"And to the points made in the dissent in this case, at least they were well thought out and reasonable."

They wern't reasonable in my opinion. One justice compared violent videogames with child porn, and the other missed the point of the arguments entirely.

I hope that was satire. We don't need the land urgently to raise crops - in fact with the CRP program we are paying farmers to keep millions of acres in grassland. We also buy excess grains and subsidize various markets because we produce so much.

Also, birth rates are being rolled back - both white and black birth rates have declined significantly with only recent immigrant populations having high birthrates - and those will likely go down over time as well. US doesn't have a problem with rising population.

It's going to be a tough election cycle. The politicians are looking to find ways to make the public like them. While 10 (or even 5) years ago they wouldn't have even dreamed about supporting something like this, groups like LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) are making their voice heard about the ongoing problems with the "War on Drugs."

It may not ever pass through committee, however if you take just 5 minutes to send a message to your Senators and Representatives telling them to support this bill, it will at least make them think about it just a bit.

However you can increase the odds by contacting your Senators and Representatives and telling them unequivocally that if they don't support this legislation, then you don't support them.

"That claim is false: the overwhelming majority of US government spending is proportional to the number of people - and in particular, a significant chunk of it is proportional to the number of old US citizens."

"Much of the rest pays for equal-chance education (teachers), unemployment insurance (which cost goes up during crises and goes down during booms), poor families/children, roads and other infrastructure - none of those have fixed maintenance costs but go up linearly with the number of people."

All spending is proportional, but some groups are more proportional than others?

The rest of your argument is nonsense too. If spending were linear, add 33% to to 1980s spending (1/3 more people) and track it to inflation. You'll get a lot smaller number than today's spending levels. Hint: $3.4 Tril - 2.6 Trillion less than last year's spending. All you've done is just prove that the government is overspending by nearly double.

We wouldn't need more taxes if we hadn't increased defense spending to huge amounts. You'll get no argument from me about cuts there. Medicare and Social Security are, while noble ideas, also unsustainable. Both are ponzi schemes with most people putting in less than they get out - in which case the first out get the benefits while those that stay in require a larger and larger burden. We are fast approaching the point when the number of recipients are larger than the number of payors, the only way to counter that is to make payors pay more (tax them, tax the rich ones more (even though they don't need medicare/SS and arn't the problem)) or to increase birth rates and/or immigration to have a larger economic base in which to pay for the next generation - basically creating economic slaves out of our children to pay for our own retirement. Bush actually had a good plan to help fix the problem - 4 cents on the dollar invested into individual accounts- but we know how that went.

We (as in the government) have also added numerous agriculture subsidies, dumped money into various new departments and bureacracies, given raises and benefit increases to federal workers - and then the federal unions have forced contractors to pay their workers federal wage rate, (you should see what the construction workers on federal projects get paid!) and paid for hundreds/thousands of pork-barrel projects (war on drugs, bridges to nowhere). If, instead of allowing special interests to mine out the money of the people in every way imaginable, we had simply focused on infrastructure, education, and modest social support, and modest defense spending, we'd be just fine.

"No, We're paying less as a percentage of GDP"

False. We're actually paying higher when all tax sources are figured in.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/27/41498733.pdf

Doubled GDP, Doubled Economy, Quadrupled tax income. Sextupled spending.

"Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."

You mean we're paying less per person. While our economy doubled in the same time frame, actual US tax income has actually quadrupled $500Mil -> $2.5 Trillion from 1980 - 2007 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-total-taxes.JPG

FYI that's well past inflation.

It's a tired and out of context argument that somehow we needed to keep these top tax rates (as much as 70%!) and that we've shortchanged ourselves, corporations are not paying enough, etc. Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all. In fact, if we had maintained government spending at 1980's levels (>$1 Trillion) and tracked to inflation we'd be just fine today - in fact we'd have a slight surplus. Instead, despite a doubling of the economy and the quadrupling of tax income, the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)

The problem has not been taxes, instead it has been both parties spending far beyond revenues, and taking loans out to pay for it (or just pushing the bills into the future, which is why some reports have us at 70 Trillion in unfunded mandates)

Should these satellites go away? Probably not. But I'd like to see something else (or everything) cut first rather than to just add more tax burden.

Free Speech Zones were reportedly invented during the 1988 Democratic National Convention. While it's easy to blame Bush for everything, the precedent was set before he came along.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/08/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-review/

They griped about no SD card slot, but gave it a 8/10. I'd trust them a hell of a lot more than Clayton Morris...

That's pathos. You're doing well, keep working at it.

But that's after the fact isn't it? Do you tell people everything you've thought of? It takes another decision (and consequently more reasoning) to communicate something. Reasoning does not require communication.

What you are referring to is "ethos" or character. It also refers to "experts" and how we are more accepting of the opinions of those who are considered "experts" in their field. For some reason you may think that I have a less valid opinion because you do not know what type or number of degrees I hold. You could be right - my opinion may not have any validity - but using ethos and a socially-constructed definition of the education level required for an "expert" is a questionable basis for decision-making, as Rhetoric is not a replacement for Reason. Which is again why the article falls flat.

And FWIW, Rhetoric and Critical Analysis is my field.

Rhetoric is the faculty of observing in any given situation all available means of persuasion. (Aristotle)

This theory (and you) seem to be suffering from a failure to understand what rhetoric is vs what reason is. Reason is the application of knowledge/experience to current or future actions or thoughts - it's cause->effect relationship awareness. You don't reach into the oven and grab a pot because you know it's hot - that's reasoning. Higher-level reasoning would be the use of a pot-holder or other tool to grab the aforementioned pot to prevent burning yourself. (The failure to be aware of and properly apply knowledge/experience and cause->effect is stupidity)

Reason is not related to communication, nor does reason require any type of social construction (except when reason deals with a social construction - such as religion) to exist - burning your hand in fire did not take a committee. They are independent and separate. That's why this "Argumentative Theory of Reasoning" falls flat on its face.

Or maybe there's no connection at all and the author is overreaching for the benefit of sales. Seriously, Just because we as a people are stupid when it comes to where/how we build (places prone to flooding, wildfire, mudslides, hurricanes, severe storms/tornados) doesn't mean there is somehow a connection to what is essentially "the beginning of the end" in the author's mind.

How is a statistic that takes the entire time period from '81-'05 relevant? Give me something that shows just the last decade please, you know the decade where California ended up owing 78 Billion (at last count) http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/bonds/debt/201008/authorized.pdf (Prior to 2003 California only owed ~23 Bil)