You derive far more value from the police protecting that million dollar home you own in CA than the poor people paying rent do.
The company that pays you âoehigh earningsâ needs a stable and prosperous society supported by infrastructure and ann educated population in order for there to be a market for their goods or services.
I thought you were smartâ¦.
A use case for higher and higher resolutions is mobile/HMD VR. Retina quality for a display 1.5 inches from your eye is something like 32K per eye. Mobile and VR will drive screen technology once TVs have exceeded a certain (rapidly approaching) threshold.
Now, here's some facts: we've been doing this "progressive taxation" thing for quite a while now, at least a few generations or so. Yet the gap between the rich and the poor in the USA has only increased. In fact, what's happening is that the middle class is shrinking, the upper class is staying relatively stable, and the poor are growing.
I absolutely agree with your last statement. But you are misidentifying the cause. We've been doing the progressive taxation thing well since the New Deal, and it worked fairly well until Reagan started drastically lowering taxes. The top marginal tax rate has fallen from 90% to ~36%, it averaged 70% from 1930s-1970s. The widening inequality between uber-rich and poor and the shrinking of the middle class is a direct product of Reaganomics, and was a completely predictable outcome.
As far as I am concerned the two worst financial decisions made by the US government in my lifetime were lowering the top marginal tax rate drastically beginning in the 80s and weakening/shredding the Glass-Steagall act in the 90s. The former started a 20 year trend of rapidly growing income inequality and the latter lead us to the Great Recession within 10 years.
Put the game up for free and run the servers yourself for free if it bothers you so much. That is your freedom, that you have ensured by releasing the code under GPL, and that SM have maintained. These guys are doing nothing wrong, and you would be doing nothing wrong if you competed with them. See RedHat vs CentOS.
1) Rich people need cash and cash equivalent/liquid accounts, too. Besides, there are other federal protections on capital assets, e.g. SIPC.
2) you are quite right, I should have said police & fire are primarily non-federally funded. Property tax does not always form the bulk of many county/city budgets, by the way. Sales tax, occupancy tax (in tourist areas), etc. are at least as important. Sales tax is another example of a highly regressive tax.
3) Oops, I named a tax benefit that disproportionately benefits the rich, and you acknowledged. Naturally, like any wingnut, you moved the bar. Now I need more... How many this time?
4) Ah, so some people have moral failings when making individual decisions, because they seek to maximize their own personal gain at the expense of others. That seems to be the situation you are decrying. How should we address this? By just complaining about it? Or through progressive laws? I guess you fall in the we should just complain about it camp...
5) How many minimum wage jobs don't require literacy? Seriously, you are delusional if you think public education doesn't provide a more capable work force. You didn't ask me to argue that our current public education is the most _efficient_ way to educate the masses, I am not sure it is. I just know that this country would not experience the productivity it does without education that is currently funded by taxes, and productivity benefits the wealthy IN PROPORTION to their capital deployed.
More adults being driven to minimum wage jobs has more to do with the diminishing middle-class, which in turn is the result of regressive tax policies.
Tax benefits for the rich
1) FDIC insurance on the first $100,000 of their money held at a particular bank. In my experience, few poor people have $100,000 bank accounts.
2) Police & Fire department protection for their McMansions. Once again, not a benefit the non-homeowning poor receive. (yes this is primarily state tax funded, but state taxes are also progressive, and there are federal funds for police & fire in many cases).
3) Military protection for their land/property/business interests. How much would it cost the typical Texas oil baron to hire a private paramilitary force to protect his oil fields from Mexico, if the federal government did not maintain a military.
4) Healthcare benefits of last resort (medicare & medicaid) to all the low-paid peons in your rich person's employ, so your rich person can pay a minimal wage and yet still have employees that aren't so disease-ridden they are non-productive.
5) Public education that educates those same low-paid peons in your rich persons employ.
Do you see the pattern? The amount of benefit you derive from the government provided services scales with the value of your assets. This is not rocket science. In the libertarian wet-dream world, your rich person is still going to be shelling out of pocket for many of the same services, and won't get "wholesale" rates on any of them either (military contractors are expensive, and want pesky things like death benefits for their survivors).
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