champu

I was just explaining that sales tax is considered regressive because people tend to frame things in terms of an income tax, and people don't usually talk about sales tax in terms of a prebate system. Which, by the way, would be a lot simpler but still runs into some issues regarding cost of living variation by location and changes over time regarding what people consider to be "necessities".

When people use "progressive" and "regressive" to describe taxes it's usually implied that they're indexing total tax paid back to the person's income. You're right that a true regressive sales tax would be absurd. Imagine paying 50% sales tax on items $5 and less rolling off to 5% sales tax as the value of the item increased to $10,000. Now THAT would have poor people rightfully pissed off. A flat sales tax is regressive under the assumption that poor people live paycheck to paycheck spending every dime they make, which makes their effective tax rate as a percentage of their income equal to the flat sales tax rate. People who are not poor generally have some level of savings/investments which they can use to earn additional money none of which sales tax touches. This reduces the effective tax rate as a percentage of your income the more you make. People who aren't "super rich" but complain about estate taxes are being called stooges here, but I don't know if that's necessarily fair. People focusing on a carrot out in the distance is probably a good thing. I think it's more worrisome when poor people don't empathize with a hard-working middle class person that gets screwed over by policies.

Why do I post here...

Uh... none. Which is not to say that a 30% reduction in defense spending isn't a good idea, and we could probably stand to cut even further, but the federal budget deficit is larger than the entire defense budget. That's projected to be true through 2015^ even with Bush's tax cuts expiring. In 2009 (admittedly an anomalous year, but still food for thought) you could have cut all discretionary spending whatsoever and the deficit still would have been over $40B. No DoD, no DOE (either of them), no NSF, no NASA, no NOAA, no DOT, no EPA, no FDA, no FEMA, no DHS, no Federal prisons, no FBI, no NIH, no FAA... and there would have still been a deficit. Of course not, but that's never been my argument.

My questions were rhetorical, I know how income tax works. It is levied when income is made, hence the name. But it is levied against you not the money itself. Thus you are taxed. Looking at another post of yours... And oops... the fragile distinction you were railing on falls apart. Again, I know what you're saying, but you're being antagonistically pedantic over a silly portion of the argument that you're not even keeping straight yourself. Why do you attach this canned argument about paying for things and tax progressivism to the post? You stop replying to people when you do things like this and you show you're just replying to some imaginary package deal of a person you've made up full of nothing but ideas contrary to your own. There's no one on the other side of that receiver.

I know what you're trying to say, but literally speaking you're incorrect. If money is taxed and not me then why, if I were to work two jobs, is the tax different than if I worked each of the jobs individually? Or, more simply, why is the last $50 I earn in a year taxed differently than the last $50 someone else earns? To argue that the tax the money underwent was somehow affected by other money I made but that I have nothing to do with it is absurd. Also, I've never heard of money being charged with tax evasion.

To add insult to injury he's probably got a crap accent now too.

Federal income tax is NOT the entire tax burden of anyone. Believe me I know. My location means I'm part of a science project in just how much one person can possibly pay in various types of taxes. I was referring to federal income tax burden in the last paragraph of that post just as I had (albeit more explicitly) in the rest of it.

I'd like to combine a couple separate comments that came up here... 2 distinct classes of folks here being lumped together. If we have people who have enough deductions and exemptions that 'should' be paying some income tax that needs to be addressed. pay the workers a decent minimum wage and they'll earn enough to pay income tax

The most egregious example of an abbreviation being more cumbersome when spoken than the words it represents is www. Three monosyllabic words that all start with the only polysyllabic letter in the English language. Needless to say, I was an early adopter of this movement.

i don't see any 'yelling'. is yourmomma really against environmental, competition and safety regulations? I was referring to the extended string of slurs and cursing, but I suppose I might have misread the tone. If you sing his post aloud to polka music, it's actually quite friendly sounding.

Ok, so you don't have any sort of valid argument, then. prove he doesn't have a valid arguement

Congratulations, you win this week's awards for the most blatant misrepresentation of something I've written and also for the most obtuse question dodge. Preventing entities from trashing the environment, stifling competition, and cutting corners on safety are exactly the kinds of things the government needs to step in on to prevent unbridled capitalism from collapsing on itself. Now that I clarified that we are in agreement on that, please explain to me what the hell, "pay commensurate to the first world country we live" is supposed to mean.

Suggested reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIBO_stability

/edited to add some bold to your statement and to add to the post of mine that I quoted.

they will when it's $17/hr. This is a very important point. If anyone thinks there's an unhealthy deterioration of the middle class in this country then they should understand that the fastest way to just wipe it out completely would be to double the minimum wage. The cost of what he believes everyone should be able to afford, what else? This is why I asked straight out in post #32 what he thinks society should guarantee everyone is able to afford.

See, that's how we need to operate to come up with great outside the box ideas like this one! ...now we just have the trivial task of convincing people they'd have a happier and fuller life as someone else's food.

that's a loaded item, Oh absolutely... hence my disclaimer at the beginning of that post. But if people complain that the devil is in the details I can always assert that any possible issues could and would be worked out just fine, and conclude that my original idea was both infallible and absolutely necessary.

Parents aside, the 3rd-and-later kids are innocent: they didn't ask to be born, and can't fend for themselves. More money staying in the family puts more food in those kids' mouths. Potentially stupid idea that I fully admit I haven't thought about for more than a minute or so... Redefine child abuse to include having a kid you can't support, take the kid away and give it to a foster home. The innocent kid gets taken care of and the parents can't abuse tax incentives.

Families that are "more self sufficient" and a "socially preferable distribution of income" are dangerously ill-defined. So cut the crap and tell me, what is your list of things that society should guarantee everyone is able to afford? And what things (presumably a subset of this list) do you think should just be provided by the government no matter what? The last time you started this thread Quade pointed out that telling ourselves, "we can all grow up to be presidents and astronauts" is a lie. I agreed but suggested a worse lie is telling ourselves, "We can all get 9-5 jobs doing anything we want, wherever we want, and expect to own a house with a white picket fence and have 2.4 kids."

If you're a pig fucker and you put on a parachute, you're still a pig fucker.

YouTube is the proverbial room full of infinite monkeys with typewriters. Don't let what bleeds lead all over again.

Lift off from Baikonur scheduled for 11:04 pm CDT Live coverage: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

That's entirely possible. And it's my opinion that the differences between Levant's case and a case where investigators would have enough to continue the complaint are ill-defined. This is based on what I read at the link SkyDekker provided where the laws call out a number of indications and contraindications that make the whole thing a mess.

Are you familiar with the so called accuracy trick? Basically it says if you're flying along under canopy and don't change anything (including winds) then where you're going to end up is the spot on the ground that isn't moving up or down in your field of view, but simply getting bigger. Something similar can be observed once you've stopped turning to swoop and your canopy is recovering. The accuracy point will gradually move from roughly directly below you (where you put it by performing a diving turn) to out on the horizon in front of you (at which point you're flying horizontally over the ground.) If the accuracy spot isn't moving "quickly enough" towards the horizon (what constitutes "quickly enough" depends on winds, canopy design, and wing loading) then you'll probably feel a bit of ground rush. If you don't do something about it, you'll just feel the ground itself.