the scale to spend which doesn't help the situation.
Are you asking Amazon to be a charity, in addition to the already blatant role of government-as-a-charity? I'm genuinely curious where you are going with this -- who do you think should be responsible for correcting the income disparity?