bmdrocks21

And these two terrible recoveries were led by Democrats who increased taxes and spending. Compared to Ronald Reagan's, Obama's recovery was quite pitiful. That would be my point to start.

I probably hate Bush about as much as you, but as far as I know, the mortgage bubble wasn't their fault. Correct me if I am wrong, obviously, but I am not aware of any Democrats that suggested bills that would have prevented it. I don't imagine that the government forcing banks to accept subprime loans helped, and that is certainly not a Republican policy idea.

I've heard that stimulus packages don't really do anything(let's assume it was financed through debt instead of taxes). Does that about sum it up?

Wasn't that the slowest recovery since the Great Depression?

I don't know if you credit Obama with creating jobs. The Great Recession officially began in December of 2007. The only place it could go during the eight years would be up.

I of course judge Trump and Obama differently because one started their term during a recession and one didn't. But Trump has broken records in unemployment and has had huge growth, versus Obama's super slow recovery.

Tax increases and stifling regulation. Duh.

And you believe this offense is serious enough to have him removed from mod?

What is this business about Virtuoso?

Yes, but they say that this identity arises around the age of three. So, it was used to give more information around when the identity arises.That would be when they could communicate the identity because it has arisen. I'm hoping and guessing this wouldn't ever happen, though. 

I gave the definition of normative. It said was it usual or typical. I am going to have to say that I believe our disagreement stems from gender vs sex. I think they are the same thing. That is why I believe in an objective standard for "gender". Because sex is concrete and objective. Gender, from what you are saying, is how you see yourself. That would make it an opinion, completely unfounded in facts. Therefore, I wouldn't consider it anything tangible or "real" under that definition.

I don't care that Obama or potatoes aren't genders. They are personal, delusional perceptions of my body and identity. The same thing as transgenders. 

It doesn't say ideally three. It frames being three and old enough to say what they want as equally viable choices.

Sex and ten toes are normative. Normative:"establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior.". It is normal to have ten toes and be either male or female, and therefore sex is normative. 

Mutations and genetic defects can happen. They don't make you non-human, but they also don't create some new category of what humans are. A biology textbook will say we have ten toes. It shouldn't say that we can have any number of toes and that every number is equally valid.

And sure, some people might think they are a gender they are not. If I thought that I was president Obama or an 80 year old potato, I would be incorrect. Sometimes your perception denies reality. That is the case with transgender folks.

You're*

Forgot the oxford comma.

Forgot a comma before "yet".

You're

Most simplest is a double superlative

Forgot a comma before "and"

I am guessing you are living in the weak reality.

If you cannot understand a simple analogy, then I am afraid that I cannot help you. Your incendiary tone is getting you nowhere. I have no reason to waste my day proving everything to someone who says something as foolish about immigrants taking welfare payments means they accept our country.

If you would like an actual discussion, how about you stop playing dumb and act like a civil adult, yes?

Saying that an involuntary subsidization doesn't mean they are indeed paying for the item they subsidized makes no sense. The rich pay for almost all foodstamps. So, whatever gets bought with said foodstamps is paid for by the rich, while the poor get it for free.

I'll use another analogy that you might be able to comprehend. You believe in universal, government healthcare, I assume. That means that everyone is forced to get the same exact plan. The super poor don't pay taxes. The rich pay most of the taxes. So, the rich will pay infinitely more than the poor, for the same exact item. Is that better for you?

That is a 100% real world example of the rich paying "double"(excessively more in this case) than a poor person who pays nothing and yet they both get the same product.

That article said you should wait until a kid is three "to communicate their gender identity". I highly doubt a three year old should be making a decision that will affect it for the rest of its life.

All I am seeing is mention of "intersex". If you are trying to argue for a third gender, I would say that a genetic defect shouldn't be considered a normal trait. If someone asked you how many toes a human has, the answer would obviously be 10. If someone asked you how many lungs a person has, the answer would be two. Just because some defects occur in a few people doesn't mean it is a human trait, which gender is. So, when you ask someone how many genders there are, it would be 2. 

:)

If someone thinks they are a gender they are not, I don't believe in indulging a delusion. The same way I would discourage people to indulge the delusions of a schizophrenic guy. 

I know what I say is true. I just don't have the motivation to prove everything to you and look up all of the articles and graphs again. You don't strike me as someone who is looking to have their mind changed. How about you make affirmative claims for a change?

It was an analogy that is surprisingly realistic, sir. The poor people get free gum through SNAP. The rich people paid for this through taxes, yet got nothing. So, when they buy the goods themselves, they will have had to pay the actual price and the tax price.

Tell her she can give away all of that privilege money if she wants. However, you can't be generous with other peoples' money.

Well, you seem to make it your goal to waste my time. I might get to some of the others when I am motivated enough.

"You found a link stating that poor people can buy chewing gum. Not a link to show how many are buying it."

I provided a link showing that poor people are buying gum at the expense of rich people.

Rich people pay most of taxes, and a lot of poor people pay none. So, I am not wrong. 

Probably because that is the entire role of the 23rd pair of chromosomes. 

That is like asking "why does DNA determine our species?".

If you think you are a man when you don't have a y chromosome, you are mistaken.

If you think you are a moose when you have human DNA, you are equally mistaken.

If you have no y chromosomes, you are a woman. If you have any y chromosomes, you are a man. End of story.

If the lyrics consist solely of "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE", I'm in!

Friends with a Beta supporter? Oof.

It is always nice to see a liberal's dreams crushed. Election night 2016 had some nice gems ;)

$13.2 million spent on chewing gum. Not emotions, facts. 

Yeah, I don't know if charging large taxes on real estate is the best route, but it seems to work out decently.

I think you are overgeneralizing. The range for board of directors' pay is $25,000 for small and the median for the largest couple hundred is $250,000.

But generally, they don't do nothing. They are in charge of finding auditors, voting on CEO changes, etc which are large financial decisions. Hunter Biden would be an exception, not the rule. 

Sure some spoiled prick might get some investments from his or her parents. But investments are a huge financial force in our economy. They allow companies to undertake large products, hire more workers, and conduct R&D. Taxing them makes the potential rewards smaller and therefore exaggerates the the risks. If you tax the rich at 90%, investing will stagnate.

Sure, they may not be able to buy a home. But the vast majority of people can at least afford to rent. I think the priority should be giving shelter to people, which they do a decent job with. Also, just because they think it will take 10-25 years to afford a home doesn't mean that their guess is accurate.

Well, the government does reimburse you for losing your job through welfare. 

I am very much against taxing wealth and net worth. That causes a variety of issues depending on the liquidity of assets. If you invest a ton of money in bonds, you aren't able to just get that money back to pay the government. If you have a lot of stocks but growth rates slow, you will have to sell most of them off to keep paying for your "wealth".

So to clarify, you would make the capital gains tax a progressive tax now or all 60%?

Well, housing necessarily has to be expensive. They have a large population compared to how little usable land they have. They have a median income that rivals ours with nearly no natural resources. They have very free markets according to the economic freedom index. They are quite an impressive country. Didn't know about all of those land taxes, but again, it makes sense based on the size of their country. 

Their income tax is capped at 15% gross income, so it is in operation, a flat tax. Income is a good thing, so you shouldn't excessively tax productivity. As of 2013, the homelessness ratio in Hong Kong was .02%. I have heard it is going up, but that seems like less of a problem than you say it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population

But the income tax taxes your gross income. Then you take home net(after tax) income is taxed. The government doesn't reimburse me if my investments fail, so what right do they have to take money made off of money they already taxed?  Not quite like the two job analogy because those are both taxing your gross income.

Yeah, I could look into those rates further. I don't know if methodologies for defining "poverty" have changed over time or have been accounted for in the graphs I have seen.

And for a lot of our history we didn't even have income taxes. But like I said, the rich almost never paid those 80-90% rates because of all of the deductions they lobbied for. If you are proposing a tax plan that they cannot avoid and are planning on actually taxing 80%, things will go quite a bit differently. Also, is your plan to tax capital gains at higher rates as well? If so, around what rate.

Hong Kong is super profitable and they have some kind of flat tax-esque system.

But the money they invest has been taxed. The investments grow from the after tax dollars, so they are getting taxed again.

How would they lose their money if they left? There are multiple stock exchanges, and since most of them make their money off of investments, it won't matter. 

That is assuming that your spending programs will move them to the upper class and that they won't ruin the market with malinvestments. Our poverty rate has been rather stable since the War on Poverty began.

I would say that we need to extensively study the opportunity cost of taxing the hell out of rich people. 

Yeah, we will disagree a lot on what taxes should be. I believe in a flat tax. But we can agree in having very little deductions. I believe that the rich should pay their fair share, but that they have an equal right to their income as anyone else.

It was as I suspected. Rich people gain most of their money through investments, and since the capital gains tax is lower, they pay a "lower" percentage. I don't really have a problem with that. It is double taxation anyway.

Ok, if they aren't agreeing to cut military spending and end the war on drugs, that furthers my point that the debt will grow.

And if you actually taxed the rich at 90%, do you think they would stay? You are taxing the people with the ability to avoid taxes quite easily. They have the resources to either take advantage of deductions or leave. If you put in a wealth tax like Warren proposes, that is exactly what will happen. Poor people don't invest.

And cutting spending doesn't always have to include cutting welfare programs, but it typically would. For instance, we had shrimps running on mini treadmills for a study and it cost between $500,000-$3 million to taxpayers. $2.6 million dollars to teach Chinese prostitutes how to drink responsibly. $3.1 billion for federal employees on administrative leave. Getting rid of stupid spending like this would be a good start.

Chewing gum with food stamps https://www.tripsavvy.com/arizona-nutrition-assistance-program-2681991

It is really hard to have a dictatorship with an armed populace. Check out Syria vs Venezuela. In Syria, they got guns and could revolt. In Venezuela, they are screwed. I was referring to the Cato Institute source that you provided as my source for us having more freedom of expression.

You said we were fifth in a couple of things, including healthiness. You compared our system to single-payer systems. You said how great their systems were. I said that there are other factors, including diets. Ours is terrible, so that will obviously create more strain on our system and make us unhealthy. Sorry for adding a little nuance instead of pointing out a singular difference between the two and pretending that correlation is always causation.

I will cite my book when I get home from my test.

This was about them having no respect for our country. I have no clue why you are trying to make some incoherent semantic argument about how taking money from us means they accept our country. There is no argument to be made there. Yes, they take money. They "accept" the money.

That was an appeal to justice and fairness, not emotion, but okay.

Yes, the gum example was an analogy. It is a hypothetical to describe a reality in new terms. And technically, through SNAP, many poor people do get free gum....the rich pay for that gum.

Ted Cruz almost lost to that gun-grabbing ex-convict Robert Francis O'Rourke in Texas!

We absolutely need to keep the Rust Belt, but if we lose Texas, we will never win a presidential election ever again.

Sure, I'm down with cutting deductions across the board. Most are unnecessary and are added to help the super rich avoid taxes.

Unfortunately I don't have a Washington Post subscription, so I will have to look around for that one.

We are collecting about the same percentage of GDP in taxes as we always have https://mises.org/library/good-ol-days-when-tax-rates-were-90-percent  Social spending is the cause of the debt. Nearly nobody ever paid 90% of their taxes. Because of tax exemptions, the effective tax rate was about 30-40%.

I am telling you that no Democrat has any plan that will balance the budget, as far as I know. You say that you will gut the military, stop the war on drugs, and add single-payer(if that indeed will cut costs). All of these are offset by their spending increase plans. The debt is a huge problem, and most of our spending goes towards welfare programs. Do you not care about all of the debt we will incur?

Well, I Ctrl+F "guns" and "speech". So, guns wasn't added to the calculation as far as I can tell. We do, however, have more freedom of expression, which speech would be included in. 

We have the second highest rate of fast food consumption. We also have the highest sugar intake. These lead to obesity, which makes us unhealthy. That is a rebuttal to your claim that universal healthcare makes us healthier. There are a lot of more facts involved.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-eats-the-most.html    https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/top-sugar-consuming-nations-in-the-world.html

Well, my data comes from a book I am reading called "We Wanted Workers". I would have to look at their citations.

They can hate everything we stand for, but they will like the free food, money, and housing. If you love your parents, will you leech off them as much as possible, even though they are going into debt to provide for you? Hell no you wouldn't. Did you move in with them because you love them? Probably not considering the aforementioned debt.

I am not basing arguments from emotion. I am using this wonderful tool known as an analogy. 

Are you trolling me? lol

European countries have decently high freedom indexes, so they share our values to an extent. However, they have strict gun laws and "hate speech" laws.

By economic assimilation, I mean they begin to resemble native-born citizens in terms of their incomes. They assimilate economically as they pick up on skills that we value and adapt to them and learn English.

We are unhealthy because we eat like s***. Everyone agrees that our current system sucks. Republicans want to increase competition, and you want universal healthcare. There isn't much common ground there, so nothing gets done and we get screwed. The facts are not "on the left". What is your definition of "the left"?

When leeching off the taxpayer, what happens? Well, to fund it, you take money from productive citizens and give it to unproductive ones. I don't know why you are pursuing an indefensible semantic argument. They are taking money because they want it, not for the good of our nation or its people. That is selfish. They are coming here to take things from current citizens. Apparently you think that means they care about our country.

Sure it is. But offering people things that they will never pay back is offering free stuff. It is like giving away a pack of gum to a poor person then charging a rich person double for the same thing. It is, for all intents and purposes, "free" to the poor person. 

Those values are shared in some other industrialized countries, but not to such a high degree.

I'm not quite sure what your wage question meant, then. People from different countries on average have wages that are largely different from those of natives. People from Mexico make a lot less than Americans for similar jobs. As they live in the country, the gap starts to disappear. "Economic assimilation".

Non-biased means fact-based and not a politically motivated representation of the facts. Think of it like reading a study vs seeing what Fox and CNN have to say about the study.

If you want to go to a country for the sole purpose of leeching off of their tax payer, you obviously don't care about it at all.

It is hard to entice people without offering everything you can imagine for "free". 

That's what I'm saying! We have some good house Republicans that are trying to cut spending, but it just isn't popular.

Personal freedom is the the ability to express yourself peacefully without the government or another private individual harming you. It is the ability to make a living for yourself without the government or another individual taking your wealth.

Well, a lot comes down to speaking English. This makes you a lot more marketable in terms of jobs. Also, being willing to move out of ethnic enclaves gives a lot more income mobility. Immigrants as they come to the US usually make different amounts than natives, either more or less, and a few generations afterwards, they make nearly identical wages. The process takes more generations if you live in ethnic enclaves, which Mexican immigrants tend to do.

Yes, non-biased. I don't want this whole assimilation thing being politically-influenced if possible.

The largest reason that Latin American immigrants come to America is because they can make more money and we have a robust welfare system. They don't have to care about our country or like it. They have a huge economic incentive to work here.

Well, Democrats are trying to fundamentally change America. Conservatives aren't. So, if you are looking for big, fundamental changes to our country, you generally don't like it, and therefore wouldn't vote for a conservative. (I know you'll ask about 'fundamental'. It is calling to change the Constitution. Strict gun control, censoring speech, nationalizing industries, etc.)

I told you what I think American values are. If you want there to be some official authority to come to the same conclusion, then we can make one like I said.

Assimilate is learning our language, economically assimilating (wages becoming the same as native-born workers), and respecting American values(liberty, etc.).

If they voted Democrat after a non-biased exposure to "American values", it would still be a positive impact. It isn't good for anyone when immigrants can't speak English, live on welfare, and hate America so much that they refuse to leave their ethnic enclaves.

Assimilation is good, and I would prefer that they vote Republican, but that can't really be helped.

Amazon doesn't pay federal taxes because of deductions. They pay payroll, state, and local taxes.

The top 1% alone pays 37.32% of all income taxes. https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2018-update/  I am not sure about your claim about us paying more (percentage-wise). Is capital gains included in that calculation?

I agree our policy is shite. Republicans go half of the way. They cut taxes, but they typically don't have the balls to cut spending, which pisses me off. 

Our biggest expenditures by far are on welfare programs, not the military. I would say that we need to end foreign involvement, which would save a little over $100 billion/year. Not nearly enough.

I don't see much value in taxing the uber rich. If we taxed the 1% at 100%, it wouldn't be enough to cover our spending, and I hear no calls by Democrats to reduce spending below where it currently is. 

I don't know, perhaps a large panel of historians can discuss some defining features of America and its people. These things could then be taught in school in a government class or something. 

Yeah, I mean I want people to assimilate because it is good for everyone economically. It would also therefore give more influence to a group that (in my opinion) will let them to be more prosperous.

Well, I am all for reforming how our patents work. The essentially patent the exact same drug with minor differences. 

The drug companies need to make a profit somehow. That is why they choose America, because they will allow them to make large profits and return their R & D costs. It is a huge investment spending millions of dollars and having to wait 12 years to start making it back(if it passes through at all).

If we could make the process of passing through FDA regulations cheaper and less time-consuming, perhaps they wouldn't need to charge as much.

I think we still have a higher per capita paper rate than most(if not all) other countries, but I could be wrong.

I do think that the end result of assimilation would be for them to vote Republican. For instance, immigrants that learn our language make a ton more money than those who don't. That means they are less dependent on welfare and therefore would put more emphasis on other political issues. 

American values are those of personal freedom and the American dream. Well, I don't think that the popularity of an idea makes it more inline with the country's values. I wouldn't say that the Nazis were doing things that aligned with Germany's values. 

I would say that, at least for America, that its constitution is what makes us distinct. It embodies the values that we were founded on. 

I think that is more indicative of American values than what poor, unassimilated immigrants choose to vote for.

Well, we should temporarily stop immigration so that we can assimilate them. When you have a rapid flow of immigrants, they are less incentivized to adopt our values. For instance, they create enclaves. They can seek employment and fulfill most of their needs around people from the same culture and country and will have no need to assimilate. 

Assimilating would be to learn our language and adopt our culture. 

I am more concerned about losing Texas. Need to stop immigration, and actually try to assimilate the ones we have.

Lol, your petty $10 billion deficit. 

Try our $1 trillion deficit on for size!

If they want it to be affordable, they have to "negotiate". That is essentially price fixing, as they will have a 100% market share. We don't price fix, which is why we lead the world in innovation. 

It takes on average 12 years and $350 million to get a new drug through the FDA. If we limit a company's ability to make a profit, I doubt we will continue to make so many new lifesaving drugs.

(I don't think this market is currently as competitive as it should be and there are a variety of ways to fix that).

Ok, but don't you believe that eliminating the competitive aspect of the insurance market would be a bad thing? In order to keep costs down without competition, I am going to hazard a guess and say that you would price fix("negotiate") treatments' costs in order to make universal healthcare more affordable.

I wouldn't quite say Afghanistan and Iraq are our allies. After what happened with Gaddafi, I doubt Iran will ever give up their nuclear weapons they are building.

Ok, I see. But why should it matter if they also offer to cover something that the government already does? Doesn't seem like outlawing it would be necessary because there wouldn't be much if any demand for it.

It shows we are smart by leaving a region that has cost us thousands of lives and trillions of dollars only to gain enemies.

Why does it matter that Russians are using an old base?

I'm afraid I don't understand eliminating private insurance companies. Let us say we get universal, government healthcare. Why shouldn't we have the choice to get private insurance which may open avenues for more drugs and treatments that the government doesn't cover?