You're going to have to come with an explanation for why this historical percentage holds true in the US but not in any other country. My theory is that it's what we generally prefer and when we adjust our tax policies, we do so within that narrow range. There's no magic economic force that reduces the government's take below 20% no matter what we do. We just choose not to raise taxes that high (and when I say, "We choose not to," I really mean, "We elect officials with enough variety in their preferences that they don't all agree to raise taxes that high"). A couple of other points:

1) The difference between 16.9% and 19.2% of GDP is massive. At our current level of GDP, it's well over $300B. The idea that changing tax rates so that the receipts bounce around in that range has no real effect is just silly.
2) I'm happy to give the Republican congress the credit for the things they were involved in, but let's not rewrite history. The deficit trajectory reversed direction before 1995. The 1993 budget was passed with no Republican support and over screams that it would destroy the economy. To my knowledge, there was nothing particularly special about the 1995 budget in terms of deficit reduction.

Once you've rammed through those gates, it's not unreasonable to weigh the possibility that you're doing something like this. If you don't want your intentions to be misunderstood, not ramming the gates is a good place to start.

If you're guarding an NSA facility, your job is to risk your life for the people and secrets inside that facility, not people trying to force their way in. If you try to strong arm your way into an NSA facility, you're probably up to no good. At best you're an unstable person trying to make a political statement and you don't mind putting others in danger to do so. At worst, you're carrying an assault team or a car bomb and things will get infinitely worse if your vehicle is allowed to hit one of those buildings.

The "Let's just see how this plays out" response is the response you get before you try to breach the outer perimter. That's your not-getting-shot-at freebee. Once you've used up that freebee, you don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. It's kind of like breaking into somebody's house at night while their family is sleeping. You get the benefit of the doubt if you stay outside the front door. Once you climb in the window, you've burned through all of your goodwill and nobody really owes you any deference.

Overly broad non-competes are almost universally unenforceable. The lawyers writing this non-sense know this.

So why, in a world with a professional class of licensed legal experts who write contracts, are lawyers allowed to put obviously illegal and unenforceable stuff into contracts and pay no personal or professional penalty for it? A pilot who regularly disobeyed FAA regulations or a doctor who consistently gave bad medical advice would be penalized, but attornies can write contracts that don't mean anything and the only thing that happens is a judge draws a line through their nonsense and gives them credit for whatever they got right. WTF? With a system like that, *I* could write contracts and take fees from clients.

You really think Amazon wants to take the PR hit by suing a contractor who worked in their warehouse for 10 dollars an hour?

Yeah, I've heard that stuff a lot from employers trying to get ridiculous bullshit into contracts with me. "It says we can burn your home to the ground and sow your fields with salt for no reason, but we'd never actually do it. What? Remove the clause? Well... no."

I've found that exercise changes what I want to eat far more than the amount I want to eat. The amount probably follows from what I'm eating. If my body is screaming out for celery and I'm eating celery, it's unlikely that I'll eat the equivalent of "one bag of Doritos" in celery. It's celery. I eat it until I've had enough celery and I'll stop. If my body isn't screaming out for celery and I pick up a bag of Doritos, I may eat the whole bag without even noticing it.

I'm guessing that if I were to eat the same food whether I was exercising or not, I would probably not be inclined to eat less. It's just that when I'm working out, my brain starts to see food as fuel, so I acquire the fuel and move on instead of engaging in whatever habitual behaviors normally drove my eating patterns.

And at your size, any exercise at all ramps that number up pretty quickly. My wife was always jealous that when I started exercising at or near her exercise schedule, I burned a ton more calories than she did. The analogy I used was, "You're a Toyota Prius cruising along on electric half the time. I'm one of those Hummers with the tattered American flag rumbling down the freeway." I'm not as big as you are, but I was surprised at how quickly I dropped weight just by doing yoga, which isn't exactly high on the list of calorie burning exercises. There's a world of difference between what it takes to do some of those movements when you weigh 115 pounds vs 205.

But isn't eating more than you need just another way of "wasting food"? :)

This is a really excellent phrasing that I've never heard before. I'm stealing that and spreading it far and wide.

I've seen plenty of people who are stuffed to the gills eat a little more food to keep it from "going to waste." Hell, I've done it myself. But you don't need the nutrition and you clearly derive no pleasure from it, so how is that any less wasteful than smearing it all over your face or throwing it into a lake? It achieved nothing good. The only thing you can say about it is that the food is gone. At that point, you're just using your body as a waste receptacle.

I guess the major lesson from this is that you waste food when you make or take too much food. Once that's done, it's waste no matter what you do with it, so solve the waste problem at the front-end.

It also recenters your brain's assumptions about what is "sweet enough" in other foods. If you've been drinking soda regularly to the point where a good apple tastes like cardboard, the calories from the sweet drinks has become only part of the problem. I know people who knocked off the zero-calorie diet sodas and suddenly found their overall eating habits improved because they didn't crave as much sweetness in other foods.

Legally that's not how it works. The Fed can create money and buy bonds and Congress can issue bonds. But if they reach the debt limit and decide not to issue those bonds, the fact that there's infinite money sitting in an electronic account at the Fed makes no practical difference. They're still not going to be able to pay their bills.

The possibility of minting high value coins was an interesting one, but it seems to me that if they ever got to the point of minting trillion dollar platinum coins, they'd have gone so far beyond parody that it would be pretty hard to go back to normal operations. Then again, the Republicans have been agitating to get Reagan's face on some money forever. A trillion dollar platinum coin with his mug on it would work on a lot of levels.

The question is do you have any cases where the fdic didn't have to make people whole because they stopped the bank from collapsing?

The historical record strongly implies that the very existence of the FDIC has prevented a lot of banks from collapsing. Just look at the rate of bank failures per year pre-FDIC and post. The idea of a "bank run" was a quaint historical thing for decades after the FDIC came into being, and bank failures for any reason declined enormously until the 1980s.

The most recent failures are sort of a vindication of a deposit insurance and regulation scheme. As people moved from insured accounts to uninsured money markets to get higher rates, they exposed themselves to the possibility of a "run" on the money market. That happened in 2008, and it looked in many ways like an old-fasioned bank run. So it's a bit of a natural experiment. A massive run on money markets didn't turn into a run on insured accounts simply because the accounts were insured.

Seconded on the whole house fan. Unless you're in a place that stays hot and humid all night, a whole house fan is an incredible energy win. In fact, it's very likely to cool the house down faster than an AC system is.

The parent makes an interesting point. If the same data they ostensibly have every right to inspect in unencrypted format were printed out in its encrypted form and you agreed to open the case, would they have the right to compel you to tell them how to read it? Or would the act of opening the case and giving them the coded papers be sufficient for compliance? If they can't compel you to decode the papers after opening the case, I don't see why they should be able to compel you to decode your digital papers after handing over the device.

He KNEW what the potential punishments where before he broke the law. I say that if you care that much about the cause, do the right thing and don't run, stand and fight injustice in court in front of a jury.

You're oscillating back and forth pretty freely between "illegal" and "wrong." If the penalty was his execution and the execution of everybody in his family, would standing trial and losing still be the "right" thing, or would the only "right' option in that case be to not break the law in the first place? What if the penalty was the execution of his family and he was blowing the whistle on secret government-run death camps? You're taking a rather absolutist position here and I'm wondering if you've really thought it through to its logical ends. Is there really no time when it's right to break the law and flee the consequences?

REAL civil disobedience is when you break the law, full knowing the consequences, ready to make your case about how the punishment isn't fair to a jury and if you loose, being punished.

I'd be more inclined to that position if it was actually legal for him to make the case to the jury that what he did was in the national interest or that the law was unjust. Unfortunately, those arguments aren't permitted. Legally, the reasons for doing it aren't relevant. The only question is whether he did it, and he has already admitted to that. There's no "making his case" in this process at all.

The perversity of the situation here is that there are a lot of perfectly reasonable defenses for crimes that are not allowed as a matter of law. If you position hinges on using those defenses in some spectacular manner to lay bare the immorality of the law and make a great public spectacle, you're going to be sorely disappointed when the judge tells you to shut the fuck up and wait for the jury to find you guilty.

Did Rosa Parks say to herself, "I'm going to break the law today and show these people how unfair it is, but when the police show up I'm going to run and hide so they don't punish me!"

If the death penalty was a likely outcome for the infraction, I doubt Rosa Parks would have done it in the first place. She'd probably have kept her head down like everybody else, and we might be sending black people to the back of the bus today.

If we make it so the only way people can do the right thing is to forfeit their lives in exchange, we're going to end up with not a lot of people doing the right thing.

If the penalties were similar to the penalties for blocking traffic in protest or refusing to go to the back of the bus, he may very well have rolled the dice. When the penalties are life in prison or the death penalty, that seems like a lot to ask. There's a reason why we celebrate people who die for their beliefs as heroes. It's because most people aren't willing to, and demanding it of anybody is pretty unreasonable.