Sales taxes are regressive taxes. When you're poor you pay a larger share of your income than a richer person. Say you earn $30k a year and you buy a 10k car. With a 10% sales tax (just for easy figures' sake) you pay $1000, 1/30th of your income. If you earn $60k and buy a $10k car, you're only paying 1/60th your income in taxes on it. Now if both guys spend their entire income then they're paying 10% of their wealth in taxes, but the marginal utility of their dollars are not the same. $60k gets you a lot more in terms of basic necessities than $30k does, so it is a greater burden on the poorer earner; say you have to spend $20k per year on food, rent & utilities, assorted bills like student loans and insurance, and expenses like health care. Sales taxes take up a disproportionate amount of what is left of the 30k's income, whereas the 60k guy can save, invest, or choose to spend a greater proportion of his money on taxable goods.

The more money you make, the more you benefit from government services. It's as simple as that.

For one, there's the old standard: infrastructure. Roads and stuff like the postal service. Have a business? You extract a lot more value from the highway system than the guy that drives 10 miles to work a day.

Education: unless you don't hire anything but illiterates for manual labor, nearly every worker you have has had 100k spent on their public education over at least 13 years. Oh, and your customers are educated too, allowing them to earn enough to buy (as well as being smart enough to want, in some cases) your products.

Law enforcement: criminals aren't just disruptive to individuals but to business as well. The implied threat of punishment prevents a lot of theft, vandalism, and fraud being perpetrated on you. A rich guy is a much bigger target for crime than the average worker. A subset of law enforcement is the court system and patents/copyright laws. There is a vast infrastructure set up purely to protect your assets and provide enforcement of abstract, artificial limits that you would in no way be able to enforce yourself (not talking about music and movies; think industrial patents and trade secrets). Without the threat of a lawsuit, what stops your competitors from making exact copies of your goods without spending the R&D costs, or keeps your debtors paying you?

Military: protecting shipping lanes and, abstractly, your life and goods from the threat of invasion. Opening up foreign markets through force (happened plenty of times throughout history), keeping stability in unstable regions to protect worldwide markets, and (let's get realpolitik here) keeping the price of oil low.

As a society, we all benefit from all these services to a greater or lesser degree, but who do you think uses more of these benefits proportionately, Joe Blow getting the median $21k a year, or billionaires like Bezos, who uses the hell out of the roads and postal service, whose business was set up by highly educated individuals, whose customers were literate [Amazon did start out as a book store, after all], that is well-known around here for attempted abuse of the patent system, that generally enjoys having secure facilities, pirate-free transportation, and the cheap oil necessary for a business based on transport? The wealthy get much more out of the government in invisible and implied benefits than any welfare queen ever could.

Demand creates jobs. To increase aggregate demand, we could lower taxes on the people creating that demand by taxing the suppliers at a higher rate. Suddenly, there is more money to fuel greater demand, increasing profits and creating new jobs. Providing more government services and directly stimulating the economy (subsidizing education or health care, providing unemployment benefits, hiring workers for construction/bureaucracy) also effectively puts more money in peoples' pockets. The money being taken from the rich is money that was not necessarily going to be injected back into the economy but could be saved or invested outside of the country, taking money out of the economy, at least in the short term. The less money you have, the more likely you are going to spend every dollar of it in your local economy; in effect this wealth transfer allows more money to be injected into the economy through purchase of consumer goods rather than being hoarded or gambled with through the stock market and other investments, which may not show returns at all, and probably not in the short term, which will keep money out of the economy. So yes, through wealth transfers, increasing taxes can create new jobs by shuffling funds away from higher-level investments to middle-class spending on consumer goods.

Income taxes, probably not. Sales taxes, payroll taxes, government fees, sin taxes like alcohol and cigarettes, yes. To a disproportionate amount, considering that when you're poor you generally don't have any savings or investment.

Not even close. A substantial portion of the country is in favor of some combination of the parts of the bill, and even the bill as a whole was polling at least 40%. How popular and effective it will ultimately be remains to be seen, and isn't something we can truly judge for years... but to compare a controversial bill that you may not politically agree with, either on principle (no expansion of government) or because it may lead to increased taxes or a lower average quality of care, to a staggering amount of incompetence that cost billions of dollars, a large loss of life (I can't put a figure on the death toll caused by incompetence rather than act of god, but suffice it to say that many people needlessly died) and nearly destroyed an iconic American city is nonsense. There are politically unpopular decisions, there are random disasters that happen during a presidential term, and then there's a massive botch attributable to a person, on national television, "heckuva job, Brownie" as we see live feeds of tens of thousands of people huddled in filth in a stadium. There's a human element of suffering on a massive scale (by Americans, which automatically means more to us than seeing Haitians or Asians suffering after a disaster), and a level of sheer personal failure, that you can't simply attach to the successful passage of a bill no matter how much you disagree with it.

The whole 'Obama's Katrina' meme isn't new. For most of the past year, various right-wing/right-leaning publications and personalities have tried sticking that phrase to a variety of events, from the Underwear Bomber and the Fort Hood shooter to H1N1 and the GM bailout. It has nothing to do with death toll, environmental impact, or anything sane, it is just a method of trying to associate Obama with the same kind of image that Bush had in response to the Katrina disaster - a connotation of incompetence above and beyond the normal standard we expect from politicians, an event that permanently soured the electorate on him. Proof: http://mediamatters.org/research/201004300043

The fact that you saw "Obama's Katrina?" on MSNBC seems a little disingenuous, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you just don't watch a lot of TV news. The fact that there's a question mark means it was probably a story about this very topic, with the left-leaning MSNBC trying to discredit such a claim. A little searching finds a clip from The Ed Show on MSNBC doing exactly that.

It's going to take quite a while for the consequences of Bush's decisions to be completely filtered out of the government. There are a lot of appointed positions such as Federal judges that you can't just throw out. There's the trillions of dollars of debt from his tax cuts, Medicare part D, and two wars that are going to shape tax and budget policy for at least the next decade. There's inherent structural things like the impact of No Child Left Behind that aren't fundamentally reshaped by Presidential fiat or congressional committee composition, and as things like the BP oil spill and stuff like the subprime/CDO meltdown (much of which could be traced back to decisions made in the Clinton era like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act) show, unintended consequences of the previous administration's actions can pop up years into even a second term. It isn't necessarily purely partisan to pin stuff on the Bush administration, it's just plain cause and effect. No politician inherits a blank slate, and political/economic forces move at a pace measured in years. Issues like the struggling economy and national debt may be 'Obama's problem' to deal with, but not everything is his fault, and which topics you attribute to either category probably depend on your political agenda.

If you only have a few hundred a month to spend on necessities after rent and the bills, that 8% (here in California sales taxes range from 8 to 9.5%)really hurts, especially if you don't have the option of saving any money because expenses like food and gas are equal to or greater than income. The family with a few thousand can afford to save, and has more discretionary income after necessities are accounted for, so they can better afford to take the hit. It's basically a function of marginal utility - to a guy with $500 a month to feed his family, those $60 taxed dollars hurt a lot more than the guy with $2000 paying the same amount but having $1500 left, and take up a larger effective percentage of his income as he has no choice but to spend most or all of his money just to get by, whereas the better-off guy can save or invest, notwithstanding the fact that he can just spend more before the tax becomes onerous. Hence sales tax being a regressive form of taxation.

Didn't see this until days later, but in case you ever check: here in Monterey Co, CA, which has one of the highest per capita illegal populations in the state, we pay an 8.25% sales tax, already higher than Texas.

I have a degree in postmodern literature, don't assume I can't blaze through your standard paperback in a couple hours, but a non-narrative government policy, with substantial room for interpretation, with flow-breaking formatting, with unintuitive legal definitions, with a lot of numbers (financial and otherwise) being thrown around, isn't exactly Tom Clancy airplane reading, and skimming and 'the gist' is exactly the kind of pseudo-reporting going on here.

Access to information is vital for being an informed member of society, and the government long ago decided it is worth subsidizing its availability. Don't think of it merely as access to the internet. We have libraries for free access to books, newspapers and magazines, government pamphlets/official documents, educational programs, public speakers and presentations, community cultural and political events, and even just intellectual hangouts. The internet is merely the world's best library, alongside being an economic juggernaut that is only going to drive more commerce in the future, and good broadband internet is a steal compared to the cost of bringing even a fraction of a decent metropolitan library's capacities to rural areas and the poor. The possibilities for furthering education (both k-12 and adult) alone should be good enough, as surely the increased tax base from an educated populace should more than pay for the subsidies, plus sometimes the government just isn't afraid of spending public money to ensure that the public can be informed about the government's activities; think how much money can be saved from having to print pamphlets, fliers, and forms. The internet isn't just for trolling forums and watching Youtube.

So the text has been out for several hours and this guy flipped through it (you can't honestly read 357 pages of children's fiction in that time, let alone government policy) enough to find a few stated ideas for taxes, and all of a sudden it's a net loss for consumers? When are those taxes going to take effect, and what is the inflation-adjusted amount in today's dollars? It's a lot easier to suggest taxes than to try and tell congress how to budget or regulate companies, so this statement of policy cannot honestly take into account any kind of subsidy that might be dreamed up by congress (save your complaints about how taxes pay for that, that's not the kind of cost we're talking about), nor any kind of price regulations that would decrease charges. A substantial part of the plan is supposed to be paid for by auctioning another part of the broadcast spectrum, and there's no way of knowing anything other than a ballpark estimate for that amount. It's not like this is anything other than the first public rough draft; items will change and funding will be battled over every day until the relevant budgets are passed.

Actually, I do have a degenerative disease in my wrists and I am looking to get a tablet specifically so that I can read again, because it isn't holding the book that is painful, but holding the pages open - at least on non-clothbound paperbacks. Netbook screens are too small and it is really difficult to read at a desk. I have used 15 inch laptops turned on their sides to get the maximum viewing range, but they are bulky and require contorted positions. Something magazine sized, light, and with a simple interface for scrolling and page turning, in full color, with PDF capabilities, would be a godsend.

Well, you could look at it as the majority party (and state populace, through propositions) passing programs that require too much funding, or the minority party blocking the new taxes being required to pay for the programs. However, the tricky thing is Proposition 13, which was passed in an anti-Tax hysteria back in the 70s, requires a two-thirds majority in the state legislature to raise taxes (to pass the yearly budget, technically) and a two-thirds majority to pass a tax through the state initiative system, while requiring only a standard majority to pass new laws that would require funding (it also keeps property taxes at lower levels than most other states, though that is quite a bit more complicated). It's pretty common for taxes to get past the 50% mark without hitting the 67% mark, so it really only takes a 34% minority to block any increase in revenue, and guess who the usual suspects are? California has only gotten by because it is one of the largest economies in the world and is able to get massive amounts of money anyway, but after 2008 lost somewhere along the lines of an entire quarter of its tax revenue from the recession, and the republicans in the legislature have been as adamantly against tax increases as those in congress are against health care, seeing this as a great opportunity to strike against all their least favorite social programs.

This kind of systematized academic attention to games is long overdue, specifically in the soft sciences and humanities. Video games have now become the most profitable means of entertainment, and it is kind of amazing that so little attention is paid to them in terms of serious academic study. As a literature grad, I can tell you that many of the books I've devoted serious academic effort to have print runs that would make shovelware developers for the DS laugh. Although that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison (for the purpose of building analytical skills, there's nothing wrong with examining a minor work, it actually is valuable to be unable to find any prior critical work to build off of), it could help raise the esteem and perceptions of relevance for the discipline outside the Academy.

The vast majority of games have a pretty shallow narrative structure, but there are still themes, relationships, ideologies, moralities, and philosophies encoded into the choices and actions we are presented with (or instructed to make) over the course of the game. And that's not even considering the larger context of cultural markers and meanings games are embedded in. As games grow in both popularity and narrative/cultural sophistication (were we presented with choices like 'kill innocents to maintain your cover with the terrorists' before this decade? Is that a function of a maturing playerbase demanding 'realism', more awareness of the importance of moral choices by developers, shifting cultural beliefs about terrorism/warfare/entertainment in the face of omnipresent concerns this decade?), there is a lot of fertile ground to be mined in artistic and cultural criticism, and a much wider scope for psychological, sociological, and educational research. Games are not innocent or 'harmless' and have the same capacity for meaning as any fairy tale, comic book, film, or nightly news report. Actions in a video game can be seen as 'natural' consequences, rather than as constrained choices in a constructed system, much like books and films and Fox News (or any other news network, though Fox are the true masters of narrative-building) reports; what happens is justified by the internal logic and prevailing ideology of the narrative - and if you think you can see through them easily and they have no impact on your ways of thinking, just look at how many people here quote Ayn Rand or Heinlein in their sigs*. When the generation that grew up with video games from birth reaches 40, I wouldn't be surprised to see ideological quotes from games there; though games are much more indirect and admittedly don't have nearly as many choice soundbites, I wonder if the fact that a player is performing the actions himself is more psychologically effective than simply being exposed to a narrative (although the narrative depth and sophistication of even the best games pales in comparison to even merely decent writers of fiction).

We give toddlers toys to build reflexes and train physical functions, but also to help build mental pathways for things such as seeing differences in colors and shapes, cause and effect, and rudimentary knowledge of currency and careers; we can see video games as toys as well in this sense, built to entertain, but also to develop and test critical thinking and reasoning skills (well, decent games do) and to allow players to take on various roles in the world (be it mayor or covert operative). In order to build more educational games, we need to NOT look at them as textbooks but more like a laboratory. Games are for doing, not reading; hypertextual footnotes to a textbook are okay. Like conventional textbooks, however, there are implicit and unstated assumptions built into the structure of games; in order to be successful as educational tools, you need to examine the entire superstructure to try and build what you want to teach into the very playing of the game. This must be how we see games as education, not merely computerized flash cards posing math questions or multiple-choice answers providing a small playtime reward. There is a game the army is developing to teach officers how to manage villages in Afghanistan; there is a village full of people you can talk to, each with a bunch of multiple-choice questions and consequences for each one (not just in the Bioware friendly/neutral/hostile tripartite fashion). The game teaches you what to ask and how to ask it; the lesson is developing diplomacy skills through a simulated interaction, not language skills by learning rote translations.

*Okay, it's a chicken-and-egg thing here, did the person's beliefs come before or after they read the book, and of course one book doesn't (hopefully) determine the course of a person's beliefs, but we've all known that kid who got into libertarianism because he read some Heinlein at a formative age, and cumulative exposure to an ideology helps cement that way of thinking into a person.