The thing we are forgetting here is that how the bridge funding was supposed to have been thought of is "well, we residents of this area need a bridge here, here's $100M of our tax dollars to do so." Not this "the government is its own entity" junk. But that's what has been happening when the funding and decision making moves away from locals deciding how to spend their money to a big nebulous "black box" of a federal bureaucracy taking money from some people in one area and spending it somewhere wholly different.

I didn't known Penn and Teller had an account on Slashdot...

A junkie is not likely to go and complain? I take it you do not work in medicine. They usually complain the loudest and most obscenely.

Docs in the U.S. are being mandated to have higher patient satisfaction scores not so much by their employers but by the largest payor- the government. It's part of several of the recent pieces of healthcare legislation. Teeing off a patient because you won't give them 1000 mg of OxyContin daily for their chronic, negative-workup back pain or giving somebody with a viral cold antibiotics is a good way to drop your scores and get dinged by the feds. Also, the reimbursements from the feds are so low that you have to see a huge number of patients per day- just like in the U.K. Left to their own devices the vast majority of family docs (the U.S. equivalent of a U.K. GP) avoid prescribing narcotics for non-cancer chronic pain and don't prescribe antibiotics for most infections likely to be viral. Why? They are very aware of the negative outcomes from antibiotic overuse. You'll be far less likely to simply throw antibiotics at a likely viral cold after you have somebody spend 3 weeks in the hospital with C. difficile diarrhea and then die from it.

PhRMA banned meals over $10/head and is supposed to limit the food to prescribers. Also cruises and the like are banned as well. A rep bringing in five 11" Subway sandwiches is about as much as you see nowdays.

In the U.S. (or at least the Midwest and South), diesel dispenser handles most often are green. Dispenser handles for fuels with more than 15% ethanol are always yellow. Gasoline dispenser handles are often black but can be any color, although they are rarely yellow to avoid confusion with higher-concentration ethanol handles.

I live in the Dakotas. You can get diesel at pretty well every station. About the only thing you can't get everywhere is E85, even though that's still pretty common.

You have some fairly significant deductions in there as you can only claim $11,900 in a standard deduction but your taxable income is $23k lower than your gross income. If like some of us you have few to no additional deductions, you would owe an extra $3k in taxes and get about $4k back instad of $7k.

No, it's very easy to end up on the short side of withholding. If you are married and you and your spouse work, don't own a home, have no children, and didn't do something unusual like buy a Chevrolet Volt to get a whopper tax credit, you *will* be owing quite a bit in taxes. Two full-time, year-round incomes which are much above minimum wage and no extra deductions beyond the standard deduction will generally make you ineligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and you will have to pay taxes. The IRS might know that you have no children (you would have more than two exemptions on your combined W2s) and aren't eligible for child tax credits but they don't know if you own a house and can deduct interest and don't know the combined income of you and your spouse when your withholding is made. They generally shoot low in withholdings in expectation that most people get to take most common deductions/credits and they don't want to withhold too much from paychecks lest people get in an uproar over taxes. Plus if you don't have enough withheld you get a pay a lovely penalty at tax time as well. It's a win-win for the IRS.

But can I has cheezburger?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

The problem is that the people demanding more from their government are perfectly willing to have *someone else* pay high taxes but not to pay higher taxes themselves.

Many people getting money back from taxes are getting *more* money than they paid in due to "refundable" credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. They *do* get some kind of "bonus" in that case. However the ~50% of us who fall into the "eeeeeeevil rich guy" category are the ones giving Uncle Sam an interest-free loan for 15 months, or paying a 3% APR penalty if we do not let them get enough principal for that interest-free loan.

FYI, did my return and owe money. And some of that 3% APR penalty as well.

He can, but he would have to be paid what any other person living here would be paid. The reason things are so much less expensive in some other countries is that their laws and regulations are different. A Chinese employer doesn't have to deal with the EPA, OSHA, the Department of Labor, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare/other Department of Health and Human Services mandates, etc. etc. A tariff or trade embargo would be the only way to stop the arbitrage based on the difference in regulations unless the regulations themselves change.

The rub is how that "true cost" gets assessed and who asseses it, because something like global warming is *extremely* hard to put a price on. That is not a free market interaction because the costs for environmental issues, especially the theoretical costs such as with global warming, are anything but easy to guess at. The government would have to do the assessing. As we know with the global warming issue, asking the government to do this job is *extremely* political. Some politicians would not put a single penny of extra cost on something because of global warming concerns, they think it's a load of crap. Others would hike the price up by an order of magnitude because they hang on Al Gore's every word.

The other thing to consider is that the likely reason the newspaper published this list was to invite retaliation against the firearms owners. There also was no legitimate public interest in disclosing these names, such as there would have been if say, you published everybody who made a campaign contribution to $POLITICAL_FIGURE in excess of $AMOUNT. I suggest we publish the telephone numbers, home addresses, and a list of everybody in the households of the newspaper's editorial staff. It's only fair to know who is behind a media outlet and having disproportionate influence on the public, isn't it?