But the corporation only pays the tax once. Every tax paid reduces another tax liability.

Nonsense. Corporate tax doesn't reduce capital gains tax or income tax, which is why you need to add the capital gains tax to the nominal corporate tax rate to arrive at the effective corporate tax rate.

Property taxes pay for...

What they are used for is irrelevant to what their effect is.

Taxes aren't evil.

That's again irrelevant. Fact is that the higher you make corporate taxes, the less people bother to invest in stuff and just consume. Eventually, the only investor left is the government and government-funded retirement programs, meaning that high enough taxes are basically equivalent to the abolition of private property and socialism.

I dare say that we don't lack programmers. But considering the wages of C-Level execs, there must be an incredible shortage of them.

So, you are using the fact that C-level executive salaries don't work the way you expect supply and demand to work in the labor market as evidence that we don't lack programmers?

Your expectations are wrong. Salaries aren't set just by supply and demand, for numerous reasons.

And, FWIW, compensation at Microsoft and Facebook is far above the median for US workers anyway.

Silicon Valley companies disproportionately hire Asians, in particular Asian immigrants, while hiring disproportionately fewer whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

So, they are consistent: they believe that US and European countries aren't producing enough good coders and hire accordingly.

Today, radical liberals have the public ear: the Democrats are in favor now, but the Republican opposition holds a large clout of power

What you call "radical liberals", i.e., liberals who go back to the root, is better known as "classical liberals" or "libertarians" in the US. Classical liberals and libertarians are split between Republican (nominally laissez-faire) and Democratic (nominally socially liberal) parties, although they have recently been leaving the Democrats, given that the Democrats seem to have given up on socially liberal policies.

Yes, and this will be a conservative vs. radical argument as always, with conservatives who want to take it in small increments, and radicals who want to slash it all and implement a 9-9-9 plan

I think a 9-9-9 plan would probably be better than what we have now, but it has no chance of passing; even if it did, it would be destroyed by the process. Also, rapid change, even for a better system, often ends up much worse in the short term.

I think what is politically feasible and much better to deal with is crafting exemptions and let people vote with their feet. Imagine creating corporate tax havens within the US to compete with Ireland, or greatly loosening restrictions on tax free retirement accounts. If you look at the history of social and political change in the US, we often haven't bothered with repealing old laws, and instead just made them irrelevant.

There will come an age when America either collapses or finds itself tired of running radicals against radicals, with the alternative of up-and-coming radicals.

I wouldn't be so gloom and doom about it; for all its problems, the US is doing very well, both compared to its own history and compared to other nations. It takes more than a Bush and an Obama to get the US to collapse.

Why wouldn't people just use the system of "where your customers pay you" for any multinational company to determine "where to tax is owed"? Much simpler and fairer between different nations.

That system is already being used: it's the sales tax.

But countries like taxing multiple times, so they also tax corporate profits, and finally tax the profits again as either capital gains or dividends (corporations also pay other taxes, like real estate taxes).

This multiple taxation means that the US has one of the highest effective corporate tax rates in the world; far higher than Canada and most of Europe. The US also has a Byzantine corporate tax system which further increases costs and risks.

That's the reason why corporations are leaving. And they are going to continue to leave unless we bring our corporate tax rates in line with other countries, meaning lower them significantly.

if a boat is female and a trailer is male, what gender should a boat-trailer be?

It's necessarily determined by the last word in the compound because German uses suffixes to indicate case and gender.

Just remember that it was progressives who brought us segregation, as well as anti-miscegenation laws, forced sterilization, and numerous other racist policies, the same kind of progressives as are so dominant in the Democratic party now.

It is somewhat elastic, see the 1990s for an example of more people coming into the STEM field due to wages. I'm also saying that we currently graduate more STEM workers than the field can absorb.

The fact that people enter the STEM field and get degrees doesn't mean that they are actually usable STEM workers. For myself, I know that there are many things I'd be lousy at no matter how much you paid me.

Many companies have business models that rely on creating new products. Apple isn't going to stop making new iPhones just because engineers get a bit more expensive.

As I was saying, the first thing those companies will do (actually, are already doing) is moving STEM-related work overseas. And if cost for STEM employees goes up substantially, people will start selling their stock.

Civil forfeiture has little to do with restrictions on the use of large bills, other than perhaps that both are rooted in a "get tough on crime" attitudes.

To accuse the C++ community of not having engaged in "reasoned discussion" about backwards compatibility is silly. Chiusano may not like the tradeoffs that C++ makes (I don't), but they are the result of a glacially slow and tedious community process and discussions. Whatever C++ is, it is by choice and reflection. Furthermore, "worse is better" refers to keeping things simple by cutting corners, and you really can't accuse C++ of keeping things simple.

(Charges about too much backwards compatibility are ironic from someone who promotes Scala, a language that makes many compromises just in order to run on top of the JVM and remain backwards compatible with Java.)

The spammers don't care in the least if 99.99% of the spam they send out gets filtered,

Sure they do: their response rates, and hence their profits, are roughly proportional to how much of their spam gets through the filter. Cut spam in half and you cut their profits in half.

Spam levels have generally been going down, probably because it's becoming less profitable to spam.

Sure, but the demand for the things produced with STEM workers doesn't go away. ... It's not like people are going to stop wanting better televisions for example.

For many of those things, there is no demand because they don't exist. There is no demand for 8K TVs, for example. Most STEM products only generate demand once they have been created, and most of them fail even to generate demand when they have done that.

As an extreme example, take the Dark Ages: theoretically, there would have been lots of demand for the products of the industrial revolution, but nobody even knew that investing in that kind of work was possible or would have paid off. It took a thousand years to get out of that trap.

Yes, that's a valid point and to the extent possible STEM workers are being replaced by automation & process improvements that makes the existing workers more productive.

The substitute I'm talking about is foreign STEM workers for US STEM workers.

Yes, there is a limit of how many STEM workers we could possibly have, but currently we're no where near the limit.

Again, you're assuming that the worldwide supply of STEM workers is elastic (i.e., high salaries generate more STEM workers) and that the demand for STEM workers is inelastic (i.e., fewer STEM workers means significantly higher salaries).

But exactly the opposite is true. The supply of STEM workers is inelastic; art history majors rarely turn into good engineers no matter how much you pay them. On the other hand, the demand for STEM workers is highly elastic: if companies can't get them at the current prices, they just won't hire at all, for the reasons I outlined above: there is no demand for their work until after they have successfully innovated.

They won't get paid if people don't see their messages due to filtering. That's why filtering is a good thing.

Did you throw in a perpetual motion machine for kicks?

Seriously, if you think you have a better spam filter than everybody else, patent it, make it a hosted service and offer for-pay filtering to people who want it. If it works, you'll have a bidding war for your startup within a few years.

If toilet paper was $1000 a roll, investors would open toilet paper factories in massive numbers, supplies would increase and costs would come down. That's how economics works.

You're incorrectly assuming that the demand for toilet paper is inelastic. In fact, there are many ways of cleaning your ass that are cheaper than $1000 toilet paper rolls and people would just switch to those instead of paying $1000/roll. At $1000/roll, you aren't going to sell any toilet paper.

If there were a shortage of STEM workers pay would increase,

Again, same wrong assumption. The demand for STEM workers is elastic; people who would make money by employing STEM graduates have many other ways of making money and they switch to those.

In many cases, a shortage of something doesn't cause prices to rise, it causes people to substitute. Your simplistic and erroneous version of economics is also why people are so irrationally afraid of monopolies.

massive numbers of people would see the big paychecks and enroll in STEM courses, the new graduates would increase the supply and wages would come back down, that's the market at work.

Here you are also assuming that the supply of STEM graduates is elastic. But most people simply aren't cut out to do STEM work, no matter how much training you give them. Furthermore, unlike building toilet paper factories, which can be done in a few months, it takes more than a decade to train STEM graduates that can compete with STEM graduates overseas.