Commenter Archive

I can't help but wonder if the Democrat's thoroughly-negative caricature of Republicans is based on what they'd do if they were rich.

So you watch TV. You just don't watch it on a TV.

It's amusing to see that our society has become so wealthy that we can, once again, watch TV for free.

"It’s incorrect because you are trying to make a single person’s experience a metaphor for how an entire economy can work."

So individual experiences can't be generalized to the entirety of society?

That's great, but it means that you can't point to a bum on the street and say "this person's poverty means that the system is a failure, no matter how good life is for the average citizen!"

"You don’t know what it’s like to be poor in any era."

So you're honestly saying that you'd rather be poor in 1600 than poor in 2011?

You honestly believe that you can say something like that and expect us to take you seriously?

"This isn’t about whether the poor have advanced..."

Did you read the blog post that started this all?

Jaybird, I can't believe you even bothered to answer that one.

"Here it is, Anno Domini 2011 and I scratch my grey beard, watching the minivans full of homeless people pulling up into the Walmart parking lot after a foraging expedition in the Arby’s dumpster. I never saw that in the 1950s."

That's because, in the 1950s, those people would be dead. Society was not so rich that the food Arby's threw in the dumpster could sustain a minivan full of homeless people.

I think you and Bo are skirting James's primary point by focusing on simple income rather than standard of living.

But rich people have more money! Don't you understand? RICH PEOPLE HAVE MORE MONEY. RICH. PEOPLE. HAVE. MORE. MONEY.

I mean, that's the only argument we need to make to PROVE that things are awful now! PEOPLE! RICH! MONEY! MORE!

A search for "business jet ownership" shows that company business jets are going away.

And when you say stuff like "Often the company just buys those tickets to start with, and hence no one is ‘reimbursed’ either" I have to conclude that, in true Republican tradition, you don't know what you're talking about but you've invested a lot of emotion in a worldview based on stereotype and hearsay.

What are you doing reading a libertarian blog if you don't believe in the ability of the tort system to resolve disputes?

No; I'm suggesting that "the unions are the only thing that saved me from ruin" overstates the case.

I mean, if you want to interpret that as "Erik's employers should have fired him"--actually, no, you can't interpret it that way. You can interpret it as "if Erik's employers had fired him then he would have had options."

Walker exempted police and firefighters because he didn't want them to go on strike. Cops going on strike is not a thing that makes anyone except criminals happy.

"Just letting the CEO or owners jet around on ‘company business’ that is one ‘business related’ lunch in Paris and then a three-day stay is _not_ taxed."

Expense reimbursements are reported as income on your W-2, and you pay taxes on them. Now, it's usually tax-adjusted by the company so that you aren't out-of-pocket on the expense (otherwise why bother reimbursing you?) but it does increase your effective income.

As for the private jet, the company pays property taxes and registration fees on that, plus fuel taxes and operations fees if they actually want to use it.

"...companies often hire _personal_ assistants for executives."

...doesn't everyone at a company work for the CEO? Shouldn't your reasoning therefore conclude that every person's salary should be considered part of the CEO's compensation?

"And capital gains are not _taxed_ as standard income, they are taxed at 15%."

So they are taxed, then. Your contention was that they were not.

I think there's a useful parallel to DADT. DADT wasn't "struck down by court action". It was repealed by a legislative act. Which is how the system is supposed to work.

"Despite the caliber of my work, I am not a unique, irreplaceable asset; my employer would have been perfectly justified in jettisoning me to the curb, just to placate a politically connected individual who was making their jobs more difficult than they already were."

And that's the point where you file a libel suit against the vendor in question, whose provably-false statements caused you significant professional injury.

"[M]ost bargaining occurs between management representatives and union chapter representatives – both made up of career civil servants. "

I think that this is the first time I've ever heard someone argue that allowing an entrenched unelected bureaucracy to do all the actual governing is a good thing.

"The elderly vote, but are otherwise impotent."

Unless they vote for free Viagra. (bah-DOOMP!)

He's not saying "the rich done got it tough". He's saying "when you talk about how we should raise taxes so the rich pay their fair share, you need to start out with knowledge of the share they already pay."

If nothing else, it avoids the embarassment of suggesting a "fair share" that's less than they pay now, which I've seen happen.

"But saying ‘My god, look at how much taxes so few people pay’, without following up with ‘because they make a huge fraction of the income’…"

It's not dishonest to bring out facts to counter stupidity. And it's stupid to repeatedly insist that we ought to raise taxes on the rich so they "pay their fair share" without actually understanding what share they do pay.

Like the man asked, what do you mean by fair share?

"Magical 100% health care coverage? Not income. Personal assistants who do everything for them, and I’m not talking about corporate assistants, I’m talking butlers? Not income. Private limos everywhere? Not income. Helicopter? Not income. "

Actually, those things are considered income. "Perks" have been being defined as income and written into the tax code for thirty years now. This is why people always go crazy about how "executive salaries have GONE WAY UP!" No; we've just declared a lot of previously off-books things to be part of their salary. They always had these things.

Of course, here's me bringing fact into the discussion, which is apparently the height of dishonesty.

Although here you are saying that the capital gains tax is not an income tax, and I can't decide whether that's dishonest or stupid (or both).

Interesting, a "roadmap" that has us traveling in three directions simultaneously. This looks like the kind of thing that Jared Loughner would have put together.

"I’m asserting that the _amount_ of tax is unrelated to the _amount_ of people paying it. "

So you're arguing in favor of the Flat Tax, then?

(he notion of progressive tax brackets is inherently bound up in the idea that the amount of tax is related to the amount of people paying that tax, because taxes are based on personal income.

Don't forget payouts for unused sick-time, something that private sector workers haven't had since the last century. (It's rather shocking to see a retired police captain say that greedy taxpayers are forcing staff cuts when he took two beat patrolmen's yearly salaries with him when he quit the force.)

Oh, and your pension is based on your final year's salary, and expenses count towards your salary, which is why retiring police captains get so much training at out-of-state facilities.

I'm agreeing with you that contracts can be renegotiated.

Your mistake is in believing that everyone in the current situation is willing to renegotiate. What you have is the government saying "no, seriously, we haven't got the money" and the unions saying "LALALALALALAA I CAN'T HEAR YOUUUUUU, now where's the pension check that you're legally obligated to give me?"

You agree...with what part of the post? You agree that the perceived effectiveness of schools was due to allowing the "D" group to drop out? Or you agree that the "D" group can't drop out anymore?

This is a bit late so I'll address each individually, rather than expect a continuing conversation.

For the first: Students in a class learn at the pace of the slowest learner. And if the slowest learners can be removed from the class, then the entire pace of learning increases.

For the second: You can't remove the slowest learners from the class unless they have somewhere to go. In times past, students who dropped out could work at jobs that required nothing more than "lift, carry, don't chop your foot off with the ax". These days, jobs like that are done by machines or Mexicans.

I'm not suggesting that we should burn down the Caterpillar factory so that uneducated teenagers have something to occupy them, but I am saying that maybe the apparent decrease in American educational performance doesn't have anything to do with NCLB, or educational policy at all.

I could see someone who doesn't pay attention to the news "voting Republican for the funding". But, as far as engineers are concerned, George W. Bush was the biggest defense cutter in history--the only new-development project that made it through his term was F-35. Damn near everything else that wasn't actually being built got cut.

Late reply--bored at work, doing some Google mining.

While we didn't have a huge ground-force army before raising the expeditionary force, the United States Navy was a respected and powerful force.

World War One started (and continued) because both sides thought that they were equally matched. As long as Germany had only England to fight, they thought that they could win. If they'd expected that a war would be against both England and America, they would have told the Austrians to get lost.