Yeah, and if you want to be scientific about that, and be honest, you'll see that cops stop a lot more people in high crime areas, and that poor urban areas tend to have lots of crime. And that some of those poor areas have a larger black population. If those areas weren't marinated in serious crime, there wouldn't be so many warrants out, stolen cars, cars full of contraband, and the rest.

What? The people whose lives are messed up are those who have to live in areas like west Baltimore where local thugs make daily life miserable for everyone else who lives there or tries to run a business there. So yes, the cops are asked to "get results," because the absence of any results would make those areas completely lost to civilization, rather than just sucking generally. Would you rather that the cops were told NOT to arrest known violent gang members, serial assault and battery specialists, and the like? What would you have them do?

That's a very insightful way to address the substance of the matter. Obviously you're not willing to say the actual numbers or description of the situation is incorrect ... you're just mad at someone for pointing it out? I get that. But you're not really making any sort of lucid point.

What? Each year, people's wages are taxed into those programs, and funds are transferred, that year, to the people who receive it. There is no "savings account." There is no "I paid into Social Security, so I'll get X when I retire." The amount that retired/disabled people get from that entitlement program is determined legislatively each year, and if you bother to read the fine print in your SS statement, you'll see that they explicitly remind you that there is no guarantee you'll get any future benefits.

Each year, funds are transferred from the people who pay to the people who collect.

Slackware was published in Walnut Creek, California right next door to Concord. (I live in Concord, had a chance to visit Slackware HQ and never did)
I think after WC CDrom shut down Slackware moved to Concord.
That may be why it matters.

Also building code enforcement takes bribes so even a 4.0 might fuck some buildings up.

I defy you to show a non-trivial, worked example. Even for a stylized case like a symphony, there are still interpersonal rivalries at work. The "entropy of the human soul" can be minimalized (at, say, a monastary), but never retired. And a symphony or a monastery are miniscule, edge cases.

Nonsense. It's not a distraction, it's different topic than the ebb and flow of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which are transfer welfare taxes). Income taxes are what pay for all discretionary spending (the military, federal agencies like the EPA, the FAA, the FCC and a jillion other activities). There's a good reason we look at all of those differently than we do the entitlement programs.

And ... capital gains? You do realize that a whole lot of middle class people also earn capital gains, right? Directly or indirectly, through things like mutual funds. Warren Buffet's secretary can put a pizza's worth of cash every month into some investments when she's young, and can and should be looking forward to earning some money from that. You know, just like him: taking money on which she's already paid taxes, and putting it entirely at risk in an investment that stimulates the economy and if and when it happens to pay off, paying more taxes on that activity.

If Warren Buffet loses money in an investment? He doesn't get to write that off against his income taxes - he just loses it, plain and simple. But he's smart, and usually makes good investments. If he's making money, the money he risked is being put to very good use in an active economy. That's the entire reason why we reward that risk taking with a lower tax rate - because we want more of that risk taking to happen.

All of which has nothing to do with transfer entitlement taxes.

> I think it is far more likely that the pharmacy sells this information to insurance, pharmaceutical, and marketing companies.

This. Pretty much every prescription the doctor writes effectively goes straight to the drug reps. If you stop prescribing, they'll know, and come in and bribe^H^H^H^Hinquire as to why you stopped prescribing their drug.

Nonsense. Well-off people pay the vast majority of the income taxes in this country. Nearly half the people in the country pay no income taxes at all (though they still get to vote on what happens to the money collected from the other people who do).

The top 5% of earners pay almost 60% of the taxes. The top 25% of earners pay over 86% of the taxes. The bottom HALF of the country pays under 3% of those taxes. So how do you come up with "never actually do pay" - ? These numbers come from the IRS. The people who cash the checks you say aren't being written.

Gore LOST in every carefully examined recount conducted in exhaustive after-the-fact tests run by a panel of journalism outlets (including some that actively opposed Bush and worked to get Gore in office). Most importantly, Gore lost in studied recounts that followed the capricious guidelines he tried to get the Florida supreme court to enforce.

No, the Supreme Court stopped a corrupt recount process, aided by a partisan state court, from continuing under unreasonable and unfair conditions. They didn't "appoint" Bush the winner, they called out Gore's cherry-picking, standards-shifting strategy for being the craven election-grab it was trying to be.

A dollar spent on an unmanned mission goes much further than a dollar spent on manned missions.

[[Citation needed]]

So, the corruption you're worried about is something that you think will be fixed by trashing a liquor store? By looting and burning the local CVS? By burning down an almost completely senior center being built specifically to improve the local quality of life in that crappy neighborhood?

Yes, the democrats that have been running that city for decades have plenty to answer for in the way of imperfect services being rendered. But unless you think it's the city government's role to step in between two people and prevent pregnancy from occurring, or to follow thousands of kids around to make sure they actually bother to go to school, then what exactly is it you're proposing? Who is it that starts and populates violent local gangs? Who is it that kills the vast majority of those who die in that area, and scares those who aren't involved out of doing anything about it? Why is it that businesses don't see any point in risking their money to launch a venture in such a neighborhood - perhaps because they can't find employable local people to actually work there, and can't find a market for their goods and services in an area that's filled with abandoned buildings and fatherless kids running drug markets?

The problem isn't government corruption, the problem is in thinking that what amounts to a poisonous local culture is the government's area of responsibility. Those neighborhoods are crap because the people that live there can't keep their own kids under control long enough to turn them into viable members of human civilization. And those that do have the wherewithal to do so leave (along with whatever economic activity they might have represented) because the local culture is completely toxic to their kids' success.

A few thousand reduced-to-ashes New Yorkers might, if they were alive, argue with your dismissal of their deaths at the hands of radical jihaddis as being non-proximate, and shadowy. They are indeed quite literally dead. Multiple very non-shadowy attempts (some very successful) by the same and related groups to kill other people, in large numbers, have also happened since then.