Transactions don't take place between individuals unless they are mutually agreed upon, the government is simply supposed to be there to protect property rights and offer recourse through courts. That is the principle scope of government.

In socialist programs, payment is forced. What is a government paid teacher beholden to? The consumer, the parents? Certainly not. Does someone vote that teacher out or in? No, they are appointed by a chain of other government officials voted in by the MAJORITY, all financed with taxes. Taxes are FORCED PAYMENTS. You don't get any say for the product you get. That people could actually come on this board and be stupid enough to equate profit with bad service is a real laugh. So many things around them, all the products you use came about from free people mutually transacting with one another. That orange you bought at the local market is a transaction as much as that computer you're using. And somehow profit and self-interest is bad? That's what incentivizes people into these transactions. But you people can't even figure out that without the taxes to fund public schools, people would HAVE more money to afford private education. It only looks unaffordable in an environment where you're getting reamed by the inflation and taxes that provide this socialist nonsense, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Famed libertarian Harry Reid once said "Government breaks your leg, hands you a crutch and says, see, without us you couldn't walk!"

The least regulated market in the world is computers, and we can easily compare what its done to advance society over some utopian ideal where people pay a king to dish out orders demanding innovation and self-sacrifice purely for the good of society. It doesn't fucking work that way. Nobody invents cool shit that helps society under some government edict, someone creates something in their self-interest that someone else might want with the end EFFECT of benefiting both parties. Yes, Henry Ford was a millionaire at the end of the day, but that money was from selling millions of people cars. That's a bit different from some despot who has a million from taxes. Unless a company in a truly free market can convince other self-interested people that their product will improve their lives, they're not going to get their money. If they lie about the product or infringe on rights, they can be taken to court. That's a desirable function of government. Not to engage in the market itself and make products or dish out subsidies to people with forcibly appropriated money, but 50% of GDP is controlled in this way.

Here's the government programs that are fairly simple in task and don't do much damage: delivering mail, picking up garbage, laying concrete. Here are the extremely complex market services that don't operate in the consumer's advantage: operating on your body, teaching and caring for your children, "managing" everyone's retirement, building and maintaining power plants. These things have impoverished an entire sector of society with the taxes needed to fund their inefficient operations. You can't opt out, you can't avoid it, even if you don't want the service. Not to mention the trillions stolen and redistributed to some companies and not others in this corporatist atmosphere we've accepted (subsidies, bailouts, tax credits). How does a company get an anti-competitive special advantage from government if it doesn't have anything to give? You idealist idiots who think your politicians are selfless angels in no one's pocket all these years need to wake up and stop entrusting them with you and your children's wealth. THEY BLOW IT. On themselves, and their corporate buddies. And it was all forced, they never had to convince you with a product on a shelf, all they had to do was get on a podium, appeal to your sense of being under-appreciated and underpaid, and promise you the mother-fucking world. Then they tax and inflate the bejesus out of you, only to hand it off to some dick providing you a "service." Then, now that they've impoverished you and made you dependent on welfare, they get on the podium again and tell you the answer is that it simply wasn't enough. That the private sector went crazy and their price fixing and interventions had nothing to with it. They need more. More power, more redistribution, more bailouts. Manchausen syndrome.

And every time some fistfuck runs his company into the ground for a million dollars, so fucking what? That allows a better company to rise up and take its place. Better than the USSR. It's not a perfect system, there's a lot of incestuous activity in the bigger companies for sure. But if you bail any of them out, it will be a merry-go-round for these fuckers. Some of the worst payouts recently have gone to Fannie and Freddie CEOs, these are pseudo-government institutions that were designed with the INTENTION of making housing more affordable, in reality leading us to the exact opposite. Their CEOs were former Clinton advisors, they're in bed with the Dodd's and Frank's of the world, they've channeled millions into Democratic and Republican campaigns alike. There are crooks everywhere, you need to figure this out already.

The banks, our money system, the lifeblood of an economy, are heavily, heavily connected to the government because of its desire to inflate rather than tax. We allow banks and only banks to loan out money they don't have AT INTEREST via fractional reserve banking. We have a non-market determined monopolized money, we allow the banking industry to centralize and price fix interest rates, THE ROOT CAUSE of credit malinvestment bubbles worldwide. You can't regulate this stuff any more than you can regulate murder, because it is inherently fraudulent what we are allowing them to be doing.

Your money is like a vote with far more overt benefits. As a consumer, that's the best vote you've got. If you want to switch off your brain and just have prosperity come down to whether the majority correctly chooses the best dictator or not, I guarantee you we are on the road to hell as we speak. There are some powers that GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT HAVE, because it matters not how long you can correctly choose the upstanding citizen to exercise them in YOUR rather than THEIR best interest if eventually someone comes in and abuses it, causing the whole damn thing to implode on itself. That is the importance of the constitution, it was supposed to stop this from happening, but as soon as they realized they could ignore it with impunity, they just use as toilet paper. Forget laws for politicians, right? Who needs regulation for the regulators? They're all angels out to save us from our greedy selves. Gimme an effing break.

>> ^spoco2
I'm not in a position to really state whether any of that is true, but if it is, and the Republicans have been in power for the last 8 years... then surely it'd be stupid to vote in more of the same leadership?
No? And if you're going to try to suggest that all the problems are because of a democrat being in office in the 1930s... please, respectfully... f ck off.
If your chosen part has been in power for the past 8 years and has done nothing but help your country sink into its own financial abyss, then have the bloody balls to accept that, don't pull some shit about someone 70 years ago causing the trouble now.
That's some serious blinker you have on there.


Though it sounds like quantum doesn't really understand what he's parroting, to those learned libertarians in world who understand the problem, he's actually kind of right and it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. It's entirely a matter of socialist big government policies that have been building over a long period of time, just waiting for someone highly corrupt to abuse them. Are you aware of the benevolent dictator argument? The idea that just because it's possible to have a benevolent dictatorship for a certain period of time, the costs of that system ultimately catch up to it because as long as those highly centralized powers EXIST, they WILL be abused by an eventual regime change and destroy the country. This is why we embrace constitutional limits on government and a system of inefficiency in which it is (supposed to be) extremely difficult for any political group to do this. Those limits started to get ignored at the turn of the 20th century and are almost all violated in some fashion today. It doesn't matter how convinced you are that your candidate is telling you the truth, some powers shouldn't exist. The system should not come down to who can pick the best dictator, and then being left with the consolation of "I told you so" when the people finally screw up and elect the wrong guy. Because there are actually two ways to do harm: through stupidity or through deceit. It's perfectly possible to be a well-intentioned, charismatic guy that is just plain wrong or ignorant how to best solve a problem. It's also possible for someone to promise to do one thing to get elected, and do the opposite once elected. People on this forum are educated enough to see #2. They're not seeing #1.

Bush is a highly corrupt individual, no question about it. But to restrict the debate to a choice between liberalism and neo-conservatism is to restrict the debate to socialism, because that's exactly what both of them are with minor differences. This population needs to understand libertarian principles, and fast. Because make no mistake, these socialist enablements and crises and scandals have plagued politics in general over the years and it was bound to come to a head sooner or later. We are in the late stages of socialism, there is nothing "regulatory" that can be done about something that is inherently fraudulent or corruptible. You simply have to understand that markets are merely individuals making mutually agreeable transactions with one another. Government's main functions are very simple, it is to make sure rights are not infringed with police/fire/national defense, and to provide a system of courts for recourse and the settlement of disputes. It is not to have its hands in every part of the market to regulate "greed," this is a nonsensical statement that assumes politicians with privileged power to forcibly appropriate money are not themselves greedy. This is the kind of idealist thinking that enables lobbying, corporatism, etc, and it's stunning that people haven't figured this out yet. The only way a person or a company can turn a profit, without infringing on people's rights, and without colluding with government-specific powers that they do not have (see:below), is to create a product/service that people will want to improve their lives with. That's it. It doesn't matter that the primary goal in a business venture is to make money in a truly free market, because the only way to make money in that system and keep it is to meet the demands of someone else. The EFFECT is that both parties benefit, even though the goals are both driven by self-interest. People are also very generous and are more apt to give excesses to charity under this system, charity was at its highest in America in the late 19th century. Because we didn't have inflation and we didn't have an income tax. Here is a short list of things that have brought us here and Ron Paul was the only one talking about any of them.

1. Centralized price fixing of interest rates by the Federal Reserve System: sends the wrong signals to investors to prevent politically inconvenient recessions, incentivizing massive misallocations of capital investment. Enables catastrophic insolvency, market scapegoating and further socialist interventions. This is THE root cause of the two market bubbles which are now collapsing, as well as the bubble that formed in the 20s and crashed in 29. This one spanned both Clinton and Bush presidencies, started with the easy money policies of the 90s that led to the tech stocks collapsing, then the inflation was filtered into real estate by Greenspan's 1% artificially low interest rates in 2000 (he also egged on the market for years, completely oblivious to what he was doing), and finally the inflation is coming home to roost in basic commodities. Borrowers are walking away and banks that invested heavily in the housing mania with are now left with mortgages that are nowhere near worth the price that they could actually sell the home. The housing market mania was so intense that people were buying homes to flip them to other people who were buying homes to flip them, until eventually, all that was left was speculative sellers with no one buying to LIVE in them other than idiots with bad credit who bought with no down payments.
2. An unconstitutional, non-market determined money: easily manufactured at no labor or material cost by the banking industry that controls it, transferring purchasing power from those who have to work for them to the recipients of this free money in wall street and in the government without asking the working man. Morally reprehensible and enables bailout legislation to deal with the insolvency that #1 causes.
3. Fractional Reserve Banking: government enables the banking industry to fraudelently loan out credit many times what it actually has in reserves and earn interest off of it. The effect cascades as a result of successive deposits of this phantom credit between banks and enables bank runs and extremely unstable leverage, creating an environment that all but necessitates an FDIC and central bank to be lender of last resort in the event of a run, which of course leads to the creation of #1.
3. Heavy subsidization: enables corporate lobbying for government handouts of forcibly appropriated money as an anti-competitive advantage
4. Income-taxation, a direct tax on production, very difficult to enforce without intimidation tactics, enables special tax credits as an anti-competitive advantage
5. Anti-competitive regulation: who's regulating the regulator? Idealist FDA powers to ban products from being chosen on the market have led to anti-competitive bans such as Stevia, resulting in health repercussions unbecoming of an agency that is supposed to protect it. Special legislation such as NAFTA, a 100-page "free-trade" agreement acting as a pretense to lower tariffs to get the WTO to raise tariffs
6. Nationalization of industry: enables predatory anti-competitive takeovers for the largest institutions of smaller institutions, enables government monopoly in industry financed by forcibly appropriated money.
7. Medicare, SS: Unsustainable, government run ponzi schemes purporting to be welfare measures. New investors paying old investors in real time, continually increasing tax rates to prolong solvency, continually changing rules about retirement age to prolong solvency. Trust fund anually tapped by congress to spend the excess by replacing them with government promises of future dollars (bonds). CPI-adjusted payouts, allowing government to underpay by understating real inflation.

And after listing all of this shit, it should be obvious to see why I'm so incensed by simple little quips like charliem's that get rated up: "unethical" loans. You want to talk about ethical lending? You think the government doing the things above under either party gives one bloody shit about ethics? Lending money is a gamble, it's a gamble you implictly allowed that bank to take by giving them your money to gamble with. Banks aren't a free storing house for money, they immediately take the money you give them and loan most of it out to someone else at interest, that's how they pay YOU interest for keeping it on their books when you could otherwise put your savings in a lockbox for a fee. But seeing as how people are cheap, ignorant bastards that have no idea how fraudulent the current system is, they will continue to ask politicians to coo-coo them with "ethics reform" and other nonsense that do nothing to solve the fundamental problems.

And let me make this dirt simple if I haven't already: you can't "regulate" or "oversee" these activities any more than you can "regulate" or "oversee" murder. It is fundamentally fraudulent to loan out something you don't have, price fixing of interest rates creates shortages of capital when people otherwise would save it, and an easily inflatable currency is nothing more than legalized counterfeiting for government and anyone who colludes with them. Wake up already.

>> ^hatsix:... but spouting off Mathews talking points makes it sound like you're terribly ill-informed.


Uhhh, that's a pretty insulting statement there champ.

And you're still wrong.

McCain's tax credit quickly becomes an increase because it grows only at the rate of inflation (%2) while tax subsidies keep up with health insurance premiums at about %7 per year. This creates an average of over $3,000.00 per year increase immediately. (These numbers are from the Congressional Budget Office, not Chris fucking Matthews, thankyewverymuch)

By 2018 most households would be paying around $25,000.00 per year while McCain's credit would cover only %28 of that cost (again, based on CBO projections, not Chris Matthews)


This is all without even getting into pre-existing conditions, seniors, or discounted premiums negotiated through group plans.


p.s: I don't get my info from TV talking heads. I like places like the Kaiser Family Foundation, Factcheck, CBO's website, and CAPAF:
http://www.kff.org/insurance/7672/sections/ehbs07-6-3.cfm


so nyaaah

>> ^volumptuous:

Yes he will.
His plan will, for the first time ever in this country, make your health care premiums a taxable income.


It's true, they become taxable, and he gives you a tax credit for $2500 or $5000. For 99.9% of people who receive insurance from their work, this is way more than enough. Our local (Premera) Blue Cross insurance offers a family 80/20, $500 deduct, $8000 Max OOP plan for $452 per month. If a family were to go directly to Premera, they could get this plan and get a tax credit for this. BUT, that family would have been taxed anyways. The new taxable item is the premiums that you pay from work, but considering that his plan completely covers a very comprehensive plan without *any* group rate, I have no problem believing that it will pay for a vast majority of americans' employer-provided plans. (My premiums are $70/month, for a plan very similar to the mentioned plan)

Here's the kicker. McCains plan is a TAX CREDIT. The previous system you purchased with pre-tax dollars, but you still paid outright. In the new system, people who HAD been paying their employer $450/month for insurance will now pay $450 taxed dollars (about $585 of pre-tax dollars). They'll end up spending $5000 ($7000 pre-tax dollars), but get a $5000 tax credit ($7000 pre-tax dollars). In order to actually have to pay more for insurance than you were before, you'd have to be paying $15000/year.



Now, personally, I like Obama's plan better, but saying that McCain is raising taxes because of this is rather disingenuous. The only people whose taxes will be raised are those getting insurance from their current employer and paying more than $1250/month... A quick survey of people on my IM list says they all pay less than $200/month for group-rate health care. The change from today is that citizens who purchase their health care independently get a tax break as well.

Look, I'm voting for Obama, I want him to win, but spouting off Mathews talking points makes it sound like you're terribly ill-informed. Now granted, *you* may end up getting taxed more, but most will not. I really like Obama's state-sponsored health care better, but either one will bring much-needed relief to those living paycheck-to-paycheck. Obama soundly trounces McCains' tax relief for those making under $40k, and is still reasonably better for those making less than $85. Neither tax plan is sustainable, and both will have to raise taxes if they EVER hope to have a balanced budget.

>> ^MINK:
^whereas the pharmaceutical industry is a group of competent and honest people with incentives to make people healthy? how about that health insurance industry? they have your health as their number one priority?


They don't have to be competent and honest, they simply have to be put in an environment in which their desires to collude with government-specific powers are disabled. Neo-con socialists and democratic socialists alike (this includes you) vote for people who want to subsidize, charge income taxes, and inflate, but tell me: how does a company bribe a politician for a special subsidy when subsidies are illegal? How does a company bribe a politician for a special tax credit if income taxes don't exist? A libertarian like Ron Paul knows the powers were idealist in nature and can't but be abused, so he's going to remove them entirely. That's exactly how you solve the problem. It isn't by talking tough with one hand and taking a lobbyist's payout on the other like every other candidate. And it isn't Nader's solution to get ANOTHER government agency to oversee this bullshit which will invariably degenerate into another bloodsucking corrupt agency after his well-meaning sponsors die off and are replaced by the order of the day.

And regarding health quality, the average lifespan of a white American male has gone from 50 in 1900 to almost 80 today. That's pretty good considering we eat like crap. You want to cite socialist nations which are dependent on imports developed by capitalist sources? How about the horror stories where people are waiting months for a scan to reveal a tumor before it's too late? Or how about the true cases of people who had tumors, but the government hospitals refused to operate on them because they didn't believe their chances of surviving were good enough to justify the cost of operating? At which point they paid for private care and lived.

The two things you're missing are these: companies are out to make a sustainable profit. Government is supposed to make sure they're not infringing on rights, and to provide courts for recourse in the event that they do. In that environment, the only way to make a profit and keep it is to give customers what they want. Do you want bullshit drugs that make you sick? No. So how could a company profit from ruining your life? With the internet and informational publications as easy to obtain as ever, they can't.

If you research some more, you'll find that the HMO act and Medicare are some of the most fiscally irresponsible and collusive enablements out there. Those, the central bank, and inflation enabled by not restricting the government to non-inflatable money are THE reasons private health care costs (and gas, and groceries, and well... everything) are becoming increasingly unaffordable. These are all socialist policies doomed to failure and that's exactly what you're getting. And your solution is more government? You're NUTS. You're barking up the completely wrong tree.

>> ^MINK:
^jesus i have no idea why people want to privatise EVERYTHING. We live together in a community. A little bit of "commun"ism is natural. Otherwise you are talking about walking around with a concealed loaded weapon all day, paying corporations to fix your gunshot wounds. Instant utopia, eh?


Communism/socialism is defined as what percentage of your labor is owned "communally" via its populist government rather than its earner. If you own someone else's labor, why work harder than the next guy? Where's the disincentive to being the lazy, unproductive one in the group when you're gauranteed the same share? Where's the incentive to work and think harder than anyone and innovate new things to get a bigger share? What happens when the government dictates unproductive positions in society, like who the artists and athletes are? These are the crushing oversight that causes every socialist big government economy to degenerate into equal misery and financial collapse.

>> ^MINK:
^I mean private TV companies are so competent and efficient, right? Let's do for our health what we did for our TV networks!! wohooo!


Besides the fact that airwaves are heavily regulated by government already, you want the content itself to be owned entirely by the government because private owners have a political bias one way or the other? Guess what happens when the government owns it. All channels = one side. I must be dreaming you said that and got rated up by the idealist socialist smeg-for-brains on this site. You don't understand the inherent costs of the best system (capitalism), you're just blinded by the false promise of a benevolent dictator who will come in and sweep away the scapegoats, and in the process you and people like you will lead us to bankruptcy and fascism.

You don't have to explain all of that to me. I understand and agree with it. I know that the majority of people benefitting from social programs are wonderful, deserving people. I'm not rich, either. I know what it's like to earn nothing and survive on it. Even then I was not happy with taxes because my taxes weren't going where I wanted them to go. Were you listening to what I was saying? I would be happy to share my money with whoever needs it, and I do! If everything was all fuzzy wuzzy like you said; taxes going to poor little elderly folks, single mothers, disabled people, etc., it would be great! I would love and adore taxes if that were true. I would love taxes if they simply funded transportation and education and medicare and welfare and all of those good things, but I know that this isn't the case. Taxpayers (including single mothers) pay for government waste, pointless wars, and yes, the occasional freeloader. We pay for the National Wildlife Turkey Federation in South Carolina, for transit centers for minor league baseball teams, for halls of fame and a million other ridiculous things. Wouldn't t be better to fund those sorts of things at a more local level instead of wasting so much money on overhead? I just found an IRS study that says that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides about $31 billion in refundable tax credits to 19 million low-income families. Great! However, the IRS estimates that $8.5 billion to $9.9 billion of this amount, nearly one-third, is wasted in overpayments each year. Ick.

My siblings and other family members have had to make use of "those services," and I very much appreciate their existence. I don't believe in the idea that people on Welfare are lazy drunks. I agree with Karl Marx about a lot of things. But Welfare IS abused and it needs to be a system where we encourage self-reliance and help people break the cycle of poverty instead of perpetuating it. And I think by "a couple of bad eggs" you mean tens of thousands.

I don't care about Joe Shmoe's birth control. It is not a neccesity. I don't care how good his sex is. I intend to use birth control pills. I never had my teeth straightened. I still have my wisdom teeth. I'm not complaining about my quality of life. A vasectomy is a luxury, plain and simple.

Uh no you do not have to pay it back. It is a one time tax credit for 2008. The misinterpretation may be that, in case you were sent the wrong amount, when you file your 2008 return you may have to pay a portion back or you may get an even bigger credit. It has nothing to do with your "normal" tax refund.

Tax credit/rebate doesn't that assume you make enough to actually even be taxed that much? Some of the poorest people, arguably people who need health care the most, probably don't even pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of the rebate.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what he's saying, but it sounds like it has something to do with the Taxes you already pay. Can someone clarify?

Eugenics does not necessarily lead to Nazism. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to influence human evolution through nonviolent means like genetic engineering and child tax credits for geniuses. The slippery slope argument is a fallacy. It has nothing to do with racism. The nazis took a reasonable idea and perverted it with their racism, went bananas with it using extreme means and pseudoscience, and did a lot of other unrelated bad things. But Eugenics is no more to blame for the holocaust than the invention of gunpowder.

GHeap,

You said: "I don't know what is greater, your ignorance or your aversion of the issue."

Almost certainly my ignorance, but it's not because of this issue. And I'm not avoiding anything. You made a claim about Romney's qualifications to serve under a Democratic president. I responded by pointing out that, in my opinion, most of his statements on the economy throughout the course of his campaign have been nothing but right-wing boilerplate. They haven't shown a nuanced understanding of the economy or a desire to be honest about our place in the world market (He's gonna bring all those auto industry jobs back to Michigan! Just you wait and see!). Moreover, I claimed that statements he made (in this video, no less!) about the Democrats and the war show him to lack sound political and strategic judgement. I'd say that lacking good judgement should pretty much disqualify you from having any cabinet position in any administration, but I guess that's just me trying to skirt the issue. Oh, wait...

The fact is, your suggestion was ill thought out. It would be as ludicrous as me saying that Romney, if he'd won, should've made Ralph Nader his Secretary of Labor.

"He's got the Reganomics thing going on. And despite how you feel about Regan, he did the economy justice."

First of all, his name was Ronald Reagan. Second, do you mean the "Reaganomics" that GHWB called "voodoo economics?" Or are you talking about the Reaganomics that no less a conservative than Mike Huckabee says is "more concerned with Wall Street than Main Street?" No, Ronald Reagan did not "do the economy justice" (mostly for the reasons Farhad points out above). And in the areas where he wasn't as awful as he could've been, it was largely because he had been embarrassed by the failure of his more ideologically driven first 2 years in office, and was forced to the left. As blogger Ezra Klein puts it:

"This is a guy who raised taxes six years in a row...passed a massive amnesty bill, wildly increased the size of the federal government, exploded the deficit, saved Social Security by instituting a large payroll tax, and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. Not to say he didn't have his conservative dogma humming along quietly in the background, but the last seven years of his administration saw him somewhat chastened, and far more deal-oriented."

So more Reaganomics? If that term means "fucking the economy up for 2 years until the situation becomes so bad politically that I have to try to pass some half-assed fixes that wouldn't be nearly as good as what the Democrats would have done all along," then I'll pass. So will any Democratic nominee for president, thankfully.

Finally, I'd point out that even though I thought what you said was stupid, I didn't downvote your comment. It was pretty cheap that you did so to me, but it's your character and reputation at stake when you do such things, not mine.

I'll accept that the US isn't a big concern to you and I'll try to adjust my comments accordingly. The current US tax code is extremely broken, but it does tax income in a "progressive" (I hate that word, it implies something it isn't but it is the correct term) manner whereby the income of the higher tax brackets is taxed at a greater percentage than the income of the lower brackets. Therefore, those in the highest bracket end up paying proportionately more than do those in the lower brackets. According to the Tax Foundation, in 2005 the top 1% of income earners in the US paid 39.4% of all federal income taxes on an adjusted gross income of 21.2%. If there is anyone reading who didn't understand that, the top 1% of households earned 21.2% of the income in the US and paid 39.4% of the income taxes. The "rich" are already paying more than their "fair share" in the US.

Where the system is broken is that we are attempting to use the tax code in order to push social engineering changes on the nation. Sure, it sounds great, and we can all agree with some things (like tax credits for hybrid and alternative energy vehicles) but the problem is that as administrations come and go they all try social engineering towards different ends. What you end up with is a mess of rediculous, outdated programs that no one wants to cut and anger a part of the electorate. I assume by the tone of your posts that you are against the concept of a lower tax rate on capital gains because it "favors" the wealthy. I ask that you understand the social engineering that was originally behind the concept. Lower capital gains taxes encourage investment in the markets. This in turn spurs the economy. Does it favor the rich? Hard to say. Certainly people with disposable income to invest get the direct benefit, but how about the people who have their pension plans invested in the stock market? A strong stock market, driven by a steady influx of capital from "the rich" directly improves the lives of those totally dependant upon their pensions. Is that good? Or bad?

In the end, I believe that the US government should not be using an income tax to try to control the behavior of its citizens anyway. Personally, I believe in a consumer tax system that completely abolishes the income tax and replaces it with a sales tax. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with health care and this video, so I'll leave it for another time.

ZOMG reln... You have drank the blue and white kool-aid alright.. "Every tech company" does not invest there. Wow, so Intel has one or two 90nm fab there (where people hand carry wafers around a clean room). They have fabs in AZ, but I don't see billions of dollars going toward reservations.

As far as the intel Inside (tm) I used to power my masterbastion videos on my computer.. I can't see much that was developed exclusively in Haifa other than the Centrino crap that got intergrate into the Pentium Ms (which eventually made it into Core Duo stuff). But really.. come on. No one ever said there weren't a bunch of smart engineers living there. A lot left for the promised land in the 70s and 80s. I don't understand why US govt has to provide money and weapons. They should pay for the weapons, and not allow Intel anymore tax credits.

Oh, and Intel is 13% of the "tech industry" exports from Israel so it can't be that booming of business. And just FYI with 5,000 Intel employees... that's smaller than each of IBM's plants in Vermont and New York. Also probably smaller than every Intel site except Ireland (which is probably mostly just package and test).

In case you didn't realize what else Bush has done for rich folks, oil companies, and auto mfg,

Prior to enactment of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (Jobs and Growth Act), the 2003 tax code schedule for business depreciation allowed for a deduction of up to $25,000 in the year of purchase of a truck or van weighing over 6,000 pounds, and set a five-year depreciation schedule. In March 2002, Congress passed an economic stimulus package that allowed an additional 30% "bonus deduction."6

With passage of the Jobs and Growth Act, Congress dramatically expanded the already generous SUV loophole by raising the deduction ceiling for certain purchases-including SUVs-from $25,000 to $100,000.7 Under this new rule, the entire cost of all but one large SUV-the Hummer H1-can be deducted. This act also increased the "bonus deduction" from 30% to 50%8, which businesses can utilize in the first year of purchase on the amount above the initial deduction. This bonus deduction was established in addition to the five-year depreciation schedule9, which remained the same.

Under the new plan, a business owner who purchases a $110,000 Hummer H1 in 2003 can now deduct a total of $106,000 in the first year (see table).

Aside from our messed up tax credits for rich, estate tax repeal, fucked up energy policies, Enron collaboration from this Whitehouse.. How totally fucked up is giving away all of these tax dollars (in un-realized tax money) for vehicles OVER 6000lbs. Not vehicles over 30mpg, or vehicles with less emissions. Total corrupt assholes.