I'll be the first person to call out a shitty teacher or an obstructive union, but this kind of discussion cannot go ahead without factoring a huge dataset: Parents. Of course, the first person who does finds himself voted out of office pretty quickly.
Or in the case of Obama, if you say it you still get elected, but have to worry about Jessie Jackson who said he wanted to "bite his [Obama's] nuts off" for "talking down to black people".
Personally, given the choice between having my nuts chomped by a crazy guy or losing re-election, I'd have to take losing.
Especially if one might state the trivial argument that we can't reliably predict weather 1 week out, and we're making huge claims over the weather in 100 years.
Schools should teach some basic statistics. This includes the difference between statistically analyzing a random variable (climate science) and trying to predict the outcome of a single instance of the random variable (weather prediction), and why the two are fundamentally different.
No, but the fact that if you put the information from the previous century into our climate models, they cannot accurately predict the current climate is statistically significant. His example was just an observation.
The race to lower taxes is a race straight to the bottom. Businesses will continue to use tax havens as long as there is any benefit to doing so, and the simple fact is that a big economy like the USA cannot afford to lower tax rates to what a little place like the Cayman Islands can charge, e.g. basically nothing.
A better solution is to change conflict laws to ignore the formal jurisdiction of incorporation and instead use the primary place of business.
Or just use FairTax or some other national sales tax and kill income and corporate income taxes all together. Your much less likely to see loss of revenue to tax havens if you are a tax haven.
This is something that the major economies of the world can cooperate to make happen, and we don't have to drop our taxes into the toilet to do it.
Great, our current government isn't big enough, lets have a one world government to regulate taxes and trade between everybody.
If you were the Cayman Islands, why in the hell would you be willing to lose a huge portion of your business by divulging tax information to other countries? What is the incentive?
I don't feel bad for the corporations, maybe they'll just have to forgo paying their executives their excessively huge salaries.
Those salaries are generally minscule compaired to their taxes and since the CEO's and shareholders run the company, the companies likely response will almost certainly be to either cut worker pay/benefits, cut jobs, or raise prices.
I do like to see this sort of thing, he seems like he is honestly trying to run the government in a fiscally responsible way.
First off, Barako doesn't have much say in the budget, congress (especially the House) does. He can only make recommendations and sign/veto the budget. Beyond that, he can't do much of anything. Second off, Congress seems to have decided the most "fiscally responsible" thing they can do now is pass a round of bailouts that approaches the total cost of the war thus far and then pass a gargantuan package of wasteful pork in the name of stimulus and then pass the largest budget in history. All this while considering following through on a massive new entitlement program (socialized medicine) pouring more cash down the drain than Medicade already has. All the while ignoring the fact that in a few years Social Security and Medicare will begin consuming more (much MUCH more) than they take in easily multiplying the current debt by several orders of magnitude.
That's a big difference from our previous president who refused to cut spending to pay for his tax cuts, and even refused to allow the cost of his several hundred billion dollar unnecessary war to be included in the normal budget. We're all paying for that kind of "limited government" now, as will be our children and grandchildren.
Bush the President was much less conservative than Bush the Candidate, I'll give you that. I am no fan of Bush as I feel we should have budgetted for the war, but even more unnnessacery than Iraq has been the costly Medicare Part-D bill and the fact that Bush gave up on his promise to reform Social Security (which together might end up exceeding the war in total cost). Bush wasn't too great, but I feel we are out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Only large companies can afford large scale tax evasion. Because of that smaller local companies cannot compete with large companies (they cannot evade taxes) and go out of business. If large companies cannot evade taxes, smaller local companies suddenly become more competitive and that will actually create jobs.
One major flaw: the large companies will still "evade" their taxes. Our tax code is about 70,000 pages in length. If one tax hole is eliminated they will either have their lawyers find another or (more likely) they will hire lobbyist to simply promote another tax exemption. Closing tax holes has been tried dozens of times with either of these always being the result. The only real solution is simply to either move to a flat tax (which has been somewhat successful in 3rd world countries), a negative tax (but every time this has been brought to the floor congress will insist on not also using this as the sole replacement for welfare), or a sales tax like FairTax (the current version H.R. 25 has a sunset provision demanding that the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution be repealed, but I also think that the law should also insist upon the repealing amendment also create a super-majority requirement of 3/5 or 2/3 of both houses to create an exemption or break for a specific item).
So, you can tax corporations without them simply passing the tax to the customer, and instead tax the owners (which may or may not be shareholders since not all companies are public) if you do it right.
So then why do we have both income and corporate income taxes?
If you really believe your own line then you would be calling pretty much all of Europe fascists. I'm not sure anyone else is really going to agree with you other than other whackjobs.
All that "fascist" really means is the government centralizes control over the economy and production, often through corporatist policies. Government Sponsored Enterprises are used to control the economy in a centralized manor and laws are often very authoritarian. Europe's democratic variant of fascism is less aggressive, but it is a similar concept, albeit with a prettier face. Keep in mind, before WWII, fascism was not a negative term. Mussolini used to be considered a progressive voice for the Italian workers.
The only real point of corporate taxes is to give the government the ability to punish companies that fall out of favor.
And people who are stupid enough to fall for appeals to class warfare will vote for politicians like Obama who promise to go after "corporate greed" and punish those who don't "pay their fair share". A company that sees its tax rates increase will increase their prices to pass the cost along or they will find ways around the tax. The same class warfare nitwits will then bitch about how these greedy companies raised their prices failing to see that the corporate tax hikes are to blame. You can sort of see how much you pay in income taxes (but withholding was designed to partially obscure this from you) but you can't see just how much of what you purchase comes not just from taxes, but from compliance cost associated with taxes (accountants as well as investments done for "tax purposes" rather than because they make business sense both contribute to the price of what you buy).
The only really successful reform in the history of the US income tax has been in the 80's when the brackets were finally indexed to inflation. Before that congress gave people a "tax cut" right before the elections. You could get a "tax cut" every 2 years and never actually see your taxes as a percentage of income decline.
If people actually saw how much of the time they spent at work just to pay for their annual taxes, I imagine you would see much more resistance to government spending. Were the dollars to be converted to the hours at the wages they were paid you would see that the average American works until May just to pay for their taxes. A transparent system such as a national sales tax would be far more effective.
Will the anti-tax people please explain how to pay for two wars and a large military budget?
The two wars are a fairly small part of our budgetary problem. Social Security, Medicade, and Medicare easily trounce the military in spending and unlike the two wars which will likely end in a few years, all three of those bloated entitlement programs are skyrocketting. The porkulus and bailouts haven't exactly helped either. The US must quickly reform Social Security and Medicare before it goes bankrupt. My understanding is even if the Bush tax cuts had not been enacted but the economy still grew, even if all earmarks were killed, and even if the War in Iraq had never occoured that would only fix about 13% of the problem our entitlements will cause.
I feel that taxes are the only viable means we have of forcing businesses to internalize erstwhile external costs (like pollution).
Pollution and other external cost are often handled by fines or occasionally on special excise taxes on products. If you dump sludge in a river and get caught you pay a fine to clean it up (plus punitive). If you sell cigarettes that give people cancer, there is a special tax at the point of sale on cigarettes that funds some of the cost of cancer treatments for the poor. The Corporate Income Tax is simply a tax for revenue raising (and earning kickbacks for fighting for loopholes if your a member of congress)
While true, that's an overly simplified view of what is being taxed
What is actually being taxed is production of value. When production is taxed, it declines.
Where it gets worse is the nasty habit the US has of using tax incentives to encourage things that don't make economic sense otherwise (such as ethanol). We redirect our resources and investments away from where they would do best in the market.
I don't buy into a lot of the class warfare concepts; however, I do believe that assigning tax heavily on labor is a bad idea. I personally don't cherish the idea of a permanent underclass
So don't tax labor or corporate holdings. Put a consumption tax on each good or service at the point of retail sale. Plans like FairTax have this done progressively by refunding poverty level spending tax amounts to everyone so that one essentially only ends up paying any taxes on what they spend beyond their basic needs.
-- and it's getting ever harder for someone who earns primarily from labor to climb into the ranks of those who earn primarily from capital gains, save via tax-sheltered investment plans like 401ks or Roth IRAs.
Not true. Only like one in ten millionares gained their money through inheritance alone. The rest have either made it themselves or they invested the previous generations savings.
Anyway, what's so hard about filling out a tax form correctly? How much "careful investigation" does it take?
Quite a bit actually. A couple years back, CNN's Money Magazine did a famous study. They took a regular family's tax information to 49 different firms. Of the 49 not one of them got the same result. According to Money's tax lawyers, all 49 were at least somewhat incorrect. Money then took it to the IRS. About half the time the IRS couldn't even give them accurate advice.
Because eventually updates are going to go away. And Hardware is going to break and hardware manufacturers are not going to devote the resources to writing the drivers for the new features on printers or scanners or whatever for XP.
Because eventually updates are going to go away. And Hardware is going to break and hardware manufacturers are not going to devote the resources to writing the drivers for the new features on printers or scanners or whatever for XP.
That is why you simply don't upgrade to a new version of an OS. We bought our PC's with XP (we had a choice between that or Vista) and we simply will net replace XP until we replace the PC's. We retire them every 5 years or so, but really we have until 2014, and I see no need for any changes until then.
Forget the Iraqis, the entire World (except the United States) was against Iraq when they gassed the Kurds (in 1988). The gassing of the Kurds was reported on the front page of every major newspaper in Europe
The former French Presidential Administration held very strong financial ties with Saddam's regime. They defended Iraq in the UN and prevented UN action because of this. Thus the US and UK acted without UN support.
There is no reasonable form of execution. Unless you live in a barbaric country like Iran, China, or the United States where it is acceptable to murder people.
Yes, the United States, how barbaric we are. I mean we give the condemned legal council and a trial by a jury of peers and only execute in extremely heinous cases after several appeals and years of waiting to see if new evidence will surface that might warrent overturning the case or allowing for a publicly elected governor or president to intervene with a pardon. I'm sure that is just as barbaric as Iranian courts authorizing public stoning or vigilantism to recover lost family "honor" or Chinese courts performing show trials with nearly 100% conviction rates for things like "antirevolutionary activities".
Lethal injection at least it seems like a painless death.
It is also far more resource intensive. Iraq doesn't have the equipment, money, or doctors needed.
Personally, in the States I still favor firing squad. It is essentially instant if you are shot in the head since you can't feel pain with your brain blown open. Plus if you are an organ donor your organs can still be used.
Iraq probably wouldn't want to do firing squads as it is too similar to a military style execution while only common criminals are hanged.
before he was hung. Yeah... hung, something you think we'd have given up a long time ago.
We have given up hanging, but Iraq has not. Iraq doesn't have the resources to perform lethal injection or the chair and firing squad would be too similar to a military style death. Hanging is almost always seen as a criminal's death. Keep in mind, for the region that is remarkably humane. Iran still primarily uses court approved public stoning. It was Iraq that tried Saddam and Iraq that executed him. We simply caught him and probed for ticks.
Yes, you can cherry-pick two points on a noisy signal and pretend it's meaningful, but that doesn't make it so. The meaningful indicator is the overall trend, not the year-by-year variations.
Our climate has been both warmer and colder in the past and so called global warming has reversed itself since the 90's. That's good. I miss the "Man Made Global Cooling" of the 70's.
You're assuming that all pollutants have the same effect. Is it so far fetched to think that some materials might have different effects than others?
CO2 isn't that effective of an insulator. As the number of CO2 molecules increases, the insulating effect of each molecule starts to decline. Eventually increases stop mattering. Methane is like 80 times more insulating and Nitrous Oxides can be well over 200 times more insulating than CO2. Both are produced increasingly by farms.
Increasing spending can in fact cut the deficit -- if it causes the economy to grow sufficiently that the increased business activity generates more tax revenue than the amount spent took away. (whether or not that will happen is open to speculation, but it has worked in the past)
By and large it hasn't worked in the past. It did not work with Japan in the 1990's when they passed stimulus after stimulus. The 1930's so called "New Deal" in America failed miserably (which is why the Great Depression hit the USA much more than it hit other countries. It lasted a decade in the USA, and only a few years in Europe). Keynesian Economics has never really had a success story.
Oh wait you are trolling, aren't you. You just wanted an excuse to post the standard list of Republican talking points to another forum. Well done.
Illegals, being outside of the eye of the law are cheaper to hire. Granted there are not a "limited" number of jobs. Markets, unlike government spending are not zero-sum. Both parties must gain for any transaction to occour and if illegals come here to work, they will also spend the results of their work. That being said, they do heavily strain government services and the open borders have increasingly become a source of crime. It is a serious issue, but not as much from an economic point of view.
This has been my answer for years, any time someone tries to ridicule my subcompact car:
"You know how some guys get big SUVs or sports cars to compensate for their sexual inadequacy? I'm doing the same thing, just the other way 'round."
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be the first person to call out a shitty teacher or an obstructive union, but this kind of discussion cannot go ahead without factoring a huge dataset: Parents. Of course, the first person who does finds himself voted out of office pretty quickly.
Or in the case of Obama, if you say it you still get elected, but have to worry about Jessie Jackson who said he wanted to "bite his [Obama's] nuts off" for "talking down to black people". Personally, given the choice between having my nuts chomped by a crazy guy or losing re-election, I'd have to take losing.
Especially if one might state the trivial argument that we can't reliably predict weather 1 week out, and we're making huge claims over the weather in 100 years.
Schools should teach some basic statistics. This includes the difference between statistically analyzing a random variable (climate science) and trying to predict the outcome of a single instance of the random variable (weather prediction), and why the two are fundamentally different.
No, but the fact that if you put the information from the previous century into our climate models, they cannot accurately predict the current climate is statistically significant. His example was just an observation.
The race to lower taxes is a race straight to the bottom. Businesses will continue to use tax havens as long as there is any benefit to doing so, and the simple fact is that a big economy like the USA cannot afford to lower tax rates to what a little place like the Cayman Islands can charge, e.g. basically nothing.
A better solution is to change conflict laws to ignore the formal jurisdiction of incorporation and instead use the primary place of business.
Or just use FairTax or some other national sales tax and kill income and corporate income taxes all together. Your much less likely to see loss of revenue to tax havens if you are a tax haven.
This is something that the major economies of the world can cooperate to make happen, and we don't have to drop our taxes into the toilet to do it.
Great, our current government isn't big enough, lets have a one world government to regulate taxes and trade between everybody.
If you were the Cayman Islands, why in the hell would you be willing to lose a huge portion of your business by divulging tax information to other countries? What is the incentive?
I don't feel bad for the corporations, maybe they'll just have to forgo paying their executives their excessively huge salaries.
Those salaries are generally minscule compaired to their taxes and since the CEO's and shareholders run the company, the companies likely response will almost certainly be to either cut worker pay/benefits, cut jobs, or raise prices.
I do like to see this sort of thing, he seems like he is honestly trying to run the government in a fiscally responsible way.
First off, Barako doesn't have much say in the budget, congress (especially the House) does. He can only make recommendations and sign/veto the budget. Beyond that, he can't do much of anything. Second off, Congress seems to have decided the most "fiscally responsible" thing they can do now is pass a round of bailouts that approaches the total cost of the war thus far and then pass a gargantuan package of wasteful pork in the name of stimulus and then pass the largest budget in history. All this while considering following through on a massive new entitlement program (socialized medicine) pouring more cash down the drain than Medicade already has. All the while ignoring the fact that in a few years Social Security and Medicare will begin consuming more (much MUCH more) than they take in easily multiplying the current debt by several orders of magnitude.
That's a big difference from our previous president who refused to cut spending to pay for his tax cuts, and even refused to allow the cost of his several hundred billion dollar unnecessary war to be included in the normal budget. We're all paying for that kind of "limited government" now, as will be our children and grandchildren.
Bush the President was much less conservative than Bush the Candidate, I'll give you that. I am no fan of Bush as I feel we should have budgetted for the war, but even more unnnessacery than Iraq has been the costly Medicare Part-D bill and the fact that Bush gave up on his promise to reform Social Security (which together might end up exceeding the war in total cost). Bush wasn't too great, but I feel we are out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Only large companies can afford large scale tax evasion. Because of that smaller local companies cannot compete with large companies (they cannot evade taxes) and go out of business. If large companies cannot evade taxes, smaller local companies suddenly become more competitive and that will actually create jobs.
One major flaw: the large companies will still "evade" their taxes. Our tax code is about 70,000 pages in length. If one tax hole is eliminated they will either have their lawyers find another or (more likely) they will hire lobbyist to simply promote another tax exemption. Closing tax holes has been tried dozens of times with either of these always being the result. The only real solution is simply to either move to a flat tax (which has been somewhat successful in 3rd world countries), a negative tax (but every time this has been brought to the floor congress will insist on not also using this as the sole replacement for welfare), or a sales tax like FairTax (the current version H.R. 25 has a sunset provision demanding that the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution be repealed, but I also think that the law should also insist upon the repealing amendment also create a super-majority requirement of 3/5 or 2/3 of both houses to create an exemption or break for a specific item).
Nope, they're going to pick up paper routes to make up for the difference.
What paper routes? The newspapers are all bankrupt.
So, you can tax corporations without them simply passing the tax to the customer, and instead tax the owners (which may or may not be shareholders since not all companies are public) if you do it right.
So then why do we have both income and corporate income taxes?
If you really believe your own line then you would be calling pretty much all of Europe fascists. I'm not sure anyone else is really going to agree with you other than other whackjobs.
All that "fascist" really means is the government centralizes control over the economy and production, often through corporatist policies. Government Sponsored Enterprises are used to control the economy in a centralized manor and laws are often very authoritarian. Europe's democratic variant of fascism is less aggressive, but it is a similar concept, albeit with a prettier face. Keep in mind, before WWII, fascism was not a negative term. Mussolini used to be considered a progressive voice for the Italian workers.
The only real point of corporate taxes is to give the government the ability to punish companies that fall out of favor.
And people who are stupid enough to fall for appeals to class warfare will vote for politicians like Obama who promise to go after "corporate greed" and punish those who don't "pay their fair share". A company that sees its tax rates increase will increase their prices to pass the cost along or they will find ways around the tax. The same class warfare nitwits will then bitch about how these greedy companies raised their prices failing to see that the corporate tax hikes are to blame. You can sort of see how much you pay in income taxes (but withholding was designed to partially obscure this from you) but you can't see just how much of what you purchase comes not just from taxes, but from compliance cost associated with taxes (accountants as well as investments done for "tax purposes" rather than because they make business sense both contribute to the price of what you buy).
The only really successful reform in the history of the US income tax has been in the 80's when the brackets were finally indexed to inflation. Before that congress gave people a "tax cut" right before the elections. You could get a "tax cut" every 2 years and never actually see your taxes as a percentage of income decline.
If people actually saw how much of the time they spent at work just to pay for their annual taxes, I imagine you would see much more resistance to government spending. Were the dollars to be converted to the hours at the wages they were paid you would see that the average American works until May just to pay for their taxes. A transparent system such as a national sales tax would be far more effective.
Will the anti-tax people please explain how to pay for two wars and a large military budget?
The two wars are a fairly small part of our budgetary problem. Social Security, Medicade, and Medicare easily trounce the military in spending and unlike the two wars which will likely end in a few years, all three of those bloated entitlement programs are skyrocketting. The porkulus and bailouts haven't exactly helped either. The US must quickly reform Social Security and Medicare before it goes bankrupt. My understanding is even if the Bush tax cuts had not been enacted but the economy still grew, even if all earmarks were killed, and even if the War in Iraq had never occoured that would only fix about 13% of the problem our entitlements will cause.
I feel that taxes are the only viable means we have of forcing businesses to internalize erstwhile external costs (like pollution).
Pollution and other external cost are often handled by fines or occasionally on special excise taxes on products. If you dump sludge in a river and get caught you pay a fine to clean it up (plus punitive). If you sell cigarettes that give people cancer, there is a special tax at the point of sale on cigarettes that funds some of the cost of cancer treatments for the poor. The Corporate Income Tax is simply a tax for revenue raising (and earning kickbacks for fighting for loopholes if your a member of congress)
While true, that's an overly simplified view of what is being taxed
What is actually being taxed is production of value. When production is taxed, it declines.
Where it gets worse is the nasty habit the US has of using tax incentives to encourage things that don't make economic sense otherwise (such as ethanol). We redirect our resources and investments away from where they would do best in the market.
I don't buy into a lot of the class warfare concepts; however, I do believe that assigning tax heavily on labor is a bad idea. I personally don't cherish the idea of a permanent underclass
So don't tax labor or corporate holdings. Put a consumption tax on each good or service at the point of retail sale. Plans like FairTax have this done progressively by refunding poverty level spending tax amounts to everyone so that one essentially only ends up paying any taxes on what they spend beyond their basic needs.
-- and it's getting ever harder for someone who earns primarily from labor to climb into the ranks of those who earn primarily from capital gains, save via tax-sheltered investment plans like 401ks or Roth IRAs.
Not true. Only like one in ten millionares gained their money through inheritance alone. The rest have either made it themselves or they invested the previous generations savings.
Anyway, what's so hard about filling out a tax form correctly? How much "careful investigation" does it take?
Quite a bit actually. A couple years back, CNN's Money Magazine did a famous study. They took a regular family's tax information to 49 different firms. Of the 49 not one of them got the same result. According to Money's tax lawyers, all 49 were at least somewhat incorrect. Money then took it to the IRS. About half the time the IRS couldn't even give them accurate advice.
Because eventually updates are going to go away. And Hardware is going to break and hardware manufacturers are not going to devote the resources to writing the drivers for the new features on printers or scanners or whatever for XP.
Because eventually updates are going to go away. And Hardware is going to break and hardware manufacturers are not going to devote the resources to writing the drivers for the new features on printers or scanners or whatever for XP.
That is why you simply don't upgrade to a new version of an OS. We bought our PC's with XP (we had a choice between that or Vista) and we simply will net replace XP until we replace the PC's. We retire them every 5 years or so, but really we have until 2014, and I see no need for any changes until then.
Until Obama invades the wrong country, nothing Obama does is worse than everything Bush did.
True, it isn't like Obama has called for things like invasion of Pakistan... Oh wait.
Repeal the PATRIOT Act. Pass a law requiring stricter oversight of government surveillance.
THAT is the answer. Not some mindless, useless "Obama is teh suxxor" bullshit.
Ok, but Obama has strong majorities in both houses, and should he actually ask for it's repeal it would be handed to him.
Forget the Iraqis, the entire World (except the United States) was against Iraq when they gassed the Kurds (in 1988). The gassing of the Kurds was reported on the front page of every major newspaper in Europe
The former French Presidential Administration held very strong financial ties with Saddam's regime. They defended Iraq in the UN and prevented UN action because of this. Thus the US and UK acted without UN support.
There is no reasonable form of execution. Unless you live in a barbaric country like Iran, China, or the United States where it is acceptable to murder people.
Yes, the United States, how barbaric we are. I mean we give the condemned legal council and a trial by a jury of peers and only execute in extremely heinous cases after several appeals and years of waiting to see if new evidence will surface that might warrent overturning the case or allowing for a publicly elected governor or president to intervene with a pardon. I'm sure that is just as barbaric as Iranian courts authorizing public stoning or vigilantism to recover lost family "honor" or Chinese courts performing show trials with nearly 100% conviction rates for things like "antirevolutionary activities".
Lethal injection at least it seems like a painless death.
It is also far more resource intensive. Iraq doesn't have the equipment, money, or doctors needed.
Personally, in the States I still favor firing squad. It is essentially instant if you are shot in the head since you can't feel pain with your brain blown open. Plus if you are an organ donor your organs can still be used.
Iraq probably wouldn't want to do firing squads as it is too similar to a military style execution while only common criminals are hanged.
before he was hung. Yeah... hung, something you think we'd have given up a long time ago.
We have given up hanging, but Iraq has not. Iraq doesn't have the resources to perform lethal injection or the chair and firing squad would be too similar to a military style death. Hanging is almost always seen as a criminal's death. Keep in mind, for the region that is remarkably humane. Iran still primarily uses court approved public stoning. It was Iraq that tried Saddam and Iraq that executed him. We simply caught him and probed for ticks.
Sometimes I wish I could forget everything I've read on primate and avian mating patterns, it would make my life so much easier.
I can't count the number of times I've thought the same thing... No wait I can.
Yes, you can cherry-pick two points on a noisy signal and pretend it's meaningful, but that doesn't make it so. The meaningful indicator is the overall trend, not the year-by-year variations.
Our climate has been both warmer and colder in the past and so called global warming has reversed itself since the 90's. That's good. I miss the "Man Made Global Cooling" of the 70's.
You're assuming that all pollutants have the same effect. Is it so far fetched to think that some materials might have different effects than others?
CO2 isn't that effective of an insulator. As the number of CO2 molecules increases, the insulating effect of each molecule starts to decline. Eventually increases stop mattering. Methane is like 80 times more insulating and Nitrous Oxides can be well over 200 times more insulating than CO2. Both are produced increasingly by farms.
Increasing spending can in fact cut the deficit -- if it causes the economy to grow sufficiently that the increased business activity generates more tax revenue than the amount spent took away. (whether or not that will happen is open to speculation, but it has worked in the past)
By and large it hasn't worked in the past. It did not work with Japan in the 1990's when they passed stimulus after stimulus. The 1930's so called "New Deal" in America failed miserably (which is why the Great Depression hit the USA much more than it hit other countries. It lasted a decade in the USA, and only a few years in Europe). Keynesian Economics has never really had a success story.
Oh wait you are trolling, aren't you. You just wanted an excuse to post the standard list of Republican talking points to another forum. Well done.
Illegals, being outside of the eye of the law are cheaper to hire. Granted there are not a "limited" number of jobs. Markets, unlike government spending are not zero-sum. Both parties must gain for any transaction to occour and if illegals come here to work, they will also spend the results of their work. That being said, they do heavily strain government services and the open borders have increasingly become a source of crime. It is a serious issue, but not as much from an economic point of view.
.. only on Slashdot would the comment, "Vulcans are hot!" get modded insightful.
And only on /. would that comment be modded funny instead of insightful.
This has been my answer for years, any time someone tries to ridicule my subcompact car: "You know how some guys get big SUVs or sports cars to compensate for their sexual inadequacy? I'm doing the same thing, just the other way 'round."
Hello ladies, I ride a bike.
Everyone knows that sex offenders float when hog tied and thrown in water. How much more scientific do you need?
How much more proof? They must weigh the same as a duck, thus proving they are made of wood.