You know, there is never just one cockroach...

Theoretically, wealth taxes are one of the most progressive taxes out there which also give the best economic incentives for growth. Income taxes discourage earning money, sales taxes discourage consumption, capital gains taxes distort / discourage investment. Wealth taxes encourage people to make the best return from their assets, and if they can't do it, sell it to someone who can.

It doesn't work for three reasons:

a) The *truly* wealthy get hurt the most by far. The ruling class will not let anything like this to happen. Other posters moaned about this hurting the middle class is a load of baloney. A small wealth tax would allow for a significant reduction in income taxes, sales taxes, or deficits.
b) Unless all jurisdictions do it, liquid capital will just move elsewhere (which is probably why wealth taxes are only widely used for real estate).
c) Some assets are hard to value. There are ways of doing this, but they are all ugly.

Not only that, but the pure fact that he realizes that what he's been doing isn't exactly the same as what you'd do in a regular job means that after few months at a "real job", he would be well on his way on being an "engineer".

Well, why don't you tell us how much different he was from Bush (who was easily the worst president in my lifetime)?

Other than the healthcare bill (which IMO fell short, but was better than nothing), everything he did, Bush would have done the same. Guantanamo is still open. TSA is gaining power, no bankers are in handcuffs, bailouts continued / expanded, the list goes on and on. He's just as beholden to the large corporations, if not more beholden.

Channel stuffing.

(Yes, I know Zerohedge is a sensationalist site).

I didn't know signing the petition was that much energy. You can do both.

And getting rid of Dems & Reps via elections, you need to start local before moving up to the presidential level. No matter how popular Teddy Roosevelt was, with a proven track record as a president, even *he* couldn't win as a 3rd party candidate.

There is an SNL episode about that (Wii, not Kinect, though)

Sorry, half of everyone is "above the median".

Depending on your distribution, there can be more than half the people having below average intelligence. Take for an extreme example of everyone having exactly the same intelligence, except for one guy not knowing his statistics. At that point, nearly everyone is above average.

Using the same analogy... you can do that, and it might be the right thing in a recession, but if you keep doing that over and over, you will gain speed and make it that much more difficult and fatal when the next skid happens.

If it was an iPhone 4S, it would have given new meaning to the phrase "Talk to the hand".