The presumption that wealthy people spend 100% of their income is invalid. The presumption that wealthy people would not buy clothing, booze, and other valuables in other lower tax jurisdictions is invalid. I've validated since this was posted that raw food would not be excluded. That is a HUGE tax increase for the poor.
The fair tax is on spending- not on INCOME. The wealthy do not spend large portions of their income. Hell- I'm not wealthy and I don't spend large portions of my income.
The "fair tax" is grossly unfair to the middle income and the poor. Once people saw what it really means in practice, it wouldn't survive 30 seconds. It's a massive transfer of taxing from the wealthy to those making less.
The clever but dishonest presentations of the FairTax Book never tell the reader that there are two tax rates that the FairTax is proposing. Under the old income tax, your individual tax rate varied but covered everyone's income (100 percent) minus deductions. Under the FairTax we have two tax rates: 1. A sales tax rate of 30 percent for everyone. 2. An income tax rate that depends entirely on how much you consume.
This next part has what I think is an error but I'm not sure... INCOME plus PREBATE X 12 minus NECESSITIES divided by INCOME mult by 100 equals PERCENT LEFT TAX RATE $30,000 + 2244 - $30,000) divided by 30,000 X 100 = 7.5 92.5% working poor $70,000 + 2244 - $56,000) divided by 70,000 X 100 = 23 77% middle $10M + 2244 - $500,000) divided by 10M X 100 = 95 5% rich
Here's the errors- if raw food is exempted from sales tax like it is now, then these numbers are less accurate. you won't pay taxes on any other taxes you pay (phone tax, property tax)
With these errors corrected, a more realistic estimate is 45% for the working poor, 40% for the middle income, and 4% for the wealthy. --- That being said, it would still be brutal on the poor and way too light on the wealthy. Any tax proposal that results in a lower rate for someone who makes more money is wrong. Trivial case- let's split the $30,000 annual cost of running the federal government equally. Wow- the poor have no income after taxes and many do not make enough to pay their $30,000 annual bill. So taxes MUST be progressive, or we must lower the cost of running the federal government to about $2,000 per citizen (i.e. about 6% of what it is now... which would be absurd-- imagine cutting 94% of the government, military, social programs, even just passing and enforcing laws).
Fairtax effecitvely cuts taxes massively for the wealthy. it has a lot of good press (aka the best propaganda money can buy) combined with a healthy dose of magical thinking.
A real fair tax needs to address the fact that state taxes typically tax in reverse with the lower income paying 10%+ of their income in taxes while the wealthy pay under 1% of their income in taxes.
The best form of a fair tax would be A fixed 20% tax on everyone with no deductions except ignoring all income at and below the poverty line.
The poor and middle class listen to this nonsense and slit their own throats while the wealthy are turning into an oligarchy and new nobility class.
Yes, I bought and brought in my own 64mb of memory (two simms as I recall) and a monitor. Made me much more productive. Can't remember when I got my first "modern" computer- I think bout 2002 when I started java coding.
When I started in 2000- the production computers here had 15" monitors and 32mb of ram. I upgraded mine to 96mb and added a 17" monitor. You couldn't use them as a TV.
Ironically, many had a vertical horizontal resolution than today's monitors. I ran at 1600x1200 instead of today's 1980 x 1080.
I will be buying myself a monitor with 2400x2000 resolution for home use soon. The 1080 restriction is just too painful for working with artwork and documents.
I feel strongly enough about it that I bought my own monitor and brought it in.
Think about the amount of his OWN time and political capital this developer wasted over a $125 monitor from Fry's.
When I started at my current company I brought in my own 17" monitor and 64k of ram. Right now I have my own 24" monitor (the 22" 2nd monitor is below the desk).
Having a second monitor with today's work environment is critical.
The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and *higher birth rates among Hispanic immigrants.*
Among the reasons -- catholic religion, culture desires children more, parents live at home and provide free baby care.
--- More importantly... you say
For example, is the percentage of Hispanics in the southwest US growing because they are having more children, because they are immigrating, or because whites aren't having enough children to keep their population constant?
This doesn't negate my point. Hispanics comprise a group resistant to the birth rate lowering effects of wealth and better personal living standards. As a result, they are coming to dominate the population.
It's true in most populations- the sub populations which resist and have larger families despite the inducements will come to dominate the population.
I'm not judging hispanics or islamics or whatever other subcultures around the world are doing this. I'm just saying that the population growth is not going to stop the way the UN has projected in the past. If anything, as the population gets higher, living standards will start dropping again, and people will start having children at a higher rate again.
Grrr. late. None from 10 careful couples who missed breeding opportunity. about 80 from 80 careful or mixed couples who bred at replacement level. about 20 from 10 *reckless* couples
Similarly, elsewhere the islamic population is coming to dominate populations.
I can't find this on India. China had such a brutal birth control policy it may not be happening there.
The cause for high breeding rate could be personal traits or some social meme (religion, customs, etc.)
Similarly, people who are sloppy about birth control. Think about the personality traits that lead you to be reckless about birth control (high lust, impulsive, substance use combined with sex) and those traits which do not. In one generation, the "reckless" female can have 4 to 5 children who will share those traits with the mother. The reckless male could have many more children. The cautious female and male might have no children.
So after just one generation, you could have (as a pure example) 100 couples that produce 100 children. None from 10 careful couples who missed breeding opportunity. about 80 from 80 careful or mixed couples who bred at replacement level. about 20 from 10 careful couples.
The next iteration- the reckless traits are more common.
I don't think we have had enough time pass yet to conclude people will continue having no children based on a tradeoff for a better life. Very quickly those who value children over a better personal life will die out from the population over multiple iterations.
Of course, then you have the drop in sperm counts from estrogen poisoning-- that may take longer to develop resistance to.
No. SOME parts of the population stop having kids when their income gets too high. OTHER parts are immune to that effect and continue to breed at high rates and are coming to dominate populations which stop having kinds.
But they could make more money with reality, ghost, and wrestling shows.
Look across the universe of cable shows and this is widely true.
I was shocked to tune to "network" TV recently and at 1pm to 4pm on a saturday-- infomercials.
That's the modern business model-- if you can make $99 showing sci-fi but make $100 showing 18 hours of non-sci-fi and 6 hours of sci-fi, then you do it.
It's not just TV stations either. It's everything.
Only black items-- because 70% of customers bought black-- 30 % bought 6 other colors. So just drop the 6 other colors and only sell black.
It's horrific- the incredible loss of choice we are experiencing in every arena for marginal improvements in profitability.
There are already multiple subpopulations who are immune to the lure of modern life style who are breeding at high rates so their cultures will come to dominate the population.
View the modern lifestyle as a really spiffy antibiotic. It is as effective as antibiotics generally. If any part of the population is resistant to the drug, that part grows until it dominates the population.
It's not WWIII. It's that any sizable war will have an increasingly punishing effect on the infrastructure. Each of the major countries could kill billions with a few well placed bombs. They don't have to nuke every city- just destroy the power grid (including wind and solar) with a few well placed EMP blasts- shreds of aluminum foil- etc.
Food is "just in time" now. There's a lot of it- but it's a very delicate operation to ensure it all shows up in the right place at the right time.
As resources grow tighter- at some point, killing will be the only answer some people think works and they'll start. It's history. It's happened for thousands of years. Suddenly we are so special that we'll be different? Don't think so.
Because in less than 50 years we probably have our first major die-off in centuries with a likely world war related to it.
And it's going to take a few hundred years to recover-- if we do recover. This might be it- our moment to get off earth or to end up with either the ruins of a civilization or a civilization so completely overwhelmed by massive overbreeding that it never has the resources to get off the planet again.
They literally believe that developers are interchangeable.
A bad programmer gets as much as a good programmer in pay. The good programmer has to fight with bad programmers (and idiot managers) to get their design in. And it's clear that the jobs are being off-shored and outsourced so the really smart people are choosing other fields.
Wages go up because you can't find workers at the lower wage any more.
Simple manufacturing jobs went from $187 to $350 in one year because they could no longer find workers at $187.
The chinese labor market is getting saturated. So is the indian labor market. This very temporary period where there were a lot of workers available for $6 per day is ending.
The remaining unexploited labor pools are much smaller.
Likewise, as parts of chinese society get good incomes ($10k to $20k) they "bid up" the cost of living for everyone. Going to the doctor is no longer so cheap. Getting Ginseng from your chinese doctor isn't as cheap. Rent within 20 miles of the work area isn't as cheap. (hence foxxcon's dorms - but the cost of maintaining the dorms is going up- we went through similar stages in the US).
World labor costs will head towards equal. Our stagnate and even decline-- theirs skyrocket.
Having put in multiple 70 hour weeks lately (and having co-workers talk about their 80 hour weeks) it seems like we are losing that battle.
But their wages are going up 20% to 100% per year. Given the very low starting bases, it will be about 8 years before it just doesn't make sense to make a lot of products there and then ship them over here.
If they were smart, they would destroy large amounts of expensive equipment on their way out. That would change things very quickly. Just offing themselves is only embarrassing.
And of course this assumes they can't get a job somewhere else (because that would be the truly smart thing to do).
This entire thing makes me a little embarrassed to use an Iphone tho it is required by work. But it says that Apple is fairly evil. This should have been resolved before anyone died.
As I sit here looking at the note with mine I had to write after I was required to change my password about 5 times in 30 days and the last change entirely invalidated my existing secure scheme.
Natural born doesn't work that way. If your parents are both citizens, it doesn't matter.
I'm not sure if one of your parents is a citizen and the other is not and you are born out of the country but I am sure the presidential clause was intended to prevent Arnold Schwarzenegger from becoming president because in an alternate reality he did and it turned out very badly so time travelers went back to 1747 and planted the idea in Franklin's head, subtly altering the the stream.
I.e. the clause is to prevent naturalized citizens- not to require that the children of citizens be born in the continental U.S.
To get even weirder, I'm not sure what happens if you are born in an area which becomes a territory and then becomes a state-- but I suspect you are treated as natural born.
Yup. Seen this many times in my own company. Talked about risks but until there was a break of some kind, it was ignored.
To be fair- they may hear about 100's of risks and how do they prioritize? Do they spend millions addressing risks which were over-ranked by their associates? You could go bankrupt that way and still get hit by what you thought was a lower priority risk that you put later in the chain.
It's not right- but it's why they do it.
FYI (This is why they ask companies like Gartner and Gartner says, "This is a risk" or "Not a risk yet" and they go with that. Gartner has wider industry experience than one company- is maybe 10% more likely to be correct and 90% likely to have about the same level of clue they do-- but their butts are covered legally.)
Slashdot Mirror
The presumption that wealthy people spend 100% of their income is invalid.
The presumption that wealthy people would not buy clothing, booze, and other valuables in other lower tax jurisdictions is invalid.
I've validated since this was posted that raw food would not be excluded. That is a HUGE tax increase for the poor.
The fair tax is on spending- not on INCOME. The wealthy do not spend large portions of their income. Hell- I'm not wealthy and I don't spend large portions of my income.
The "fair tax" is grossly unfair to the middle income and the poor. Once people saw what it really means in practice, it wouldn't survive 30 seconds. It's a massive transfer of taxing from the wealthy to those making less.
Here...
http://fairtaxfraud.com/fair.asp
The clever but dishonest presentations of the FairTax Book never tell the reader that there are two tax rates that the FairTax is proposing. Under the old income tax, your individual tax rate varied but covered everyone's income (100 percent) minus deductions. Under the FairTax we have two tax rates: 1. A sales tax rate of 30 percent for everyone. 2. An income tax rate that depends entirely on how much you consume.
This next part has what I think is an error but I'm not sure...
INCOME plus PREBATE X 12 minus NECESSITIES divided by INCOME mult by 100 equals PERCENT LEFT TAX RATE
$30,000 + 2244 - $30,000) divided by 30,000 X 100 = 7.5 92.5% working poor
$70,000 + 2244 - $56,000) divided by 70,000 X 100 = 23 77% middle
$10M + 2244 - $500,000) divided by 10M X 100 = 95 5% rich
Here's the errors-
if raw food is exempted from sales tax like it is now, then these numbers are less accurate.
you won't pay taxes on any other taxes you pay (phone tax, property tax)
With these errors corrected, a more realistic estimate is 45% for the working poor, 40% for the middle income, and 4% for the wealthy.
---
That being said, it would still be brutal on the poor and way too light on the wealthy. Any tax proposal that results in a lower rate for someone who makes more money is wrong. Trivial case- let's split the $30,000 annual cost of running the federal government equally. Wow- the poor have no income after taxes and many do not make enough to pay their $30,000 annual bill. So taxes MUST be progressive, or we must lower the cost of running the federal government to about $2,000 per citizen (i.e. about 6% of what it is now... which would be absurd-- imagine cutting 94% of the government, military, social programs, even just passing and enforcing laws).
You must have children. While not as smart as a 5th grader, it was probably less stupid than something a 3rd grader might write.
Fairtax effecitvely cuts taxes massively for the wealthy. it has a lot of good press (aka the best propaganda money can buy) combined with a healthy dose of magical thinking.
A real fair tax needs to address the fact that state taxes typically tax in reverse with the lower income paying 10%+ of their income in taxes while the wealthy pay under 1% of their income in taxes.
The best form of a fair tax would be
A fixed 20% tax on everyone with no deductions except ignoring all income at and below the poverty line.
The poor and middle class listen to this nonsense and slit their own throats while the wealthy are turning into an oligarchy and new nobility class.
Ahh! My bad.
Yes, I bought and brought in my own 64mb of memory (two simms as I recall) and a monitor. Made me much more productive. Can't remember when I got my first "modern" computer- I think bout 2002 when I started java coding.
Perhaps you know it as a 17 inch CRT.
When I started in 2000- the production computers here had 15" monitors and 32mb of ram. I upgraded mine to 96mb and added a 17" monitor. You couldn't use them as a TV.
Ironically, many had a vertical horizontal resolution than today's monitors. I ran at 1600x1200 instead of today's 1980 x 1080.
I will be buying myself a monitor with 2400x2000 resolution for home use soon. The 1080 restriction is just too painful for working with artwork and documents.
I feel strongly enough about it that I bought my own monitor and brought it in.
Think about the amount of his OWN time and political capital this developer wasted over a $125 monitor from Fry's.
When I started at my current company I brought in my own 17" monitor and 64k of ram. Right now I have my own 24" monitor (the 22" 2nd monitor is below the desk).
Having a second monitor with today's work environment is critical.
Go to a friends house, ask some of their favorite films or TV shows and give them 4 stars for a while in your profile.
There is a problem that your early filtering may prevent you from seeing things that you would like later and you have to shake things up.
Interesting concept. I think it has validity.
Sigh...
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0079.pdf
Double the birth rate of whites.
About 150% the birth rate of blacks
http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-04/news/29509479_1_world-population-population-division-wealthy-western-nations
The United States is growing faster than many rich countries, largely because of high immigration and *higher birth rates among Hispanic immigrants.*
Among the reasons -- catholic religion, culture desires children more, parents live at home and provide free baby care.
---
More importantly... you say
For example, is the percentage of Hispanics in the southwest US growing because they are having more children, because they are immigrating, or because whites aren't having enough children to keep their population constant?
This doesn't negate my point. Hispanics comprise a group resistant to the birth rate lowering effects of wealth and better personal living standards. As a result, they are coming to dominate the population.
It's true in most populations- the sub populations which resist and have larger families despite the inducements will come to dominate the population.
I'm not judging hispanics or islamics or whatever other subcultures around the world are doing this. I'm just saying that the population growth is not going to stop the way the UN has projected in the past. If anything, as the population gets higher, living standards will start dropping again, and people will start having children at a higher rate again.
Grrr. late.
None from 10 careful couples who missed breeding opportunity.
about 80 from 80 careful or mixed couples who bred at replacement level.
about 20 from 10 *reckless* couples
For example...
Most of southwest USA will be hispanic within 20 years. It's a growing population.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/22479
* Teen Birth Rate Drops in U.S., but Not for Hispanics
and
http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
* In fact, the Hispanic-origin population would contribute 32 percent of the Nation's population growth from 1990 to 2000, 39 percent from 2000 to 2010, 45 percent from 2010 to 2030, and 60 percent from 2030 to 2050.
Similarly, elsewhere the islamic population is coming to dominate populations.
I can't find this on India.
China had such a brutal birth control policy it may not be happening there.
The cause for high breeding rate could be personal traits or some social meme (religion, customs, etc.)
Similarly, people who are sloppy about birth control.
Think about the personality traits that lead you to be reckless about birth control (high lust, impulsive, substance use combined with sex) and those traits which do not.
In one generation, the "reckless" female can have 4 to 5 children who will share those traits with the mother. The reckless male could have many more children.
The cautious female and male might have no children.
So after just one generation, you could have (as a pure example) 100 couples that produce 100 children.
None from 10 careful couples who missed breeding opportunity.
about 80 from 80 careful or mixed couples who bred at replacement level.
about 20 from 10 careful couples.
The next iteration- the reckless traits are more common.
I don't think we have had enough time pass yet to conclude people will continue having no children based on a tradeoff for a better life. Very quickly those who value children over a better personal life will die out from the population over multiple iterations.
Of course, then you have the drop in sperm counts from estrogen poisoning-- that may take longer to develop resistance to.
No.
SOME parts of the population stop having kids when their income gets too high.
OTHER parts are immune to that effect and continue to breed at high rates and are coming to dominate populations which stop having kinds.
They could make money on sci-fi.
But they could make more money with reality, ghost, and wrestling shows.
Look across the universe of cable shows and this is widely true.
I was shocked to tune to "network" TV recently and at 1pm to 4pm on a saturday-- infomercials.
That's the modern business model-- if you can make $99 showing sci-fi but make $100 showing 18 hours of non-sci-fi and 6 hours of sci-fi, then you do it.
It's not just TV stations either. It's everything.
Only black items-- because 70% of customers bought black-- 30 % bought 6 other colors. So just drop the 6 other colors and only sell black.
It's horrific- the incredible loss of choice we are experiencing in every arena for marginal improvements in profitability.
The overpopulation problem is unstoppable.
There are already multiple subpopulations who are immune to the lure of modern life style who are breeding at high rates so their cultures will come to dominate the population.
View the modern lifestyle as a really spiffy antibiotic. It is as effective as antibiotics generally. If any part of the population is resistant to the drug, that part grows until it dominates the population.
It's not WWIII. It's that any sizable war will have an increasingly punishing effect on the infrastructure. Each of the major countries could kill billions with a few well placed bombs. They don't have to nuke every city- just destroy the power grid (including wind and solar) with a few well placed EMP blasts- shreds of aluminum foil- etc.
Food is "just in time" now. There's a lot of it- but it's a very delicate operation to ensure it all shows up in the right place at the right time.
As resources grow tighter- at some point, killing will be the only answer some people think works and they'll start. It's history. It's happened for thousands of years. Suddenly we are so special that we'll be different? Don't think so.
I agree with your basic point that if we don't do ourselves in-- then we are at the start of the window for an external event to do us in.
Which is why we should be putting more energy into asteriods (extinction) vs global warming (very annoying but not extinction level).
Because in less than 50 years we probably have our first major die-off in centuries with a likely world war related to it.
And it's going to take a few hundred years to recover-- if we do recover. This might be it- our moment to get off earth or to end up with either the ruins of a civilization or a civilization so completely overwhelmed by massive overbreeding that it never has the resources to get off the planet again.
They literally believe that developers are interchangeable.
A bad programmer gets as much as a good programmer in pay. The good programmer has to fight with bad programmers (and idiot managers) to get their design in. And it's clear that the jobs are being off-shored and outsourced so the really smart people are choosing other fields.
Wages go up because you can't find workers at the lower wage any more.
Simple manufacturing jobs went from $187 to $350 in one year because they could no longer find workers at $187.
The chinese labor market is getting saturated. So is the indian labor market. This very temporary period where there were a lot of workers available for $6 per day is ending.
The remaining unexploited labor pools are much smaller.
Likewise, as parts of chinese society get good incomes ($10k to $20k) they "bid up" the cost of living for everyone. Going to the doctor is no longer so cheap. Getting Ginseng from your chinese doctor isn't as cheap. Rent within 20 miles of the work area isn't as cheap. (hence foxxcon's dorms - but the cost of maintaining the dorms is going up- we went through similar stages in the US).
World labor costs will head towards equal. Our stagnate and even decline-- theirs skyrocket.
Having put in multiple 70 hour weeks lately (and having co-workers talk about their 80 hour weeks) it seems like we are losing that battle.
But their wages are going up 20% to 100% per year. Given the very low starting bases, it will be about 8 years before it just doesn't make sense to make a lot of products there and then ship them over here.
If they were smart, they would destroy large amounts of expensive equipment on their way out. That would change things very quickly. Just offing themselves is only embarrassing.
And of course this assumes they can't get a job somewhere else (because that would be the truly smart thing to do).
This entire thing makes me a little embarrassed to use an Iphone tho it is required by work. But it says that Apple is fairly evil. This should have been resolved before anyone died.
Oh absolutely.
In fact, I hear he started monologuing during the fight. Definitely an evil mastermind.
So insightful.
As I sit here looking at the note with mine I had to write after I was required to change my password about 5 times in 30 days and the last change entirely invalidated my existing secure scheme.
Natural born doesn't work that way.
If your parents are both citizens, it doesn't matter.
I'm not sure if one of your parents is a citizen and the other is not and you are born out of the country but I am sure the presidential clause was intended to prevent Arnold Schwarzenegger from becoming president because in an alternate reality he did and it turned out very badly so time travelers went back to 1747 and planted the idea in Franklin's head, subtly altering the the stream.
I.e. the clause is to prevent naturalized citizens- not to require that the children of citizens be born in the continental U.S.
To get even weirder, I'm not sure what happens if you are born in an area which becomes a territory and then becomes a state-- but I suspect you are treated as natural born.
Yup. Seen this many times in my own company.
Talked about risks but until there was a break of some kind, it was ignored.
To be fair- they may hear about 100's of risks and how do they prioritize? Do they spend millions addressing risks which were over-ranked by their associates? You could go bankrupt that way and still get hit by what you thought was a lower priority risk that you put later in the chain.
It's not right- but it's why they do it.
FYI (This is why they ask companies like Gartner and Gartner says, "This is a risk" or "Not a risk yet" and they go with that. Gartner has wider industry experience than one company- is maybe 10% more likely to be correct and 90% likely to have about the same level of clue they do-- but their butts are covered legally.)
I bet Bin Laden regrets allowing his iPhone app to "use his current location".
Not my joke. Saw it on Yahoo. Had to share it.