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So right on, cayenne8! I've been screaming about this runaway growth in government spending for years now. Some have clearly gotten the message, but President Obama certainly has not. He just advocated a cut of $400 billion over 10 years. I think he's hoping people will hear $400 billion in cuts and assume he's talking about per year amounts. $400 billion over a decade in government cuts translates to (I know the math is challenging here) $40 billion per year, when we're running $1.5 TRILLION deficits per year. He also called for a freeze at the current post so-called "Stimulus" hyper-inflated government spending levels. And he thinks that's going to cut with people concerned about deficits and debt? He must think that portion of the American public is dominated by ignoramuses.
Federal spending needs to not be frozen or cut with a scalpel (like Obama advocated during the election), it needs to be slashed with a machete. Will that government workers in our bloated federal bureaucracies out of jobs? Certainly it will - it has to. The American people can't afford to pay for the scale of unnecessary, unconstitutional government. All sectors of government spending need to be slashed - Discretionary, Non-Discretionary (Entitlements) and Defense. It's important to point out for those on the Left who blame the wars for the deficits that less than two years of spending on Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) equal ten years of spending on the War on Terrorism - and that figure is based on numbers from a year ago. The Baby Boomers are going to cause the Ponzi Retirement Schemes to collapse as they begin retiring en masse this year. Social Security is already now running an annual deficit, which wasn't predicted to happen for a number of years. Anyone who doesn't demand huge reform wants those schemes to go bankrupt. I'm calling you out, Left-wingers who say no changes are necessary.
The only thing that President Obama said on the debt problem that was at all worth saying was that Discretionary spending only accounts for a small fraction of total spending - about 9 to 12%. The rest of the pie needs to be massively reduced. Will it cause higher unemployment and lower GDP in the short term? Certainly. But that employment and GDP is based on a phony economic model anyway - one that says that we can endlessly spend and not care about our deficits and debt, not worry that Debt Service (interest on the national debt) will in a short number of years be more expensive than our current Defense spending levels. That's unsustainable. Anyone on the Left who says we can't cut or we can't make changes to the Ponzi Retirement Schemes because it will hurt old people is advocating the destruction of the country. It's really just that simple.
While a lot of your post is correct, you are mistaken about some of your claims. Inter vivo giving (gifts to family members during a giver's life) is limited to $13,000 a year tax free. And trusts do not in and of themselves shield against the death tax (a.k.a. the estate tax). Trusts are more efficient and protective than regular wills, but they don't bypass the death tax. I know because my beloved grandmother passed away in 2009, and we're still dealing with the complications of the death tax. I've had to become well acquainted with all of these issues because I've been acting as the family representative to my grandmother's financial professionals.
If you do the research you'll see for yourself that trusts don't shield you from the death tax. Instead, clients that may be hit by the death tax are usually sold insurance policies that are designed to pay in excess of the death tax liability. It's true that taxes on inheritance are nothing new in the US and that the Bush-era tax cuts made the death tax less oppressive, but it still does have impacts on American families that have accrued moderate assets. By the way, another thread discussed Warren Buffet. He has very dishonestly called for higher death taxes because he owns a corporation that sells death tax protection policies.
Death tax relief was extended through 2012 by the emergency tax compromise at the end of 2010.
See this recent informative article on the death tax for more information.
iOS and Mac OS X are much more similar to each other than base Unix is to OS X. iOS is OS X in most all respects. iOS's hardware support and services are paired down to run on a very small number of static hardware devices (i.e. devices that don't have any hardware upgrade potential), and its user interface elements are quite different. It runs on the ARM processor family where Mac OS X doesn't (at least not publicly). It has some additional components and APIs for mobile uses that Macs don't need.
But aside from that, it is OS X. Its file system structure is nearly identical when you peer into it, which tells you a lot about how the OS architecture. iOS has many of the same system file components and runs many of the exact same services. Its programming environment (Xcode) and programming language (Objective C) are shared with Mac OS X. Apple pulled Mac OS X developers off to help speed the original version of the iOS to market, and we've also heard that improvements in OS X have gone into iOS. Should I go on?
Microsoft still holds the copyrights to its software and therefore the distribution rights, so no, Intel can't just buy it retail and sell it in a manner that Microsoft disapproves of. Besides, it would be financially unworkable for Intel to have to buy retail licenses to sell these hypothetical Windows 8 phones. If Microsoft isn't on board it can block Intel legally and very definitively on copyright grounds. Besides that, check out the ruling in Omega v. Costco. IANAL.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
