do you mean regressive, not progressive?

Can someone give me a cliff's notes on US tax?

There are economic situations in which some level of wealth distribution is desirable. For example, free trade across borders is a benefit to a nation as a whole (comparative advantage etc etc), but the benefits are not shared (i.e. jobs are lost in exported industries, while other areas benefit immensely) and so some level of wealth distribution would be necessary in order to share the benefits.

lol I meant progressive. I have a head cold, that's my excuse.

Damn. In Canada, middle class (beware upcoming "racism") WASP families would be the least interesting people to politicians. We don't exist. Millions (billions) is spent to get the immigrant vote, the poor vote, the rich vote, whatever, and nobody cares about the 85% of the population that isn't any one thing... average people don't count here.

OK, now I'm all fired up. Thanks.

I said it as soon as he was named Obama's running mate. Biden will cost Obama votes - way more votes than he will get for him.

Biden's brain and Biden's mouth are very often running at different speeds. As the election gets closer, he'll make many, many more stupid statements, and McCain's camp will nail him for every one of them.

Zurv, you don't strike me as the kind of guy who needs a whole lot of needling to get fired up about something.

That's a compliment, BTW.

in the uk there has been this big push to get everyone to go to university to study something. As a result there's been this huge growth in crap degree subjects like golf course studies and the like, and you can't get a plumber for love nor money, but if you can he drives a porsche. Instead, i think it's pretty obvious that there are some areas, most notably things like plumbing etc., which are best taught in ways other than universities (i.e. apprenticeships or w/e) and that a decent proportion of the population is better served by getting education directed towards something more practically useful like electrics than a course in the politics of star trek.

In a similar way, there has been a lot of effort in younger education to standardise the education system, with the end result that everyone gets the same crap education, rather than trying to match teaching to abilities and aptitudes. Equal != identical.

Not a whole lot gets me going, really. Politics is on the short list, along with people wasting my time, and ****ing around in games

Can I get an "AMEN!" up in this congregation?

One of my very favorite articles about class in American politics. Swiitch sounds like he will like this one too.

link

Calling it prejudice is a strange way to put it. Anything I am prejudiced against, I do not want. Ask someone making $30k a year if they want to change places with a person making $250k a year.

Anyway - this is NOT how people should view those making more money than they are, but do, which is stupid.

My first 'real' job, I made $20,700 a year. When my wife and I got married, our combined income was about $45k a year. Rather than hate those making more money than we did, we tried to figure out how and why they make more money, and then did what they did.

The best argument for progressive taxes and moderate wealth redistribution imo is that preserving a strong middle class and ensuring opportunities for the lower class are a fundamental aspect of a strong economy that enables the upper class to actually garner their high income.

To use a ****ty analogy, I'm sure you've all read some essays and articles on how you keep a poker game healthy in the long run. It needs to have enough short-term luck so that fish still have enough winning sessions that they keep coming back, but enough long-term skill so that pros are still favored.

If a game is too luck-based, then pros get frustrated and stop playing. The game dies. If a game is too skill-based, then pros fleece the fish too quickly and end up trading their own money around to little/no benefit. The game dies.

you see taxes and government are a lot like poker hlghlghhlghgh in conclusion regressive taxes (sales, flat income) sound great philosophically but will disproportionately hurt the lower and middle classes in the short-term and will hurt the upper classes in the long term when they have no one to sell/market frivolous gadgets and cheeseburgers to

the choice of Palin has utterly negated this advantage because not only does she also make stupid statements and have lots of political baggage (like biden), she also has ensured no one will be paying any attention to biden whatsoever

I'm working from home today because I'm sick and I'm reading this thread in my pajama bottoms and Obama t-shirt. Just sayin'

I need to muster up the energy to write a good analogy for clown about patents and copyrights too.

I disagree with this.

Biden will get his headlines - he craves the spotlight too much not to. Living in Southeastern PA may have something to do with me seeing it, but Biden has gotten more press in the past than even our own Senators have, at times.

unless he says something truly, fundamentally damaging, the media will not care enough to do anything other than to air some interviews and stump clips, he's been campaigning non-stop since the dnc and the only thing i hear about him from pundits/blogs/newspapers is "Where is Biden? WHY DON'T WE SEE BIDEN WE NEED MORE BIDEN okay back to the cratering stock market and sarah palin buying a tanning bed"

Maybe their values don't change, but I think its possible people can change the order of importance of conflicting values.

For instance, I have known one of my best friends since high school. In HS, he stood out as the biggest Democrat in our group. He even did some volunteering for some local Dem canidates when he was in college. He voted Clinton in 96. In 97 he graduated law school and got a job at a high-profile, nationwide law firm. He voted Bush in 00 and 04, and is planning on voting McCain this year. He is still fairly liberal on social issues, but admits to voting his pocketbook.

I think there are a fair amount of people who have gone through a similar progression. The old "If you vote Repub when you are young, you have no heart, and if you vote Dem when you are old, you have no brain." cliche.

Okay, some topics I'd love to chime in on here. I'll stick with intellectual property rights for starters.

Software patents are out of control, and copyrights are granted for too long. Business ownership instead of personal ownership of copyrights is what's driving that - when a person owns a copyright, it's easy enough to expire it when he dies, for example. But when a business owns a copyright, they might be keeping it in play for hundreds of years. How long should Disney expect to be able to retain control of a film they made, for example? How long should the Happy Birthday song be owned by someone before it falls into public domain? These aren't easy questions and I don't have ready answers for them all.

A quick primer on what kind of IP rights there are in the US.

In the US, there are a few different methods of protection, which Zurvan has pointed out - I can only imagine that Canada's laws on the matter are quite similar to the US for trade purposes. Software is currently usually protected by both patents and copyrights.
Copyrights protect your work from being copied without your permission. This doesn't have to be just word-for-word copying, but usually is. However, there are built-in exceptions to copyright protection known as fair use. Fair use isn't always well defined, but basically it protects things like critiques and parodies, and some educational mechanisms.
Patents protect an invention. Historically they would protect an actual thing, a product or feature of a product, that has been invented and is going to be for sale. The purpose of a patent was that the inventor would put the details of his invention in a public arena for people to learn how it is made, and in exchange be given a temporary monopoly on the right to produce and sell that invention. In this way the purpose would be for the state of the art to advance over time as the granted monopoly expired and the invention became available for use by all to build on.

However, this protection was specific to the implementation listed in the patent. For example, imagine the days before the intermittent windshield wipers - they were either on low or high speed. Then someone comes along and realizes that an intermittent wiper would be useful too, and comes up with a way to do it using, say, a capacitor that charges up and fires periodically. Then person A patents this idea and starts selling it to a car company.
Well, now person B working for a competing car company wants the same feature. They can't just start making the same mechanism, it's protected by law. But, they could make an intermittent wiper that uses some other mechanism, say for example a wheel with long spokes hanging off of it, and the spokes rotate into a contact that completes a circuit and fires the wipers once for each time the spoke passes. It's a totally different invention to implement the same feature on the car, and it wouldn't be subject to the same patent.

Unfortunately, there are several things broken with the current patent system. First, business cycles in different industries have vastly different time scales. A car takes something like 5-7 years to go from concept to production, minimum; a 5 year patent on an invention wouldn't even have time to get sold and thus would have no value. However, in the software industry, 6 month development cycles are common - and a 20-year protection (which is the current length of patent in the US) is an eternity; very few things in the software industry are even useful 20 years later. Second, there are so many patents in any given field that it's becoming very difficult to know if you're unintentionally violating someone else's patent. In industries with a high cost of entry already, hiring someone for a patent search isn't a significant % increase to the cost of the product. But in industries where the cost of entry can be minimal - such as software - the patent search can increase the cost of the product creation by many times the original cost, artificially creating a barrier to entry in the market. Third, in large part because of the last point, patent lawsuits are now being used as a source of income rather than a protection of an existing stream of income. This is clearly an abuse of the original concept of the system, but a natural result nonetheless. Companies patent anything and everything they can think of, and then go out into the market looking for violators and either convince them to fork over a licensing fee to continue business, or create a lengthy court battle over the patent and often win some sort of compensation anyway. Whole corporations have sprung up whose sole business is to purchase patents that they think are likely to be infringed upon unknowingly and thus create litigation opportunities. This is actually stifiling creativity in the software marketplace, as there is a lot more risk than reward involved in putting a novel concept into the marketplace, unless you are backed by a large patent portfolio yourself (such as IBM).

I don't think there are easy answers. On the one hand, there seems to be good value to encouraging creativity and invention. On the other hand, defining what's protectable and what isn't, and in what circumstances, seems murky. Sound waves bombard my body - do I have the right to record them? What rights to I have to the recording I made? Can I copy it? Can I sell it? Can I give it away for free? Why or why not? I'm sure the band at the concert I was at would prefer that I wasn't recording it at all, and certainly they don't want me selling it or even giving it out for free in a lot of cases. A mathematician derives a formula for "optimal bonus incentives for managers" in a particular niche industry. Should that be protectable? Should he be able to sell it to a given company, and choose not to sell it to particular companies? If so, how closely would other companies be able to mimic it? "The exact same, except $1 more on all bonuses" seems too close, but then what's "not too close"? Should a math teacher be allowed to teach the derivation of the equation to students without the orginator's permission? (This is a real-world question; someone actually did this and grabbed a patent on it, and the patent validity went to court). I don't know where I stand from all this, but I think it really does need a rethink from the ground up, and not just some minor tinkering to fix thinks.

Why Everyone Should Be in Favor of Reducing Taxes on the "Rich"
Also lol @ 250k being rich, especially if inflation takes away half of that and taxes take another 30%+ of what's left over.

Let me quote one of my favourite musicals:
Actually I'll also link the song:
Do you hear the people sing?

Also lol Madtown reading that marxist stuff in English...looks so odd.

Hm, nice ninja edit. The rest of that wasn't there when I started reading that first link

anyways, that link is really hard to take very seriously or even read due to the heavy-handed tone in the article. I really couldn't get past section I, and I even agree with several points they're making.

obama compared to chavez in the first sentence, stopped reading

i read "The Fair tax Book" and do think it would be the best system for our country



it's mostly a Vat tax

you are so openminded

to be fair, i also stop reading things that compare bush to hitler

That's exactly what it seems like to me.

Ah dan, you're the average american that I picture in my nice little ideal world where Americans still care about you know kinda American stuff like freedom and silly stuff like that.

See above.

It's so simple. stay the **** out of their life and everything would be so much better for them. As I said before I love to argue with Socialists and it always starts like this "Hi, my name is Kris I'm a capitalist. I understood what you said about the minimum wage now tell me why you hate the poor. Do you think you're something better?". It really catches them off guard to throw their silly emotional guilt arguments at them.

German system (lol complexaments):
4 years of basic school -> split into 4 different types of schools (+ special schools)
a) Gymnasium = the top school prepares you for University (including the 4 years of basic school 13 years total)
b) Realschule = aimed to get you a degree after 10 years total and allows you to decide to switch to Gymnasium or go into a craft
c) Hauptschule = designed from the beginning to be over after 10 years total to go into a craft
d) Gesamtschule = some odd mix of all invented by the Socialists to unite everything under one grand umbrella (nordic model iirc). All degrees are possible, 13 year degree is significantly worse than Gymnasium one.

If you switch into a craft (mechanic, carpenter, nurse etc. etc.) it's 4 years of a 50/50 mix of practical work and school specialized in what you'll do (basic medicine for nurses, mechanics/electronics for car mechanics etc. etc.)
If you go to university there's two choices
a) University = well University doh
b) College = less theory, more practical work generally concidered less elite than universities but also with less strict requirements to get in

Additional notes (Gymnasium only as that's where I went):
Mandatory foraign language #1 starts in 5th grade (English), second one starts in 7th grade (usually French, Latin sometimes Russian or Spanisch). Optional third language in 10th grade.
Math and science classes are significantly harder than anything I've seen in the US

Obama is pretty much a softened version of Chevez I think the comparison is spot on.

im posting from my phone

there is an incredibly good chavez documentary you guys should watch

its called "the revolution will not be televised" i'll post the link later but just search for it on google video

it takes place during the 2002 coup attempt and the filmmakers have incredible access- both to chavez and then later to the right wingers behind the coup

its actually one of my favorite movies