The problem is that taxes are always shoved back down. The corporations don't pay their taxes their customers due, and thus it is the poor, lower and middle classes that are stuck paying those taxes.
Yeah, ideally we could restructure the entire system into something much more efficient, but we are stuck for a while with just small adjustments in the %'s.
There are so many things that would be interesting to do, but everything has its ups and downs.
My contempt for contemporary education is a result of seeing how much the public schools I attended neglected. No courses in latin, Ancient History, or Economics. Nothing but the mind numbing disinteresting topics of Grammar (which is a fluid field that whips like a cat of nine through changes), Chemistry (I was hoping to blow shit up, not learn how to make lead yellow), and limited History that offers limited coverage of the motivations and factors that contributed to such mind altering events as the Yorktown Victory that ended the war and culminate with the British playing, "The world turned upside down." Perhaps that should have been a better national anthem, as in truth the American ideal of isonomia (equality before law for all) was a revolutionary concept that was never taken to the level of an entire nation state.
Oi, no joke. They need to just tell people to get smarter and push sciences, econ, math, history, well hell everything, and expect more from our kids.
When I finally have kids, the biggest thing that I am going to push onto them is Math. With math it will allow them to still chose w/e they want to do, but there is not a single career that you will not be able to benefit from math.
Who said anything about letting the elderly sit on the side of the road and slowly die?
I'd be the last one to let my parents see such a fate visit them, but due to the absurd level of taxation I have no recourse but to either strike it rich, or let the state take care of them. Neither of those options appeal to me. My parents deserve better than to have the grim reaper of the state continuously watching them waiting for them to take their last breath.
But what about the people that don't have anyone to look out for them. We need welfare systems, and if we just left it up to the people that are willing to work for the good of society it is an unfair burden.
Trade is voluntary, and should be unrestricted. The free trade proposed by NAFTA, GATT and the WTO is not true free trade. Of course the influence of those that can pull credit out of their ass (the Central Banks) and pull money from the same orifice distorts the markets. Credit, while it does have its uses must be limited, otherwise the end result is a nation of debtors, akin to the United States.
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he warned that the central banks would result in the enslavement of the citizenry by the banks and the corporations that grew up around the banks if they were ever allowed control of the money supply.
Who truly owns their own home, besides the old (and even then the government collects rent from them) and the wealthy (and they too pay rent to the government.)
I agree with America over using bad debt. It is sick, we are becoming ass backwards. But you cannot blame the government on this (Not saying you have), it is the people that are the drivers in this.
We over borrow to get crap that make us fat and lazy (I say this as I am typing on a computer with a tv on surrounded by junk (except my bookshelves I consider those a good investment), sigh).
We under educate, over eat, over borrow, overreact with anything we see as an attack, underreact to things that don't directly affect us immediatly, have almost zero concept of how the future is setting up, and how the past can show us that.
The banks are a good thing, it is people that are irresponsible.
Anytime you remove the financial industry from any past society it collapses.
For obvious reasons I oppose Property Taxes except on rent producing properties (residences should not be taxed, but farmland, and apartments should be) and income taxes. Both are akin to enslavement by the government, and deprive people of their ability to actually ever retire.
The thing I have come to understand from our debates is that there is a lot of points that you make from your point of view that have merit. Even if I totally disagree with your term slavery with taxes because you are not forced to do anything, you chose to do it oout of knowing what will happen if you don't. I don't consider it slavery that I don't put my hand in a beesnest because I understand the consequences.
If we could totally rewrite tax policies and start from scratch, we could make a lot of improvements. I think that the science is there now to pretty much understand what will happen with most models. But imagine the firestorm that would happen if Obama came out with a comletely new and scientific tax structure. Even if it ended up costing everyone much less money.
He even got shit for stopping a program that was paying billions for 100 jets that were never flown and were designed in the 70's.
thats not my recolection of history. i believe there was very bad winters and a lot of starvation until free markets were developed in the mid 1600's but i could be wrong on that. but nobody can argue that these folks were fearless in some of the things they faced down. google "mountain men diaries". there werent roving heards of animals everywhere. when men chased beavers west they had a hell of a time.
i think that is one thing that has gotten so tangled and twisted today. there are very few pioneering people left. everyone wants a handout rather than busting your hump and taking a few chances. back then, men were men and we went out and made a way where there was none before. we have become very femanized in society and all we want to do is be nutured.
I was not talking about white people from Europe, I was talking the actual first americans the future "Native Americans" that crossed the ice bridge from asia.
They took a country from 100% wilderness and no human activity, to a booming structure that covered almost every area of the country in just a couple decades. Granted they were lucky and started in the west where the weather is very mild (once they made it past canada) and worked their way east and south. It was an amazing history that is almost fully ignored by our schools.
Even more is that ancient greece/rome (I never did too much studying on this other than the fun stories of their gods as a kid) is credited with things like Trig when the Chinese came up with it about 300 years earlier.
