But top-tier incomes are really unstable, they go down fast in a downturn and up fast in an upturn, so federal revenue takes it on the chin from that group during times like 2008-2011.

Is that a bad thing or a good thing? If the ideal case is for taxation to decrease during lean times, and to increase during times of plenty, that might make a rather nice automatic adjustment.

That's probably the dominant factor in changes federal revenue as a percentage of GOP these days, now that 1% of tax payers pay about 1/3 of all income taxes, and that noise drowns out any signal we might get from changes in top marginal rate.

Also worth noting that in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of greatest economic growth in our history, we had a much higher top marginal rate. As corollary evidence, consider that a lower Gini index (less income concentration) correlates to a higher GDP per capita (PPP, product per person) all over the world.

I don't care about equality for its own sake, I'm a heartless economist: Whatever maximizes long run GDP is the best answer; it makes the rich richest, and it makes the poor richest, and it makes everyone in between richest, in the long run. That is the only objective definition of "good" in my world. There's a lot of unfounded beliefs on both sides of the argument, but the data, if you look at it without presuming to know the answer, points pretty hard in one direction.

Thank you! Just yesterday, in fact, I submitted this one for an initial 25 prints as proofs, and if they come out right I'll be printing 2,000 to hand out at Burning Man. What do you think of Snowden Doctorow versus Snowden Binney? The upside to Doctorow is name recognition and the approachability of his writing, particularly Little Brother and Homeland. The upside of using Binney, of course, is that more people should know what he has done for his country.

Your thoughts? (and if you ping me off list at bob at thrhahxhehl.com remove all the h's, I'll mail you a few)

Do you want to increase tax revenue, or tax rates? The two are not necessarily the same, depending on which side of the Laffer Curve we currently occupy.

Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is now, and has been for a decade, lower than it was in the 50's and 60's. Since the 50's and 60's were the two decades when we rose to superpower -- with the highest sustained GDP growth in our history -- empirical data says we are safe to at least go up to that level.

I would posit that we are almost certainly in the big hairy middle section of the Neo-Laffer Curve. That is, even without the evidence we gathered during our golden era, I would still suspect we are far from the point where excessive taxation becomes a primary cause of reduced GDP growth.

a revenue reduction concurrent with an even larger spending reduction.

Yes, as soon as we get that big spending reduction (which I favor), we can take revenue increases off the table. Meanwhile, I remain a fiscal conservative; our deficit is excessive, and we must do all of: cut defense, cut health spending, cut social security, and increase revenue until we bring the deficit under control. We cannot tolerate saying, "But not the one I don't like." Bullshit. Cut them all, and increase revenue, until we get the deficit under control. Then we can have our pudding, but we can't have any pudding if we don't eat our meat.

Realistically, I'm not sure things would be much better if we had a different president. Even Ron Paul, who would assuredly do his damnedest to actually set things right, would be one man against an army of criminal, power-hungry scum. Still, I'd rather take a man that tries over a man that supports this evil.

Vote Snowden/Binney 2016.

P.S. F-22 is highly likely going to be better for close air support than F-35. That in spite of having no such capability. Because there is no way for F-35 to have any close air support capability due to its extreme fragility, high minimum air speed and complete lack of ability to loiter.

Project to add attack functionality to F-22 fleet existed, and would have been (and likely still is) far cheaper and more productive than creating a new fighter. That will now apparently cost almost as much as F-22 on top of it. Rafale, Eurofighter and Gripen are viable options as well.

As for "you will never get funding", that is a US POLITICAL choice. The fact remains that CHOICE exists. It's that politicians choose not to exercise that choice for political reasons in one NATO country. Considering that F-35 program has a lot of donors from the countries that are not US, and that without those the project would likely be scrapped as costs would jump further, this is pretty much purely a political problem. Not even a choice, but an actual problem, because many countries paid for F-35 without tenders.

And eventually, it seems that people who made those decisions will be called to answer why, at which point it's fairly likely that we'll have massive corruption trials and jail time for politicians, as well as collapse of the project.

Marines and UK need replacement for Harrier. That means STOVL or full VTOL. At the moment, the only aircraft that meets the requirements is the Harrier and the barely flying version of F-35B as well as Soviet Yak-38 which is no longer in service and cancelled Yak-141 which is the aircraft from which Lockheed Martin licensed the STOVL system from.

Can you please keep your micropolitical bullshit to yourself? This is an adult discussion about real issues.

Again, the "F-35 is the only game in town" clame is a bold faced lie. NATO countries currently operate the following 4.5/5th gen fighter/attack aircraft:
F-22
Rafale
Eurofighter
Gripen

We are spoiled for choice. This is definitely not about that.

In a fight with "real adversary" by your definition, F-35 is the single worst choice of all aircraft, barring downgrade to F-4 or similar, due to its extreme cost. Ignoring the MAD aspect of the issue, if you're facing a massed assault of decent air superiority aircraft in a shitty fighter that has barely any missiles and only frontal stealth, you're dead.

Current fleet at least has a chance because there's enough of air superiority aircraft that have decent to good performance.

And again, you appear to be ignoring the fact that F-35 is a terrible attack aircraft even if we pretend for a moment that Lockheed Martin isn't advertising it as a fighter. Attack aircraft's primary role requires it to have decent operational range and payload. F-35 has neither without external hard points.

And no offence, but in modern world, enemy will know you're coming. Political conflicts that result in massive conflagration between two major states are affairs that take months to appear. And once that happens, spy satellites AWACS aircraft and strategic search radars kick in. Stealth provides little protection from those, you will be spotted. It will only provide protection from fire control radars which cannot get a proper lock due to sensory deprivation, and considering the questionable stealth that F-35 has in the first place and the fact that Russians operate MiG-31s which will be locking on it from above rather than below, F-35 is still pretty much the worst choice.

the Constitution is a blacklist of things government is not allowed to do, not a whitelist of things Citizens ARE allowed to do.

I get your sentiment, and support it, but I must quibble on a minor point: The main body of the Constitution is a whitelist of duties the government is charged with, and the means for doing so. The first ten amendments, The Bill of Rights, is a blacklist of things the government is forbidden from doing without a constitutional amendment. The 9th and 10th amendments specify that the Bill of Rights, being a blacklist, is not to be interpreted as a whitelist of citizen rights.

The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, ... It's all about taxes ... there are but a handful of congresscritters who actually are for less government spending,

Are you unhappy with taxes or with budget allocation? The first and third part above are about budget allocation, which, unfortunately, has very little to do with taxation. The middle part is about taxes, which, unfortunately, have very little to do with budget allocation.

I favor reducing spending and increasing taxes. That is because I am a fiscal conservative and we are currently running a wildly excessive deficit. I believe in running a balanced budget except during exceptional economic downturns, in which a short-term deficit is fiscally prudent for the long-term outcome, and in times of plenty, when a short term surplus prepares our larder for the next downturn.

Conflating reductions in spending with reductions in taxation is a premeditated psychological manipulation tactic. There are bad people out there who want to maximize their personal short-term outcome by cranking up the deficit and damn the consequences to the economy. Those people are not helpful to America. Do not fall victim to the false equivalence of taxation and spending.

Why not? US is currently Russia, largely due to complete halt of develpment and massive brain drain after the fall of Soviet Union. That suggests that US has at least ten to fifteen years of head start. If you go into details, Russians probably still lead on aerodynamics and engines or are about even due to two decades of lost development. US has a massive lead in its traditional advantages of logistics, production and avionics.

US most definitely has the time to develop something else. That argument is quite ridiculous.

The main argument here is cancellation of F-35 program because of structural failures of the program mentioned above, and usage of F-35 development to create three separate aircraft for each branch (carrier based fighter/bomber, airforce strike focused fighter bomber and marines STOVL strike focused fighter/bomber).

This would also solve the problem with Lockheed Martin becoming an effective monopoly for future fighter production in US as tenders could be given to separate companies.

Entering? Yes. Reading and managing with numbers? No. You seem to think that the only costs with data management are entering. That's just ridiculous.

I'm not going to even bother with the rest of your argument, which amounts to "spreadsheet bad for everything, world is wrong in choosing it, I stand alone as a warrior for just cause". Good luck with that.

I think your other part where you are grossly misinformed is where you think that stealth is end goal. It's not. It's merely a means to an end, and end goal of stealth is immunity to radar guided missile's targeting system.

Electronic warfare aircraft are means to that very same goal, that are proven to be about as efficient as stealth but take the exact opposite path to tackle the problem - instead of sensory deprivation of stealth, they use sensory overload instead. This approach has significant benefit over stealth in that this approach allows EW aircraft to provide same benefits to entire fleet of allied aircraft. That's how downright ancient Panavia Tornadoes and older, traditionally vulnerable to SAM aircraft like F-15Es and F-16 were able to operate in Libya in spite of heavy SAM presence across the region.

EW aircraft are basically a cheaper, more efficient means to solve the problem that stealth attempts to solve. They are more efficient because they don't just cover stealth aircraft, but they cover all aircraft in the fleet. This solves the massive problem that US discovered it had in Iraq war - few stealth aircraft and too many targets to hit them with, while a lot of older, functional aircraft that couldn't penetrate air defenses and couldn't be used.
This is what was solved in Libya.