Links With Your Coffee - Monday
- Looking Right, Looking Left: Online Only Video: The New Yorker (Mitt Romney)
- Shouts & Murmurs: The Afterlife: Cutting Back: Humor: The New Yorker
Increasingly, in recent centuries, We have been reminded of a fact that We have tended to overlook: eternity lasts a very long time. Our resources, though “infinite,” are not unlimited. Keeping murderers and warmakers submerged in boiling blood, for example, is manageable in the near term but cannot be sustained for all eternity, since the energy expenditure required to heat blood forever will eventually constrain even Our ability to undertake other desirable projects, such as the continuance of the universe as a whole. We face a similar energy crisis with regard to evil counsellors, whom We have promised to incinerate everlastingly; with regard to blasphemers, sodomites, usurers, and doers of violence against Us, who must be tortured without end on heated sand; and with regard to Count Ugolino, Archbishop Ruggieri, and others who are permanently frozen in ice. The avaricious could conceivably be put to work ceaselessly twisting the heads of diviners and fortune-tellers, or keeping flatterers covered with filth, or cladding hypocrites in leaden mantles, but not even We can unwrite the terms of Our own first law of thermodynamics. . .
- Jürgen Habermas: Philosopher, poet and friend - signandsight
I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
- The reading cure | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato. But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides. Blake Morrison investigates the rise of bibliotherapy
- Good Math, Bad Math : Bad God Proofs: the Islamic Version
I've been sent Yet Another Proof of God. This one goes to rather a lot of trouble to appear to be mathematical. I thought that it would be fun to rip it apart. For a change, this one is from an Islamic moron, rather than the usual Christian moron. Alas, it's pretty much as stupid and shallowly wrong as the usual christian one.
- Mike Huckabee wants to abolish the IRS | Salon.com
. . . both conservative and liberal economists believe the real rate would end up even higher. Estimates of the actual rate of taxation required for the FairTax to be "revenue neutral" (meaning for it to bring in exactly the same amount of revenue that the federal government collects under the current system) start at 30 percent and keep climbing. William Gale of the liberal Brookings Institution think tank says it's a de facto 44 percent sales tax. Calculations go still higher once you add in all the necessary and politically inevitable exemptions on big-ticket items -- like a new home or hospital care. Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation, which draws members from both parties and both houses, says the real rate would be 57 percent. (And this leaves aside the enormous federal outlay required by the "prebates," which even FairTax advocates say would cost the government $485 billion per year.)
(tip to Frank)
Comments
Here come the Fair Tax defenders, duck!
people besides huckabee defend the fair tax ?
Quiet, you might provoke the Syngas-Fair-Tax Dragon...
I hate when politicians drag out this old load of crap notion. Most people think that a flat tax would only be 10-15 percent and they don't bother to educate themselves or sometimes even turn a deaf ear to anybody who tries to explain this to them. This is a political load of crap that I hate because it brings out the shallowness and stupidity of a majority of Americans who jump right on the idea as a great thing.
I don't know how long it's going to take these smarter-than-me people to realize it (and that Google engineer is no doubt smarter than me), but when you introduce your argument by hurling insults and epithets (calling your opponent a moron), then I conclude that you're too scared or weak in your thinking to have a winning argument. So I stop reading and close the link. And the "it's only a blog" defense for this behavior doesn't cut ice with me either.
I wonder if this guy calls a Google colleague a moron when he thinks he's written a bad algorithm. If that's where the Big G is headed, then I'm moving to Wikia.
Been there, done that...
Yep, me too. Been there, done that.. been there, don't wanna go back...
Been there and got no where..
I read the Fair Tax article and still don't get how it would be beneficial to the rich people who are making more than 200k. Anyone can explain it simpler for me?
The cost of living would be much higher, but you also don't get tax withheld off your checks. Seems fair if everyone pay the same tax percentage without the deduction loopholes, right?
I'm in no way a supporter of Huckabee (because of his education and religous), but I would really like to understand more about his proposed fairtax.
"Most people think that a flat tax would only be 10-15 percent"
Actually, it would if we quit tossing the majority of our money into war and the Fed. Just saying.
While your bleak description of a flat tax does sound bad, it truly doesn't sound much worse than our current system. And it doesn't make sense either because if we would all have to pay 57% to keep up the current system, then where the heck is that money coming from now?
When you include sales taxes, gas taxes and all the others aren't we already paying obscenely high taxes right now? I will say that when it comes to tax debates I am what was described above as the "stupidity of a majority of Americans" since I've never studied all the numbers nor would I have the ability to understand the spreadsheets anyway. But I don't think your description of all of us as "shallow" is fair and maybe instead of insulting folks who don't have the time, or brains, to understand the complexities of it all, you could be a bit more helpful and either tell us how a flat tax is worse than our current system, or at least direct us to a place to gather the information laid out simply for us dolts.
Thanks.
PS - I should probably mention that I've nothing against the current system theoretically. It just appears to have become a convoluted racket to prop up the Fed, lawyers and accountants. Seriosuly, it's bad enough the amount of taxes we all pay, but then the amount we shell out to folks who just help us figure out how much we owe. Either the current system should be streamlined or a better way needs to be found. Especially when we've got this crap going on: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16223-2002Jan21?language=printer
The Wikipedia article seems to be mostly an ad for the Fair Tax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
William Gale has written several articles critical of the (un)FairTax. An early article: Don't Buy the Sales Tax
For more on the Fair Tax: The Wikipedia article seems to be mostly an ad for the Fair Tax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
William Gale has written several articles critical of the (un)FairTax. An early article:
Don't Buy the Sales Tax
For a recent knock-down-drag-out discussion here on OGM:
War on Greed
Thanks Tim!
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