>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

@NetRunner There is nothing intrinsically morally good about pleasure,

Right, but depriving people of pleasure, or inflicting pain on people seems to immediately become a question of morality, does it not?
>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
My chief concern isn't that you have to be considerate, it is that you are considering something you can can't measure, legally. How many broken arms does it take to equal a murder? How many indecent exposures are equal to a hate crime?


Again, I don't really see that as an issue. I don't have a hard and fast rule that would be able to tell me how many broken arms equal a murder, but it seems pretty reasonable to state that there is a finite number where it would make sense, wouldn't it? Surely repetitive violent assaults would eventually earn you the same punishment as a murder as it stands now.

In any case, it's a heuristic for arriving at moral assesments, it's not meant to be a formal criminal justice system in its own right.

That said, why is breaking an arm a lesser charge than murder in the first place? Seems perfectly clear why if you look at it with a utilitarian eye, but it seems less clear if you believe that morality is entirely derived from some sequence of categorical imperatives.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

People can be unhappy for valid and invalid reasons. Happiness is an emotion. Happiness isn't rational. Happiness is related directly to what makes us animals, not humans. Happiness has no proper gauge, it has no measure, it has no quantifiable meaning outside of personal subjective experience. Something that makes one person sad, makes another happy. Some people like being mad, which makes others unhappy, which makes some people happy. Happy is a useless idea for basing moral arguments. I am staring to hold that Aspergers is the next stage needed in humans to put aside these silly emotional states that tie us to animal notions of morality. If we want to be better than pigs and rats, then happy needs to die, and soon.


And yet pain and pleasure are at the core of how we experience the world. We can try to pretend we're not connected to the world of animals, but we are.

Oh, and for sure, in a society built on glorifying selfishness, disconnectedness, and individualism as an end in and of itself, evolution is pushing us all ever closer to a race of total psychopaths.

You know, the ultimate moral creatures. Totally unhindered by any such animal emotions, like empathy, sympathy, compassion, honesty, loyalty, etc. Obsolete concepts that only those bestial liberals keep pushing, as if there was any moral worth in guaranteeing people a right to the pursuit of happiness...

Also, if your chief complaint about utilitarianism is that following it requires you to actually think about the consequences your actions will have on other people, and never provides any totally clear answers even then, you might want to think about whether that's really bug and not a feature.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
More happiness isn't a moral argument. It might make more people happy to have capital punishment, but that isn't a moral justification. So do go on and on.
Capital punishment doesn't make people happy, and a society that inflicts it on people who are sometimes completely innocent makes people really unhappy.
As for "happiness isn't a moral argument", the right way to think of it is "how is it moral to arrange society so that vast classes of people are unhappy?"
Maybe you have an answer for that, maybe you don't, but it's not an invalid moral question to raise.


People can be unhappy for valid and invalid reasons. Happiness is an emotion. Happiness isn't rational. Happiness is related directly to what makes us animals, not humans. Happiness has no proper gauge, it has no measure, it has no quantifiable meaning outside of personal subjective experience. Something that makes one person sad, makes another happy. Some people like being mad, which makes others unhappy, which makes some people happy. Happy is a useless idea for basing moral arguments. I am staring to hold that Aspergers is the next stage needed in humans to put aside these silly emotional states that tie us to animal notions of morality. If we want to be better than pigs and rats, then happy needs to die, and soon.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

More happiness isn't a moral argument. It might make more people happy to have capital punishment, but that isn't a moral justification. So do go on and on.

Capital punishment doesn't make people happy, and a society that inflicts it on people who are sometimes completely innocent makes people really unhappy.

As for "happiness isn't a moral argument", the right way to think of it is "how is it moral to arrange society so that vast classes of people are unhappy?"

Maybe you have an answer for that, maybe you don't, but it's not an invalid moral question to raise.

>> ^Trancecoach:

I like Jon Stewart's response on The Daily Show to Fox's allegations that Warren Buffet is a socialist. He said, yeah, that's like saying that George Clooney is gay for banging a lot of chicks.


Clooney is gay...Pitt and Damon said so!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-1WGE_x45g

I like Jon Stewart's response on The Daily Show to Fox's allegations that Warren Buffet is a socialist. He said, yeah, that's like saying that George Clooney is gay for banging a lot of chicks.

*promote

...in honor of Warren Buffet: socialist
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-18-2011/world-of-class-warfare---warren-buffett-vs--wealthy-conservatives?xrs=share_copy

I never ever said you were right wing. & You didn't stipulate that you were talking about sales tax, there was no way I could have known you meant sales tax.


In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/Peroxide" title="member since February 17th, 2007" class="profilelink">Peroxide I am hardly right wing, and many state use something other than income tax. Usually sales tax, which is at a flat rate. So, it is already there to be seen really. The US government used to subside nearly completely on tariffs as well, which is also flat. Long tradition of flat, sales taxes around the world, so I don't know exactly what you mean by your comment. Consumption taxes seem more fair as it taxes people who do and use things as they do and use them. Which I think was one of the arguments that was being thrown around as to the level of fairness. If you drive a gas hog of a car, you pay more consumption tax....makes sense to me! If you wanted to make it progressive, you could change the rate on certain things, or offer food stampish things to people that are low income, basically forfeiting their tax back to them in the way of rebates. Lots of different ways to handle it. I just know that now, I can't file my taxes without the help of a computer. And even then, I don't know if it is right. At any time the government could audit me and really, I wouldn't know how valid their claim would be. How many of you are sure that you aren't guilty of tax fraud? Have you read the X million lines of tax codes?

I admittedly can't find statistics on this. My google-fu must be tuned to much with finding tech related stuff too much now.

Consumption taxes cost the gov't a lot of money, not businesses per se. Most of what the stats I saw was due to consumption taxes actually being more prone to fraud. Granted, there's plenty of tax evasion with income tax, but it's actually less costly to find relevant info to detect and bust those people. It's easy to pull bank records, payroll info, etc.

If I find this data, I'll PM it to you or post in a relevant area.

If you're looking for a system that fits perfectly with ideals, you'll likely object to a progressive income tax. I'm not interested in what is philosophically ideal as much as I am in a system that works for the economy. I don't really care that I pay for other people's education, health care, etc. I care that as many people as possible are employed, that there's lower crime, that overall everyone is more prosperous on average, etc. That is far more important than me paying a few extra dollars in taxes for maybe even things I disagree with, and don't want to pay for. I didn't go around protesting that my tax dollars were being spent on the most recent Iraqi war, saying that their decision to go to Iraq inhibited my personal freedoms to do what I want with my money. It was for common defense, even if I disagreed with going in.

The individual freedom argument is oversimplifying the issue. Case in point, if a flat tax caused crime to go up, how is it a gain in personal freedom that you don't have to pay more taxes for things you object to if you're more prone to being robbed or murdered? If you're an entrepreneur, how are you more free if you don't have to pay for other people's education, but you can't make your business work because you can't find the skills necessary in your labor force?

It was progress for society to setup compulsory education for all people. You could argue it restricted people's freedom to not go to school, or parents to choose to not educate their kids. But that's frankly a ridiculous argument to say that progress at the cost of individual liberty isn't progress at all. Society progressed because the general population became literate through a compulsory requirement to become educated as children.

The truth is we have and should continue to make decisions like this based on what would benefit society, not what fits an ideology. Ideologies provide frameworks that help come up with new ideas, but those ideas should then be looked at with what the results would be, not lock us into only using ideas from that school of thought. Those discoveries that violate common ideologies eventually end up forcing us to change our ideologies in small ways or completely abandon ideologies altogether because they don't work anymore. But we should never do something only for the sake of ideological consistency.

I can't see how a flat consumption tax would help society. Objectively speaking, one issue our economy is facing right now is there is too much wealth concentration in the hands of the rich, so there's an incredibly weak market for purchasing goods and services business owners are producing. I'm not saying this to proclaim the rich are evil or anything of the sort; I'm just saying pragmatically the economy can't work for business owners nor the poor and middle class if consumers don't have money to buy goods and services the rich are producing. One way to remedy that is progressive taxation.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I don't know where the 98% efficient is coming from. The compliance cost alone I have read is close to 5 billion hours or so. With computers, I would imagine the sales/consumption tax is nearly automatic. Hard to find examples that aren't in someones sphere of influence. As for the "not progressive enough", that isn't really in the spirit of compromise. If I don't want it at all, and you want it all, halfway seems like the only way it will end up. A consumption tax seems easy enough halfway point. If you find it lacking, then join a charity that subsidies it out of your own pocket. Stop trying to be fair with other peoples money. Maybe I don't want to give every single useless tom dick and harry a leg up in life, I only want to help people I know and trust. Unless we are trying to make being a reclusive shut in completely against the law now. Progress at the cost of individual liberty isn't really progress at all.
Edit: Here is a less new, but more exhaustive link on costs.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr138.pdf
Last edit I swear:
I know you might not trust this, but this is a little blurb from the "Fair Tax" http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq_answers
It is progressive, which I don't like, but it is the best compromise I can find around. Seems reasonable enough.

Interestingly, all the fair tax graphs explicitly state that income=expenditures. Hopefully we all know by now that the richer you are, the smaller portion of your money you spend. Thus where is the tax burden going? Not on the very poor, they make little enough that they are exempt. Not on the very rich. They spend only a small fraction of their income. Therefore if it is indeed revenue neutral, the burden is falling on the middle class, who make enough money to significantly outweigh the prebate, and spend 80-90% of it.

However, the same graph showing the tax progressive also shows an effective tax rate decrease for everyone. How can it be revenue neutral if absolutely everyone is paying less? The trend line on the graph doesn't seem to indicate an intersection anytime soon. This begs the question: who pays more? If you give even one person a tax cut, you can't be revenue neutral unless someone else gets a tax increase!

All in all that site looks put together by people who wish to deliberately misrepresent the facts. I therefore want them nowhere near government policy. We have enough crooks and liars in Washington already.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I don't know where the 98% efficient is coming from. The compliance cost alone I have read is close to 5 billion hours or so. With computers, I would imagine the sales/consumption tax is nearly automatic. Hard to find examples that aren't in someones sphere of influence. As for the "not progressive enough", that isn't really in the spirit of compromise. If I don't want it at all, and you want it all, halfway seems like the only way it will end up. A consumption tax seems easy enough halfway point. If you find it lacking, then join a charity that subsidies it out of your own pocket. Stop trying to be fair with other peoples money. Maybe I don't want to give every single useless tom dick and harry a leg up in life, I only want to help people I know and trust. Unless we are trying to make being a reclusive shut in completely against the law now. Progress at the cost of individual liberty isn't really progress at all.
Edit: Here is a less new, but more exhaustive link on costs.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr138.pdf
Last edit I swear:
I know you might not trust this, but this is a little blurb from the "Fair Tax" http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq_answers
It is progressive, which I don't like, but it is the best compromise I can find around. Seems reasonable enough.

Seriously, it is like I am speaking a foreign language sometimes. At least, I shut up the trolls for the most part.

In reply to this comment by bamdrew:
... just thought this should be restated... add some brackets, and remove the temporary tax-gifts to the wealthiest... no need to get excited... these numbers aren't net worth, just yearly income... this takes us back to the 90's... remember Saved-by-the-Bell? Yeah, the 90's,... see, its all going to be fine.


>> ^MycroftHomlz:

Here are the current tax brackets.
10% Bracket $0 – $8,500
15% Bracket $8,500 – $34,500
25% Bracket $34,500 – $83,600
28% Bracket $83,600 – $174,400
33% Bracket $174,400 – $379,150
35% Bracket $379,150
I think Buffet wants something like this,
10% Bracket $0 – $8,500
15% Bracket $8,500 – $34,500
20% Bracket $34,500 – $83,600
25% Bracket $83,600 – $174,400
30% Bracket $174,400 – $379,150
35% Bracket $379,150
40% Bracket $600,000
45% Bracket $1,000,000

Are you ever going to address the fact that the Great Depression was ended by massive record deficits, followed by taxing the richest by over 90%?

Your entire argument is deficits never work, and raising taxes on the rich hurts the economy. I just gave you an irrefutable example of that being dead wrong, and you go into FDR's New Deal. Dude, I'm not debating the New Deal with you.

Prove that the US economy got out of the Great Depression without massive deficits (regardless if it was New Deal spending or WWII spending, it's irrelevant), followed by massively taxing the rich over 90% in the 1950s, during which the US economy was extremely prosperous.

That's the thing, dude. You can try to dodge this all you want. I'm not letting you try to move to discussing the New Deal, or Social Security, or how apparently communist George W. Bush (SERIOUSLY?!?!? WTFBBQ?!?!?!?) is.

This example in US history proves your rigid, ideological economic philosophy is dead wrong. You can't argue honestly that deficits are always bad, and massive gov't spending is always bad, and the US gov't can't help aid in turning around the economy. It most certainly can. It indisputably did. There's no "some fact" to this. It absolutely is historical fact.

That's the thing. Once you admit that yes, deficits can and do help end recessions, and taxing the rich more heavily can be good for the economy, we might be able to actually have an honest, adult conversation about how to help the economy. Until that, you're just spewing idiotic and/or intentional misinformation.

And then you just completely glossed over the entire reason why the gov't is almost always the one who HAS to spark the economic turnaround. We NEED the gov't to stimulate the economy, just as we need the gov't to put the brakes on when the economy grows too quickly, which is when those deficits can get paid for incidentally.

Are you just gonna sit there and call everyone other than the Tea Party communists, or are you actually going to address any of this?

>> ^quantumushroom:

The rich pay a higher percentage, and more taxes overall than the poor. Why do you think anyone is saying otherwise?

And that's absolutely how it should be, for the good of everyone, rich included.
But why doth "the poor," who siphon the "free" money, have no civic responsibility at all? Shouldn't they be paying something into the system? Or maybe "dependency voters" are needed by a certain political party?

It's perfectly sensible to talk about why some people don't pay any taxes at all. I'm not even debating that. But the rich should still pay more, regardless. The US has been one of the strongest economies for most of the 20th and 21st centuries with a progressive income tax, and it's been a heck of a lot more progressive than it is now, and we were still very prosperous.
The rich already DO pay more. It will do NO GOOD to shakedown the rich for ever more $$$. The problem with tax addicts is they can never get enough. It's too easy to spend money. Destroy the incentive to invest and/or create (or deny there is incentive at all) and you get stagnation. GOVERNMENT CREATES NOTHING.
Showing fraud in some programs doesn't mean the program should be abolished. It can be reformed as well. There are plenty of ways to do that. We didn't abolish welfare in the 1990s. We reformed it. And no, it's not true that private businesses will always create the jobs when the economy is down. History has proven quite the opposite. Why would a business invest to make more goods and services if there's no market for it. A downturn in the economy breeds more economic decline. It's called a business cycle, and it's a natural occurrence. If you were a business owner, generally speaking, if you know less people out there have the money to buy your goods and services, would you increase production and hire more workers? Of course not. Does the average person put more money into the stock market or take money out when the market tanks? Takes money out, which drains money for investing. This is basic micro and macroeconomics.
But what about now, when our cherished federal mafia creates INstability? No sane businessperson will hire now with the Hawaiian Dunce in office. I've heard this claptrap about government spending as savior before.
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Some force has to run counter to the natural tendencies of the market to force demand to increase, and of course this virtually always requires running a deficit. This is why slogans like "the gov't should be run like a business" are simplistic and wrong. The gov't should in those situations create jobs through various programs, thereby increasing income for the lower classes, which creates spending and demand, which then causes businesses to increase production, hire more workers, and that gets the economy back on track. You can site case study after case study in our history we've done this, and it worked.
But it's not working now, is it. OOPS! I agree that govt should not be run like a business. It should instead by treated like the dangerous raw force it is, because that's ALL it is.

We ended the Great Depression via defense spending in the form of WWII in record levels as the most obvious exaggerated example. That historically was qm's worst nightmare - record deficits in raw amount at the time, and still to this day historic
record deficits as a percentage of GDP during WWII, followed by a tax raise on the richest Americans to over 90%. And what calamity befell the US because of those policies? We ended the Great Depression, became an economic Superpower, and Americans enjoyed record prosperity it and the world had never seen before.
This is historical fact that simply can't be denied.
There's some fact in there, but the cause and effect seems a little skewered.
FDR was a fascist, perhaps benevolent in his own mind, but a fascist in practice nonetheless, the sacred cow and Creator of the modern, unsustainable welfare state. He had no idea what he was doing and there is a growing body of work
suggesting his policies prolonged the Depression.

Here's what happened - Democrats deficit spent as they were supposed to (which is exactly what the GOP would have done had they been in power, because it was started by George W. Bush), which stopped the economic free fall.
This is all quite arguable. Yes, Bush the-liberal-with-a-few-conservative-tendencies ruined his legacy with scamulus spending, but nothing--NOTHING--close to 3 trillion in 3 years! Spending-wise, it's comparing a dragster to a regular hemi.

Moody's didn't downgrade the US debt. It was S&P. They sited math about the alarming deficits which contained a $2 trillion mistake on their part. They also sited political instability as the GOP was risking default to get their policies in place, which btw still include massive deficits.
Do you wonder why you can so neatly explain things while the Democrats in DC, with their arses on the line, cannot? The failed scamulus has forced the DC dunces to change boasts like "jobs saved" to "lives touched". Apparently there's a lot more to this tale than the Donkey Version.

The GOP couldn't stop the Democrats from spending all that money?! Laughable.
They didn't have the votes.

The GOP started the freakin' bailouts and stimulus! What did the GOP do the last time there was a recession after 9/11? Deficit spent, then continued to deficit spend when the economy was strong. Dude, seriously, you have no factual basis for
that kind of claim whatsoever.
Compare taxocrats' dragster-speed spending of the last three years versus Repub spending during the 8 years before it. The argument of "But they do it too!" has some merit, but as the rise of the Tea Party has shown, business-as-usual is no longer acceptable.
Oh, and taxocrats, remember this: the Hawaiian Dunce considers anyone making over 250K to be millionaires and billionaires.

Dude, I'm not the victim, I couldn't care less if you call me a communist. From you, it doesn't mean anything since 99% of everyone is left of you. Therefore, you think everyone is a communist. That explains most of your gibberish posts.

Pretty much how Lewis Black describes Glenn Beck playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except there's only one degree, and Kevin Bacon is a COMMIE!

I guess I need something that doesn't make any sense to end this post now, but it needs to be in all caps, because that makes it more emphatic...

MY ANACONDA DON'T WANT NONE UNLESS YOU GOT BUNS, HON!

*shrug*

>> ^quantumushroom:

Quit acting like a victim, it's unbecoming, especially since you're casting stones.
YOU DON'T START NONE THERE WON'T BE NONE.
>> ^heropsycho:
I knew it was only a matter of time before you'd call me a socialist. That of course makes me a communist, since socialism and communism according to you are the same thing. ROFL...
So in short, everyone even remotely to the left of qm is a communist apparently.
>>

Dag forbid they even consider the logic I layed down.

>> ^bamdrew:

... just thought this should be restated... add some brackets, and remove the temporary tax-gifts to the wealthiest... no need to get excited... these numbers aren't net worth, just yearly income... this takes us back to the 90's... remember Saved-by-the-Bell? Yeah, the 90's,... see, its all going to be fine.

>> ^MycroftHomlz:
Here are the current tax brackets.
10% Bracket $0 – $8,500
15% Bracket $8,500 – $34,500
25% Bracket $34,500 – $83,600
28% Bracket $83,600 – $174,400
33% Bracket $174,400 – $379,150
35% Bracket $379,150
I think Buffet wants something like this,
10% Bracket $0 – $8,500
15% Bracket $8,500 – $34,500
20% Bracket $34,500 – $83,600
25% Bracket $83,600 – $174,400
30% Bracket $174,400 – $379,150
35% Bracket $379,150
40% Bracket $600,000
45% Bracket $1,000,000