Well, this far-right-wing mod entirely agrees with you so far... But has no modpoints to give, sadly ;)

On a more personal note however, I've crossed the entire spectrum from left to right and it's pretty clear that it's just divisive nonsense. Big government 'socialists' or big business 'fascists' are the same evil: Centralization of power. The people in the know play both sides equally well.

For the sake of my understanding, why would GDP be a good measure for government growth? A population that produces more requires more services? I don't think the US grew very much in infrastructure since then. It did grow in population though, but would it be by that big a factor? It does make sense that more people certainly would mean more services to provide.

I'm not an expert, hence the suggestion being qualified as humble, but I think the current tax revenus of the US government would cover the 2006 budget.

Assuming that this is right (could be wrong), were people dying in the streets for lack of government services back then? Is there any crucial reason why the government couldn't survive on a budget equivalent to what it had just a few years ago?

I'm so with you on that one... May I add screen space being used for my work, not giant blank areas that serve no purpose, like 10 pixel padding around every single item or giant icons that a Parkingson's disease patient on speed could never miss. I could also do without the nagging sensation that I'm using a 24" smartphone that even Jobs would have labeled too dumbed down for the masses.

There used to be a time when a larger monitor meant more information in front of you. I guess it's still true, only the information now is just blank spaces between inane UI elements. Were I still a kid, I'd feel like my parents took away my Lego Technic set to hand me a bucket of Duplo.

The sad part to me is that both these alternatives would also be very eager to pass similar nonsense. They'd just use cyber-bullying or some more liberal-friendly excuse.

I'm with you on that one.

I actually made a mental picture prior to clicking the link of what it might look like, guess what I came up with... It's a display on one side and no display on the other side... Was I surprised? No! It's so amazing... A tablet that just looks like a tablet and I had the great imaginative power to guess figure it out all by myself. Anyone interested in my predictions of what the iPhone 6 will look like?

Let's be pretend that it's 999 billion dollars over 10 years (the upper margin of hundreds). That's 100bn/year. Deficit is close to 100bn *a month*... I'm not sure that tax is going to do better than encourage the government to spend more. I humbly propose that a tad more attention be put on lowering spending rather than increasing taxes.

You have to kill the host, it's the only way to be sure.

I pretty much agree with you on the rest but that is not a good argument. People having lots of money is no excuse to 'steal' (I know it's not stealing, but the people you argue with think so) from them. Here's the argument I propose instead:

If musicians really do need to make a living, they ought to *work* for their living. Eg.: You can't really pirate the experience offered by a live performance. People are willing to pay for that stuff. And the $30 T-Shirt. If an artist wants to get paid for producing new material, they can enter an agreement with their fans: Here's a donation button, when it reaches $x, we'll release the next album. It means real work though... They won't be able to pull that off often for releasing crap.

I really don't think that's the goal... It's a convenient excuse but piracy isn't what's being stopped. Controlling the free flow of information among people is the objective here. The media industry has a vested interest and certainly pays the big bucks for it but that's just to grease the squeaky wheels.