Eva: 1-- I turned over Fred's screed to lit dept.... It's good to learn they finally found something to do. 2.-- ... since you've only read Rand. When children use tactics like this, isn't it usually accompanied by a rousing 'Nanny-nanny-pooh-pooh????' 3--Here. you're either a liar or a total illiterate. what I also wrote was ,"beyond the sensitivity issue, it's not the approprite language for political negotiation." There are illiterates, and then, there are illiterates. Political negotiation with whom? Your assumption is that it is a necessary tactic to negotiate with idiots. I just spent 30 years of my adult career proving to myself that it is not necessary to negotiate or even deal with idiots. Am I worried about proving that to others? Towards what end? Negotiation is a last resort when there are no more effective choices. Avoidance is one; you don't go through a road block when you can easily speed around it. When it comes to the clumsy political forks of the mob, avoidance has been trivial. When I was younger, and extrapolating political trends, I was certainly more worried about this issue. (That isn't paternalism, it is a fact.) But for the last half of my career at least, it's been apparent that a governing fact is largely the following: those who can, will, and those who can't won't. It is embarrassing to realize how much of my youth was once concerned with those who can't. I'm not talking about 'can't' in the sense of the disabled like my youngest son; I'm talking about can't in the sense of the Holy Average and their quest to ride others like a tribal property pony. The Holy Average is not disabled in any sense of the word; the Holy Average has been pandered to, and has accepted, the idea that adulthood is just the endless Thirteenth Grade of Life, and they just need to show up, slouch in their chairs, let the government 'run the economy' and wait for the weekend. They were pandered to, but many of them(not all of them)also readily bought this idea. They let their belt out. They ran downhill. Well, I wonder, how is the view from there in these economies? They were done to, true enough, but they also did it to themselves. There is a two word sign in my office that summarizes my approach to the tribal sensibilities of the Holy Average: "Unionize this." It is right next to the mandated labor notices in my office for my non-existing employees, as well as the pension plan notices, and so on. Now to translate this into the high-school English that best befits your capacity to comprehend: my concern is lowering taxes. having you fissiles use 'rape' as a metaphor messes up real political action. Your concern is lowering taxes? Wake up and smell the composition of the U.S. Congress. Nobody had more frequent flyer miles to Georgetown than Ted Kennedy. The odd peculiarities of the quarterly repatriation laws were laughingly referred to as 'The Senate Rules.' The highest grossing office of Citi is tiny office of 10 folks down in that same Georgetown, and every time(like clockwork)there is noise made by some boob to 'drag' the executives of Citi in front of the C-Span cameras to divulge all the non-disclosed activity in the Caymans, the execs by now must simply send a form letter asking if they should provide all the current Congress and USSC justices and POTUS names in chronological or alphabetical order. If I actually believed, for a second, that your number one concern was taxation, I'd wonder why? Taxation is not a cause, it is an effect, and fools of both parties who claim to want to mold the nation via taxation are hiding some other agenda. A Krugman wants to point at the highest marginal income tax rates in JFK's America ...and ignore the total size of the federal government overhead at the time, or the payroll tax. And if you go back another 50 yrs, the income tax itself started out at a maximum of 1% on the top 1% of earners. (An effect, not a cause, else, what was the cause that funded earlier federal overhead without income taxation?) And over the course of a hundred years of redistributive clumsy forks by the tribe -- the selling of which to boobs as boob bait has proceeded unchecked now for a century -- the gap between rich and poor has seldom been higher. Well, OK. If this is Progressivism, then ... take all the time in the world needed to figure it out America. Because those who can, will, and those who can't won't. Taxation is an effect; the cause is ever expanding wagon riding. I mean, unbounded expansion of the federal shed risk, defined benefit pension welfare state. (Not 'welfare' -- not Hayek's safety net -- but the cancer that is our boundlessly growing public institutions of everything, which are and have been in chronic fiscal crisis.) If you check the scoreboard-- or even, just get the data from Census and plot out income x people earning income vs income, it is as plain as the nose on our faces where the government needs to go to fund its boundless appetite for more. It can only tax wealth once; it must tax income in order to survive, and that plot of income explains precisely who it is that has been taking it on the chin all these years, and why. In a nation where AWI is around $45k/yr, at AWI minus AWI(0), that mountain of taxable income goes to zero, and at AWI + AWI, that pile of taxable income is dropping quickly to the axis, on its way to fringe anecdotes. "Oh dear, look at these fringe examples of people earning over ten times AWI... let's raise their taxes on income over 250K by 3.9%....and then, the Holy Average won't notice that they are suddenly paying for their HI out of after tax W2 instead of their pre-tax earnings when Obamacare shows up. Boob bait for boobs. You could spell this out with a giant crayon, and they would still not understand what is being done to them. There won't be much sympathy offered to the Holy Average who suddenly find themselves funding their HI out of after tax dollars-- that has been the case for small business "S" Corp owners for decades. Those who actually have employees and were offering them healthcare are only to glad too move their employees to ACA and drop the HI expense; some might even raise their W2 by the amount of their decreased expense(thus realizing the same business deduction as before, when HI benefits were paid out of pre-tax earnings. But in the end, not by "cost-plus," and it will be the employees paying for HI out of their after tax W2 income. When all the dust clears(at least on the short term), the employers costs either go down or stay the same; no complaints. The employees realized after HI benefits and taxes income goes down. The difference flows to government, out of the hide of the Holy Average. As program costs rise, those costs are now no longer the burden of employers who shed the HI load onto employees, and so, the political brunt of those future cost increases now go directly to employees; this is one flaw in the grab, but it is a longer term issue, and that is not something politicians usually concern themselves with at all. As well, there will be no paper trail on their W2 for them to figure it out. ("Look...my W2 income went up by the amount of my HI benefit....but I paid my HI premium out of after tax dollars, not pre-tax earnings..." and we are already far beyond the accounting ability of that same Holy Average who still thinks their employer is paying half of their FICA/MEDI tax on their behalf, because they don't know what the 941 is and don't realize it is all being 'paid' for by their employer, who takes it all out of their 'earnings' -- the full amount he is paying for their services which he fully understands when negotiating their wages, even if they don't. The impact of ACA? The government has found a way to tax the HI benefits of the Holy Average, that huge pile of taxable income. Once again, the Holy Average will find itself working harder(those that are working at all)for less and wondering why. The next phase(assuming the Dems can find enough post election time to ease it into place)will be the overt 'Cadillac Plan' taxation, and eventually, all employees not converted over to private ACA will have their HI benefits taxed as well. But, this is just one play of many along the way, aimed directly at the center of mass of the plot of taxable income. Regulated pension plans are next on the agenda, as that giant sucking sound from DC needs to be endlessly fed. 4-- Yes, rote learning is rather boring. But the simple fact is that 'rote' is more or less how we 'learn' You ought to try it sometimes. Moreover, it's fairly obvious that those whose knowledge of philosophy stops with Rand are hardly in a position to talk of others' 'indoctrination.'. Well, when you leave that part of your youthful instruction, as we all once did, you will get to witness firsthand how those 'taxes' you are so concerned about gets 'invested' by the federal government, and then you will actually be in a position to evaluate 'taxes.' Looking only backward at written history/philosophy is a necessary part of all of our education. At some point, it will be necessary for you to look ahead at unwritten history. Your assumptions about what others have read and not read are just laughable leg lifting. If you truly knew how precious that make's you sound. Like a child thumping baseball cards. You want to not be treated like a child, then stop acting the child. Or not. On Rand: screw Rand. You make this quiet niche out to be some kind of AS thumping card carrying cult; if I ever sensed that I'd have been out of here years ago. I appreciate Rand, and take her implicit advice to heart: bow your head and worship on no other human peer's altar-- which I took to include Rand herself. The great clawing of our human peers over each other-- including Rand and all those faces on your favorite well worn baseball cards, is what is just boring as hell. Yes, we've all long read both sides of those same baseball cards, but feel free to thump away. I've found my way to take a pass on that, and hope you do, too, someday, when you grow out of baseball card adolescence and finally, at long last, find your own words and thoughts. Fred (Edited by Fred Bartlett on 2/16, 10:18am)
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