You mean the Executive Branch that originated the idea this time around? Or maybe you mean the one that signed it into law? Perhaps you're thinking about the Executive Branch that encouraged its allies in Congress to kill a bill that would have allowed the Executive Branch greater leeway in how the sequester was implemented.

"Weasels, all of 'em."

At least we can agree on that.

First of all, the hidden wealth doesn't make your argument stronger, it makes it weaker. If the money hadn't been hidden the imbalance in the the amount of the total income tax paid would be even more disproportionally allocated to the rich.

Secondly, most minimum wage workers are still dependents or are supplementing their income, not trying to raise a family of four.

Finally, congratulations: at $160K annual earnings YOU are just short of being in the top 5% of all income earners in the US (starts at $186K). Your combined salaries also put you comfortably in the global 1%. You greedy scumbag, you.

So please tell us: if capital and management add no value to production, why don't the laborers just give them the boot and go into business for themselves? Think how much richer they each could be individually if they weren't paying for all that useless overhead? Maybe this is just the first time anyone has thought of it, in which case, you're welcome.

-1 Disagree. Your quoted text indicates who released the information but does not include the identity of the person or persons who leaked the information in the first place. In fact, had you only quoted one more paragraph (the one directly above your excerpt) you could have saved everyone a lot of time:

"The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ exploration of the secretive world of offshore companies and trusts began after a computer hard drive packed with corporate data and personal information and e-mails arrived in the mail."

25% of 100K = 25K
10% of 2M = 200K

The multimillionaire is paying nearly 10 times as much as the couple making 100K.

In what way is this retrogressive?

To play devil's advocate: why are we not penalizing the 100K couple for FAILING to make $2M and thus depriving society of an additional $175K in tax revenue! It's unfair that this couple should be able to get away with only paying $25K in taxes when they're enjoying the rich benefits of our society!

You're living in a very small world and there are very few people who live there with you. (Despite this post, I'm one of them btw.) People who live in the rest of the world, and that's almost everyone, are never going to code up a game themselves. The idea isn't even going to cross their mind. Why? Because they don't care.

They just want something that works. They own technology to accomplish a task, not for the sake of owning the technology. They want to take a picture, send an email, read a web page, or play a game and they don't care in the slightest how many Mega-pixel-fps-giga-tdp widgets 2.0 this thing has over that thing. This is why the iPad (and the iPhone) is so popular; it gets out of the way and let's people do what they want to do without having to know or care how it happens.

If the device in their hand does what they want it to do then there is no 'upgrade' (I'd argue: downgrade) path to a PC. The personal computer as you and I know it will die a much deserved death.

You care. I care. We are, however, a shrinking minority.

...because it's a hot, power hungry, big, buggy, malware ridden, unreliable, overcomplicated, expensive, time consuming pain in the ass for almost everyone who isn't a computer geek (and that's nearly everybody).

I think what keeps being over looked here is what Apple brought to the scene with the iPad; an actual tablet computer. Prior to the iPad tablets were laptops without keyboards: heavy, buggy, hot, slow, clumsy, kludges that kept trying to force a desktop UI into a pseudo-touch/stylus interface.

Apple broke away from that and their success in being the first to understand what a tablet needed to be and _finally_ getting the rest of the world to understand what tablet computing _should be_ can be seen not only in their sales but also in their imitators. Every other single tablet on the market now is merely a variation on Apple's success without any additional innovation in the concept.

Yeah, I guess I didn't read #3 closely enough. I left with the gist that it inflates the the overall price to the end user but obviously missed the inefficiencies due to the dead weight loss. Mea Culpa.

You forgot:

4. VAT imposes a dead weight loss in terms of record keeping and reporting that's >> than a sales tax.

Pffft...you guys are wasting your time.

Those features were all deprecated in the last build. See the patch notes.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

A peaceful assembly of the people is a reasonable way to define a corporation.

Which, painful as it may be, was the correct choice. Given the future state of SS's finances it was a populist mistake to ever lower the rate in the first place.

You'd have to get rid of more than just the politicians. You'd have to get rid of the bureaucrats too. Plugging shiny new politicians in to the same old bureaucracy will result in the exact same outcome in a year or so.

You won't get an argument from me about the WSJ; it's really gone downhill since Murdoch got involved. Also try:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/

You'll not likely agree with him but he's worth a read.