"Do you really want to live in the country that MAXIMIZES tax revenue at your expense?"
I do already. I shop at Wal Mart and AT&T provides me phone service. Without a government to stop them "immoral" corporations would take every penny I have and leave me destitute.
"Lower taxes no longer works- the money is invested overseas where the real wage slave labor is these days."
Exactly. A minimum of 35Trillion dollars is being hidden away in overseas accounts like Mitt Romney's and then used to hire Chinese workers rather than US workers. Then right wing ideology demands that we do more to make it even easier for businesses to offshore jobs. It's reached the point of insanity.
You would think that with all his tax avoidance Mitt Romney would have generated a few more jobs in the US, but alas it seems he prefers to employ Chinese.
And so how did Mitt Romney get away with paying only 13%? No wonder he doesn't want to release his taxes. He's doing paying 24% less tax than the rest of those in the top 0.1%. Must be unwilling to reveal trade secrets, I guess.
"No, the government enforces your rights (or they should), it doesn't give them to you. "
Just a moment ago you were whining over the fact that the heavy hand of government was taxing you. Now, you are insisting that the heavy hand of government "enforce your rights", which I presume they should do for you because you didn't want to pay your taxes.
Without a government the entire concept of rights is meaningless, since then its just a question of the strongest get all the rights and everyone else gets none.
You really need to move to Somalia. They have very little government there.
Obviously, neither Jesus nor the government has managed to seize any one of Romney's bank accounts, even the more than 20 overseas accounts, which he uses to avoid paying taxes.
The right wing is voting for a candidate who launders his money because by their ideology money laundering is equivalent to "freedom". It seems apparent that their rhetoric has gotten out ahead of their ideology to the point their ideology makes even less sense by the day.
"That's like saying, "Every place with pond scum has water.""
If you can't tell the difference between the US and Somalia, where they barely have a government, then you belong in that pond.
Government is not the problem. It's people who think government is the problem that are the problem. If you don't like your government, do everyone a favor and LEAVE!
"Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. "
No in a capitalist system, you can just starve to death instead. Again, another bogus argument, You seem so in enraptured by your own ideology it squeezes out any opportunity for you to actually think about the nature of the human condition. I guess that's the real enchantment with right-wing ideology, no hard thinking required.
" then that's a solid indication that they aren't getting anything right."
This argument is bogus, since it assumes that there is some way to tell what "getting it right" is in science. Yes, there are many benefits, but most often those are purely tangential to the questions initially or primarily involved in the research.
Your use of the Human Genome Project is a perfect example of just hjow bogus your argument is. Human Genome Sciences was first, but only because it had the government project's results openly available to them constantly, whereas the the private results were never shared until they were published. Further, the government funded effort was much broader in scope and of far more value to science.
As for the "efficiency" of Human Genome Sciences? The CEO Craig Ventnor crashed the stock and took a gigantic golden handshake on the way out the door and left shareholders high and dry. I'm too painfully aware as I was a major stockholder. The company was recently sold for pennies on the dollar. So much for your "efficiency" argument.
"The difference is that the private sector has to provide something of value at some point or eventually they run out of money."
The problem with your argument is that the "something of value" doesn't have to be to society, just to those who are stuffing the profits into their pockets. So eventually all the money winds up in an extremely few hands and we destroy the economy as the republicans are trying to do now, whereas governnent, in contrast, by definition, has to take everyone's welfare into account, not just the few who own everything.
trains certainly are a lot more expensive than cars in large part because the actual "cost" of cars, such as in traffic deaths, pollution, etc are subsidized without those doing the subsidization being readily identifiable and those creating these costs being seldom, if ever, held accountable. Likewise, once built, even if it only goes say 1.5 times faster than current trains, it will result in huge saving, if more and more riders and more trains can be added to the track.
Do you have any idea of how much less gasoline would have to be consumed if everyone who commutes on I5 could instead take a train? Do you have any idea of how much less carbon dioxide would have to be produced to produce all the cars that are used over the life of a train? Have you driven I5 lately? It's bumper to bumper for 500 miles between SF and LA. Just think of what it's going to be like in 20 years by the time the high speed rail lines are finally finished. It's not as if the Europeans, Japanese, and now Chinese haven't already beaten us to this realization that without trains to move large numbers of people, their countries are at a competitive disadvantage as cars are just a lot more inefficient.
You really have to be specific when you are talking about science projects, since what is regarded as "waste" may well result directly from the consequences of an experiment. One simply has to be prepared for "some waste" as it's unavoidable and inherent in the scientific enterprise.
If one could funnel all the waste generated trying to "shut down the waste" into science, it would be well funded into perpetuity. There are no straight lines to scientific discovery and pretend the process should be streamlined to "avoid the waste" would permanently put an end to science. "Waste" has to be considered in relative terms, since by definition one doesn't know what the out come of experiments is going to be. If one had knowledge in advance to avoid "waste, there would be no point to conducting the experiments. When things don't according to plan, it generates "waste", yet if scientists were forced to stop conducting experiments because they might result in "waste", all scientific progress would stop.
The problem is that human's aren't perfect and people are going to make lots of mistakes. If we shut down every activity in which human's made mistakes because "someday we will run out of other people's money", humans would still be living in caves, which lately seems to be where republicans want to take us these days. They are determined to destroy science in this country since it competes with their religion and their goal of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
"Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?"
Then we just shutdown and let the Chinese and the Russians take over? It's not as if they are going to make the kind of mistake that you and other conservatives who use this ridiculous argument suggest. Taxes, my friend, are the price of civilization get used to it and just pay your fair share and stop trying to protect the Mitt Romney's of the world from paying their's (and no 13% is not a fair share and certainly 0.82% as they propose to pay under the Ryan/Romney/Republican plan is even less so).
I wouldn't put too much stock in the depth of the Pope's faith in god as particularly relevant, especially now that he has hired Fox News to provide him with PR advice.
" though for us intelligence seems to have helped."
Judging from the state of the planet and what future generations are about to inherit, one would either have to conclude that either that isn't true or that we lack intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
Then explain to me how Mitt Romney only pays 13%.
"Do you really want to live in the country that MAXIMIZES tax revenue at your expense?"
I do already. I shop at Wal Mart and AT&T provides me phone service. Without a government to stop them "immoral" corporations would take every penny I have and leave me destitute.
Reid's "invisible friend" actually works for Bain and prepared Romney's taxes.
"Lower taxes no longer works- the money is invested overseas where the real wage slave labor is these days."
Exactly. A minimum of 35Trillion dollars is being hidden away in overseas accounts like Mitt Romney's and then used to hire Chinese workers rather than US workers. Then right wing ideology demands that we do more to make it even easier for businesses to offshore jobs. It's reached the point of insanity.
You would think that with all his tax avoidance Mitt Romney would have generated a few more jobs in the US, but alas it seems he prefers to employ Chinese.
And so how did Mitt Romney get away with paying only 13%? No wonder he doesn't want to release his taxes. He's doing paying 24% less tax than the rest of those in the top 0.1%. Must be unwilling to reveal trade secrets, I guess.
"No, the government enforces your rights (or they should), it doesn't give them to you. "
Just a moment ago you were whining over the fact that the heavy hand of government was taxing you. Now, you are insisting that the heavy hand of government "enforce your rights", which I presume they should do for you because you didn't want to pay your taxes.
Without a government the entire concept of rights is meaningless, since then its just a question of the strongest get all the rights and everyone else gets none.
You really need to move to Somalia. They have very little government there.
"Jesus didn't seize all my bank accounts"
Obviously, neither Jesus nor the government has managed to seize any one of Romney's bank accounts, even the more than 20 overseas accounts, which he uses to avoid paying taxes.
The right wing is voting for a candidate who launders his money because by their ideology money laundering is equivalent to "freedom". It seems apparent that their rhetoric has gotten out ahead of their ideology to the point their ideology makes even less sense by the day.
"That's like saying, "Every place with pond scum has water.""
If you can't tell the difference between the US and Somalia, where they barely have a government, then you belong in that pond.
Government is not the problem. It's people who think government is the problem that are the problem. If you don't like your government, do everyone a favor and LEAVE!
"Nobody is forced at gunpoint to invest in any given business. "
No in a capitalist system, you can just starve to death instead. Again, another bogus argument, You seem so in enraptured by your own ideology it squeezes out any opportunity for you to actually think about the nature of the human condition. I guess that's the real enchantment with right-wing ideology, no hard thinking required.
" then that's a solid indication that they aren't getting anything right."
This argument is bogus, since it assumes that there is some way to tell what "getting it right" is in science. Yes, there are many benefits, but most often those are purely tangential to the questions initially or primarily involved in the research.
Your use of the Human Genome Project is a perfect example of just hjow bogus your argument is. Human Genome Sciences was first, but only because it had the government project's results openly available to them constantly, whereas the the private results were never shared until they were published. Further, the government funded effort was much broader in scope and of far more value to science.
As for the "efficiency" of Human Genome Sciences? The CEO Craig Ventnor crashed the stock and took a gigantic golden handshake on the way out the door and left shareholders high and dry. I'm too painfully aware as I was a major stockholder. The company was recently sold for pennies on the dollar. So much for your "efficiency" argument.
"The difference is that the private sector has to provide something of value at some point or eventually they run out of money."
The problem with your argument is that the "something of value" doesn't have to be to society, just to those who are stuffing the profits into their pockets. So eventually all the money winds up in an extremely few hands and we destroy the economy as the republicans are trying to do now, whereas governnent, in contrast, by definition, has to take everyone's welfare into account, not just the few who own everything.
" incredibly expensive train"
trains certainly are a lot more expensive than cars in large part because the actual "cost" of cars, such as in traffic deaths, pollution, etc are subsidized without those doing the subsidization being readily identifiable and those creating these costs being seldom, if ever, held accountable. Likewise, once built, even if it only goes say 1.5 times faster than current trains, it will result in huge saving, if more and more riders and more trains can be added to the track.
Do you have any idea of how much less gasoline would have to be consumed if everyone who commutes on I5 could instead take a train? Do you have any idea of how much less carbon dioxide would have to be produced to produce all the cars that are used over the life of a train? Have you driven I5 lately? It's bumper to bumper for 500 miles between SF and LA. Just think of what it's going to be like in 20 years by the time the high speed rail lines are finally finished. It's not as if the Europeans, Japanese, and now Chinese haven't already beaten us to this realization that without trains to move large numbers of people, their countries are at a competitive disadvantage as cars are just a lot more inefficient.
"waste like this."
You really have to be specific when you are talking about science projects, since what is regarded as "waste" may well result directly from the consequences of an experiment. One simply has to be prepared for "some waste" as it's unavoidable and inherent in the scientific enterprise.
If one could funnel all the waste generated trying to "shut down the waste" into science, it would be well funded into perpetuity. There are no straight lines to scientific discovery and pretend the process should be streamlined to "avoid the waste" would permanently put an end to science. "Waste" has to be considered in relative terms, since by definition one doesn't know what the out come of experiments is going to be. If one had knowledge in advance to avoid "waste, there would be no point to conducting the experiments. When things don't according to plan, it generates "waste", yet if scientists were forced to stop conducting experiments because they might result in "waste", all scientific progress would stop.
The fact is that in science, if you don't make any mistakes, you don't learn anything new. That's the price of science.
The problem is that human's aren't perfect and people are going to make lots of mistakes. If we shut down every activity in which human's made mistakes because "someday we will run out of other people's money", humans would still be living in caves, which lately seems to be where republicans want to take us these days. They are determined to destroy science in this country since it competes with their religion and their goal of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
"Eventually you run out of other people's money, and then what?"
Then we just shutdown and let the Chinese and the Russians take over? It's not as if they are going to make the kind of mistake that you and other conservatives who use this ridiculous argument suggest. Taxes, my friend, are the price of civilization get used to it and just pay your fair share and stop trying to protect the Mitt Romney's of the world from paying their's (and no 13% is not a fair share and certainly 0.82% as they propose to pay under the Ryan/Romney/Republican plan is even less so).
He may have been a devout Monk, but he still evolved from a fish.
Apple, the new Microsoft. Greed gets in the way, no matter what.
I wouldn't put too much stock in the depth of the Pope's faith in god as particularly relevant, especially now that he has hired Fox News to provide him with PR advice.
"They haven't changed,"
They have changed alright and do so continuously. You just failed to look closely enough to notice. Had your prostate checked recently?
"RE: I wonder what "the dark ages 2.0" will be like.:"
Vote for Mitt Romney and you'll get a chance to find out.
Once you come to appreciate the meaning of your own death and see no reason to fear it, you too can be free from religion. All it takes is courage.
" though for us intelligence seems to have helped."
Judging from the state of the planet and what future generations are about to inherit, one would either have to conclude that either that isn't true or that we lack intelligence.