It has less to do with getting people to use cash than it is about keeping the surcharges down. When the surcharge was hidden Visa could raise the surcharge every year with no market consequence. Now if Visa raises the surcharge then people will use credit cards less. In theory this will cause the surcharge to go down. With lower prices retailers can sell more products and make more money.

Also where do you want to work? Are you willing to move to California? Do you need to stay in the midwest or southeast? Are you willing to move to Mexico City?

Most of the US federal debt has occurred in the last 20 years. looking further than that is silly.

Your source shows 1 year and mine shows 19 years. Your source is also only looking at benefits instead of total government spending. it isn't counting military spending, income from federal jobs, or farm subsidies. Your source also shows CA not bringing up the rear. Instead they are pretty much almost in the middle. That chart says CA gets $1.09 for every $1.00. More than half the states on that chart are getting more than that.

States are allowed to decide local taxes. They are allowed to have taxes lower than the taxes of another state. But when a state levels a tax on a particular thing they are not allowed to give discounts to in state businesses. In this case they were taxing investment income. Examples: Having zones with no property tax is legal. Giving bread growers a 0% income tax rate is legal. Giving bread growers cash is legal. A 6% sales tax on imported bread and 2% sales tax on local bread is illegal. (I'm not a lawyer)

19 years dammit. 2009 - 1990 = 19 I can't subtract anymore.

No it doesn't. It shows 9 years. Numero NINE. 1990 -> 2009

The Commerce Clause is a free trade agreement between the states. A lower tax rate for local companies means a higher tax rate for out of state companies. Protecting local companies with taxes hurts out of state companies. Commerce Clause is there to prevent this exact scenario.

Key words your ignoring: law, passing, and criminal. No law was passed. Instead a court invalidated a law. Thus when the people doing the action, they were not innocent. Second ex post facto only applies to criminal law. No tax payer is going to jail over this.

Californians pay more in federal taxes than they recieve from the federal goverment. The following map shows Federal Taxes minus spending on a state by state basis. http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/americas-fiscal-union
Texas and Minnesota both pay more taxes than they recieve. The biggest debtor state in the union is Virginia.

This isn't a retroactive law. This is invalidation of a law by a court. California basically created a tarrif to promote local buisnesses. States are not allow to create terrifs. California had two options. They could send money to every out of state buisness that was damage by the tarrif. Or they could undo the benifit the in state buisnesses recieved. California is broke so they did the second thing.

Sony lost plenty of money when the store was down. Disk based games didn't sell because people wanted to play multiplayer. Consoles didn't sell because of the bad press. DLC and PSN games didn't sell because the store was down. After it came back up many people removed their credit card info and stopped buying DLC and PSN games.

Fine a drop in the bucket compared to the PSN store being down for several weeks. Games released when PSN down also did not sell well. They also purchased credit card theft insurance for all their users who had credit card info on PSN. They also had to give out free games to get people to bring back good will from users. So even without fine the market punished Sony quite a bit.

Another theory. Gender imbalance is a clue that some hiring is not based on skill and merit. One could test this by seeing if fields with greater gender imbalance have more ethical violations than similer fields with less imbalance.

I interprit this as follows. Gender imbalance in a field increases the likelyhood that that the biased for gender contains low quality employees. These people would not have their job in a fair job market. Likewise the other gender will contain higher quality people who were able to overcome the gender bias with exceptional skills.