Well, you said it yourself: The question is age-old...

This is not a fair comparison. You burn significantly more calories, since you're constantly running from police trying to arrest you for indecent exposure.

"Le Last Mile."

What do they call a hogshead?

I'm currently submitting a patent application for the use of a Zans to open cans.

With lycanthropy, you only have to worry about supernatural issues once (or occasionally twice) a month. You can adequately prepare yourself for them by locking yourself up. The rest of the month you're perfectly free to live a normal life, walk around in the sunlight, eat garlic bread, etc.

I was replying flippantly to my parent post, who seemed to envision China as a warped, frustrated old man determined to turn America into Pottersville. China just wants stability. They buy economic stability by manufacturing stuff for us, and buy currency stability (which facilitates the broader economic stability) with our government debt.

Very smart people on both sides of the Pacific know we're in a death embrace. Sure, they could stop bidding on our debt, but they know that would tank our currency, cause the trillions of dollars worth of notes to dive rapidly towards worthlessness, and kill one of their most important export markets. However we get out of this, it's going to happen very, VERY S-L-O-W-L-Y. China's too big a player in currency markets to dump anything without ruinous consequences for all parties.

Wait a minute... You can arbitrarily raise the interest rate on Treasury Notes!? Woo hoo! I'm gonna buy a whole mess of 'em and raise the rate to 3,000%, compounded minutely! Suck it, Uncle Sam!

Me, too!

I am so unbelievably tired of hearing this fallacy repeated over and over again, when it is just not true. I mean, it's trivially true, in that the money used to pay the taxes will ultimately come from consumers, because that's where all the company's income comes from. But it is absolutely positively not true that the price must rise dollar for dollar with increased taxation. In fact, price has almost nothing whatever to do with unit cost, especially when a company has an artificial monopoly on a product, as they do with software, and double especially when a company has an actual monopoly on a product, as Windows does with desktop operating systems.

Price is concerned with one thing and one thing only: Supply and demand. And when you have an artificial monopoly, you control supply entirely. If Microsoft decides to produce only 1,000 copies of Windows 7, the price will be astronomical... Well above the marginal cost to produce it. If they decide to produce 10,000,000,000 copies, the price will dive to the basement and end up at pennies per copy, and they may need to open up a new landfill next to where they buried all those copies of E.T. for the Atari 2600.

If Microsoft raises the price of the product to account for this additional taxation, and they sell exactly as many copies as they would have otherwise, that only means that the price they were charging is too low. If that taxation suddenly disappears, I can guarantee that the price won't decline by even a single penny. Don't believe me? Gas is much cheaper now than it was a few years ago, but have the airlines eliminated those fuel surcharges and baggage fees?

If you don't think that corporations should pay taxes, that's one thing. But don't try to scare people into supporting tax dodges for huge, profitable coprorations for fear that the cost of their product will increase dollar-for-dollar.