Social Security is originally a welfare system designed such as to ensure that retirees will have some money when they retire. It is a countermeasure to economic collapse in such a way that banks are raided by depositors and forced to fold due to insolvency, and a counterpart to the FDIC which insures deposit accounts against insolvency.

I am quite aware of the economics of welfare programs, and the political methods of controlling public opinion. The terms "Social Services", "Social Security", and "Social Welfare" are used interchangeably in some contexts, particularly in America where "welfare" carries automatic negative connotations and so a number of programs have been termed "Social Services".

It is also interesting that the opposite happens in common conversation: unemployment is technically a form of insurance, although also a form of welfare; it is, thus, described as such depending on the speaker's motive. When a person becomes unemployed, he is often told, as I have been, that unemployment is "his money", because "he paid it in taxes" (this is strictly untrue: it's paid by a business based on how many of its former employees have collected unemployment historically, and thus less is paid if fewer employees go on unemployment). When unemployment is discussed publicly in an economic downturn, such as the Great Recession of 2007, it is termed as a form of welfare--going so far as to mandate an expansion of unemployment insurance as a welfare service at the Federal level, paying for it in taxpayer dollars to extend terms from 6 months to 12.

Regardless, social security is Government retirement aid in cash dollars. Social Security also provides Hospital Insurance, ostensibly, as medicare and medicaid; interestingly, if you have assets, they won't give you a fucking nickel unless you spend your own money first and firmly run out: it's means-tested insurance, which screams "welfare" so hard in your face that you must have gone deaf at your age not to hear it. By this mechanism, high-income earners--who are mandated to pay a much higher premium than low-income workers, almost twice as high--are entirely unable to collect on this "insurance" in any way.

Of course I did not count healthcare or education services in my calculations, as they aren't relevant to my larger argument. We could probably classify healthcare as welfare, at least medicaid and medicare, but that is an issue of current debate and is sensible to land on either side of that argument; education is more the shape of a social service, and is neither a necessity for life nor a thing which must be provided at any particular time to provide for life, as would be surgery or food or shelter.

On the one hand, we have people calling for taxes on liquor and cigarettes to be banned because they just, mostly, hit the poor, who smoke too much and drink too much.

On the other, we have these same people claiming that's not a thing.

Meanwhile, my city has taken a disliking to its image, and so has rescinded thousands of liquor licenses in areas it wants to "clean up", so as to encourage the poor to move somewhere else. It works.

You also seem to have a fetish for attacking a rational thought because it is distasteful, rather than accept that it is reasonable and useful.

You have no reading comprehension ability. Go back to either third grade or to whatever treatment center corrects mental retardation--it can be done, retards can be made functional on a normal human being level.

That's a lie.

In 2013, the US Government spent $960.8 billion on retirement benefits (social security taking up the lion's share); $160.4 billion on sickness and disability (social security again); $109.7 billion on food security; $170.7 billion on income security; $9.7 billion on other family and children focused welfare; $160.9 billion on unemployment; and $46.7 billion on housing assistance (I exclude other HUD activities, such as community building). This totals $1,618.9 billion in 2013, of which $1,268.7 billion was Federal spending.

The total personal income in 2013 was $14,301 billion; income from welfare is taxed (stupid), so the base personal income comes to $11,884 billion.

What percentage is $1,618.9 of $11,884?

Stop manipulating the numbers. The per-capita income I calculate is $49k, but excludes anyone under age 18 and excludes income FROM WELFARE, because of course we tax your social security and unemployment income for some stupid reason; including taxes taken from welfare paid out, it's $59,340. Dividing out the amount the government spent on welfare, you get $6,717 per capita, or 13.7% (my number), 11.3% (including taxes taken out of welfare paid out).

By the by, I tend to ignore the taxes from welfare when doing the math because I am looking at replacing the welfare system, and that so-called income will dry up--its replacement will be untaxed, because taxing it just adds complexity and is stupid. It's like a secret tax: we could tax you 3.6% more, but instead we'll just tax welfare 10%, and notice welfare isn't working because it's too low, and increase it, and raise the amount of tax collected to justify welfare. Taxing the poor on money you're giving them that you took from the rich is just a way to pretend you're not taxing the rich--if you didn't tax the welfare payout, you could just make it that much smaller! Anything I come up with for welfare says "untaxed" stamped right on the box, because why the fuck would we give you a pile of money and then come back to you and demand you give some of it back?!

It appears that word does not mean what I think it means. How odd. Wasn't there a word of that structure that meant "to cut away"? As in surgery, when a tumor is [!excised]???

If you're just trying to assert that the tax is made progressive, sure. It's a graduated tax system in some way I guess, although the described implementation is impossible to track (how do you know how much people bought? The government doesn't know what you paid in sales tax...). If you're trying to assert that this is a good plan or of any use.... no.

Christ that's a complex architecture. How'd it do on power consumption? 0.01W?

Because that wont get you money; it'll just leave you untaxed.

I've done some exercises exploring high taxes on the poor. The results are astounding: jacking up taxes insanely doesn't actually hurt the poor. If you make $10,000, you pay 17.2%--10% income and 7.2% social security, a total of $1,700/year. If we jack it up to 25%, you wind up paying $2,500/year, or $67/mo more. That's annoying if you're poor, and will cause a crisis; but the fact is the poor are largely consuming cigarettes and booze at a higher cost than that, and any general instability (a flat tire, or being scheduled for fewer hours at K-Mart) will cause the same problem.

By the same token, dropping taxes off the poor doesn't help. The standard deduction of near $6000 makes the above calculation laughable: you're talking about taxes on $4000, and the actual impact is about $27/mo, with the same consideration. Likewise, the taxes you pay in the first place are about $57/mo, which would be helpful, but is going to allow you to live the same slum lifestyle with just a tiny bit less worry each day, unless you get a flat tire or need a tooth filled and have to shell out $800 and your life is destroyed.

By the time you've jacked up taxes on the poor enough for it to matter, you've exceeded the tax rate of a flat tax system. The top-tier income tax here is 39.6%; if we jacked taxes up on the poor, we could have a flat tax of 39.56%. At that rate, the resolvable crisis of being poor and losing $50 is no longer "other poor people live on like $200 less, so figure out how to survive"; it's "holy crap, half my money is gone!" and it's started to become a real social problem.

I resolved this largely by eliminating all welfare taxes by eliminating all direct welfare, accounting for 36% of Federal spending. This, plus the state welfare services conjoined to these, drops $16.2 trillion from spending and taxes; I then add on a 14.5% tax to collect $17.2 trillion. At the bottom bracket, it comes to 11% + 17.2% = 28.2%, a bigger bite; but, at $10,000/year, you'd lose $1,820/year to that. The separate 14.5% tax is divided up evenly among every natural-born American citizen resident in country (territories, military bases, etc.), proving $7,125/year in the 2013 numbers I used for income and population.

The result of this is a slightly increased tax on the rich (39.84% instead of 39.6%) and a smooth transition upwards. There's a sudden tax increase in the middle, around $120k income, because social security taxes cut off there and mine don't. Everyone under the per-capita income comes out slightly richer; everyone above it comes out slightly poorer. There's no unemployment because everyone gets a $600 check from the government (social security) every month: a family is getting $1200/mo, flat out; this number follows inflation and any increase in total income (individual and businesses), and of course the real buying power increases as the economy gains wealth.

By a number of economic factors--largely the absolute lack of risk in housing the unemployed, as they will have a precisely-known amount of money for you to align your cost structure to and build out a sizable margin when deciding how much to charge them and what kind of flat to rent them--businesses become suddenly capable of drawing a tidy profit from the poor and downtrodden, mostly by taking their money. The poor, in exchange, gain access to housing and food, although the housing is small and the food is of most basic quality, along with other basic needs. Welfare traps evaporate, as you continue to collect the only welfare in existence until you die. Economic dips and downturns are buffered against, mass unemployment doesn't create as much of a crisis, and welfare costs don't spike in these situations.

It's not as simple as people like to think. So many moving parts dependent on so many other moving parts. It took me a month to get it right.

That's not enough taxes. The government spends 13.68% of all income across the country on welfare alone.

As well, this tax excises taxes from the poor and shifts them solely on the rich. Taxing the rich as a cash cow isn't a good proposal, although a progressive tax system has many merits (the largest of which being that high taxes on the poor drive up wages, which acts as an avoidable tax on the rich by way of reducing human resources--eliminating jobs--through process management).

I have a better system already anyway, one with many features beyond "eliminate income inequality." My target was to eliminate poverty and increase economic stability, and I have succeeded in that and more. Now I just need an implementation plan, and a wielding of power to have it pushed into public policy.

You mean from the last 12 years. Come on now, we know this started post-Pentium 4.

It was, at the time, largely speculated to be a marketing ploy to make MACs seem more like friendly PCs than as some weird PowerPC chipset that you play with in primary school. I speculate that virtualization has something to do with it, as it's easier and was more familiar at the time than JIT translation CPU-to-CPU (as LLVM does), and was interesting to the common man to run Windows upon a Mac.

These are RISC cores--occasionally ARM or a modified architecture--running an x86 or x86-64 translation layer as the decode cycle, such that the x86 instructions are cached as RISC instructions. ARM virtualizing x86 would be amusingly fast, too--faster than x86 running x86.

It's only ambiguous in the context of a global political system, and only because the stance that a Liberal Democrat may take in America may be the Conservative stance in some small European country, while the Conservative Republican stance may be the Liberal stance in some South American country.

Consider the socially conservative stance of retaining Catholic religion in society, in the good process of government, in schools, in laws; in ancient Rome, those who pushed for change from Romanism to Catholicism were the liberals. and so would those be in Pakistan or India who seek to throw out Islam!

Liberals seek change, and seek it quickly; Conservatives seek stability, and only implement change in a slow procession. This is how you classify them, same as classifying a Male animal versus a Female animal: although birds have XX males and XY females (called ZZ and ZW), the XX Male is known male when XX Female is a Female in mammals because the Male produces the sperm and the Female the ovum. A political system may seem inverted because the ideals of the Liberals and Conservatives are reversed; yet the political atmosphere may also be inverted, such that conservative policies hold true to the current state of things, whereas the liberal policies seek major change, and where these relations are inverse in the opposite system's establishment.

The term "Liberalism" has a good fifteen different definitions in the study of politics; in the study of political science, it is much more clear. I find simpler frameworks easier on the mind.

You make a terrible assumption: that energy is not scarce.

You cannot measure the energy available by any fuel source. It cannot be done. You can measure its caloric output, its thermodynamic potential, you can measure and calculate and predict all these scientific things; but you cannot measure its availability.

Humans, given infinite energy, will use a lot more energy than of current fashion. We manufacture molybdenum and cesium by fusion now, at great expense of energy; with unlimited energy--or with such ridiculous quantity such as from a dyson sphere, which should provide 13,000 TRILLION times our current energy usage after considering all losses in solar parabolic collection and transmission--we could doubtless fiss any matter by brute force, and then produce nuclear fusion on manufacturing scale to produce any element required in any quantity, at any expedience, for trivial cost.

Imagine a ten-fold or even a hundred-fold increase in consumable energy. I can provide you a thousand-fold increase in energy use, and by that scale you will have only a tenth or a hundredth of the available energy as you do now, and soon find your oceans dried and lifeless.

We deforested the earth because of an endless supply of trees. Oil, similarly, was this thing that you found and it never stopped coming out of the ground; the reserves were estimated so large at one point as to rival the earth's oceans. I've had people as well tell me there is so much water, and so much of anything else we can fuse, that we will never run out if we run the fusion reaction at full force in earnest to supply endless and infinite power for all time.

And in the scholarly pursuit of Political Science, "Liberals" are those who wish to move rapidly through new policies, and who spend money and go into debt sharply to do so (fiscal liberals); while "Conservatives" are those whose policies are slow and metered, and whose finances are concerned with fiscal sustainability.

I don't care that you want to define "Conservative" as synonymous with "Christian Republican" and "Liberal" as synonymous with "Atheist Democrat"; these are religions and party affiliations, not political stances and behaviors. It would be the same as defining any red car as a "Race Car" and any black car as a "Town Car".

It is this belief which is fundamental to conservative politics. What I said about not leaping if there is a ladder holds true in two ways: a set of metered steps, even deployed rapidly and sequentially, is better than one giant leap; but, at times, a policy is impossible or even catastrophic without at least a central upheaval, and so one should reason determinedly about the policy and the plan before accepting the need for such an undertaking. Such undertakings may be occasionally necessary, but they should be taken only when so, and only once having considered the dangers and the planning to contain them.