"Years earlier, they had amassed...", before building the model.

The model came later as a result of the failed projects, realizing that a symptomatic approach was flawed. The model was to take a more holistic methodology to addressing the flooding along the Mississippi.

The timeline is as follows:
the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927:
Flood Control act of 1928-
Army Corps of Engineers gets to work
Sec. of Commerce H.Hoover directs Flood Relief
towns & cities which had flooded get levees
The Great Flood of 1937:
towns downstream of newly protected communities get flooded.
ACE begins with simple models in dirt
1943 gets funding to build largest scale model for study:
1"=1000' horizontal, 1"=100' vertical
German POWs used for initial labor.

sorry that wasn't clear enough before. There was no model before.

>> ^notarobot:

>> ^deathcow:
My god you realize what this is.... this is not a flood control system... this is a coverup. They'd discovered Moria! Refer to 01:25

But where did they put the Balrog?


If you pause at 1:32 you can just make it out in the upper left. That's why this clip was only 2 minutes long, it killed the entire crew and this was footage was sent back as a warning. It's OUR coverup, not Japans.

>> ^deathcow:

My god you realize what this is.... this is not a flood control system... this is a coverup. They'd discovered Moria! Refer to 01:25


But where did they put the Balrog?

Wow, no kidding!
>> ^deathcow:

My god you realize what this is.... this is not a flood control system... this is a coverup. They'd discovered Moria! Refer to 01:25

My god you realize what this is.... this is not a flood control system... this is a coverup. They'd discovered Moria! Refer to 01:25

So, these statistics are from the IRS and isn't internet hearsay. Medicare makes the percentages paid by top earners go up. So do property taxes. (Sales tax and state taxation is another discussion and doesn't involve the Federal government. In any case there's no way to enforce a progressive sales tax. So if this is unfair, then the only thing to do is eliminate it altogether. But that is a state-by-state decision.) Medicare along with Medicaid and some other mandatory taxes account for 33% of Federal expenses/budget, while social Security for 21% (even thoug Social Security is a separate Trust Fund).

Social security is capped for various reasons and it doesn't have anything to do with current tax debates or legislative proposals. Social security tax is about 15%, half of which is paid by the employer. Social Security is in theory a separate budget from the rest of the federal budget. And for 2011, the total tax is reduced with the employee paying only 4.2% of it and the employer paying 6.2%.
Medicare, as mentioned, is not capped at any income. On a million dollar income you pay about $14,500. On a 45K income you pay about $652.

Unemployment taxes are paid fully by employers not employees.

The complaint that the bottom 80% pay 13% is misleading because the bottom 50% (half the population) pay between only 0-3%.

Top 10% (not top 20%) - pay 70%
Bottom 50% - pay 3%
Everyone else - 27%

But it gets a bit more complicated because about 47% of households pay 0% income tax, a majority in the bottom 40% of earners.

Top 10% earners have to pay more (70%) for the roads, government salaries, wars, national parks, Airforce One, NPR, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, and most other government services (the bottom 50% pay less than 3% of it) but when buying goods (with or without sales tax), like coffee or an iPhone or pumping gas or a movie ticket, it does cost top earners a smaller percentage of their income.

Some other "taxes" are, in effect, flat taxation like business license, car registration, bridge toll, sanitation and flood control, parking meters, etc.

Fairness in this is a matter of opinion (and self-interest). I'm not an accountant so I can't really go into all the various loopholes in our tax code.

And I'm talking mostly about taxation at the Federal level of which income tax accounts for about half. Like I said, sales tax is a state matter and so are fees like parking meters etc. Taxation at the state level seems to draw less controversy because Democratic states will "happily" pay more and Republican states will "happily" pay less and you can select a state to live in at just the right taxation for you.

And as we all know on the Sift, you have that statists on one side who think more taxation is better because the government is here to help and anti-statists on the other who think "that government is best wich governs least" (or not at all). And also the hybrids like Lyndon Johnson, Larry King, Jon Stewart, and others, including most corporatists.

>> ^Ariane:

>> ^Trancecoach:
The Top 1% also pays nearly 40% of the Federal Income Tax
>> ^ghark:
Some interesting facts about the top 1%:
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent Of The Nation’s Personal Debt
The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five
-wealthiest-one-percent/


Umm, no.
"The Internet is awash with statements that the top 1 percent pays, depending on the year, 38 percent or more than 40 percent of taxes.
It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.
Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800."
http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_thin
gs_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html
Sales taxes and other flat taxes are even more unfair. We low income people pretty much spend all the money we make and as a result pay (in my state) 8% of my income in sales taxes, while the top 1% only spend a small fraction of their wealth on items likely to collect sales tax, so I would not be surprised if the average top 1% pays even 1% on sales tax.
The top 20% earn 93% of the wealth, yet only pay 70% of the taxes, leaving the other 13% to the bottom 80% who only earn 7% of the wealth. THAT is what needs to be corrected.

it was the human erosion of the wetlands that allowed Katrina to hit so forcefully in the first place.

The reason that Katrina became a category 5 hurricane while it was still in the Gulf of Mexico was because of wetland erosion? This is a fascinating posit, and I look forward to seeing your supporting evidence.

It is not logical to be so blindly and religiously convicted to ones political beliefs you defend a given party regardless of how indefensible and reprehensible their actions are.

I concur. People should stop blindly and religiously defending Democrats like Nagin & Blanco for thier role in the Katrina mess. Their incompetence and mismanagement of the city of New Orleans, its allocated funding, and its flood control system created a precarious situation. Additionally, their reluctance to evacuate in a timely fashion cost hundreds of people their lives. The Bush administration's inadequate initial response exacerbated the problems that these democrats created. Also, environmentalist lobby groups that prevented the Army Corps of Engineers from repairing the levees share a large amount of the blame for the deaths of so many people. Incidentally, environmentalists also share a large amount of responsibility for the size and intensity of the current fires in Los Angeles.

I don't like this question;

29) A flood-control levee (or National Defense) is considered a public good because:
A. citizens value it as much as bread and medicine
B. a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it
C. government construction contracts increase employment
D. insurance companies cannot afford to replace all houses after a flood
E. government pays for its construction, not citizens

I'm putting B?, but both B and E are simplistic to the point of being confusing.



Okay, now this one,

31) International trade and specialization most often lead to which of the following?
A. an increase in a nation’s productivity
B. a decrease in a nation’s economic growth in the long term
C. an increase in a nation’s import tariffs
D. a decrease in a nation’s standard of living

Now I want to put A, but B could be the answer if you're talking to a jerk... this is kind of a bogus question.