My Land of Misery wrote in news:3bf8a$492cb5d7$ snipped-for-privacy@news.teranews.com:
The top 50% of wage earners pay 96% of the taxes. Hardly a "huge chunk" of taxes for the minimum wage worker.
"Allan Smith" wrote in news:h4udneXGyssaXLfUnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Yes, debt was increased by excess spending, not for a lack of revenue.
"Ernie Jurick" wrote in news:4PCdnWTC361Sa7fUnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
Sorry, but you're way off. From the Census Bureau:
Of course, that even begs the question of whether or not allowing the government to take more of our money is a good thing anyway?
Dave Head wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Since when does the government care what the Constitution says?
They ain't voluntary. Men with guns make sure of that.
Therefore, if someone takes your money without your permission, what else is it called except for theft?
I suppose one could technically argue that it's extortion. Pay up or else go to jail.
Similar to dealing with organize crime, except in the case of taxation, it's legalized extortion.
Who cares how are taxes are compared to socialist countries worldwide? Since when is is depressed 2nd and 3rd world countries our baseline?
Greater school revenue better schools.
And federal income tax has nothing to do with local school taxes/revenue.
Yes, and if we had no taxes in this country, think of all the money we'd have. Of course, we'd be Sudan, with no government, just rival gangs and warlords controlling things, but hey, right-wingers can put up with anything if they get to keep an extra dollar!
ews.teranews.com:
Income taxes only. And so? That's anybody making over $32,000 a year. People making below that are poor!
And poor people pay a greater % of their salary in Social Security taxes than the wealthy; that's what the poster was referring to.
Neither is stopping at a red light, or not committing arson. What a doofus.
You, sir, are a kook. K-O-O-K.
You and your friend McVeigh?
Your opinion. Get elected or appointed to the USSC and it'll mean something. Now it just labels you as a K-O-O-K.
I meant "no corporate taxes." I thought that would be clear from the previous posts regarding eliminating the income taxes - _all_ of them, and substituting a consumption tax. Sorry if it was unclear.
Dave Head
snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
There _is_ that aspect of it.
I was absolutely flabbergasted that 4 Supreme Court justices were able to label the concept of owning a gun as being an individual right to be "a stretch," as it is immensely clear what the FF's meant from their writings and the use of the phrase "the people" in amendment itself, etc. Those 4 appear to operate on the idea that the original meaning is irrelevant and they're going to do what _they_ think is the best thing for 21st century America (IOW, they're going to change the Constitution by edict rather than by the process prescribed by the Constitution itself) and thus proclaim themselves to be smarter than the FF's. They need their asses kicked.
Heaven forbid we have minimum government and be free instead of being slaves to the ruling class for half the year or more.
What do you think the ruling class in the US is? They are are warlords and thugs just on a larger scale. Look at how the ruling class uses the US military. Just like organized crime and warlords use their muscle.
Keep that 'left-right' delusion of yours. The real division is rulers and serfs.
If you knew anything at all about the history of the constitution you would understand that the FF saw gun ownership as a way for the STATE governments to counteract the power of the FEDERAL government. None of the 13 colonies would have ever signed the US constitution if they had any idea that they would NOT be allowed to secede from the Union any time they wanted.
The idea was to permit states to create militia's which would in effect be their own private armies, and the 2nd amendment was put in place to prevent the federal government from ever taking away the authority of the individual states to run their own armies.
Of course, Slavery and the Civil War saw an end to this. States Rights today are dead as a doornail. Note also that the 2nd amendment wasn't written for GUN ownership it was written for ARMS ownership. As in, ANY kind of arms, including machine guns, explosives, etc. Because after all, a state's army would need military weapons.
It IS a stretch that the Constitution has been interpreted this way. But, you seem to fail to understand that law is built not only on the written laws but the many, many precedents of how those laws have been interpreted. The past interpretations of the 2nd amendment today have as much legal weight as the amendment itself. The justices understand that, which is why they understand it's stretched, but they also understand that they still have to give weight to that stretching.
Ted
This is called a "diversified economy" We need BOTH types of jobs, both the manufacturing and the programming.
Service jobs are just as required. Consider the people who paint the Golden Gate Bridge. They start at one end, and by the time they make it to the other end they have to start over on the one end again. By your definition this isn't a produced product that has value for a very long time. However, if they stopped doing it, the bridge would rust and collapse.
All these jobs are part of a diversified economy. All are needed.
That isn't true. However, why would we want to? Those battleships are sitting ducks and were obsoleted by modern nuclear subs.
Both General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding build the nuclear subs used in the US Defence fleet today. GD in fact bought out GM's defence divisions back in 2003, and Chrysler's defense divisions back in 1982. Loral corporation bought out Ford Motor Company's defense division back in 1990 then later sold them to Lockheed.
It's called "institutional knowledge"
Apparently nobody can spell it either - Stradivarius, not stradavarius!
And as for the assertion that nobody can make a Strad, that is wrong. The Strad's secrets were figured out pretty recently by Texas A&M University biochemist Joseph Nagyvary who made one and arrainged for a blind audience test - the audience preferred his instrument over the actual Strad. As you might imagine, Nagyvary makes violins today:
It's also known that each Strad was hand-tuned during manufacture, as Strads are not all identical, and are not even symmectrical. Most violins today that are manufactured and sold to your typical violin student are made for looks, and they look great. Sound quality isn't as high on the list.
apprenticeship
It's not "lost" knowledge. This is like the Saturn V rocket. We no longer have the blueprints, tooling or dies to make a Saturn V. But, we have some Saturn V's in mothballs somewhere. If we really wanted to make another one, we could study the ones we have. Sure it might take a few years to develop a process for making one again, but with enough money spent on the project it could be done.
But, is it really? When you include all the environmental costs of cleaning up after heavy industry I think you will find it isn't nearly as profitable as you claim.
There's other reasons that there's not a lot of money in programming these days.
This is a eugenics argument, and it is morally bankrupt. Even if it were not, per the "Normal distribution" for IQ scores (where your getting this from) only around 20-25% of the population has an IQ of 85 or lower, and only around
20-25% of the population has an IQ of 115. The majority of people have IQ's between these amounts. Your arguing in effect for continuing the factory system for only 25% of the population.IQ measurements are on a curve. If the entire population's IQ increases then the median point - the 100 - simply moves. Thus you will ALWAYS have some portion of the population with a "lower" IQ unless every single person scored exactly the same on the IQ test.
Many studies have shown that wild changes in IQ in children can result from environmental and other program changes. Alfred Binet himself claimed that IQ was not a fixed amount. It's know known that providing an intellectually stimulating environment for children is one of the most important factors that will raise children's IQ. It has also been observed that there's a coorelation between lower-IQ and poverty; children from poor sections of a city tend to have lower IQ's.
My belief based on my lifetime spent observing the situation is that the ONLY reason we even have a significant number of lower-IQ people in the US today is due to parents - more poor, but some not - who use the television as an electronic babysitter for their children. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) agrees with this somewhat - they recommend that kids under 2 years old not watch ANY TV and that those older than 2 watch no more than 1 to 2 hours a day. However I think this is far too much. Parents should teach kids that TV is for occassional entertainment value ONLY and it is NOT for constant escapism. 1-2 hours a WEEK should be it.
What also "ain't happenin" are teachers like your mother successfully teaching people like myself - who scored around 130 on the SB IQ test as a child - yet never got decent grades in school.
People like your mother can only teach kids who do exactly what they are told. Your mothers preconceptions are unfortunately very common among the teaching ilk. My rough guess is that 75% of teachers in the average public school are not capabable of teaching anything other than the absolute median pupil. And private schools are 10 times worse because any student in a private school that doesen't exactly conform to their norm is "fired" (their parents are asked to leave)
Schools are mills for the average person. Claiming that what they turn out is indicative of what can be done with any given person is poppycock. The most important thing with the student is motivation - a student highly motivated to learn can score straight-A's as long as they aren't mentally handicapped, whereas a student highly motivated to f*ck-off and NOT learn is not going to score decently no matter how high their IQ.
All of that is true. However as to why waste R&D on small cars, there is a very good reason to do so - product diversification. This is why Toyota wasted time tryting to produce the POS Tundra that stank so bad.
OK, so then the import automakers will NEVER produce large cars that pollute and thus large cars will be wiped out of American roads in 15 years. Yeah, right.
The import car makers "suffer" under the same safety and tailpipe restrictions that the domestics do. Thus the idea that the domestics are put at a disadvantage compared to the foreign makers due to safety regulations is nonsense.
The guys who knocked down WTC are still in operation in the mountain regions of Pakistan. For all the money that was spent we still don't have Osama's head on a pike.
The "terrorist" who got his hands on weaponized anthrax and sent it through the mail here was home-grown. He committed suicide recently when he was found out - see Bruce Ivins.
Don't be a moron and equate Afganistan and Iraq. They are different countries and Afghanistan was hosting Al Queda, while Saddam was mortal enemies with Al Quada.
Ted
That was the rule in our house from my age of 4 until about 10. My 4-year younger bro and I were given the task to choose what to view during those two hours per week, subject to pop's approval.
Ted, your post has appeared in several different groups. Which of them do you consider your resting place? I enjoyed your post and method of presentation; I'd like to *see* more of you. There are several other folks who have also appeared recently in misc.news.internet.discuss; I'd like the same info from them.
To whomever brought many of you here, thank you! We need some new input. ;)
Yep. But we largely don't have manufacturing any more, at least not nearly enough of it.
Yes. But, the manufacturing jobs are far fewer than they should be. Not everyone can paint a bridge for a living. I expect these guys are probably fairly well paid, but there are only so many bridges. And there are far too many people that are in the "service sector" that don't make squat for wages, but could if there were a few more factories in town. Get a "service sector" job working heating and air conditioning. There's a lot of overhead in obtaining service vehicles to make service calls to residences and businesses, plus the wasted time in traveling to and from the customer's site. Unless you're working on big commercial units and working in a union shop where the profits can be made to be distributed more equitably, you're not going to be making a lot of money.
I met a guy at the gym - worked that sort of job for a small business and wasn't making a lot of $$$. Then he got a job working on large air conditioners for big buildings such as malls, etc. Via the union, he was getting $70K a year. Not too bad for not going to college. But those sorts of jobs are way too few. Lots of people that could do factory jobs just fine are stuck with things like retail jobs, and working several of those just to stay above the poverty line. That shouldn't be happening in this country, but the rape of manufacturing by the tax system, the envirowackos, and the excessive safety bunch have brought that about.
I read that we couldn't produce a solid piece of metal big enough for some part of the ship any more, maybe the bow. Not sure. But anyway, nuclear submarines? Nuclear submarines cannot sit off your shore and pound hell out of the enemy in the hills above your position, as one of our battleships did in Lebanon in I believe it was the early 80's, in support of the Marines. Size matters, and it is seriously awesome to have multiple projectiles each weighing as much as a Volkswagen bug coming in on enemy positions. You can't demoralize the enemy like that with a nuclear sub...
Nevertheless, it provides good jobs for more people like no other endeavor.
There's the part about it being fun, too. Anything that is fun usually doesn't pay for squat, although programming _did_ pay pretty good until the H1B Visas and the outsourcing.
What? It is not. It just says that half the people are below average in intelligence. Its a fact.
And it says there's some jobs that are not available to them. That also is a fact. They can try, but they will be unsuccessful in competition with smarter people. That's just the way it is.
Not true. I said that some factory workers are _not_ less than 100 IQ. There are people in factories that are far in excess of 100 IQ. My Mother used to work in a factory - I don't know what it was, but I'm pretty sure it was higher than mine, and mine is above average.
Yep, and those that have no aptitude for purely mental endeavors, which are mostly what makes good money any more, should have the option of an industrial job that still pays decent wages.
Before TV, there were still people that didn't make good doctors and lawyers, but could still do excellent factory work.
Hey, lets just leave Mom out of it - she was an exceptional teacher, who taught
1st grade and had kids reading in a matter of 6 weeks by rejecting the standard "See-Say" method of "modern" teaching and went back to phonics on her own. Mom was exceptional in many ways, and was told after taking aptituded tests when she went back to school that she could have been "anything she wanted to be."Well, it would have been nice to diversify, but a company can only have so much money, especially with the gov't sucking money out of the corporations via the income tax and other taxes which are excessive. If you want less of something, then tax it heavily. We did, and now we have less of it.
?
Did you read what I wrote? American car manufacturers were disproportionally stressed by having to meet a "grams per mile" standard that was an absolute number, rather than a percentage. So, making a V8 Oldsmobile get X grams per mile is much harder, and therefore much more expensive, than making a 4 cylinder Fiat or an Opal or an MG meet that same number. American car manufacturers were much more adversely affected than foreign car manufacturers because they were making big cars and trucks, which is what the American public wanted to buy from them.
They are dying in the mountain regions of Pakistan, thanks to UAV's, cruise missles, and the US Army Rangers. Its a matter of time until UBL is out of doors someday and a UAV-launched Hellfire missile targets his navel.
Yep. But if UBL gets hold of several tons of the stuff, it _will_ be spread all over the east coast, you can bet on it. One of those letter-borne anthrax samples emitted a single spore that traveled from DC to Baltimore and infected a woman who died from it. A _single_ spore, the doctors believe. Figure a few tons of it shoved into the atmosphere like a fog. Millions of deaths, probably. I'll likely be dead if they get their hands on it within the next 3
- 5 years, before I can move back to the midwest where things are cheaper and a less-interesting target.
And they were both threats to us. Saddam had already proved that in 1991, was shooting at our planes every damn day, and there was no way to tell for sure whether he was cooking up a big vat of anthrax to give to terrorists to deliver to our densly populated regions or not, other than to go in and have a look like we did. But we liberated millions of people from his tyranny, and, if everything goes right, will have replaced him with a friendly government in the middle east, a rarity. We can use more of those.
Sorry. What I was thinking but didn't say is that the attitude of cutting federal taxes, that tax cuts are always good because all taxes are too high, has made it to all levels of government. My local statehouse rep ran a campaign that taxes were too high and cutting taxes would help industry, increase revenue, etc... when they've already been cut and the decreased revenue has resulted in necessity of cutting services.
The FF's were extremely concerned about that and the government power being used against the citizens. The object of the 2nd amendment was to have arms in the hands of the _people_, and not at some armory where it could be turned against the people by either the federal government _or_ the state government. The FF's did not trust _any_ government - Feds or States - and meant for political power to remain in the hands of the people. Chairman Mao said, "Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun" and the old commie bastard was right.
It was also to prevent the states from taking away individual liberties against its citizens. Guns were meant to be owned and kept by the _people_, for the purpose of being _able_ to form a militia. That's why it says, "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Yep. We have too many restrictions on _arms_ ownership already.
The 2nd amendment has been directly ruled upon in extremely rare circumstances. Most rulings used by anti-gun proponents often are not even made on the 2nd amendment itself, but on some tangential technicality. But the FF's were pretty clear in their writings that they meant for people to have the individual right to keep and bear arms.
I can tell you that I saw Brent P mostly in the rec.autos.driving until the recent attack on the usenet by some gov't agencies that have gotten many servers shut down, and so has diminished that group by a substantial amount of traffic.
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