There are two things wrong with your reasoning. One, companies don't care about preserving other companies' ability to profit. If Merck comes out with a product that renders several of Pfizer's drugs obsolete, Merck isn't going to give two shakes about Pfizer's bottom line and sure as shooting is going to release that product. Two, something that is so effective as to "destroy [the] ability to profit" in itself is a very salable product and you can make money from it and thus it WILL be sold. Vaccines are a great example of this. They eradicated one disease (smallpox) from the face of the earth and made other formerly-ubiquitous diseases very rare. Their cost is typically not that high and they certainly do result in "lost revenue" to the healthcare industry as a whole because of fewer drugs being prescribed and fewer doctors' visits and hospital stays. You would think that if the "destroying their own ability to profit" motive really was happening that doctors would discourage people from getting immunizations and that no companies would dare make and sell vaccines. Yet doctors are huge proponents of vaccines and there are quite a few vaccine manufacturers out there. Come on, use a little common sense and give up the "evil Big $INDUSTRY is sitting on this revolutionary invention to prevent its use" conspiracy nonsense- it makes as much sense as the "vaccines causing autism" and birther conspiracy crowds.
The difference between citalopram and escitalopram is not in the delivery system, it's in the molecular orientation of the drug itself. Escitalopram is only the active S enantiomer whereas the generic citalopram contains the inactive (and as far as we can tell, biologically inert) D enantiomer as well as the active S enantiomer. Yes, citalopram and escitalopram are the same active drug, think of citalopram to have more "inert filler" in each pill than escitalopram. There are a few other drugs like this- levalbuterol (Xopenex- the S-enantiomer of albuterol), esomeprazole (Nexium- the S-enantiomer of omeprazole). Doctors are well aware of this and rarely prescribe the on-patent pure-enantiomer drugs. Probably the biggest reason I've seen is insurance company formularies having the on-patent drug available at a lower co-pay to the patient than the generic OR the doc having samples on hand and filling a patient's prescription with those samples. Either way, the patient isn't paying more to have the brand-name drug. Patients hate to pay one cent more for health care than they believe they have to, and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so. Patients will and do go elsewhere for medical services if they feel they are having to pay too much.
Also, you can only patent a pure stereoisomer version of a drug once. Once escitalopram's patent runs out, the manufacturer would have to make another modification to the molecular structure (adding/subtracting substituent groups) to result in something patentable.
Healthcare professionals are lobbied by drug reps to prescribe their drugs, sure. But when all you can get from the drug reps is an occasional inexpensive in-your-office bagged lunch (most freebies are now illegal), their effect is pretty darned low. Your patients complaining about you/the pharmacy/the medical profession in general trying to rip them off by prescribing expensive meds is FAR more common and carries much more weight than a boxed lunch from a sandwich shop once a month.
...and in the real world, many patients are on lovastatin, pravastatin, or simvastatin instead of on-patent statins like Lipitor or Crestor precisely because the patents have run out and they are available as inexpensive generics. It is not in the doctors' best interests to have their patients get sticker shock every time they go to the pharmacy to pick up a newly-prescribed medication, since the patients will go to docs that don't try to bankrupt them at the prescription counter. Most patients know about the $4 lists and get very PO'd when you prescribe something that costs a hundred bucks a month.
.
Anandtech uses a very odd selection of benchmarks that seemingly serves just to make Intel CPUs look good, since Intel is a major site sponsor. How else could you explain them doing stuff like using Cinebench 11.5 to develop power draw numbers but completely omitting performance data using that application, and instead using Cinebench R10 to determine CPU performance? Cinebench 11.5 performs much better on AMD's CPUs than R10 does, so if you wanted to show Intel's wares in the best light, you'd use R10. Ditto with any of the Adobe garbage or Microsoft's terrible Excel 2007 Monte Carlo simulation. A guy at AMD picked that last one apart and showed that the settings Anandtech used on the Monte Carlo benchmark pretty much ensured that AMD's CPUs performed in a worst-case scenario. Plus, who in their right mind actually runs serious mathematical computations in MS Excel as compared to a proper tool like R? I take Anandtech's benchmarks with a mountain of salt. I go to Phoronix.com if I want to see benchmarks that are anywhere near accurate.
Socket 939 was somewhat short-lived, but the rest of the sockets had a long lifespan. Socket 940 was used from Day One of the Opteron launch in 2003 until the middle of 2006, and it supported everything from the very first 130 nm Hammer single cores to the 90 nm dual-cores in single-socket through 8-socket servers. Socket 754 did duty as a laptop socket for the original Turion single-cores until AMD introduced S1(g1) alongside Socket AM2 and Socket F in mid-2006.
In that same time period, Intel had two desktop sockets (478, LGA775) and a bunch of incompatible chipsets, five x86 server sockets (603, 604, Socket M, LGA771, LGA775), and three laptop sockets (478, 479, M) plus BGA479. AMD probably should have rolled out 939 for the desktop alongside 940 and left 754 for laptop only, but I won't really fault them too much for making 754 a budget desktop socket. A lot of very neat HTPCs were made with 25-watt Turion MTs in S754 boards because of AMD's "mistake.":D
Intel has made some pretty hot-running CPUs since they did away with the Pentium 4s and Pentium Ds. The 65 nm Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition CPUs were 130-watt units that ran pretty darned hot. The Core i7 Bloomfields also are well-known for being some pretty hot-running CPUs. Most of the faster quad-core or better post-NetBurst Xeons are known to be pretty toasty too. The worst offender probably is the massive Nehalem-EX Xeon MP with a NVIDIA Fermi-sized die and a TDP to match. The reason Sandy Bridge CPUs run cool is mostly because they are only available in dual-core and quad-core variants. Once Intel releases the six and eight-core models with their >100-watt TDPs, you'll be able to fry your bacon on Sandy Bridges too.
Ah, I forgot, you also need to add "127.0.0.1 assist.mediacomcable.com" to your/etc/hosts. assist.mediacomcable.com is the server that does the page display for their NXDOMAIN hijacking. Adding the line to/etc/hosts and not using Mediacom's DNS servers results in a "page not found" error when having a 404 error.
I have Mediacom's internet service and the solution is to use a different DNS server other than the ones Mediacom provides. I use Level3's DNS servers (4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3) for my DNS lookups and I do not get any redirects. You can either manually set the DNS servers on your computer or set them at the router.
Soda is absolutely still sold in English units in the U.S. The 12-ounce aluminum can is one of the most common containers for soda and will continue to be due to the large number of vending machines that are designed to work with that specific container. (Okay, maybe they could call it a "355 mL can" but that's just a conversion; it would be the same exact container.) The 20-ounce plastic bottle is also extremely common, and 8-ounce cans, 12-ounce bottles, and 24-ounce bottles are seen with some regularity.
Other consumer products are a real mismash of English and metric sizes, as well as some "made for a particular price point" sizes that don't come out evenly in either English or metric units. Your engine example is a good one. The displacement is measured in liters and the fasteners used on an engine are typically metric as well, but power and torque are always given in horsepower and lb-ft rather than kW and Nm, and the efficiency is in miles per gallon rather than liters per 100 km.
The union often gets its way by infringing on the right of free association. Unions that are solely around because people freely choose to associate with them (as in unions in right-to-work states, where employees can choose to join or not to join the union) have far less power than unions in non-right-to-work states (the unions force people to join them if they want to work at a certain place of employment.) Also, don't forget the union harassing employees who still want to go to work for whatever reason when the union is striking.
I think you're talking about surgical residents there, not med students. (For the uninformed, residency is basically the equivalent of a mandatory 3-8 year post-doc that all graduated-from-med-school physicians must do before they can practice medicine by themselves.) Med students sometimes do get only a few hours of sleep, but the most they do during a surgery is hold a retractor or suction. The residents can actually do at least parts of the surgery and they often are chronically sleep-deprived.
"Civilian" rounds have a legal definition in some countries as "a cartridge that has never been chambered in a military rifle." This distinction is used because rifles chambered for "military cartridges" like the.30-06 are banned in those countries due to idiotic/evil politicians and hoplophobic voters.
The most common round fired by civilians in the U.S. is probably the.22 LR rimfire. Most any shooter has at least one and they shoot at least an order of magnitude more.22 LR than they do any other caliber, because a 500-round brick of.22 LR costs about what a 20-round box of non-milsurp ammunition for a common non-magnum centerfire rifle does. I'd also be willing to bet there are more shotgun rounds fired than rifle rounds per year as shotgun ammunition is also less expensive, albeit more like three 75-round boxes of inexpensive shells vs. one 20-round box of inexpensive centerfire rifle ammo. Guys go to shoot sporting clays and burn up 100 shells a round all the time, but what do you do to burn up five boxes of.30-06?
It's faster than most common civilian HANDGUN rounds. High-powered long rifles are very common in the U.S. and their bullets usually travel in the 2500-3500 fps range. The only rifle rounds that are under 1540 fps are either lightly-loaded cartridges designed for 19th-century rifles (e.g..45-70 black powder) or are subsonic rounds used with extremely heavy bullets. Shoot, even most shotgun slugs and muzzle-loader sabots manage to cross 1540 fps nowdays.
There have been quite a few products worth spending money on in the last few years if your workload consists of applications that are highly multithreaded and/or use a large amount of memory. Servers especially have gotten phenomenally better since three years ago with Intel retiring their aged, performance-sapping FSB architecture for an IMC + point-to-point link architecture, Intel getting rid of high-latency and hot FB-DIMMs for normal DDR3, AMD releasing the MCM Opteron 6100s with 2-3 times the number of cores per socket as they had in early 2008, and the adoption of 2 Gbit DIMMs. Low-power/embedded users also are in luck as products like AMD's Fusion APUs and dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9s are much better than the early 945GC + single-core Atoms, 130 nm AMD Geodes, or ~600 MHz single-core ARM CPUs available three years ago. Also, the rise of NAND SSDs has done a lot to increase computer performance over the last three years as well. Other than that, most desktop CPUs and GPUs aren't phenomenally better or faster than those around three years ago. There has been some improvement, but nothing like what we saw during any three years of the 1990s.
Social Security actually does classify as a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes give earlier investors payouts not from any actual investing taking place, but from buy-ins from newer investors. They are also destined to fail because the number of people getting paid will exceed the number paying in. Social Security fulfills all of those criteria.
- There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by other government agencies.
- The initial beneficiaries got paid almost exclusively with money collected from younger workers, since they did not contribute much into the system due to timing issues (retiring shortly after the SSA was started and thus not paying much into the system, yet being eligible for benefits.) So, even if all of the money collected in the payroll tax stayed in Social Security, the initial "investors" were still paid off with buy-ins from newer "investors."
- Now that the number of younger workers isn't growing as quickly as it once was (no new baby boom), the retiring workers drawing on the system are now taking out more money than the current workers are paying in. This is the bankruptcy stage.
The problem is that the diploma is really what is valuable, not the education. If the grad really had to know their stuff for the job they're going to be doing, cheating would be rare since it would greatly affect their continued employability. But, many jobs just require a diploma as a check box for the HR people to check off for the "required qualifications" and don't really require the education. Students know they won't need the education and thus put little work into it, since the only real consequence for cheating is whatever the school hands out for punishment if they catch you.
Yet you conveniently overlook England, France, and Greece. All of those nations are in deep financial trouble. They also are experiencing rioting as well over the government daring to tackle the issue.
Sweden sits atop a ton of timber and iron ore, which it exports at a great profit. Germany is one of the less-socialized nations in the EU, which is why they are not in quite as much trouble as France, England, and Greece.
There are a lot of factors involved and balances to be struck, but we shouldn't sit around and thank rich people for sending crumbs down. That's a recipe for becoming a third-world economy.
So is taxing the snot out of everything and spending the money on socialist programs, if Europe is any indication.
Yes, and people with money to spend are those with jobs. Quite a few employers are small businessmen who pay personal income tax on their business income, and end up with a figure over $200-250k (the $250k bit is only for couples, the $200k is for individual filers.) If you tax the hell out of the people who own the business, guess what? They either have to jack up prices to compensate for the higher taxes, which is going to be a loser in this economy, or try to cut expenses. The latter frequently involves laying people off or at the very least, not hiring. So guess what, by jacking up taxes, you either do not change or even decrease the number of people with jobs and thus have fewer customers. But hey, you got to "stick it to the eeeeeeevil rich people," so you're happy, right?
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There are two things wrong with your reasoning. One, companies don't care about preserving other companies' ability to profit. If Merck comes out with a product that renders several of Pfizer's drugs obsolete, Merck isn't going to give two shakes about Pfizer's bottom line and sure as shooting is going to release that product. Two, something that is so effective as to "destroy [the] ability to profit" in itself is a very salable product and you can make money from it and thus it WILL be sold. Vaccines are a great example of this. They eradicated one disease (smallpox) from the face of the earth and made other formerly-ubiquitous diseases very rare. Their cost is typically not that high and they certainly do result in "lost revenue" to the healthcare industry as a whole because of fewer drugs being prescribed and fewer doctors' visits and hospital stays. You would think that if the "destroying their own ability to profit" motive really was happening that doctors would discourage people from getting immunizations and that no companies would dare make and sell vaccines. Yet doctors are huge proponents of vaccines and there are quite a few vaccine manufacturers out there. Come on, use a little common sense and give up the "evil Big $INDUSTRY is sitting on this revolutionary invention to prevent its use" conspiracy nonsense- it makes as much sense as the "vaccines causing autism" and birther conspiracy crowds.
The difference between citalopram and escitalopram is not in the delivery system, it's in the molecular orientation of the drug itself. Escitalopram is only the active S enantiomer whereas the generic citalopram contains the inactive (and as far as we can tell, biologically inert) D enantiomer as well as the active S enantiomer. Yes, citalopram and escitalopram are the same active drug, think of citalopram to have more "inert filler" in each pill than escitalopram. There are a few other drugs like this- levalbuterol (Xopenex- the S-enantiomer of albuterol), esomeprazole (Nexium- the S-enantiomer of omeprazole). Doctors are well aware of this and rarely prescribe the on-patent pure-enantiomer drugs. Probably the biggest reason I've seen is insurance company formularies having the on-patent drug available at a lower co-pay to the patient than the generic OR the doc having samples on hand and filling a patient's prescription with those samples. Either way, the patient isn't paying more to have the brand-name drug. Patients hate to pay one cent more for health care than they believe they have to, and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so. Patients will and do go elsewhere for medical services if they feel they are having to pay too much. Also, you can only patent a pure stereoisomer version of a drug once. Once escitalopram's patent runs out, the manufacturer would have to make another modification to the molecular structure (adding/subtracting substituent groups) to result in something patentable. Healthcare professionals are lobbied by drug reps to prescribe their drugs, sure. But when all you can get from the drug reps is an occasional inexpensive in-your-office bagged lunch (most freebies are now illegal), their effect is pretty darned low. Your patients complaining about you/the pharmacy/the medical profession in general trying to rip them off by prescribing expensive meds is FAR more common and carries much more weight than a boxed lunch from a sandwich shop once a month.
...and in the real world, many patients are on lovastatin, pravastatin, or simvastatin instead of on-patent statins like Lipitor or Crestor precisely because the patents have run out and they are available as inexpensive generics. It is not in the doctors' best interests to have their patients get sticker shock every time they go to the pharmacy to pick up a newly-prescribed medication, since the patients will go to docs that don't try to bankrupt them at the prescription counter. Most patients know about the $4 lists and get very PO'd when you prescribe something that costs a hundred bucks a month. .
Intel apparently canceled LGA1356 and instead will just have LGA2011 for high-end desktop, DP server, and MP server.
Anandtech uses a very odd selection of benchmarks that seemingly serves just to make Intel CPUs look good, since Intel is a major site sponsor. How else could you explain them doing stuff like using Cinebench 11.5 to develop power draw numbers but completely omitting performance data using that application, and instead using Cinebench R10 to determine CPU performance? Cinebench 11.5 performs much better on AMD's CPUs than R10 does, so if you wanted to show Intel's wares in the best light, you'd use R10. Ditto with any of the Adobe garbage or Microsoft's terrible Excel 2007 Monte Carlo simulation. A guy at AMD picked that last one apart and showed that the settings Anandtech used on the Monte Carlo benchmark pretty much ensured that AMD's CPUs performed in a worst-case scenario. Plus, who in their right mind actually runs serious mathematical computations in MS Excel as compared to a proper tool like R? I take Anandtech's benchmarks with a mountain of salt. I go to Phoronix.com if I want to see benchmarks that are anywhere near accurate.
Socket 939 was somewhat short-lived, but the rest of the sockets had a long lifespan. Socket 940 was used from Day One of the Opteron launch in 2003 until the middle of 2006, and it supported everything from the very first 130 nm Hammer single cores to the 90 nm dual-cores in single-socket through 8-socket servers. Socket 754 did duty as a laptop socket for the original Turion single-cores until AMD introduced S1(g1) alongside Socket AM2 and Socket F in mid-2006. In that same time period, Intel had two desktop sockets (478, LGA775) and a bunch of incompatible chipsets, five x86 server sockets (603, 604, Socket M, LGA771, LGA775), and three laptop sockets (478, 479, M) plus BGA479. AMD probably should have rolled out 939 for the desktop alongside 940 and left 754 for laptop only, but I won't really fault them too much for making 754 a budget desktop socket. A lot of very neat HTPCs were made with 25-watt Turion MTs in S754 boards because of AMD's "mistake." :D
Intel has made some pretty hot-running CPUs since they did away with the Pentium 4s and Pentium Ds. The 65 nm Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition CPUs were 130-watt units that ran pretty darned hot. The Core i7 Bloomfields also are well-known for being some pretty hot-running CPUs. Most of the faster quad-core or better post-NetBurst Xeons are known to be pretty toasty too. The worst offender probably is the massive Nehalem-EX Xeon MP with a NVIDIA Fermi-sized die and a TDP to match. The reason Sandy Bridge CPUs run cool is mostly because they are only available in dual-core and quad-core variants. Once Intel releases the six and eight-core models with their >100-watt TDPs, you'll be able to fry your bacon on Sandy Bridges too.
Ah, I forgot, you also need to add "127.0.0.1 assist.mediacomcable.com" to your /etc/hosts. assist.mediacomcable.com is the server that does the page display for their NXDOMAIN hijacking. Adding the line to /etc/hosts and not using Mediacom's DNS servers results in a "page not found" error when having a 404 error.
I have Mediacom's internet service and the solution is to use a different DNS server other than the ones Mediacom provides. I use Level3's DNS servers (4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3) for my DNS lookups and I do not get any redirects. You can either manually set the DNS servers on your computer or set them at the router.
Soda is absolutely still sold in English units in the U.S. The 12-ounce aluminum can is one of the most common containers for soda and will continue to be due to the large number of vending machines that are designed to work with that specific container. (Okay, maybe they could call it a "355 mL can" but that's just a conversion; it would be the same exact container.) The 20-ounce plastic bottle is also extremely common, and 8-ounce cans, 12-ounce bottles, and 24-ounce bottles are seen with some regularity. Other consumer products are a real mismash of English and metric sizes, as well as some "made for a particular price point" sizes that don't come out evenly in either English or metric units. Your engine example is a good one. The displacement is measured in liters and the fasteners used on an engine are typically metric as well, but power and torque are always given in horsepower and lb-ft rather than kW and Nm, and the efficiency is in miles per gallon rather than liters per 100 km.
The union often gets its way by infringing on the right of free association. Unions that are solely around because people freely choose to associate with them (as in unions in right-to-work states, where employees can choose to join or not to join the union) have far less power than unions in non-right-to-work states (the unions force people to join them if they want to work at a certain place of employment.) Also, don't forget the union harassing employees who still want to go to work for whatever reason when the union is striking.
It's hard for taxes to be at a "100+ year low" when the 16th Amendment (which authorized the current federal income tax) was not ratified until 1913.
I think you're talking about surgical residents there, not med students. (For the uninformed, residency is basically the equivalent of a mandatory 3-8 year post-doc that all graduated-from-med-school physicians must do before they can practice medicine by themselves.) Med students sometimes do get only a few hours of sleep, but the most they do during a surgery is hold a retractor or suction. The residents can actually do at least parts of the surgery and they often are chronically sleep-deprived.
Medicine is far, far worse that engineering with the altruism bit.
"Civilian" rounds have a legal definition in some countries as "a cartridge that has never been chambered in a military rifle." This distinction is used because rifles chambered for "military cartridges" like the .30-06 are banned in those countries due to idiotic/evil politicians and hoplophobic voters.
The most common round fired by civilians in the U.S. is probably the .22 LR rimfire. Most any shooter has at least one and they shoot at least an order of magnitude more .22 LR than they do any other caliber, because a 500-round brick of .22 LR costs about what a 20-round box of non-milsurp ammunition for a common non-magnum centerfire rifle does. I'd also be willing to bet there are more shotgun rounds fired than rifle rounds per year as shotgun ammunition is also less expensive, albeit more like three 75-round boxes of inexpensive shells vs. one 20-round box of inexpensive centerfire rifle ammo. Guys go to shoot sporting clays and burn up 100 shells a round all the time, but what do you do to burn up five boxes of .30-06?
It's faster than most common civilian HANDGUN rounds. High-powered long rifles are very common in the U.S. and their bullets usually travel in the 2500-3500 fps range. The only rifle rounds that are under 1540 fps are either lightly-loaded cartridges designed for 19th-century rifles (e.g. .45-70 black powder) or are subsonic rounds used with extremely heavy bullets. Shoot, even most shotgun slugs and muzzle-loader sabots manage to cross 1540 fps nowdays.
This is Slashdot, we don't do that sort of thing here.
There have been quite a few products worth spending money on in the last few years if your workload consists of applications that are highly multithreaded and/or use a large amount of memory. Servers especially have gotten phenomenally better since three years ago with Intel retiring their aged, performance-sapping FSB architecture for an IMC + point-to-point link architecture, Intel getting rid of high-latency and hot FB-DIMMs for normal DDR3, AMD releasing the MCM Opteron 6100s with 2-3 times the number of cores per socket as they had in early 2008, and the adoption of 2 Gbit DIMMs. Low-power/embedded users also are in luck as products like AMD's Fusion APUs and dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9s are much better than the early 945GC + single-core Atoms, 130 nm AMD Geodes, or ~600 MHz single-core ARM CPUs available three years ago. Also, the rise of NAND SSDs has done a lot to increase computer performance over the last three years as well. Other than that, most desktop CPUs and GPUs aren't phenomenally better or faster than those around three years ago. There has been some improvement, but nothing like what we saw during any three years of the 1990s.
The government owes themselves the money. They didn't take that money and lend it out, they spent it. Thus it isn't an asset, it's debt.
Social Security actually does classify as a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes give earlier investors payouts not from any actual investing taking place, but from buy-ins from newer investors. They are also destined to fail because the number of people getting paid will exceed the number paying in. Social Security fulfills all of those criteria.
- There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by other government agencies.
- The initial beneficiaries got paid almost exclusively with money collected from younger workers, since they did not contribute much into the system due to timing issues (retiring shortly after the SSA was started and thus not paying much into the system, yet being eligible for benefits.) So, even if all of the money collected in the payroll tax stayed in Social Security, the initial "investors" were still paid off with buy-ins from newer "investors."
- Now that the number of younger workers isn't growing as quickly as it once was (no new baby boom), the retiring workers drawing on the system are now taking out more money than the current workers are paying in. This is the bankruptcy stage.
So, Social Security actually *is* a Ponzi scheme.
I don't think ECC is a mandatory part of the DDR4 spec, but the module shown in the picture in TFA is an ECC module.
The problem is that the diploma is really what is valuable, not the education. If the grad really had to know their stuff for the job they're going to be doing, cheating would be rare since it would greatly affect their continued employability. But, many jobs just require a diploma as a check box for the HR people to check off for the "required qualifications" and don't really require the education. Students know they won't need the education and thus put little work into it, since the only real consequence for cheating is whatever the school hands out for punishment if they catch you.
Yet you conveniently overlook England, France, and Greece. All of those nations are in deep financial trouble. They also are experiencing rioting as well over the government daring to tackle the issue.
Sweden sits atop a ton of timber and iron ore, which it exports at a great profit. Germany is one of the less-socialized nations in the EU, which is why they are not in quite as much trouble as France, England, and Greece.
There are a lot of factors involved and balances to be struck, but we shouldn't sit around and thank rich people for sending crumbs down. That's a recipe for becoming a third-world economy.
So is taxing the snot out of everything and spending the money on socialist programs, if Europe is any indication.
Yes, and people with money to spend are those with jobs. Quite a few employers are small businessmen who pay personal income tax on their business income, and end up with a figure over $200-250k (the $250k bit is only for couples, the $200k is for individual filers.) If you tax the hell out of the people who own the business, guess what? They either have to jack up prices to compensate for the higher taxes, which is going to be a loser in this economy, or try to cut expenses. The latter frequently involves laying people off or at the very least, not hiring. So guess what, by jacking up taxes, you either do not change or even decrease the number of people with jobs and thus have fewer customers. But hey, you got to "stick it to the eeeeeeevil rich people," so you're happy, right?