"Punishing consumption hurts the economy because the people who have money are discouraged from using it..."
It's a different discussion, but the whole "consumption economy" is a fraud. We're soon going to learn that using credit cards to fund our consumption of imported goods is an unsustainable economic model. Saving and organic capital formation, not debt and consumption is our path to prosperity.
"Taxing income does not cause people to work less..."
I've seen conflicting data on this point. I think it probably works both ways depending on the individual.
One one hand, if you're working 40 hours and pay an average tax rate of 28%, would you work another 10 hours knowing that your marginal tax rate will be 39%? Would it affect your decision to expand your business? If you're deciding whether to work or live on welfare, isn't your decision based after-tax income?
Even If the converse is true, and income tax forces people to work MORE, like requiring most households to have two income earners or forcing someone to take a second job just to get by, isn't that also a negative consequence?
Taxes on wages, salaries and profits at every point in the supply chain directly affect prices. U.S. made goods would definitely be more competitive with no income tax.
Seems like capital gains should be treated separately.
Q: Why do we tax cigarettes? A: Because we want people to smoke less.
Q: Why do we tax wages? A: Because we want people to wor... Oh, wait...
Our nation managed to prosper for well over a century without income taxes. When the government created it, they assured the people that this was ONLY going to affect rich people. LOL.
Taxes suck in general, but they show up in retail prices regardless of whether tax is applied at the point of sale or whether taxes are baked in to the sticker price for the item.
If you're going to create disincentives for certain behavior, punish consumption, not work.
"That deduction for a kid is less than the deduction you as a person get."
Kids don't create a proportional increase in expenses either. i.e. your household expenses didn't go up by 50% when your family went from 2 people to 3.
The most egregious injustice in the tax system is that people with no kids are forced to pay taxes to fund public schools which they don't use.
There are bad taxes and there are even worse taxes. Applying a tax to income, especially WAGE income, is about the worst idea imaginable because you are punishing value-add productive activity.
Sales taxes are bad too, but consumption is the least productive thing that we do. Given the choice of two bad options, I'll take the option that encourages saving and provides a disincentive for consumption rather than the option that punishes productivity and work.
The whole "consumption-driven economy" is an unsustainable fraud and replacing income taxes with consumption taxes would help cure that insanity too.
As for the "regressive" nature of consumption taxes, there are good ways to address that with pre-bates so that the poor don't end up paying more tax.
I'd say that the "evidence" is overwhelmingly favorable to free market solutions and generally unfavorable to big government and central planning. For-profit businesses provide millions of goods and services with high quality at affordable prices. Competition and innovation tend to drive improvements in quality and put downward pressure on prices.
What marketplace approaches have really been attempted in education? The education cartel fights against any sort of reform that would put market pressures on education. Even when the government isn't operating the schools directly they're distorting the market through loans, grants, subsidies and regulation. A genuine free market education system would never produce so many illiterate high school graduates, and so many college "graduates" with six figures worth of debt and no useful skills.
I know that Wal Mart sells a lot of junk, but when you need mouthwash, a rubber tote bin, a beach towel, clothes hangers, a can of spray paint or any of 10,000 other items, the Wal-Mart solution works just fine. Assuming they managed to get a huge piece of the education market, I think their "product" would be equally acceptable and much less expensive.
"unbreakable addiction to corporate propaganda,"
As opposed to an unbreakable addiction to big government propaganda?
All the "test and metrics" BS in education is just another government bureaucracy thing and you can't run education like a business when there is no penalty for failure.
P.S. Government corruption is the biggest driver of poverty and wealth inequality in the USA. If government betrayed you so that Wal Mart could be more profitable, it's not Wal Mart's fault.
"Coverity Scan service... was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security"
If software is a "Homeland Security" issue, shouldn't they be focusing on the proprietary software that most consumers, businesses and government agencies are using?
"Mental Illness" has been a central issue in the current debate about firearms. If the government is going to expand restrictions based on a determination of who is "mentally ill" they shouldn't also have the power to make the definitions.
Anti-gun extremists regularly disparage firearms owners as being "crazy" or "nuts" simply because they happen to own firearms. If someone suggests that the U.S. government is devolving into a tyranny (with good evidence), they inevitably earn the label "paranoid".
If new restrictions on civil liberties are applied to people who are "mentally ill" and government gets to make these decisions, they will just keep expanding their definition of "mental illness" to cover whomever they want to disarm. Sort of like they're doing with "terrorist".
I'm talking about the value proposition to the consumer for a particular good or service. Price AND quality.
"... a race-to-the-bottom for crappy quality at low prices."
As opposed to our current public education system with crappy quality at high and steadily increasing prices? A system that leaves the majority of Americans with no choice but to do business with the local education cartel?
I have a hard time imagining a service like education being scalable and replicable to the degree of a McDs or Wal-Mart, but I guess it's possible. However, it certainly couldn't happen immediately. Remember that at one point, McDonalds actually sold real food and despite their ubiquitous presence, people still have plenty of options.
If government stayed out of it, I think we'd see a thriving marketplace with many small businesses offering a wide range of services. If someone was smart enough to build an education business to the size of a Wal Mart or McDs and got rich doing it, good for them.
How about separation of school and government instead?
Only when government gets involved in something can we observe steadily increasing costs for stagnant or declining quality of product/service. In every other market things get better and/or cheaper, or at the very worst, keep a constant value.
Make the schools private, make the teachers compete for those jobs and make the schools compete to attract students. Bring in the education entrepreneurs.
I disagree. Rock and roll upset the status quo and challenged then-contemporary societal norms. Some rap music "challenges" norms of humanity. Glamorizing assault, murder, rape, pimping, etc.? I think that's a step beyond the sex and drugs angle in rock music. Sure, there are interesting, entertaining and profound rap lyrics. I won't condemn a whole style/genre. At the same time, there is plenty of this violent, misogynistic SHIT floating around.
"No federal law has been made to impede the free exercise of religion on marriage."
Married people and single people are treated differently under numerous federal laws. That's a form of discrimination one way or the other. All such laws should be repealed.
"marriage != religion."
Marriage was a religious thing long before it became a government thing.
I think that's what the OP is saying. "Marriage" is not in The Constitution, therefore, the federal government should have absolutely no involvement. Marriage was a religious thing long before it found its way into law. As you point out, the First Amendment could also be construed to indicate that marriage is none of the government's business.
The individual states, via their state legislatures, ratified The Constitution and created the federal government. The federal government has only those powers which are specifically granted to it by The Constitution. There is no authorization for the federal government to conduct a military invasion of any sovereign state. If The Constitution had implicitly or explicitly granted this power to the federal government, The Constitution never would have been ratified.
I agree with the premise. I'd like to see people wear surgical masks during flu season when they're using mass transit. Americans are just too "cool" for something that practical however. Maybe something really nasty will come along and change that.
As a group, I don't think Christians or creationists are any more gullible than a random sample of the population.
I'll take a stab in the dark and guess that you were not raised in a household of active religious practitioners who attended religious services and studied religious texts regularly.
In my experience, the people who are able to break away from the belief system that was instilled in them from childhood are an exception.
They weren't immediately arrested, but I think it's a little too early to believe that nothing's going to happen. The principal was obviously downplaying it, but he left the door open for what the consequences will be. The laws regarding unauthorized computer access are mainly federal laws. I'd be concerned that the local federal prosecutor would decide to take an interest.
A little early to determine whether or not sanity will prevail in the aftermath. The principal's statement indicates that the consequences are TBD.
Also, I thought that most of these computer "crimes" were based on federal laws. Would it be up to the school to decide whether or not to pursue criminal charges?
"David "Cole" Withrow is a Princeton High School honors student who was arrested Monday and charged with a felony for having a shotgun in his truck in the school parking lot."
The reporter didn't bother to dig up any past incidents involving a black teenager. She did discover that school administrators have committed the same "crime" and were never charged.
1. The incidents have nothing to do with each other 2. The circumstances are not even remotely similar 3. One was on school property, the other not 4. One was apparently an accident while the other was deliberate 5. People are absolutely paranoid about improvised explosives after the Boston thing
I completely agree that the kid is getting shafted, but put the damned race cards away.
Slashdot Mirror
For a second, I thought it started out with
"Industrial mind control researchers" :-O
"Punishing consumption hurts the economy because the people who have money are discouraged from using it ..."
It's a different discussion, but the whole "consumption economy" is a fraud. We're soon going to learn that using credit cards to fund our consumption of imported goods is an unsustainable economic model. Saving and organic capital formation, not debt and consumption is our path to prosperity.
"Taxing income does not cause people to work less ..."
I've seen conflicting data on this point. I think it probably works both ways depending on the individual.
One one hand, if you're working 40 hours and pay an average tax rate of 28%, would you work another 10 hours knowing that your marginal tax rate will be 39%? Would it affect your decision to expand your business? If you're deciding whether to work or live on welfare, isn't your decision based after-tax income?
Even If the converse is true, and income tax forces people to work MORE, like requiring most households to have two income earners or forcing someone to take a second job just to get by, isn't that also a negative consequence?
Taxes on wages, salaries and profits at every point in the supply chain directly affect prices. U.S. made goods would definitely be more competitive with no income tax.
Seems like capital gains should be treated separately.
We should ban all INCOME taxes instead.
Q: Why do we tax cigarettes?
A: Because we want people to smoke less.
Q: Why do we tax wages? ... Oh, wait ...
A: Because we want people to wor
Our nation managed to prosper for well over a century without income taxes. When the government created it, they assured the people that this was ONLY going to affect rich people. LOL.
Taxes suck in general, but they show up in retail prices regardless of whether tax is applied at the point of sale or whether taxes are baked in to the sticker price for the item.
If you're going to create disincentives for certain behavior, punish consumption, not work.
Amazon did $60,000M in sales last year.
A business that does $1M in sales is not only "small", it's microscopic and is going to feel the brunt of this law much more than the big guys.
Why do you think Amazon supported the bill? Because they wanted things to be "fair" to brick and mortar establishments?
"That deduction for a kid is less than the deduction you as a person get."
Kids don't create a proportional increase in expenses either. i.e. your household expenses didn't go up by 50% when your family went from 2 people to 3.
The most egregious injustice in the tax system is that people with no kids are forced to pay taxes to fund public schools which they don't use.
There are bad taxes and there are even worse taxes. Applying a tax to income, especially WAGE income, is about the worst idea imaginable because you are punishing value-add productive activity.
Sales taxes are bad too, but consumption is the least productive thing that we do. Given the choice of two bad options, I'll take the option that encourages saving and provides a disincentive for consumption rather than the option that punishes productivity and work.
The whole "consumption-driven economy" is an unsustainable fraud and replacing income taxes with consumption taxes would help cure that insanity too.
As for the "regressive" nature of consumption taxes, there are good ways to address that with pre-bates so that the poor don't end up paying more tax.
http://www.fairtax.org/
I'd say that the "evidence" is overwhelmingly favorable to free market solutions and generally unfavorable to big government and central planning. For-profit businesses provide millions of goods and services with high quality at affordable prices. Competition and innovation tend to drive improvements in quality and put downward pressure on prices.
What marketplace approaches have really been attempted in education? The education cartel fights against any sort of reform that would put market pressures on education. Even when the government isn't operating the schools directly they're distorting the market through loans, grants, subsidies and regulation. A genuine free market education system would never produce so many illiterate high school graduates, and so many college "graduates" with six figures worth of debt and no useful skills.
I know that Wal Mart sells a lot of junk, but when you need mouthwash, a rubber tote bin, a beach towel, clothes hangers, a can of spray paint or any of 10,000 other items, the Wal-Mart solution works just fine. Assuming they managed to get a huge piece of the education market, I think their "product" would be equally acceptable and much less expensive.
"unbreakable addiction to corporate propaganda,"
As opposed to an unbreakable addiction to big government propaganda?
All the "test and metrics" BS in education is just another government bureaucracy thing and you can't run education like a business when there is no penalty for failure.
P.S.
Government corruption is the biggest driver of poverty and wealth inequality in the USA. If government betrayed you so that Wal Mart could be more profitable, it's not Wal Mart's fault.
"Coverity Scan service ... was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security"
If software is a "Homeland Security" issue, shouldn't they be focusing on the proprietary software that most consumers, businesses and government agencies are using?
"Mental Illness" has been a central issue in the current debate about firearms. If the government is going to expand restrictions based on a determination of who is "mentally ill" they shouldn't also have the power to make the definitions.
Anti-gun extremists regularly disparage firearms owners as being "crazy" or "nuts" simply because they happen to own firearms. If someone suggests that the U.S. government is devolving into a tyranny (with good evidence), they inevitably earn the label "paranoid".
If new restrictions on civil liberties are applied to people who are "mentally ill" and government gets to make these decisions, they will just keep expanding their definition of "mental illness" to cover whomever they want to disarm. Sort of like they're doing with "terrorist".
I'm talking about the value proposition to the consumer for a particular good or service. Price AND quality.
"... a race-to-the-bottom for crappy quality at low prices."
As opposed to our current public education system with crappy quality at high and steadily increasing prices? A system that leaves the majority of Americans with no choice but to do business with the local education cartel?
I have a hard time imagining a service like education being scalable and replicable to the degree of a McDs or Wal-Mart, but I guess it's possible. However, it certainly couldn't happen immediately. Remember that at one point, McDonalds actually sold real food and despite their ubiquitous presence, people still have plenty of options.
If government stayed out of it, I think we'd see a thriving marketplace with many small businesses offering a wide range of services. If someone was smart enough to build an education business to the size of a Wal Mart or McDs and got rich doing it, good for them.
"(6) Separation of school and private sector."
How about separation of school and government instead?
Only when government gets involved in something can we observe steadily increasing costs for stagnant or declining quality of product/service. In every other market things get better and/or cheaper, or at the very worst, keep a constant value.
Make the schools private, make the teachers compete for those jobs and make the schools compete to attract students. Bring in the education entrepreneurs.
Get acquainted with your neighbors. Then you won't be so terrified of what they might be building in the basement workshop.
If you want "safe" live in a police state, or maybe just go all the way and spend your life in a padded cell hidden away from the scary world.
I disagree. Rock and roll upset the status quo and challenged then-contemporary societal norms. Some rap music "challenges" norms of humanity. Glamorizing assault, murder, rape, pimping, etc.? I think that's a step beyond the sex and drugs angle in rock music.
Sure, there are interesting, entertaining and profound rap lyrics. I won't condemn a whole style/genre. At the same time, there is plenty of this violent, misogynistic SHIT floating around.
"No federal law has been made to impede the free exercise of religion on marriage."
Married people and single people are treated differently under numerous federal laws. That's a form of discrimination one way or the other. All such laws should be repealed.
"marriage != religion."
Marriage was a religious thing long before it became a government thing.
I think that's what the OP is saying. "Marriage" is not in The Constitution, therefore, the federal government should have absolutely no involvement.
Marriage was a religious thing long before it found its way into law. As you point out, the First Amendment could also be construed to indicate that marriage is none of the government's business.
The individual states, via their state legislatures, ratified The Constitution and created the federal government. The federal government has only those powers which are specifically granted to it by The Constitution.
There is no authorization for the federal government to conduct a military invasion of any sovereign state. If The Constitution had implicitly or explicitly granted this power to the federal government, The Constitution never would have been ratified.
Personal computers running Linux? :-)
I agree with the premise. I'd like to see people wear surgical masks during flu season when they're using mass transit. Americans are just too "cool" for something that practical however.
Maybe something really nasty will come along and change that.
As a group, I don't think Christians or creationists are any more gullible than a random sample of the population.
I'll take a stab in the dark and guess that you were not raised in a household of active religious practitioners who attended religious services and studied religious texts regularly.
In my experience, the people who are able to break away from the belief system that was instilled in them from childhood are an exception.
Problem solved.
If people want their kids to learn that the FSM created the earth and the universe, so be it.
They weren't immediately arrested, but I think it's a little too early to believe that nothing's going to happen. The principal was obviously downplaying it, but he left the door open for what the consequences will be.
The laws regarding unauthorized computer access are mainly federal laws. I'd be concerned that the local federal prosecutor would decide to take an interest.
A little early to determine whether or not sanity will prevail in the aftermath. The principal's statement indicates that the consequences are TBD.
Also, I thought that most of these computer "crimes" were based on federal laws. Would it be up to the school to decide whether or not to pursue criminal charges?
The English teacher obviously gets a pass.
From North Carolina:
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=9087003
"David "Cole" Withrow is a Princeton High School honors student who was arrested Monday and charged with a felony for having a shotgun in his truck in the school parking lot."
The reporter didn't bother to dig up any past incidents involving a black teenager. She did discover that school administrators have committed the same "crime" and were never charged.
The idiocy isn't unique to Florida.
"What exactly is the non-racist explanation"
1. The incidents have nothing to do with each other
2. The circumstances are not even remotely similar
3. One was on school property, the other not
4. One was apparently an accident while the other was deliberate
5. People are absolutely paranoid about improvised explosives after the Boston thing
I completely agree that the kid is getting shafted, but put the damned race cards away.