Be Excellent To Each Other

Parts of this I found startling:


Also:

Cavey, if you're reading this -- you've written a lot about your beliefs that wealth creators need tax breaks (even ones who use business expenses to buy fireworks for their parties ). Can you defend the Republicans here?

Oh, and more from the NYTimes:

Seems to me that taxes for the top few and for businesses will continue to fall just as they have for ages now until there is some joined up international thinking, otherwise they will continue to blackmail the countries who generated their wealth by threatening to go abroad. It's inevitable.

This was quite an interesting show:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vhgpl

It's about business tax but many of the same issues must still apply.

[Haven't read the article]
Does it say what percentage of the countries tax that 1% pay?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 06717.html

Comparing Democratic and Republican tax plans
The Republicans' plan to extend the Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthy would cost $36.6 billion more than the Democrats' plan, which extends cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and individuals making less than $200,000.

So, under the Republican plan, anyone earning less than $200,000 is better off?

The numbers are the size of the tax cut, so everyone is better off under both plans. For anyone under $500k per year, they are almost equivalent; people are generally fractionally better off with the Democrat plan. The startling difference is in the $1m+ category.

No, but the second article I've linked to says that the proposed tax cuts of the Republican plan leave the Federal deficit down by an extra $36bn per year compared to the Democrat plan. Wolfram Alpha suggests that total income tax income for the state is around $1.1trill overall (2007 figures).

Do the maths, would you? I'm ill

You can't answer your question from those figures alone - more data is required.

I am continually astonished.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12 ... index.html

They want to give $700bn to people who's individual income is over $250k. I just can't fathom it.

I believe the logic goes: "I'm wealthy because I'm great. Fuck off everyone who is not me. Fuck you."

But the lower classes voted for these clowns in vast, vast numbers!

I've said it so many times man. Out there you either have everything or you have absolutely fucking nothing. There is no inbetween



How long did you stay out there for Doc?

The news is absolutely full of shit. Fox News used to be owned by Jebidiah Bush (SIC). He also had shares in Time Warner, so we were NOT allowed to stock Bowling for Columbine until the elections were over and Bush was in. (Ed - Blockbuster Video)

The news is heavily censored, the views in the papers are heavily weighted. Before the elections kick they have automated bots phone you at your house and give you a load of bullshit asking you to vote for them.

The people who have nothing are attending Tea Party rallies in their tens of thousands to demand these tax cuts though.

Sorry mate.. I'm having one of my moments.. Context problem..

Do you mean these poor people are demanding to be fucked in the ass? If so that wouldn't surprise me at all. No money = no education. I saw a docu on BBC3 a few weeks back with these religious schools.. Fuck me it was like watching a load of zombies.

Because the world is binary to them. Either you vote for the rich to shaft you, or you're a socialist, where "socialist" means "the most absolute evil possible".

I'd imagine. I dunno, people just don't seem to understand politics on a grand scale, and reduce everything to absolutes, and cling desperately to them. I mean, Obama's campaign was founded entirely on "change", without ever actually saying what would be changed, when, to what, and how. They just spewed out the most vague word possible and let people define it as their individual fantasies dictated. The Tea Party stuff is probably quite similar, broadly speaking. People hear one thing they like about it, and therefore assume that it must also stand for everything else they value.

They might just be screaming out for tax cuts without realising it doesn't include them?

That actually sounds more than likely.

No, everyone earning over $200,000 is better off than under the Democrats.

Which, IIRC, equates to the top 4% of Americans.

Look at the infographic I put further up though - the difference isn't significant until you reach the $500k+ bracket.

Fuck yeah. I'm struggling to see a problem with this.

I don't understand the difficulty in grasping how idiotic the voting masses are in the US.
Surely it's all down to the American dream? Socialism conflicts with that on so many levels.
Basically, I get the impression that most of the uneducated populace are beholden to the myth that "wealth, success, fame, the whole caboodle" is available to one and all with just a smidgen of determination and some luck.

Like you Doc, it confounds me that the people who would benefit most from voting for a democratic, ne socialist state that would provide for them seem to vote Republic in their droves as they're too ill informed to realise that most of them aren't going to make it in the mythical free for all that is the American Dream ™

Honestly they're lovely people but man are they naive when it comes to politics.

Last week I was speaking to my friend in Maryland and he asked me to give him a 101 on politics.

I'm actually serious.

They don't even bother. Near on all of them I met didn't give a fuck and didn't even realise what it was they were voting for. Whoever they were most pissed off at? they would just vote for the other one.



And that's absolutely true.

Many years ago when GW was voted in my mother in law voted for him. I was so fucking pissed at her, silly bitch. I asked her why she had voted for him and she said "because I will get taxed less"

So I said to her "you do realise he is about to take your country to war? during which you will be far FAR worse off?"

She didn't give a flying fuck. All she thought about was herself. I remember when I sat down for the first Christmas dinner with that family.. Stuck up fucks. My ex wife's nan said to me "So how do you like it over here?" I said "Yeah it's lovely ! but I just can't get over how big everything and well spaced out it is" she replied "well maybe you would like it better in Bridgeton if you're used to 'row homes' " (a well known 'project' shit hole where the houses are connected, like an attatched here).

I got pissed and said - "do you realise that the house I lived in in London is worth over $450,000?"

She didn't like me any more after that. Bitch.

I was watching a bit of FOX news with Glenn Beck last night. Frankly, he scared the shit out of me, yet impressed in equal measure. He was talking about China, and described how it was State Capitlaism. Then he went back and went over how the 'founding fathers' wanted the country to run (local, state, national, global, in decreasing levels of power), then he took this, put a S on state, pointed to capitalism, said that this wasn't the case in China as it was socialism, by his definition, so crossed out capitialism, and then wrote socialism next to the word national and BANG! Hitler!

I can totally see how the sophistry works, but then again, the Septicania is still quite a nascent country compared to the rest of the world, and tempting though it is to mock them, if enough of them are able to come over the Europe (and not in the 1942 sense) then maybe like travelling uncle Matt in the Fraggles they can educate their countryfolk. They also need to go through things like citizens revolutions and stuff like that to sort out the power structure.

As an aside, nobody from Arizona has ever been US President.

I guess what I cannot fathom is just how the political dialog in the US can be so broken, that it can encourage so many turkeys to vote for Christmas.

A lot of what I've read criticises the ability of the Democrats to communicate a strong and simple message, whereas the Republicans are very, very good at soundbite politics. A recent episode of This American Life spoke to a senior strategy advisor within the Democrats. He said that each day the Republican central party will send out emails and faxes to huge numbers of senators and party officials, with a half-dozen talking points they should hit during all the media engagements that day, right down to the exact wording they should use. Turn on the news, and you see a connected party with joined-up thinking; a senator from Ohio echoing points made by the Speaker of the House, and then that same point is expanded upon by a politician from Texas. Meanwhile, the Democrats are a party of liberals; they don't have any such central messaging system and when efforts have been made to introduce one they've ignored it.

They are also bizarrely unwilling to engage on things. Take this "Obama is a practicing Muslim" meme that Glenn Beck has repeated many times on national TV -- they've never taken any steps to debunk it, they simply seem to regard it as beneath contempt. Which would be great except for many American voters, it seems to be regarded as a tacit admission that it's true.

Isn't a lot of it about aspiration? The whole 'American Dream' thing ties into this. People don't want to vote for restrictions to be placed on the wealthy and successful, because goshdarnit, one day that'll be them up there in that penthouse flat with a million suits and a Bentley.

It's also a mindset. There was something in the Economist a week or two ago about the differing attitudes of America and Europe - when asked the question "is success in life down to personal effort or external factors" (or something to that effect), people in Europe are far more likely to say it's down to external things, whereas the Americans look at it the other way.

We need some sort of scheme "adopt a red state American" - over xbox or whatever, and carefully and gently de-program them.

Cavey flounced a couple of weekends ago.

Surely also there's an air of helplessness about it all on the part of legislator. You can tinker at the margins, redistributing a little bit, but the end result of capitalism is to funnel money upwards. 4/5 of the net growth in the American economy from something like 1980-2005 (this was in The Week last week, though I can't remember where they were quoting from) went to the top 1%. So economic growth simply encourages the disparity - it's systemic, not something you can legislate away, or at least not quickly. Possibly if countries just upped their tax rates, closed loop holes and then took the hit, allowing people to leave, then the next country to have the problem did the same, eventually we might get somewhere. But that's a timescale of 10s of years.

Of course, them with the money make the rules.

You only need to look at Ireland to see how a few people have forced an entire country in massive debts they will never pay off.

And when I say a few, it is believed to be as few as 105.

*Looks at £12 shaped gap in wallet*

What for this time?

For the good of the Party.

Probably you being rude to him.

You are myp, right? Hard to tell with the completely different name, but you seem enough of a merchant.

I have him on ignore so I wouldn't know if he were here or not, to be fair.

Decent article in The Guardian today about this, although it's saying the same things as many others.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... se-bailout

I find it absolutely staggering that an entire nation (i.e. the population of Ireland) can be impoverished to cover the bad debts of crazy banking gamblers in the rest of Europe.

Ireland's wealth being sucked away by foreign powers, leaving its largely innocent population completely shafted?

Well, at least it's a return to familiar ground for them. All they need now is a corrupt and abusive chur... oh.