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@Club
What about Poverty rates?
To me this is an implementation detail. If you are taxing junk food in a bid to increase overall health, a reasonable plan to promote healthy options instead of just discouraging unhealthy options would be to then use those taxed dollars to subsidise healthy options.
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@Club
You've conflated junk food with fat food. The Danish "fat tax" included among other products meat, dairy and cooking oils. I don't consider these products to be junk food and using it as an example against a junk food tax is misleading.
The rest of the arguments made against a junk food tax seem to be predicated on poor implementation and reliance on the nirvana fallacy. They just aren't very good.
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@TheRealNihilist
Wikipedia articles are backed up by multiple sources of the type you are describing. If you want to examine the claims made in a Wikipedia argument more in depth, the superscript footnote numbers will link to the relevant articles and studies.
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@TheRealNihilist
@Club
This is an example of pigovian taxation. The closest parallel which you can base its possible effects are the various soda taxes implemented across the world. The results of which have generally been reductions of soda consumption.
Even though the tax may seems like it works, it probably won't. You see, the problem of obesity and heart disease is too complicated for just a tax to fix.
Could you elaborate? If you have a set of factors that are directed correlated with a problem, and you minimize those set of factors, the occurrence of that problem should decrease right?
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@Greyparrot
The less redacted version was available to only 12 congressional leaders under several restrictions that stop discussion of the unredacted portions even between committee members. This negates the point of unredacting those portions and is not in compliance with the subpoena.
As far as grand jury testimony goes, it took around 2 years for the decision to release the watergate grand jury material. The reasoning to me is not overly different in this case
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@Greyparrot
Well there are several points to be made here.
1. Even if grand jury testimonies cannot be released, why not release the less-redacted version as a sign of good faith towards complying with the subpeona to the best of ability and law?
2. While releasing grand jury testimony is generally illegal, there are certain circumstances where it is permissible. For example, grand jury testimony was released in the Nixon case so that congress could properly determine whether there was any malfeasance on Nixon's part. Hence there is precedent in releasing grand jury testimony so that congressional oversight can be performed.
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@Dr.Franklin
Why are those reasonable reasons if he's not compelled to consult with Mueller and the DOJ by law?
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@Dr.Franklin
You certainly said why you thought he did that. You didn't explain why it's not a crime however.
To me it's quite simple.
There was a federal subpoena
That subpoena was ignored
He did not have a reasonable reason to ignore the subpoena
Ignoring a federal subpoena is a crime
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@Dr.Franklin
So my understanding of the situation is that the house judiciary committee officially issued a subpoena for the unredacted mueller report and its underlying evidence. Barr ignored this subpoena. Defying a federal subpoena is a federal misdemeanor crime
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@Dr.Franklin
I'm not sure I understand your reaction then. If Barr knowingly and willingly broke the law, and there is no mitigating legal circumstance which justified his action, it seems hardly unsurprising or unfair that he got held in contempt
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@Dr.Franklin
But you said he was upholding the law. What law(s) require him to consult with Mueller and the DOJ first or for them to give the green-light to congress first?
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@Dr.Franklin
Can you elaborate on which laws require him to converse with his department and/or Mueller first?
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@Dr.Franklin
So my understanding of the situation is that the house judiciary committee officially issued a subpoena for the unredacted mueller report and its underlying evidence. Barr ignored this subpoena. Defying a federal subpoena is a federal misdemeanor crime
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But he's also breaking the law by ignoring a house-issued subpoena right?
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@Dr.Franklin
Of course you don't need to go through an entire website to decide whether it should be trusted. However, picking out a few cases where you personally disagree with the assessments does not invalidate the website as a whole.
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@Dr.Franklin
I mean.. two cherry picked and very generous interpretations do not make an entire website false
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@Dr.Franklin
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What statistics did she make up?
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@Alec
Citation neededAgreed. The American left realizes that banning guns won't reduce gun crime relative to the status quo. So they have decided to move on to banning only AK 47s and AK 15s. This has it's pros and cons.
The Left gets the gun laws they want. The Right gets the abortion laws they want.
Well, Firstly, these aren't the gun laws that the left wants. Nor are these the abortion laws that the right want.
Secondly, not much has been achieved with your proposed laws of gun control in terms of gun violence. Everything has been achieved with your proposed laws of abortion.
This is what I mean by value. One side gets everything they want, the other-side does not. This is not a compromise
AK 47s according to their advocates should be legal to defend against a potentially tyrannical government. It's a defense against potential tyranny. The left believes that a tyrannical government won't happen in the US in the near future, the right believes it is a possibility.
This has nothing to do with morality. It has to do with practicality.
Most want to ban the AK and the AR guns.
Citation needed
Any offers? I can make a counter offer. Only legal guns are pistols, shotguns, and rifles in exchange for abortion being banned with exception of the literal life of the mother would terminate unless they get an abortion (basically to ave a mother's literal life from death).
No. Compromising between gun control and abortion laws is foolish. There are far better compromises to be made in both issues when examining them alone. For example, guns ownership may be unrestricted, provided there is a strict registration with mandatory expanded background checks which are applied to private sales. Or abortion is heavily restricted in the third trimester except in the cases of when the mother's life is in danger, but is unrestricted in the first trimester.
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@Alec
The point of banning guns isn't to ban guns. It's to reduce and minimize the associated gun violence. If you were to go by your compromise, what has actually been achieved in this regard? Meanwhile if you were to examine banning all abortions, if your goal is to prevent "lives" lost via abortions, banning all abortions is a fairly complete solution. Value wise, they aren't equal in the slightest.
If we were to go further and you could offer a complete solution for gun violence in return for a complete abortion ban, from a moral perspective, they would be still unequal in value. Even if you justify banning abortions as saving innocent babies, there's no way to get around the fact that you are trampling on female rights to bodily autonomy to do so. With gun control, I don't believe there is much moral reasoning in being against gun control.
Finally, such a compromise would be stupid because both parties aren't completely black and white on such issues. Not all democrats wish to ban all guns. And not all republicans wish to ban all abortions. A good compromise is one that pleases the most people. Banning all abortions is incredibly unpopular even among republicans
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@Alec
There's still an issue of terminology but lets leave this aside. Do you personally think that this would be a good compromise?
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@Alec
New offer; Only guns allowed are pistols, rifles, and shotguns in exchange for banning abortions nationwide. Would you accept?
What exactly do you imagine would be banned? Rifles and shotguns are extremely broad categories. For example, an AK-47 is a type of semi-automatic rifle. Semi-automatic rifles are a subset of rifles. The only meaningful type of gun that would be banned that I can think of are revolvers.
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@Alec
It just depends what you're trying to do. When you take a mean, median or mode of a sample, what you are typically trying to do is to extract a meaningful average representation of that sample. A mean in this case doesn't really do a good job at representing average wealth salary so to use that number seems kind of arbitrary
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@Alec
It's not about better or worse. It's about suitability on sets of data and which is best representative of the "average case" of that data set. Medians are tolerant of data sets that are abnormally skewed towards either end however means are not. Because a large proportion of wealth (and income) is gathered towards a minority of Americans, the median is better suited in this case.
For example, if there were a million people who had 1 dollar and 1 person who had 1 billion dollars, the mean would be 1000 while the median would be 1. Obviously, the mean is not representative of an average point in this data set in this case while the median is.
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I have no idea what's happening with US education. You guys are the richest country in the world and are spending way more on average per student. And yet your teachers are seemly earning way less than average. There is zero incentive to enter into a profession that has an mediocre average salary. Clearly the solution is to raise teacher wages. I just find it bizarre that the wages are so low in the first place, with the average spending being so high
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@Alec
If a business operates from 6 am to 9 pm(or 6:00 to 21:00, I don't know if New Zealand has the 24 hour clock), then that's seems to be when people would be getting stuff from that business.
But you've at least doubled the minimum requires hours. Do you think businesses can support these extra wage costs? Do you think there will be as many customers when they too have to put in more work to secure their their lifestyle?
This does not affect the majority of America. All it does is it gives the poor what they deserve for working a low paying job. If they want a better job, they got to earn it. How they would earn it depends on their profession. Plus according to my spreadsheet, the poor at the end of the year would actually have a lot of money left over. They may not be living in a house, but they have money that can be used for investments so they can eventually afford to rent a place due to dividends.
The majority of Americans do not currently pay at least $17,000 in tax annually. They pay around ~$10,500. This difference is not an insignificant number. So yes, it would affect the majority of America.
It sounds like you're punishing the poor for being poor. The simple fact of life is where you are born in life more often than not decides where you will end up in life. A person who is born in poverty in the ghetto's is more likely to continue to be impoverished for his/her life compared to someone born upper-class. I think it is untenable to punish someone for something that is not their fault.
How did I murder them? Putting someone in a tent is not murdering them.
Well what happens to someone who cannot work, or works but cannot get enough hours? Or the people who now have to work more than double their hours every single day with 1 hour of rest inside a tent that contains all their belongings.
Because the rich contributed way more to society then the poor did and therefore should be allowed to keep their money. Therefore, I think any income tax is unjustified towards the rich that earned their money.
This isn't absolutely true. For example, how would you approach someone that has scammed their way into wealth or someone who has purely inherited all of their wealthy? Poor people put in hard work, why do you think it's justified to negate their hard work just because it isn't as impactful towards society? But it's more than that. Why do you think it's justified to put them into slave-like conditions?
It's like GPAs. If your GPA is a 4, someone else's GPA is a 1.5, and you need a GPA of 2 to pass, is it justified to take .5 from your GPA to give it to the guy who didn't work as hard? Or is it better to encourage the guy with a 1.5 GPA to get a 2 on his own independently so he can be successful without bringing you down. The best way to being up the poor should not involve bringing down the rich.
So this scenario relies on both people starting from the same GPA. The more likely scenario is that one person's GPA starts at 4.0, and another person's GPA starts at 1.0. The person with the 1.0 GPA has a chance to end up with a good GPA, but in general, the person with the higher starting GPA will end up with the higher GPA..
In this scenario, your solution for the person with the 1.0 GPA is give him far more difficult coursework than the person with the 4.0 GPA because you think that he should prove himself worthy of a higher GPA. However in reality, the difficult coursework is far too difficult for anyone except for the exceptional few and you end up suppressing the others.
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@Alec
How did you get $24000 a year? My link got nearly $40,000 per year with a $7.25 minimum wage
I googled minimum living wage which gave minimum living wages for all the states. And then I googled minimum wage for Florida. I'm guessing you've got a minimum living wage for a household and you're using the federal minimum wage
There are 24 hours in a day. A minimum wage worker can work 15 hours a day and have their expenses fulfilled with a $7.25 minimum wage.
Right. But the hours to be worked have to be provided from somewhere. Businesses employ people and set hours based on the viability of operating that business in that period of time. Business maintain operability based on the number of customers they receive. You've decreased the number of customers by requiring them to work for longer hours, as well as overworking them such that they're unlikely to wish to do anything after their shift(s).
Showering once a day takes about half an hour. Meal preparation can be done quickly if they buy food that's easy to prepare, like many sandwiches. If they can't afford I house, I suggest just buying a tent and using that as a shelter. It works and it's cheap, which is what poor people need. Thoughts on that?
My thoughts are you've drastically lowered the quality of life for a majority of Americans, murdered the ones at the lower end and unaffected the rich minority. I understand your thought process was to lower the tax burden on the rich, however you've excessively pushed this burden onto the poor. I have no idea why you think this is a good idea. Depending on your income, money does not retain the same utility. For a poor person, $10 might be the difference between eating today. For a rich person, $10 is meaningless. It might well be that taxing a poor person $100 would have a dramatically greater impact than taxing a rich person $10,000.
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@Alec
Your spreadsheets are set to private. That said, your description doesn't inspire much confidence. When you're fiddling around with numbers it's easy to lose sight of the significance of those numbers. Hours to work don't just magically appear and there is no automatic switch for spending. Take the minimum living wage of Florida for example which is ~$24,000. Zap off the 12% federal income tax to give ~$21,000 and add on your tax to give ~$38,000. You need to take home ~$730 a week which is ~$104 a day. The current minimum wage in Florida is $8.46 so you would need to work on average 12 hours a day. Assuming 8 hours of sleep, this leaves 4 hours of spare time. Of course you also need to calculate time spent for meal preparation, personal hygiene and house work. This doesn't seem remotely reasonable to me
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@Snoopy
Well the basis is the summary in its whole which includes the quote. I don't think it's reasonable to focus on Barr's conclusion and ignore Mueller's quote. And hence no matter which way you look at Trump's tweet, it's a distortion or it's misleading of Barr's summary
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@Snoopy
I probably should've clarified. It's irrelevant whether or not Trump was referencing Barr's conclusion in the summary or not. The impact in terms of removal of context and twisting of words seems to me to be the same. Either the quote was the basis, in which case there is a definite twisting of words, or Barr's conclusion was the basis, in which case the context of Mueller's quote has been removed
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@Snoopy
Irrelevant in the context of this discussionAt that point, was President Trump referencing the summary, or a single quote of the Mueller report?
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@Snoopy
Why yes, yes I didDid you have a point to begin with?
And on that note, do you recall a news source that took a statement by Robert Mueller, William Barr, or Donald Trump and twisted words or removed context?
No.
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@Snoopy
I'll make one for you. President Trump may have read past the quote you supplied from the Mueller report and gotten to this part, just one paragraph down. It appears to state the determination was made regardless of presidential protections from indictment, and criminal prosecution.
Still missing the point
Which does not necessitate him reading the summaryNonsense, we've already established otherwise that Donald Trump was clearly referencing the summary put forth to congress by the Attorney General.
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@Snoopy
Its in agreement. What country are you from?
Hmm? NZ
President Trump read this. It appears to state the conclusion is made regardless of his legal protections from indictment, and criminal prosecution.
Well we certainly can't know what Trump has or hasn't read. And that might very well be true for Barr's conclusion.
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@Snoopy
Yeah, that's what I figure.
Is this a agreement or a disagreement?
Did you have a point here?Second Paragraph, Page 3"After reviewing the Special Counsel's final report on these issues; consulting with Department officials, including the Office of Legal Counsel; and applying the principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Council's investigation is not sufficient establish that the President Committed an obstruction -of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president."
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@Snoopy
I missed something. Where was that claimed?
Trump's tweet is clearly a reference to the Barr summary, or do you disagree?
Okay, so that begs another question. What charges of the Russia investigation are you implying have yet to be addressed? Or do you mean to say that there is simply not sufficient evidence of him committing a crime, and Trump was never proven innocent?
So there are several take away points from legal experts
1. Several actions Trump took as described in Mueller's report are obstruction
2. Current DOJ policy states that a sitting president cannot be indicted, which is probably why Mueller did not bring forth charges directly
3. If Trump had not been president and these actions had occurred, he would've probably been indicted
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@Greyparrot
Who said anything about following anything blindly? Personally I think a certain level of skepticism is probably healthy in most cases.
However it's just a fact that the US government agencies are more credible than not. You mentioned that people were recently fired from the FBI for telling falsehoods. This tells me that there is a strong ethic in the FBI for maintaining truth. Apart from that, it's an anecdote. So in reality, it doesn't tell me anything at all
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@Snoopy
Its a personal twitter account. It's Donald Trump's personal twitter account. It is a politician named Donald Trump's personal twitter account. The meme's are way more entertaining than the news.
And it's great you feel that way. However from my perspective, he is the president and it is implied that what he says is rooted in data that isn't available to the general public. For example, if he were to say that there were mass incidents of election fraud, one might reasonably assume that this statement is drawn of private data from American intelligence agencies and is to be taken seriously. Accordingly, other people, especially those coming from low-information perspectives may take these views seriously.
Why did you quote Robert Mueller's non-conclusion rather than William Barr and Rod Rosenstein's conclusion then?
Two reasons
1. Because Barr and Rosenstein's conclusions, while based upon the report are not part of the report itself. If your claim is that the report has exonerated you, clearly the report is relevant and not Barr's independent conclusion.
2. Because Barr's conclusion doesn't really bear much relevance in the context of exoneration. No further charges is not equivalent to complete and total exoneration which I think is an important distinction.
Why are you quoting Donald Trump's twitter account rather than the summary Attorney General William Barr sent to congress? Did you read the summary?
You could make a case that Barr's summary was a misrepresentation of the report certainly. But it doesn't really have the reach of the sitting president. My assumption is that most people wait for the summaries to be broadcasted on news networkers, or in my case, Trump's twitter account which is a better fit topically
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@Snoopy
Right, so I didn't say that Trump's twitter account was news media, but my position is that the effects of his public statements are comparable to news sources in terms of the dissemination of certain topics and their corresponding impacts on the American population.
What I said has nothing to do with the ultimate conclusions made by Barr, only that what Trump said in that tweet is a distortion of what Barr's report has stated, which I thought was an example of "twisting words".
Finally, my understanding of the whole situation is that Mueller's intention was to leave any further proceedings to congress.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
What do you mean? I feel like it's an apt point.1. Trump is the president, with intelligence and experts behind him. Hence his words are taken seriously2. Because they are taken seriously, they are invariably disseminated throughout the country as a source of informationClearly, Trumps disseminated statements aren't all that different to the impact of mainstream media news storiesSo the question remains, are media-like twistings of words and removals of context topical? Because I think it's a rather similar situation. The only difference is where the twistings and removals occur. ie primary vs secondary sources of information
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
What do you mean? I feel like it's an apt point.1. Trump is the president, with intelligence and experts behind him. Hence his words are taken seriously2. Because they are taken seriously, they are invariably disseminated throughout the country as a source of informationClearly, Trumps disseminated statements aren't all that different to the impact of mainstream media news storiesSo the question remains, are media-like twistings of words and removals of context topical? Because I think it's a rather similar situation. The only difference is where the twistings and removals occur. ie primary vs secondary sources of information
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@Greyparrot
I can't hear you from where I'm standing at my goalpost
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@Mopac
Well just Barr's summary suffices as well, despite it having its own problems
Specifically 1st paragraph page 3,
"The special counsel states that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.""
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@Greyparrot
He can say that he was exonerated without specifically stating it was AG Barr that exonerated him with the help of the Mueller report.
But obviously characterising the situation as a "complete and total exoneration" is removal from the context of the summary or report
Why would there be a link stating Mueller's outrage with Trump? Is this something I claimed?Where is the link stating Mueller's outrage with Trump? The only outrage Mueller has shown is toward the media so far. I provided a link for an actual person outraged at Trump. Where is your link?
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