It's how a conservative politician gets to leak news that the war is doing well and the liberals are all corrupt.

Lest that sound like picking on the conservatives only, let's make it clean that CNN and the New York Times use anonymous sources all the time as well for things that really should not be anonymously sourced. But I can't help but think that's what a WSJ whistleblower site is really about, as a repository for political figures to say things that they wouldn't want to say to your face.

First of all, those 18% of taxes are coming from different places. Check this graph from Reuters. Over the past few decades, we've been taking in much less tax revenues from business taxes (corporate, excise) and taking in much more from payroll taxes (social security, Medicare). That goes along with the fact that we cut business taxes and raised payroll taxes during the 80's. So if the Laffer curve exists, it apparently doesn't apply to half the taxes that we collect.

Second, we can talk about wealth disparity. The income tax is a tax that primarily affects high incomes, while low incomes can often deduct out of income tax completely while still paying FICA taxes. You would imagine that during a period like the 00's in which the gains in GDP were mainly being absorbed by high income earners that you would then see a rapid expansion in income tax revenues, but as the chart above showe, income taxes went up during the dot-com boom but barely returned to a historical average near the peak of the next boom. That would indicate that we're going to need another overinflated bubble to get income tax receipts back to the historical average after yet another recent drop.

There's also the fallacy that more tax cuts will continue to drive GDP and employment, while the current trend is that liquidity amongst corporations is substantial enough to create more investment but that hiring is being held back by a lack of demand. While tax cuts may be a driver of employment, it's unlikely as big of a driver as demand, which has sharply dropped as the costs of consumer goods and services has risen. If the deficit is a concern, then income tax increases would likely have a lesser impact on the economy than in cutting services that contribute to the working and middle classes that drive demand.

Whenever I'm about to go shopping for an expensive product wih many different choices available, in a field that I do not consistently read consumer reports about so as to be immediately informed about the choices and quality, one of the first things I am going to do is to ask the people I know online for help in choosing something, because one of them is bound to know much more about the subject than I do. I don't see what's so lazy about a guy soliciting for help about purchasing a product - hell, I call that the smart way to go.

Actually, if you're looking for an accurate portrayal of medicine, watch Scrubs. And I'm not kidding about that - there's a show that was intentionally based on a lot of real-life experiences of medical interns and nurses and such, even if the show was exaggerated for comic effect.

Oh, come on. If we derived modern computers from the aliens' systems, then certainly the aliens had their own problems. I can just imagine those two aliens in the mothership sitting there, staring at the virus notification on the screen, going, "I TOLD you to download the latest service pack! Fscking McAlienfee!"

If your brother owns a truck, then I can assure you that he is always being asked to help haul things. That is the curse of being The Guy I Know With A Truck.

I want to say this as someone who generally enjoys Apple products but does find them a bit overpriced, so please withhold fanboy accusations in one direction or another.

An executive at our company recently gave a speech to our team about how impressed he was with Apple's sales theories. He says that he sees Apple as successful because they don't just make products that fit into a certain line - they make new products.

As in... what's an iPhone? If you had to describe an iPhone to someone, what would you say? You would say maybe, "It's a smartphone that functions using a touch screen instead of a keypad and has access to a very large number of small applications and games." Go into an Apple Store, though, and ask a rep what an iPhone is, and he'll say, "Well, it's the iPhone. Here, try it out." Then he'll give you one and let you play with it for awhile.

When you watch a commercial for the iPhone, you never hear things like, "blazing fast 1.5 Ghz speed," or "some of the largest capacity on the market." You also never hear the word "smartphone." When you watch an iPhone commercial, you see people browsing the internet or playing games or chatting on IM. By the way, you might recall how the original iPod commercials never said the words "mp3 player" - they just featured silhouettes of people dancing. And when has Apple ever referred to an iPad as a "tablet computer?"

Whenever Apple markets a product, they don't describe it to you. They tell you its name, they show you what it does, and they try to get you to think of it as a brand new device that has no relationship to anything else on the market. Getting back to our executive at our company, he talked about developing our product suite with a new name that hadn't been used before, and talked about how he'd set up their booth at the last major trade show to have tons of demonstrations, where people could just interact with the product rather than reading a ten-page fact sheet about all of the new and interesting things that product can do. We had a ton of interested customers at that booth this year.

You can't help but compare that stuff to Microsoft, who is always playing catch-up. "Here's OUR mp3 player! Here's OUR user-friendly OS! Here's OUR smartphones!" Microsoft markets its products as the MS iteration of products that always exist, giving them that special MS touch that makes those products better. Apple markets its products as... Apple products. I don't care whether you love or hate Apple or something in between - you have to respect that strategy.

I've been occasionally hearing this argument lately. "Yeah, we know these guys are doing bad things, but what if you find out that your guys are doing bad things, too? That would prove that you're even more evil, now wouldn't it!" It sounds like an attempt to conflate a hypothetical situation with what's actually going on. You know, things that there are no evidence for yet do not deserve equal weight with things that are actually evident.

This is in no way to say that I think the Obama administration is completely blameless and angelic in all things. If we were to discover that this firm was working on some of the same hacking and propaganda techniques on behalf of the government, then I'd damned well like to know about that as well. If the Obama administration was using these tactics on American citizens, I hope the investigation uncovers it somehow. And if you, parent poster, murdered a bunch of people ten years ago, I would hope that you are sent to jail for it. You know, if you did that. But in the meantime, we've got documents pointing to fraud being done by this firm on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, so why don't we start with that?

"The BBC has a clear agenda of promoting a multicultural society while being run by the oxford elite and including very little of the multicultural society and villifying anyone who dares question this."

If this is true, then that would be an example of someone complaining about something that they have no direct knowledge about. That's not a conspiracy theorist. The definition of a "conspiracy theorist" is someone who comes up with theories about conspiracies. For example, the crazy idea that Google is secretly a tool of the liberal government - an idea not backed by any direct evidence of Google's involvement, but simply by drawing lines between names on a whiteboard. Does anyone in Europe advance conspiracy theories in the way that Beck does, from a well-paid platform?

Most libertarians that I know of say that they want to decrease government regulations on businesses, because they consider these to be a distortion of the free market. When asked what will happen to a business that damages the environment or discriminates against people, etc., most libertarians respond that these businesses will simply go out of business because no one will do business with them, there will be boycotts, and the like. It's a theory that implies that governments should not be strong enough to restrict businesses ("government small enough to drown in a bathtub") but should be weak enough that they can be taken down by a coordinated consumer effort. It's a theory that businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals. And if such a thing were possible, then Rockefeller would have gone out of business.

Do other countries have conspiracy theorists with such depth and wide-reaching audiences that have radio or television programs?

Ah, so it was moderately pseudonym'ed. I abscond.