The tax system explained by Andy Fountain

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.
If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that’s what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve.
‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men? The paying customers?
How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so the fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings)
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 ( 22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
‘I only got a dollar out of the $ 20,’ declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a Dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’
‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’
‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, this is how our tax system works.
The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction.
Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Republican Stronghold Falls

 One by one, prized Republican strongholds fell Tuesday night and yesterday. Ohio and Indiana, Florida and Virginia, Colorado and Nevada — all succumbed to Senator Barack Obama. And for conservatives it was as disorienting a day as any in the history of the movement that has been a dominant force in shaping modern American politics.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

A resident of Lafayette, Ind., in reflection in window, protesting against Republicans on Monday at the courthouse and party offices.

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if (acm.rc) acm.rc.write();One thing was clear: the Republican Party was no longer the party of George W. Bush. But exactly whose party was it, and whose should it become? Senator John McCain never quite succeeded in presenting a coherent alternative version. Can someone else do better?

The answers that have emerged so far reflect the party’s current confusion. A coalition once notable for its disciplined unity is now threatened by sectarian rifts that could widen significantly in the weeks ahead. Already, neoconservative defense hawks are pitted against isolationists, libertarian antitax brigades resist the values-driven politics of social conservatives, and the party’s intellectuals operate at a growing remove from the base.

Consider the case of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. To some conservatives — including several scheduled to attend a brainstorming meeting in Virginia on Thursday — Ms. Palin represents the party’s fresh-faced future. She personifies the values of small-town evangelicals, and her Western style lends piquancy to her populist mockery of Beltway elites and what she has called “the permanent political establishment.”

And yet that establishment includes Republicans like Colin Powell, Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, and Kenneth M. Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s final White House chief of staff, both of whom voiced their dismay at Ms. Palin’s presence on the ticket and declared their support for Mr. Obama shortly before Election Day.

Meanwhile, party operatives, crunching the unfriendly numbers, are rethinking the red state versus blue state election model mastered by tacticians like Karl Rove. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, wants the party to redirect its energies toward voters in the populous states of the Northeast and the Great Lakes region. James Greer, the Republican chairman of Florida, believes the party must adjust to changing demographics. “The party needs to focus on Hispanic voters and African-American voters,” Mr. Greer told The New York Times. “It is the future of the Republican Party.”

But the hunt for votes is only part of the problem. There is, more fundamentally, the question of what the two parties have to say and how they say it. Longstanding ideological debates, in particular, seem increasingly irrelevant and out of date.

It may well be that some of Mr. Obama’s positions are to the left of the nation’s at large — as Mr. McCain and others asserted time and again. But it may also be that most Americans do not much care. What seems to have impressed them is Mr. Obama’s attunement to the problems afflicting the country and the hope he offered that they might be solved.

If so, then Republicans may have to jettison some of the most familiar items on their agenda. “The issues that have provided conservatives with victories in the past — particularly welfare and crime — have been rendered irrelevant by success,” Michael Gerson, the Bush speechwriter turned columnist, wrote last week. “The issues of the moment — income stagnation, climate disruption, massive demographic shifts and health care access — seem strange, unexplored land for many in the movement.”

In fact these “issues of the moment” have been with us for years now, decades in some instances, but until recently they were either ignored by conservatives or dismissed as the hobby-horses of alarmist liberals or entrenched “special interests.”

The key word in Mr. Gerson’s analysis is “movement,” a term more applicable to moral or spiritual crusades than to the practical matters of governance, particularly governance in a two-party system, where success almost invariably requires compromise, consensus and a mind open to all manner of workable solutions.

These have not been, historically, the strength of “movement conservatives,” who prefer arguments built on first principles often expressed in supercharged rhetoric. “Conservatives seem to have a genius for winning the all-important semantic battles,” the policy thinker and journalist Richard N. Goodwin wrote in 1967. “Anti-union laws become ‘right to work’; national health insurance becomes ‘socialized medicine.’ ”

Some 40 years later, there are conservatives who still inveigh against the perils of socialized medicine. In the last weeks of the campaign, Mr. Obama was repeatedly labeled a “socialist” — a word all but emptied of meaning today when nations like China and Russia have lustily embraced the free market even as a Republican president proposes a $700 billion bailout of failing Wall Street firms. And yet even after Tuesday’s results, some were still clinging to the old rhetoric. An Obama presidency will “deliver socialism, something too many of his supporters never saw coming,” L. Brent Bozell, one of the expected participants in the Virginia meeting, wrote Wednesday on National Review online.

But if movement politics disdains nuance, its insistence on “core” principles lends steel to its adherents, who are inclined to regard all defeats, even major ones, as temporary setbacks.

This highlights a profound temperamental difference between the parties. The Democrats, more inclined in recent decades to pragmatism, have tended to bow to popular will even in close elections. President Bush, though he lost the popular vote in 2000 and though many believed that the Florida recount was unjustly halted by the Supreme Court, nonetheless had little trouble pushing his first initiatives through Congress, including one of the largest tax cuts in history.

When Mr. Reagan was elected in 1980, he probably stood farther to the right of the public of his time than Mr. Obama stands to its left today. Only two years before, in the Congressional election of 1978, Democrats held on to substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, despite the troubled leadership of President Jimmy Carter. And there was little tangible evidence that voters had embraced the supply-side economics that became a cornerstone of Reaganism.

But when Republicans achieved a slight majority in the Senate to go along with the Reagan landslide, Democrats, still in the majority in the House, accepted much of his agenda, in deference to the public’s will and also in recognition that a new era in politics had arrived.

This history forms a telling contrast with 1992, when Bill Clinton amassed an impressive total of electoral votes, 370, and went to Washington with large majorities in the Senate and House. Owing to the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, Mr. Clinton received only 43 percent of the popular vote — still 5 percent higher than the incumbent, the first President Bush, and a more conclusive victory than the younger Mr. Bush achieved in 2004. But conservatives sensed weakness, and the Republican Senate leader at the time, Bob Dole, put Mr. Clinton on notice.

“He didn’t get a majority,” Mr. Dole said the next day. The country, he added, “had plenty of doubts about Clinton. They want change. Well, we want to be responsible and deliver change, whatever that means, but we’re skeptical so we’ll wait and see.”

This set the tone for Mr. Clinton’s presidency, which remained embattled for two terms. Mr. Dole repeatedly used the filibuster to thwart Mr. Clinton, and in his second term Mr. Clinton was locked in a war with Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House, who for a time appeared to be the dominant partner in their uneasy relationship.

Mr. Obama has an advantage: He attained both a majority of the popular vote and a strong electoral victory.

The topics scheduled for the conservative conference on Thursday, according to one participant, include a discussion of how to rebuild a “national grass-roots political and policy coalition” modeled on the one conservatives put together in the 1970s, when in the waning days of liberal hegemony, Beltway organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation extruded position papers, and publications like The Public Interest and Commentary became citadels of conservative ideology. Movements are conditioned to absorb setbacks and losses. Tuesday’s election is the latest, and probably not the last. It has given the Republican Party a fresh challenge — one it has not shied from in the past.

Spam Check points and 2.0 abusers

I have been pushing some of the more popular online networking tools out there to their limits.  Sphinn booted me completly, they found out right off the bat that I was not interested in Tech talk but rather in taking advantage of their friendship.  I was using them to socially network myself with google.  The funny thing is that the company that runs Sfin has become almost communist in their approach to things.  What do you know, give a nerd an exclusive club that only the “cool geeks” can get in and they act just like the jocks.  I’m a liberal, too liberal to vote for a 2 party system, I thought we were a democracy?  More like a monecracy, money makes them crazy.  They can have the money, and you can have your up tight suit wearing dork that seems closer to being a hippy.  Only in a 2 party race can hippies side with some one like Obama, what I joke.  You could always vote for Mcain since he is a little more like Lt. Dan, Forest.  I hate politics, I hate Sphin, and I love time.  That must be part of hell, there must be no time, because time gives you a chance to get over things.  Even an open source project like sfinn has someone in their pocket.  Thank God for Bill Gates not selling out, one of the true pioneers.  Linkedin put an automatic block on my account because too many people said they didn’t know me…yet.  That is the point of social networking.  I like being spam blocked because it seems their is always a way around it.  Who out there is going to judge my useless dribble is any less important than yours at least I had humor ie. 2 guys from spfinn walk into a bar…I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I didn’t like spinn anyway, and I always need a scapegoat.  I know the system is designed to save society as a whole and what I am doing is nothing new.  Canadians have been doing it for years.  I have lost my train of thought.  I was watching Bladerunner last night and I can’t believe how short technology is falling of all of our expectations, it is old money holding us back.  We live in a monarchy and there will be no William Wallace to save us in a 2 party system.  On Linkedin you can add your email address to your last name so that even if the person trying to connect with you is banned from open connection you can type in the email of the contact to connect.  They will have a setting soon, you would think.  If I am going to banned from Spfin, I think all the “spinners” that happen to be working for a certain unamed company down in Seattle that all “circle spin” themselves should be harnessed.  But oh no, the scape gote is a much easier out.  And when you vote you are casting a spin to our corupt corporate system and voting for the lesser evil and following the other pawns and surfs to the castle, or the walls outside the castle.

Conservative Politics From Kenny

Perhaps you`ve seen it, the near-precise moment when John McCain lost control of his campaign. The scene is a now familiar one, the bogus “town-hall meeting.” He’s passing the microphone around like a decrepit Donahue, standing before a woman who starts by saying she “can’t trust” Obama; McCain is nodding along, intimately engaged for the moment in manipulating the neurotic angst that is the dwindling lifeblood of his campaign. About the time she says her fear is due to what she’s been reading, a look of worry creases his trademark frown of condescending concern; he’s contemplating preemptively snatching the microphone back from her, when she lays it on him: Obama is “an Arab”. She’s managed to confuse her slander (assuming there
isn`t an “Obama is an Arab” email careening about the internet), but it matters not.

Taking back the microphone, still in the affectedly somber tones we usually hear dulling the senator’s continual call to panic (before the more immediate economic panic swamped it along with his campaign) he informs his disappointed supporter that while he`s spent the last several months denouncing as irresponsible peace-mongering Barack Obama`s marginal departure from a foreign policy of serial occupations determined by the requirements of AIPAC and the defense industry, no, the man is in fact human, and all that entails. The crowd lets fly with various notes of despair, all but booing their candidate.

It was about as close to sympathetic as our too-proud would-be president has come in a long time, but it’s the anonymous woman, now a momentary punchline, who deserves our compassion (in taking a break from writing this I find her being parodied on television as “Crazy McCain Campaign Lady”). Her only sins are a lack of sophistication and an abiding faith in a political party. In taking advantage of this that party has terrorized her with the serial bogeys of Iraqi WMD, Iranian nuclear weapons, treasonous Democrats and now an Islamic Manchurian Candidate, with only resolute John McCain and his platoon of lobbyists and ideologues standing athwart these allied furies, united solely but unalterably in their Hatred of America and Her Freedoms.

If you’re a severe enough white liberal, witnessing the exchange you probably experienced that familiar rush of ethno-masochistic ecstasy at the welcome sight of white Republican “bigotry”, producing an odd combination of gloating and dismay (think of the old joke about the conflicted lover: “Don’t! Stop! Don`t…stop! Don`t stop! Don’t Stop!”). Whatever internal psychic tension is produced in the breasts of our liberal brethren by this fetish, this conspicuous self-abnegation, is probably one of the great unexamined social effects of our time.

Indeed, soon after, on the subject of the increasingly hysterical mood of Republican rallies, Chris Matthews sounded as dismayed as the McCain crowd as he all but demanded that Pat Buchanan personally reign in the cranks. One wonders how Mr. Matthews, having participated in the fear mongering preceding the Iraq War of which this woman`s neurosis is the continuing effect, plans on enforcing his edict. Judging by the volume of his indignation he’s going to defend his offended sensibilities by deluging us all with spittle. Watching the man snap one more tether to reality, assuming it can’t be long before someone relieves him of his microphone, I console myself that the affair is not without its entertainments and compensations.

If you’re just paleo enough to find the preceding mostly inoffensive, and you saw the video above, you probably cringed. You may be tempted to sue the liberals for peace, if they`ll only protect you from the barbarian hordes that have sacked and taken over the Republican Party. GOP, we hardly knew ye.

If you’re a supporter of John McCain you’re not reading this, but laps

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