Ah, here's the confusion. A Fair Tax has a very specific meaning: it is a consumption tax. I had no idea you were talking about an income tax. None of what I've said applies to you.

[Citation Needed]

That chart assumes that rich people will pay a consumption tax on every dollar they earn, which is completely wrong. It's also worth noting that the person who pays the most as a percentage of their income on your chart is the guy making $100,000. And that's even ignoring other regressive tax and fee structures, which move the line to a lower income.

Take a look just a second at the numbers you posted. If they pay .03% in state and local taxes, and those are in the form of 6-10% consumption taxes, then the reasonable assumption is that if you give them a 25% consumption tax, they would pay somewhere around 1.25% of their income into it. Actually, it would probably be less, because the tax would encourage them to spend even less and invest even more. If you can explain to me how going from 17% down to less than 2% is an increase in their tax burden, I'm all ears.

In order for "fair" taxation to be anywhere near fair, you have to assume that there is actual equal opportunity for success in this country. Until you can make the claim with a straight face that a poor black kid growing up in downtown Oakland has the same opportunity as a kid with rich parents growing up in San Rafael, I don't have any idea why you would think there is anything fair about taxing the same way as adults when the former claws his way up into the middle class and the latter gets to coast by and still be rich.

Everybody thinks they are super clever when they start talking about a "true" fair tax, but the basic question is an argument over what "fair" means. Is it fair for each person to pay an equal portion of their income in taxes? What about the same flat dollar amount per person, wouldn't that be more fair? Or maybe it would be fair for the people who by far benefited the most from the political and economic systems of this country to put the most back into the system that helped them get where they are in the first place?

And this is why nobody takes Libertarians seriously.

The rich buy less as a portion of their income. They tend to reinvest their money to make even more instead, whereas a poor person spends every dime that they make.

Which, of course, assumes that the rich spend their money. Since the rich do not and instead reinvest it, your entire line of reasoning completely falls apart. If you want to tax wealth, you have to tax wealth. Also, as stated repeatedly, many national sales tax plans don't exclude necessities. And necessities don't even begin to close the gap between what the poor pay as a percentage compared to the rich. It's all a big lie.

I think they have a couple of reasons for this lawsuit. First, they don't want any precedents set. A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users, and Aereo claims they are protected because they are just a long wire between the antenna and the user. If that argument holds for free over-the-air programming, it might be used later to protect streaming of something that is not quite so free. Also, they are probably worried about losing out on revenue from selling people the programming if they don't see it for free over the air when it broadcasts (or via DVR). They want additional advertising value to go to re-runs rather than disappearing into this system, and they are possibly scared it will hurt things like DVD/iTunes sales. They want to be in control as much as possible of any format swapping you do.

Personally, I think they are shooting themselves in the foot, in that I bet they could negotiate advertising revenue by leveraging these additional live viewers, and this adds to the ever-increasing perception that the old school broadcasters are unfriendly to viewers because they can't keep up with the times, but those are of course the typical mistakes these people make anyway, so it isn't surprising.

Ridiculous. You talk about evolution over millions of years as if it contained a bunch of discrete changes the size of farmers mass killing prey or entirely new predators showing up to kill an indigenous population. Those sorts of things can happen, but most evolution in anything more than one cell is basically indistinguishable along a timeline of "TENS OF YEARS" much less noticeable advantageous for a predator or prey. It's not like a hamster is giving birth one day and out pops a gerbil and shazam, a new species is born. Natural Selection takes trait variances that alter survival chances by fractions of a percent and causes them to manifest just a little more each generation across an entire population. This is not comparable at all to your alleged counterexamples.

And we may not have been able to observe changes over millions of years, but we certainly have gotten to watch evolution happen. It is repeatedly demonstrable in single celled organisms where we can watch hundreds and thousands of generations in a matter of years.

Do you know what's actually dangerous to science? Individuals thinking that they are so smart that they can hand wave away thousands upon thousands of hours of expert research on the grounds of a couple of trite little anecdotes because they apparently think they are so much smarter than the entire body of scientists working on a subject that the scientists have never considered this particular line of reasoning. If your negation of an entire body of scientific research can be expressed in a few lines, it either A) better include an incredible new piece of evidence that nobody in the field has seen before or B) is probably a crass oversimplification that isn't nearly as clever as you think it is. I don't see a lot of A) here..

Right, you just insert unsubstantiated beliefs from a religious text until somebody can prove otherwise. More power to you, but don't pretend that it is in any way a rational decision that equates in any way to what actual research there is on any given subject. Creationism doesn't challenge my reasoning because it has nothing to do with reason. If I have to fill the gaps with something, I'll choose the Flying Spaghetti Monster and wait for you to explain to me why your nonsensical choice has any "merits" over mine.

"Since I cannot defend with certainty any scientific answer that doesn't raise problem I personally default to faith, as I accept that I lack both evidence and intelligence to explain corner cases of science. " What kind of lame justification is that? I can't see what's on the other side of my cubicle wall right now, so I have no proof that it exists, so I default to being ? Just because we don't have an explanation for something doesn't mean that there isn't one and we should "default" to any particular religious doctrine.

They are just waiting to see which country loves the telescope enough to cede ownership rather than let it be cut in half, then they will give it to that country because they must be the real, loving mother!

Not really. As much as our politicians would love for us to all believe that it's a fight about all the little bit like this, there's no amount of discretionary budget you are going to cut to make a real difference. The longer you let our politicians turn thumb wrestling matches over things tiny programs into huge government-shutting-down cat fights, the longer it is going to be before any meaningful discussion about the budget.