No idea how things have gone since I finished my tour, but back in 2000 the USMC was unloading all internal IT knowledge and moving to consultants. If the Airforce made the same move, this could entirely be due to a private corporation that our militarty is dependent on keeping quiet to protect their contract and having an individual leak the story to the press.
That would explain why the DoD had no idea about it until the story was published.
The federal constitution trumps all else. Even state laws. The constitution puts a limit on the powers of the government. In this case, the 4th Amendment basically states that the government can NOT search you, your house, papers, or effects with out cause and that warrants must be granted by Judges. Over the years there have been a number of court cases that have refined the specifics of the amendment, allowing officers to perform weapon searches, etc...
These laws will >hopefully be overturned if they ever get infront of the Supreme Court as it seems like a direct violation of the 4th Amendment.
Not that I know if he was correct or not, but asking a police officer for legal advice is akin to asking a blind man for a description of the Mona Lisa.
Most of my interactions with police officers have left me with the impression that in terms of legal knowledge, they are laymen who took a symester of criminal law at the local community college.
depending on the freequency you can fit more data. So they could be saying that reallocating freequencies to take advantage of new technology that we could effectively get 24 times as much bandwidth as we currently have. But yeah, the whole thing seems conviluted.
On the other hand, we are forced to pay for Healthcare of others. It's already a socialized system. No one will be turned away from an emergency room. And our payments are bloated to cover the loss from uninsured patients and set-cost payments (medicare).
So if I'm already forced to subsidize everyone else, why shouldn't they be forced to either subsidize along with me (the socially responsible choice) or to pay a penalty, to atleast put some skin in the game.
It is unfortunate that we don't have much for non-profit or a government option. Because I'm getting pretty sick of paying 20 cents on the dollar to pay Cigna's CEO's pay check while getting raked for $20k+ a year in health care expenses.
I don't buy that excuse. The MSM makes news cycles about the most inane of things. Heck, we gave up 2 weeks of news cycles over a family's debate over Cindy Shehan's will and death. It turned a tiny local event that only effected 1 person into a national debate on every damn channel.
This is a national debate, being acted out in a local protest, and there's not a wiff to be heard about it. A lot of folks are saying "they don't even know what they're protestings for" Which may be, or may not be. I don't know, I'm not there and this blog reference and a couple of people sharing stuff on face book is about the extent of coverage that I've seen.
Maybe if we got some decent media coverage of the protest we would know what it is they are protesting. Maybe if more people knew about it, more people would attend. Maybe if the media industry put more value of significant social issues than over hyped rediculousness we wouldn't be having this discussion now;)
Many parts of the country have different rates for electricity at different points in time.
You could for instance, charge your car over night at a cheap rate, and then on a day when you aren't traveling, use the juice from the car during the day when the rate is higher, or when the power goes out.
This is true, but they are generally tied to each other.
No, they aren't. Stock value is only tied to stock holders' desire to retain their stock, and non-owners to want to buy their stock.
Having low capital is one way to make less owners want to hold on to their stock and would be buyers less interested in purchasing it, but it is far from the only means.
Market instability, economic issues, significant real world events, etc... will all cause a stock to lose value even as the company it is part of is performing well above expectations.
Is Netflix about to invest $900M on 30 movies?
Netflix has roughly 25M customers paying a minimum of $10 a month. If they paid for nothing else, they could amort out that $900M and have it paid off in 4 months.
So yeah, they could. Odds are though, that they'll license select movies for a period of time. $120M for 3-4 movies over a 6-12 month period. At the end of which, they'll switch to a different set of movies for another 6-12 months.
For a company with a gross revenue of ~$3 Billion, that would work out to be about 4-8% of their revenue stream.
Two things: First - That thing is BAD ASS!!! I want one
Second - That patent appears pretty specific and applies to one precise implementation of dual-rotor elevation control. The MS patent appears much more vague, effectively allowing them to patent ALL such devices.
If the flying car patent did not have the rotors drawn in, and instead had black boxes labeled "lift providing system here", I would be just as irate with it.
This sounds pretty much identical to the tricorders, especially the ones used by the medics that had a small wireless module that they could use for scanning specific points.
It's often said that Life immitates Art, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't meant to mean Corporations patent sci-fi entertainment creations.
Or does someone have a patent on flying cars and warp engines?
One would assume that a team of scientist having the time to run the experiment 15,000 times, would have had the thought to verify the measuring devices.
Similar to measuring the weight of a bowl, then the weight of a bowl filled with salad. You are only charged for the weight of the salad. Or are we suggesting that our world's top scientists are no smarter than the lunch lady in the cafateria?
Not that I'm fully convinced that there isn't some other possible explaination, but it seems like these guys should be bright enough to identify and calc out the consistent timing losses due to things such as wiring delays.
You are correct, it was a bad guess on my part and I should have continued investigating before posting it.
Although as I'm reading more reports on the proposal, I think it's becoming less of an issue, as that $450B also appears include the rollback of the unearned income tax breaks that Bush put into play. If that is true, those tax changes likely have far more impact on the $450B than the changes to the income tax brackets.
To look at it another way though, the top 1% controls roughly 35% of the wealth in the country. Which could be correlated to about $5T of the GDP. So to get $448B out of them would require an effective tax hike of about 9%. Seeing as how over the last 10 years they've been enjoying a 4% income tax cut and a 15% unearned income tax cut, that doesn't seem out of line at all.
You know, if you're going to throw out numbers, you should pick accurate ones. The million dollar + income tax bracket change is only expected to generate $448B, 1/3rd of the amount you are talking about.
Which using your own numbers means taxing people ~$333k. I don't have a good number for "average" anual income of the top 1.5% of Americans, but let us supose that is works out to be on the order of $10 million.
And that turns out to be a net increase of... 3%
OMG!!! A 3% tax increase on people's income OVER a million dollars!!! The poor subjegated people that will be effected! How will they ever life with their rights and liberties being stripped away so!
Come on, get real, this is an insignificant change to the individuals it effects, and it directly benefits the other 98.5% of the population. More so, it works against the trend of stripping the liberties of the lower 98.5% to benefit the uppser 1.5%.
if you did not have their capital to use for your "work" you would have virtually no income.
I disagree. Having a credit market definately eases growth, but it is not an absolutely manditory asset. Growth will occur with out it, it will just be slower and have additional and different issues.
I'm not saying that we should be taxing everyone down to some sort of commie level of suckiture. There is a middle ground between communism and oligarchy. We don't have to march in lock-step to one or the other.
If you let the government take if from them, that wealth will be wasted.
I also disagree with this premise. Some of it will be wasted, just as the original corporation would have wasted some portion. Heck, my company just wasted something between $50,000-$100,000 on sending a full team of peopole to Ireland for a requirements debate on something that might impact us for $2000 worth of labor. The government holds no monopoly on waste.
Additionally, some government programs generate far more wealth than they costs. The two biggies IMO: Transportation and Education. I benefit from both of those investments to a huge amount every day. Every one of my co-workers, my family, and my friends was educated through either public schools or via federally/state subsidized education programs. These are people I depend on daily to provide me with goods, services, and companionship. With out their educational backgrounds, it would be impossible for me to do my job, to contribute to society, or to collect my paycheck.
Anything else is immoral, you have no right claim what belongs to another.
Yet you claim rights to roads that I have paid for, you claim rights to schools I have funded, you claim rights to hospitals, etc...
The fact that the wealth use more public resources is automatically accounted for in a pure sales tax system because they do more consumption
Arguably true, but the consistent outcome of regressive taxation is a consolidation of wealth, which leads to a reduction in liberties of those who are on the losing end.
So which is more imoral: to tax a person who earns more in a way that won't significantly impact their liberties, or to set up a taxation system that explicitly leads to a reduction of liberties of the majority of the population?
If Wealth is finite, you are absolutely right. If it's something that can grow and expand (and, yes, shrink), your premise is flawed.
I would not say that wealth is finite, but I will say that the anual growth of wealth is finite.
And if you look back over the last 10 years or so, about 98% of that wealth growth has gone to the top 10% of the nation, and the other 2% has gone to the other 90%.
I would consider the loss of opportunity and liberty to be the greatest threats to the continuation of society AS WE KNOW IT.
I would agree. But if you look at the functional result of consolidation of wealth, that is EXACTLY what we see. As wealth consolidates, those that are on the losing end are put into a position where they are significantly less able to ever aquire more wealth. Being so disadvantaged, they will be less likely to have the oportunity to go to college, to get a good public education, to get proactive health care, they will be more likely to be incarcerated, etc... They will never enjoy the opportunities or liberties of those who have benefited from the consolidation of wealth.
And if we look at the functional impact of those who would have had more wealth consolidated to them if we move to more progressive taxation, having a person who is earning over $1 million per year pay an additional 3% taxation on their income over $1 million, will have a negligable impact on their ability to educate their children, purchase property, travel, eat well, aquire top rate medical care, etc...
So my point is that a progressive tax system has a negligable impact on the liberties of those at the top, where as flat tax systems are inherently regressive and have a significant impact on the liberties of those at the bottom.
Heh, if I had all the answers, I wouldn't be sitting here posting on/. I'd be off trying to implement them and to lead the US back to a world leader status.
From my understanding though, specifically following the lessons learned in Japan's "Lost Decade" and the US post WWII, I would say that we should be focusing a LOT more on education.
Innovation is what leads nations out of economic slumps. Post WWII the US poured tons of money into sending war vets to college. We transitioned over a few years to a nation with some of the highest rates of post-secondary education in the world, and as a result enjoyed decades of leadership in innovation, economic growth, and quality of life.
And Japan's recovery coming out of the 90's was significantly fueled by it's advances in technology and related exports. All of which was underpinned by their substantial investment in education.
So now we're looking at the nation, we're running a 6% production/capacity gap, which means there is no drive, even with tax cuts, for companies to hire. And we have 9% unemployment, many of those workers are trained for jobs that no longer exist.
So IMO, we sould work with the lessons we've learned: get the unemployed educated and retrained for growing fields with job demand. Pushing blue-sky R&D projects to open the doors to new technological leadership. And to refine the IP laws of this country to open up competition and innovation.
Those would be the areas that I would focus spending on. It's the long game. It wouldn't get us out of our current stagnation for a few years. But when the benefits begin coming in, they will be far more benefitial than the current crop of tax cuts that the GOP is demanding.
If you live paycheck to paycheck, effectively you pay 5.5% in taxes assuming you do nothing but spend your money on taxable goods.
If you do not live paycheck to paycheck, you only pay that 5.5% tax on the money you spent on taxable goods.
For low-income individuals, a significantly larger portion of their expenditures are applicable for sales tax, meaning that 5.5% tax may wind up being 4%+ of their annual income. Where as an individual who is exceptionally wealthy will not be spending a significant amount of their income on taxable goods. So that 5.5% will only be about 1% of their income.
By their very nature, consumption taxes are regressive, not progressive. Poor people almost universally pay a higher rate on consumption taxes than rich people.
The same can be said for income taxes. Individuals like Buffet, Jobs, Syrge, etc... who take $1 salaries are effectively scamming the tax system. They pay into unemployment insurance, social security, payroll taxes, etc... at a $1 income level. Meaning THEY AREN'T PAYING INCOME TAXES EITHER! They get the vast majorty of their anual pay from unerned income. Dividens, stock bonuses, trades, etc...
And THAT is the huge tax cut that was supose to expire. The piddly 3% change to the top marginal INCOME TAX is nothing, the 15% cut to the top marginal unearned income tax is where the resistance is coming from.
It's also used to tax non-residents. If all government revenue came from a bill presented to every legal resident, then all tourists, visitors, and illegal resident would be enjoying their time in the US completely tax free.
But, earning money is not a side affect of society, it is the primary purpose of society to provide order and mechanisms for economic growth
No, it isn't. The primary purpose of society is to continue the existance of the society. Economic growth is a result of our current growth rates and stability of social interactions. Consolidation of wealth however leads to threats to the continuation of society as we know it. The challenge though, is that many of those with wealth believe they would benefit more from a new society in which more wealth was consolidated. So they can use their wealth to influence people who aren't in their wealth class to believe that there isn't a threat to social stability.
It is a masterful art, but it will not lead to a better America.
That isn't to say that we need to get all commie and make everyone equal. A progressive tax program is hardly full on commie though.
And to counter your political jab: We all know what happens when Republicans propose tax cuts and spending cuts. Taxes decrease on the rich and the poor die in wars.:P
Keeping the money that you earned and worked for is cheat
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH. LOL.
The vast majority of this income in this range is "Unearned Income." People aren't earning nor working for multi-million dollar annual incomes, they are enjoying the benefits of others work by collecting dividens and stock profits.
It's been a while since I learned about Alaska, but don't they have significant methane trapped in peat moss? That could be a good tie in to the methanole fuel.
Another option would be to get a miniaturized steam engine. People may think they are antiquated, but steam is what generates almost all of the electricity in this country. The heat can come from geo-thermal, nuclear, solar salts, coal, etc... but it all does the same thing: boil water.
That's just an accounting trick. If I give you a dollar, but then you spend the dollar and replace it with a piece of paper that says, "I owe me $1", it doesn't change the fact that you spent the dollar and have nothing to show for it but a piece of paper.
Are you suggesting that the concept of debt doesn't exist? That there is only having money and spending money?
I'm pretty sure my bank doesn't consider their money "spent" as soon as they cut me a loan. Just as I'm sure the SSI trust administrators don't consider their funds "spent" as soon as Congress borrows from it under contract with interest.
Social Security should not have been allowed to have "surplus".
I think it's save planning. We know that the population is growing, and we know that the boomers are going to create an increase in SS spending, so I see no issue with planning ahead, running a surplus when times are good, and folloing your system of automatic adjustments as a base line.
I like the idea of your proposed theory, but I fear the practical application of it. I think it could be used quite easily as leverage to dismantle SS all together. I also fear how the system would opperate in a down-turned economy such as now. With more people than ever depending on SS thanks to the economic fallout and unemployment, you would have to raise payroll taxes significantly to keep up. To make up for the larger demand and the lower number of workers.
It's nice in theory, but there would be no safety net and it would quickly turn into deficit spending and point pointing to it and saying "This is part of the budget!!" instead of being as we both wish, independent.
That's lunacy... We're talking about IT work, not heavy lifting and manufacturing. An IT person in their 40's still has 20+ years to "grow into the position".
Slashdot Mirror
No idea how things have gone since I finished my tour, but back in 2000 the USMC was unloading all internal IT knowledge and moving to consultants. If the Airforce made the same move, this could entirely be due to a private corporation that our militarty is dependent on keeping quiet to protect their contract and having an individual leak the story to the press.
That would explain why the DoD had no idea about it until the story was published.
-Rick
Are you trying to justify your post to me? Or to yourself?
-Rick
Heh, Ad Homnim is so much easier than debating the merits, isn't it?
-Rick
The federal constitution trumps all else. Even state laws. The constitution puts a limit on the powers of the government. In this case, the 4th Amendment basically states that the government can NOT search you, your house, papers, or effects with out cause and that warrants must be granted by Judges. Over the years there have been a number of court cases that have refined the specifics of the amendment, allowing officers to perform weapon searches, etc...
These laws will >hopefully be overturned if they ever get infront of the Supreme Court as it seems like a direct violation of the 4th Amendment.
-Rick
Not that I know if he was correct or not, but asking a police officer for legal advice is akin to asking a blind man for a description of the Mona Lisa.
Most of my interactions with police officers have left me with the impression that in terms of legal knowledge, they are laymen who took a symester of criminal law at the local community college.
-Rick
depending on the freequency you can fit more data. So they could be saying that reallocating freequencies to take advantage of new technology that we could effectively get 24 times as much bandwidth as we currently have. But yeah, the whole thing seems conviluted.
-Rick
On the other hand, we are forced to pay for Healthcare of others. It's already a socialized system. No one will be turned away from an emergency room. And our payments are bloated to cover the loss from uninsured patients and set-cost payments (medicare).
So if I'm already forced to subsidize everyone else, why shouldn't they be forced to either subsidize along with me (the socially responsible choice) or to pay a penalty, to atleast put some skin in the game.
It is unfortunate that we don't have much for non-profit or a government option. Because I'm getting pretty sick of paying 20 cents on the dollar to pay Cigna's CEO's pay check while getting raked for $20k+ a year in health care expenses.
-Rick
I don't buy that excuse. The MSM makes news cycles about the most inane of things. Heck, we gave up 2 weeks of news cycles over a family's debate over Cindy Shehan's will and death. It turned a tiny local event that only effected 1 person into a national debate on every damn channel.
This is a national debate, being acted out in a local protest, and there's not a wiff to be heard about it. A lot of folks are saying "they don't even know what they're protestings for" Which may be, or may not be. I don't know, I'm not there and this blog reference and a couple of people sharing stuff on face book is about the extent of coverage that I've seen.
Maybe if we got some decent media coverage of the protest we would know what it is they are protesting. Maybe if more people knew about it, more people would attend. Maybe if the media industry put more value of significant social issues than over hyped rediculousness we wouldn't be having this discussion now ;)
-Rick
Many parts of the country have different rates for electricity at different points in time.
You could for instance, charge your car over night at a cheap rate, and then on a day when you aren't traveling, use the juice from the car during the day when the rate is higher, or when the power goes out.
-Rick
This is true, but they are generally tied to each other.
No, they aren't. Stock value is only tied to stock holders' desire to retain their stock, and non-owners to want to buy their stock.
Having low capital is one way to make less owners want to hold on to their stock and would be buyers less interested in purchasing it, but it is far from the only means.
Market instability, economic issues, significant real world events, etc... will all cause a stock to lose value even as the company it is part of is performing well above expectations.
Is Netflix about to invest $900M on 30 movies?
Netflix has roughly 25M customers paying a minimum of $10 a month. If they paid for nothing else, they could amort out that $900M and have it paid off in 4 months.
So yeah, they could. Odds are though, that they'll license select movies for a period of time. $120M for 3-4 movies over a 6-12 month period. At the end of which, they'll switch to a different set of movies for another 6-12 months.
For a company with a gross revenue of ~$3 Billion, that would work out to be about 4-8% of their revenue stream.
-Rick
Two things:
First - That thing is BAD ASS!!! I want one
Second - That patent appears pretty specific and applies to one precise implementation of dual-rotor elevation control. The MS patent appears much more vague, effectively allowing them to patent ALL such devices.
If the flying car patent did not have the rotors drawn in, and instead had black boxes labeled "lift providing system here", I would be just as irate with it.
-Rick
This sounds pretty much identical to the tricorders, especially the ones used by the medics that had a small wireless module that they could use for scanning specific points.
It's often said that Life immitates Art, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't meant to mean Corporations patent sci-fi entertainment creations.
Or does someone have a patent on flying cars and warp engines?
-Rick
One would assume that a team of scientist having the time to run the experiment 15,000 times, would have had the thought to verify the measuring devices.
Similar to measuring the weight of a bowl, then the weight of a bowl filled with salad. You are only charged for the weight of the salad. Or are we suggesting that our world's top scientists are no smarter than the lunch lady in the cafateria?
Not that I'm fully convinced that there isn't some other possible explaination, but it seems like these guys should be bright enough to identify and calc out the consistent timing losses due to things such as wiring delays.
-Rick
You are correct, it was a bad guess on my part and I should have continued investigating before posting it.
Although as I'm reading more reports on the proposal, I think it's becoming less of an issue, as that $450B also appears include the rollback of the unearned income tax breaks that Bush put into play. If that is true, those tax changes likely have far more impact on the $450B than the changes to the income tax brackets.
To look at it another way though, the top 1% controls roughly 35% of the wealth in the country. Which could be correlated to about $5T of the GDP. So to get $448B out of them would require an effective tax hike of about 9%. Seeing as how over the last 10 years they've been enjoying a 4% income tax cut and a 15% unearned income tax cut, that doesn't seem out of line at all.
-Rick
You know, if you're going to throw out numbers, you should pick accurate ones. The million dollar + income tax bracket change is only expected to generate $448B, 1/3rd of the amount you are talking about.
Which using your own numbers means taxing people ~$333k. I don't have a good number for "average" anual income of the top 1.5% of Americans, but let us supose that is works out to be on the order of $10 million.
And that turns out to be a net increase of... 3%
OMG!!! A 3% tax increase on people's income OVER a million dollars!!! The poor subjegated people that will be effected! How will they ever life with their rights and liberties being stripped away so!
Come on, get real, this is an insignificant change to the individuals it effects, and it directly benefits the other 98.5% of the population. More so, it works against the trend of stripping the liberties of the lower 98.5% to benefit the uppser 1.5%.
-Rick
if you did not have their capital to use for your "work" you would have virtually no income.
I disagree. Having a credit market definately eases growth, but it is not an absolutely manditory asset. Growth will occur with out it, it will just be slower and have additional and different issues.
I'm not saying that we should be taxing everyone down to some sort of commie level of suckiture. There is a middle ground between communism and oligarchy. We don't have to march in lock-step to one or the other.
If you let the government take if from them, that wealth will be wasted.
I also disagree with this premise. Some of it will be wasted, just as the original corporation would have wasted some portion. Heck, my company just wasted something between $50,000-$100,000 on sending a full team of peopole to Ireland for a requirements debate on something that might impact us for $2000 worth of labor. The government holds no monopoly on waste.
Additionally, some government programs generate far more wealth than they costs. The two biggies IMO: Transportation and Education. I benefit from both of those investments to a huge amount every day. Every one of my co-workers, my family, and my friends was educated through either public schools or via federally/state subsidized education programs. These are people I depend on daily to provide me with goods, services, and companionship. With out their educational backgrounds, it would be impossible for me to do my job, to contribute to society, or to collect my paycheck.
Anything else is immoral, you have no right claim what belongs to another.
Yet you claim rights to roads that I have paid for, you claim rights to schools I have funded, you claim rights to hospitals, etc...
The fact that the wealth use more public resources is automatically accounted for in a pure sales tax system because they do more consumption
Arguably true, but the consistent outcome of regressive taxation is a consolidation of wealth, which leads to a reduction in liberties of those who are on the losing end.
So which is more imoral: to tax a person who earns more in a way that won't significantly impact their liberties, or to set up a taxation system that explicitly leads to a reduction of liberties of the majority of the population?
-Rick
If Wealth is finite, you are absolutely right. If it's something that can grow and expand (and, yes, shrink), your premise is flawed.
I would not say that wealth is finite, but I will say that the anual growth of wealth is finite.
And if you look back over the last 10 years or so, about 98% of that wealth growth has gone to the top 10% of the nation, and the other 2% has gone to the other 90%.
I would consider the loss of opportunity and liberty to be the greatest threats to the continuation of society AS WE KNOW IT.
I would agree. But if you look at the functional result of consolidation of wealth, that is EXACTLY what we see. As wealth consolidates, those that are on the losing end are put into a position where they are significantly less able to ever aquire more wealth. Being so disadvantaged, they will be less likely to have the oportunity to go to college, to get a good public education, to get proactive health care, they will be more likely to be incarcerated, etc... They will never enjoy the opportunities or liberties of those who have benefited from the consolidation of wealth.
And if we look at the functional impact of those who would have had more wealth consolidated to them if we move to more progressive taxation, having a person who is earning over $1 million per year pay an additional 3% taxation on their income over $1 million, will have a negligable impact on their ability to educate their children, purchase property, travel, eat well, aquire top rate medical care, etc...
So my point is that a progressive tax system has a negligable impact on the liberties of those at the top, where as flat tax systems are inherently regressive and have a significant impact on the liberties of those at the bottom.
-Rick
Heh, if I had all the answers, I wouldn't be sitting here posting on /. I'd be off trying to implement them and to lead the US back to a world leader status.
From my understanding though, specifically following the lessons learned in Japan's "Lost Decade" and the US post WWII, I would say that we should be focusing a LOT more on education.
Innovation is what leads nations out of economic slumps. Post WWII the US poured tons of money into sending war vets to college. We transitioned over a few years to a nation with some of the highest rates of post-secondary education in the world, and as a result enjoyed decades of leadership in innovation, economic growth, and quality of life.
And Japan's recovery coming out of the 90's was significantly fueled by it's advances in technology and related exports. All of which was underpinned by their substantial investment in education.
So now we're looking at the nation, we're running a 6% production/capacity gap, which means there is no drive, even with tax cuts, for companies to hire. And we have 9% unemployment, many of those workers are trained for jobs that no longer exist.
So IMO, we sould work with the lessons we've learned: get the unemployed educated and retrained for growing fields with job demand. Pushing blue-sky R&D projects to open the doors to new technological leadership. And to refine the IP laws of this country to open up competition and innovation.
Those would be the areas that I would focus spending on. It's the long game. It wouldn't get us out of our current stagnation for a few years. But when the benefits begin coming in, they will be far more benefitial than the current crop of tax cuts that the GOP is demanding.
-Rick
In Wisconsin we have a 5.5% sales tax.
If you live paycheck to paycheck, effectively you pay 5.5% in taxes assuming you do nothing but spend your money on taxable goods.
If you do not live paycheck to paycheck, you only pay that 5.5% tax on the money you spent on taxable goods.
For low-income individuals, a significantly larger portion of their expenditures are applicable for sales tax, meaning that 5.5% tax may wind up being 4%+ of their annual income. Where as an individual who is exceptionally wealthy will not be spending a significant amount of their income on taxable goods. So that 5.5% will only be about 1% of their income.
By their very nature, consumption taxes are regressive, not progressive. Poor people almost universally pay a higher rate on consumption taxes than rich people.
The same can be said for income taxes. Individuals like Buffet, Jobs, Syrge, etc... who take $1 salaries are effectively scamming the tax system. They pay into unemployment insurance, social security, payroll taxes, etc... at a $1 income level. Meaning THEY AREN'T PAYING INCOME TAXES EITHER! They get the vast majorty of their anual pay from unerned income. Dividens, stock bonuses, trades, etc...
And THAT is the huge tax cut that was supose to expire. The piddly 3% change to the top marginal INCOME TAX is nothing, the 15% cut to the top marginal unearned income tax is where the resistance is coming from.
-Rick
It's also used to tax non-residents. If all government revenue came from a bill presented to every legal resident, then all tourists, visitors, and illegal resident would be enjoying their time in the US completely tax free.
-Rick
But, earning money is not a side affect of society, it is the primary purpose of society to provide order and mechanisms for economic growth
No, it isn't. The primary purpose of society is to continue the existance of the society. Economic growth is a result of our current growth rates and stability of social interactions. Consolidation of wealth however leads to threats to the continuation of society as we know it. The challenge though, is that many of those with wealth believe they would benefit more from a new society in which more wealth was consolidated. So they can use their wealth to influence people who aren't in their wealth class to believe that there isn't a threat to social stability.
It is a masterful art, but it will not lead to a better America.
That isn't to say that we need to get all commie and make everyone equal. A progressive tax program is hardly full on commie though.
And to counter your political jab: We all know what happens when Republicans propose tax cuts and spending cuts. Taxes decrease on the rich and the poor die in wars. :P
-Rick
Keeping the money that you earned and worked for is cheat
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH. LOL.
The vast majority of this income in this range is "Unearned Income." People aren't earning nor working for multi-million dollar annual incomes, they are enjoying the benefits of others work by collecting dividens and stock profits.
-Rick
It's been a while since I learned about Alaska, but don't they have significant methane trapped in peat moss? That could be a good tie in to the methanole fuel.
Another option would be to get a miniaturized steam engine. People may think they are antiquated, but steam is what generates almost all of the electricity in this country. The heat can come from geo-thermal, nuclear, solar salts, coal, etc... but it all does the same thing: boil water.
-Rick
That's just an accounting trick. If I give you a dollar, but then you spend the dollar and replace it with a piece of paper that says, "I owe me $1", it doesn't change the fact that you spent the dollar and have nothing to show for it but a piece of paper.
Are you suggesting that the concept of debt doesn't exist? That there is only having money and spending money?
I'm pretty sure my bank doesn't consider their money "spent" as soon as they cut me a loan. Just as I'm sure the SSI trust administrators don't consider their funds "spent" as soon as Congress borrows from it under contract with interest.
Social Security should not have been allowed to have "surplus".
I think it's save planning. We know that the population is growing, and we know that the boomers are going to create an increase in SS spending, so I see no issue with planning ahead, running a surplus when times are good, and folloing your system of automatic adjustments as a base line.
I like the idea of your proposed theory, but I fear the practical application of it. I think it could be used quite easily as leverage to dismantle SS all together. I also fear how the system would opperate in a down-turned economy such as now. With more people than ever depending on SS thanks to the economic fallout and unemployment, you would have to raise payroll taxes significantly to keep up. To make up for the larger demand and the lower number of workers.
It's nice in theory, but there would be no safety net and it would quickly turn into deficit spending and point pointing to it and saying "This is part of the budget!!" instead of being as we both wish, independent.
-Rick
That's lunacy... We're talking about IT work, not heavy lifting and manufacturing. An IT person in their 40's still has 20+ years to "grow into the position".
-Rick