That's not the issue. Let's say we both produce product X. However, you are just starting out and I've been at it a long time. You, being an upstart pay 30% of your revenue in taxes. I only pay 5%. That is the issue, except that instead of us producing something, we are paid wages for doing work. Is it right that one person should pay a greater percentage of their earned income than any other?

If we take the high moral road and say that one human life is worth the same as any other -- rich or poor. Then the amount that the government spends for protecting life is equal and doesn't figure in. However, what the government spends to protect property and possession does. As an example, a homeless person doesn't get much protection from the fire department. Likewise, the Wallstreet bailouts didn't really go to help most people, just those with large sums invested.

It seems we live in a country where it is alright for the government to subsidize an oil company or a bank, but not the people who actually work for the oil company or the bank. I am not saying that is right or wrong, but simply what the discussion is really about, versus simple class warfare.

Many people are saying that the government should not have bailed out GM and instead they should have gone through bankruptcy. That is all fine and dandy, but what about the 1.4million GM employees that would have lost their jobs? (If it sounds like I am arguing both sides of the argument, I am, because I am trying to help define what the argument is actually about).

What about the investment bankers on Wallstreet - why is it okay to bail them out for not analyzing the risk they took, but to bail out an actual homeowner is considered some type of socialist plot?

Society, or at least those who control things (the 1%, so to speak) don't like those questions to be raised or addressed. It is far easier to blame some other element of society, whether liberals or conservatives or immigrants or (fill in the blank) than to look at their/our own involvement. It is also easier for the other 99% to blame those same elements for the cause of all of their problems.

Until we drop the blame game, we will never have real discussion or a solution. Until then, we can only get trapped in fringe things like whether or not there is class warfare.

It is a myth to think that wages are set by the market. I am pretty sure there are many, many people who are qualified to work in those high corporate jobs for a fraction of the price paid to the current executives.

As for closing the deficit, one could always return the tax rates back to the late 1990s when as a country there was no deficit and we had some of the most productive years in our history. But based on your numbers and the need to tax 100% everything over $276k, then dealing with the deficit must be hopeless as that will never occur. As for medicare, the wealthy and poor alike pay into it. The problem is the taxable wage portion never kept up with inflation. If that one change had been enacted in the late 70s, there wouldn't be a problem with social security or medicare. Remember that all of those baby boomers that are now draining social security and medicare are the same ones who paid in to support those that came before them. They aren't the generation that decided to only have 1 kid per family.

Nobody is saying to tax the rich out of existence. However, in the early 70s, CEOs made 4 times the amount of the average worker in the company. Today, it is in the neighborhood of 1,000 times.

Ours isn't the first society that had a huge disparity between the ruling class and the working class. And every single one of them led to major sociological changes. If the United States is supposed to be a land of equal opportunity and justice, then shouldn't are tax systems reflect that?
What happens to the wealthy, that you want to keep from leaving the country, when the working class can no longer feed their families and there isn't any assistance to help them?

If so, it isn't spelled out in the article. What the article does state is that the 47% figure is extremely misleading. For instance, from the article, people earning about $35,000 a year are paying 3% of their income in taxes (after deductions and credit). So if $35,000 is the cutoff, then that must mean that 47% of the workers fall below that amount if they aren't going to be paying taxes.

I guess, if the upper class wants the lower classes to pay more in taxes, it seems like the first thing that needs to change is that the upper classes need to pay the lower classes more in wages.

Bill Gates is free to do with his money as he sees fit. However, there has always been class warfare in the US. Otherwise, we wouldn't have terms like poor, middle class, wealthy, etc. One may legitimately argue if any of those classes are benefiting at the expense of the others. Such a discussion is not class warfare, but what a healthy society does to protect the welfare of all of its people, not just a few.

Of course that 47% includes the retired on Social Security, students, unemployed people, etc. Also, those numbers do not include social security taxes which are a federal tax.

Real data suggests that the working poor - those who work 32 hours or more a week do indeed pay taxes. Of course, if they are making minimum wage and have a child or two, it is very possible that their standard deduction may negate the taxes except for social security. But then, if you want the minimum wage workers to pay more in taxes, all one would need to do is raise the minimum wage.

The whole argument is to deflect that the top few percent pay less in taxes as a percentage of their income than 95% of the country.

That is one of the reason most parochial schools (not just Catholic ones) can educate students at a significantly lower cost than public schools.

Actually, OSS is helping here quite a bit. If CUPS was closed, then these changes would leave Linux users in a real bind. However, since it is open, the features being removed are being picked up by a different project. That is how OSS is supposed to work -- if the developers drop support for something, but the users want it, they have access to the code and can add it back.

Actually, Apple isn't breaking compatibility, the CUPS developers are on behalf of Apple. One has to wonder why, Apple's requested features couldn't have been added to CUPS instead of also having to remove others that Apple doesn't use.

If I work at the chip plan and accidentally pour the sour cream and onion seasoning into the vat that the cheddar cheese seasoning was supposed to go into, that sensor on the chip line won't catch that, it is looking for shape and size and color variances (ie burnt). While it is true that there are already industrial systems in place that can handle things like this, who would you suggest foot the bill for installing them in every pharmacy, hospital and clinic in the country?

Even if they are installed, unless you are going to scan every pill at the time the prescription is filled and compare a markings, shape, weight, color etc. (and what about generics, they change quite often), how will it work? Most of robotic systems rely on a human being to put the right thing into a coded container that the robot then selects from. It is much more efficient than scanning each part each time. However, get the wrong thing in the right container and the wrong thing gets dispensed, just like the seasoning in the potato chip factory.

Exactly right. While the discussion seems to be focused on the wrong medication being dispensed or even drug interaction, it is far more common that the correct medication, but at the wrong dosage is dispensed. Dosage errors are not going to be picked up by an e- system.