Wow, what an idiot. We already have property taxes on homes - but I don't see people moving out of the high tax ares. In fact they move to them because they offer good services. Similarly, we already tax the homes of old people, so what kind of idiot thinks that would suddenly put old people out of their home?

Yes, my method would shift the tax burden to the wealthy a SMALL amount, but not by much. Current estimates have the US wealth divided as such:

0-50 percentile are poor. They own nothing and pay no income tax. nothing changes for the poor

51-90 are middle class, own 1/3 of the property and pay about 1/3 of the taxes. Again, nothing changes.

91-99 are upper class, own a bit less than 1/3 of the property but pay a bit more than 1/3 of the taxes. They do better with this system.

1 % are truly wealthy, own more than 1/3 of the property but pay a bit less than 1/3 of the taxes (mainly becuase of tax manipulations). They lose their unfair advantage.

My system does not eat the rich, but is simple.

If you pay an annual ownership fee of 5% (excluding IRA and the first home), then you would not have to pay any income tax. The math works out fine. Under those circumstances people still pay for things they need. Cars, clothing, jewelery, etc. But we would stop buying junk we don't need - like a sports car we can't afford. There would be a slight increase in the market for consumables - specifically experiences, and classes.

Your argument makes ZERO sense. If you think that taxing what people own means the state owns it, then taxing what people earn means the state earns it.

Tax does not equal ownership. It is a fee for protection from invasion, pollution, crime, etc.

The more wealth you have, the more you should pay to protect what you own. Taxing income on the other hand makes no sense, why should you pay more because you earn more? Because you might some day eventually own more?

No it doesn't. The only way to get rich is to save. The incentive to save still far exceeds the incentive to spend.

Effectively what this does is make it a bit harder to get rich and STAY rich.

In other words it reduces the gap between the wealthy and the poor,

If you merely keep an IRA as tax free, effectively the middle class starts to save, while the wealthy, particularly the extremely wealthy, start paying their fair share.

The key thing is this is a simple tax structure that soaks the wealthy, the exact opposite of the flat tax that soaks the poor.

What idiot thinks the company doesn't pay the ownership tax? And who said anything about business expenses being deductable? That works when you are trying to calculate your income, it doesn't apply when you are talking about ownership taxes

I the US it's called a property tax. You pay a small % each year. Rather than a lot when you buy

I agree. The rules the CIA etc. use for deciding who is a terrorist and who is not, while self-serving, are definitely a lot better than what the media uses.

Among other things, it means the bombing of the navy ship USS Cole is not a terrorist attack.

Right now it is nearly impossible for a Republican to win the general election.

During the Bush years, the GOP has sidetracked itself with it's own gerrymandering. By pursuing said strategy, they created a bunch of safe districts, allowing only the most extreme, conservative people to get elected. This works extremely well on the local level, but the Constitution of the US prevents them from gerrymandering all the democrats into a a few states.

This forces the majority of the party to kowtow to the extreme right on issues like gay rights and gun control, so it becomes impossible for a truly moderate republican, such as Huntsman to win the nomination.

As such, the Democrats get to decide who runs the country, while the Republicans get to decide the Congress. The Senate and the Governorships are the only real elections up for grabs.

No. You should tax people on what they own, not what they earn or what they consume.

If you tax people on what they earn, people declare certain things as 'not an earning'.

If you tax people on what they consume, than you are screwing over the people that have no money - the elderly, students, sickly people, etc.

If you tax people on what they OWN, then you don't screw over anyone. While similar to a consumption tax, it affects the wealthy more than the poor - it stops them from buying things outside of the tax system, and if you can't pay the taxes on it you shouldn't buy it.

Sometimes the US government is reasonable when it comes to defining terrorism.

The intelligence agencies in particular, are pretty good about insisting that attacking soldiers/"combatants" is not terrorism. The NSA probably insisted that the FBI say it wasn't terrorism.

Note, the reason the Intelligence agencies are good about not falsely claiming terrorism is that they themselves routinely kill people for political reasons and they don't want other people to call them terrorists. After all, you don't want to say that killing a spy is terrorism if you yourself kill spies. So they loudly claim that only killing a civilian makes you a terrorist.

Which won't survive a Presidential Veto. The president has expressed concerns that mirror ours and the FCC.

They had the gall to say their illegal invasion of privacy was OK because their was no financial harm?

By that logic, some freak could put a camera in their shower - or worse their KID'S shower and not get punished.

Yes, I know that much of the Internet based business hates privacy and tries to pretend it doesn't exist, but that is the enitre reason why we put those laws in place.

Is punishment for writing bad contracts.

Right now - with minimal punitive effects - the system encourages people to over-reach when writing such contracts, in the hopes of intimidating people from using their legal rights.

This effect, rather than a few rare extreme punitive tort cases (i.e. suing because the coffee is too hot), is why we get said contracts and why we have to sign away our rights whenever we decided to go say white water rafting.

Yes, that is the key measure of how good your code is.

If you have no rhyming variable names, then your code sucks. 1 stars

If you have one or two, it is barely acceptable. 2 stars

Half rhyme, then 3 stars.

If most, but not all, rhyme, 4 stars.

If every single variable rhymes with at least one other variable, you have a great job, 5 stars.

To get the coveted 6 stars, all the variable names have to rhyme with each other.

Found it. Spencer Chen, last year: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/...