Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.

But the tax structure is only a secondary factor in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The primary factor is that wealth accumulates in the hands of those who control the means of production, and we've let the balance between capital and labor get too far out of whack. It's only going to get worse as technology advances. As machines get more efficient, the value of human labor is diluted. The free market value of some forms of labor has already fallen below what people need to live with dignity. We need government to intervene in the economy so that the distribution is more even, if not completely equal. A cap on income and wealth might be a good thing, but I think it is more important to set a floor that no one is allowed to fall beneath.

That's fine in your 20s, but eventually you need health insurance and a retirement plan. And if you live some place where $16k a year is livable, you'll probably also need a car.

Baby Boomers are *supposed* to gobble up the Social Security trust fund! The reason the trust fund was created in the first place was to pre-fund the retirement of the Baby Boomers!

Believe it or not, people didn't just discover the Baby Boom last week. The actuaries of yesteryear were not complete morons. Changing demographics were built into Social Security from its inception.

The AP has really deteriorated. Shame on them for publishing this scare-mongering, disingenuous piece worthy of Fox News.

If by "nuking" the moon, you mean completely obliterating it like some James Bond villain and screwing up our tides, don't be ridiculous. That isn't even within our capability.

They proposed detonating a nuclear device on the moon. So what? Aside from the needless complexity and expense, how is nuking a lifeless rock outside of Earth's atmosphere worse than than nuking the Bikini Atoll, or the desert in New Mexico?

That said, I don't understand what advantage they thought they would gain by having missile bases on the moon.

Feh. The Bible is merely one collection of texts out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and not the most influential among them. It is certainly not the work on which Plato, Aristotle, or Homer based their works. And are you discounting the entirety of the pre-Christian Roman Empire's contribution? Because a lot of people would consider that the basis of Western civilization and morality.

there has to be a better solution to a cultural problem than increasing your crime rate and turning it into an ugly, smelly concrete jungle.

At what point did I describe Evanston, IL as a crime-ridden, ugly, smelly concrete jungle? It's a nice suburb where you can have your car and your yard but it's also not too sprawly. Problem is we don't build them like that any more.

driving is not that awful of a soul crushing experience, either. The drive is frankly not very important or noteworthy compared to the destination.

It's not the driving, so much as it is all the stuff that has to be wiped out to make room for huge freeways and parking lots. But it's also the driving. When you have a highly populated area where everyone drives, you get sprawl, and with sprawl comes longer commutes. It is not uncommon to have longer than an hour commute in the Bay Area. Two hours a day in traffic isn't soul crushing? Maybe you've just never experienced anything better.

Soul crushing is urban, like your neighbor's kid was in the crossfire got shot and died, or your car/house/garage was broken into for the fifth time, or you were mugged again, etc.

WTF are you talking about? Have you spent any significant time in San Francisco? We're not all living The Wire out here. I lived there more than a decade and never experienced any violent crime. There is some bad shit going down in the Bayview / Hunters Point area, but in 10 years I never went anywhere near there. My experience in the Richmond District is about as far removed from urban gangbanging as any suburbanite's.

Hey the Sunset is a happening place! 9th and Irving.

I would expect someone who grew up in the city to figure out how to get from Lake Merced or wherever to the part of town where there is stuff going on. You don't find yourself in the ghost town part of San Francisco by accident--the locals have to work really, really hard to keep fun stuff from infiltrating.

There are suburbs and there are suburbs.

Evanston, IL, is a pre-WWII suburb where you can take the El into Chicago, and can walk to the park, to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bookstore. There is a mix of detached single-family homes and apartment buildings.

The suburb where I grew up in California is 30 miles outside of Sacramento. You can walk to... well you can walk to another house. If you want to go anywhere else, you have to drive. Most people commute more than 45 minutes to work. There is a mix of large detached single-family homes and larger detached single-family homes. (Because the locals will scream bloody murder if anyone attempts to build apartment buildings. Something about "property values" and making the community accessible to skeezy people such as singles, childless couples, and people who can't qualify for a mortgage.)

If you grew up in a suburb like Evanston, I understand where you're coming from. If you grew up in a place like I did and loved it, I must conclude you do not have a soul to be crushed.

I just have to make sure... you're talking about San Francisco, right? I lived there for more than a decade and never felt particularly unsafe, so I'm not sure what city you're talking about with this "extremely high crime."

no parking so only locals are allowed

This seems to be what your complaint really boils down to. Just take transit. Eventually you might find you prefer a 20-minute bus ride to an hour commute from some soul-crushing suburb, and you will start to appreciate the urban amenities that are available to you that are impossible for a car-dependent suburb to offer.

I grew up in San Fran and let me tell you, after hours its a ghost town,

Huh? You might want to travel outside a 3-block radius of the Transamerica building.

Lost in these articles about all the virtues of areas outside Silicon Valley is the fact that the capitalization of Silicon Valley venture capital firms is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitors in New York City and Boston. Nowhere is even close when it comes to throwing money at startups. Where does Phoenix rate? It doesn't. If someone has a brilliant startup in Phoenix, and they manage to wrangle some venture capital, the first thing their investors will do is move them to Silicon Valley so they can keep tabs on them.

If I need information about something, I go to Wikipedia before I go to the "official" website. That tells you all you need to know. Wikipedia provides the information you want without a lot of cruft. Nothing ugly about that.

Do you really believe there are a lot of Shakespeare-spouting extemporaneous haiku poets who get played by the "dihydrogen monoxide" gag? Science and math are included amongst the liberal arts, you know.

Ah, whatever. I get tired of being condescended to by engineers who would never hack it in a rigorous liberal arts program. The world needs engineers, yes, but if you look at the architects who designed Chicago, or the scientists who built the atom bomb... these were not narrowly educated men. They studied art, music, literature. social science. If all you aspire to be is a draftsman, then fine, go to trade school. University degrees are devalued when they're given to people who haven't really studied anything beyond a narrow career specialty.

You know what the world doesn't need? More drones who are trained to produce X quantity of widgets, but who lack the broad education to fully participate as citizens in a democracy.

Look at any thriving democracy and it becomes clear: The majority of its citizens have good liberal arts educations, and are not merely trained for what their employers require.