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ORIGINAL: xssve

Truth is, and everybody knows it - if you're working your ass off all the time and still can't make ends meet, while others are swimmin' in it without lifting a finger, somethin' is funky in Denmark.

They tell you it's taxes, Mexicans, ect., blah, blah, but it's all Red Herrings - you need to pay less attention to what they're saying, and more attention to what they're not saying.

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ORIGINAL: lockedaway

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ORIGINAL: xssve

Truth is, and everybody knows it - if you're working your ass off all the time and still can't make ends meet, while others are swimmin' in it without lifting a finger, somethin' is funky in Denmark.

They tell you it's taxes, Mexicans, ect., blah, blah, but it's all Red Herrings - you need to pay less attention to what they're saying, and more attention to what they're not saying.

Good post!  Excellent post, in fact.  Google "number of taxes enacted since 1960"!  Look at the number of taxes that were enacted under democratic administrations.  Yes...you work hard and you make less.  You are taxed to death!!!  Cops write tickets for no lights on bicycles and every other offense imaginable because the municipality needs the revenue.  Every year there are more actions that require permits, licenses, user fees, surcharges, etc.  On every ballot for every election is a tax initiative question.  You are right...good post.

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#2: Obedience

Imagine that you've volunteered for an experiment, but when you show up at the lab you discover the researcher wants you to murder an innocent person. You protest, but the researcher firmly states, "The experiment requires that you do it." Would you acquiesce and kill the person?

When asked what they would do in such a situation, almost everyone replies that of course they would refuse to commit murder. But Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, revealed that this optimistic belief is wrong. If the request is presented in the right way, almost all of us quite obediently become killers.

Milgram told subjects they were participating in an experiment to determine the effect of punishment on learning. One volunteer (who was, in reality, an actor in cahoots with Milgram) would attempt to memorize a series of word pairs. The other volunteer (the real subject) would read out the word pairs and give the learner an electric shock every time he got an answer wrong. The shocks would increase in intensity by fifteen volts with each wrong answer.

The experiment began. The learner started getting some wrong answers, and pretty soon the shocks had reached 120 volts. At this point the learner started crying out, "Hey, this really hurts." At 150 volts the learner screamed in pain and demanded to be let out. Confused, the volunteers turned around and asked the researcher what they should do. He always calmly replied, "The experiment requires that you continue."

Milgram had no interest in the effect of punishment on learning. What he really wanted to see was how long people would keep pressing the shock button before they refused to participate any further. Would they remain obedient to the authority of the researcher up to the point of killing someone?

To Milgram's surprise, even though volunteers could plainly hear the agonized cries of the learner echoing through the walls of the lab from the neighboring room, two-thirds of them continued to press the shock button all the way up to the end of scale, 450 volts, by which time the learner had fallen into an eerie silence, apparently dead. Milgram's subjects sweated and shook, and some laughed hysterically, but they kept pressing the button. Even more disturbingly, when volunteers could neither see nor hear feedback from the learner, compliance with the order to give ever greater shocks was almost 100%.

Milgram later commented, "I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

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I think you missed the point, but whatever.

You don't benefit from roads, and educated employees? Technological spillover from research? Maybe you ought to count your blessings, why is it the countries with the lowest taxes are the most backwards countries in the world? Why have we grown so much economically since the 1960?

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being taxed for a bridge to nowhere.

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ORIGINAL: lockedaway
If you are soooo laudatory about taxes, why shouldn't we be taxed at 90% of our incomes.  Right?  I mean if taxation is so good to a prosperous country as you have espoused,  shouldn't our federal income tax be 90%.  I await your answer.

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

exactly the same to be said of corporations.

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ORIGINAL: xssve

Oh I see, the school thing - are you taxed at 90%? If not, what the fuck are you talking about?

Although, as a matter of historical record, the highest rates of economic growth in the United States occurred when the top rate was 90% - go figure.

Economic growth slowed dramatically after the Reagan tax cuts, climbed after they were raised in Eighties - that's is what the numbers show, don't shoot the messenger.

You don't have to believe, me, go look it up - then we can debate why such a counter intuitive thing might have occurred, but at least you're going to have to explain that somehow, those are hard numbers.

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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

What told me? Your constant attacks of "liberals". Its become your parroting phrase.

Liberals do this

Liberals believe that

My only point was to get you to see that BOTH sides of the isle and inept in the positions we put them into.

1) Stop accusing liberals of everything that runs down the pike. Because, when you do, I will be here to show you just how much the conservatives are doing the same.

2) Make sure you read that with the understanding that I dont buy into the liberal rhetoric either. Quit slamming one side, slam em all.

3) Start taking the blame yourself for putting the same assholes back into office... just like the rest of us do.

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ORIGINAL: Hippiekinkster

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Well ain't that special, someone who thinks he can dictate what other people think about and what they talk about... so "American"

Yeah, same old moronic cliche. Real deep thinking there. See why I have him on block? Besides the fact that he thinks it's cool to denigrate people with disabilities.

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ORIGINAL: lockedaway
spend more, more social programs

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ORIGINAL: bighappygoth39

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ORIGINAL: lockedaway
If you are soooo laudatory about taxes, why shouldn't we be taxed at 90% of our incomes.  Right?  I mean if taxation is so good to a prosperous country as you have espoused,  shouldn't our federal income tax be 90%.  I await your answer.

You're happy with paying more taxes than more prosperous people who are better at hiding their funds, then?
The only people anybody's talking about taxing at a 90% rate are the Donald Trumps and Steve Jobs, and not even the Anarcho Syndicalists say too much about that anymore.

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Raise taxes, spend more, more social programs, more cuts to defense, socialize medicine, etc. etc. etc.

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ORIGINAL: lockedaway

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I think you missed the point, but whatever.

You don't benefit from roads, and educated employees? Technological spillover from research? Maybe you ought to count your blessings, why is it the countries with the lowest taxes are the most backwards countries in the world? Why have we grown so much economically since the 1960?

Damn...thought you had turned a corner but I guess not!!!  You use the same red herring arguments as every other liberal; "you rely on the police,"  "you rely on the fire department", "you rely on sanitation" and in your case "you don't benefit from roads and educated employees?"
And my answer is the same answer it has been in a hundred threads or more.  Yes, you tax for the basic administration of your country.  Higher taxes DO NOT lead to better education.  You know what educates people?  The parents that preceded them.  Does that mean I am espousing that there should not be mandatory, public education?  Of course not.  But I don't think you need dozens of vice principals, administrators, smaller and smaller school districts, life time pensions for 25 years of service.  C'mon, sport, use your head.  There is a difference between taxing for a road and being taxed for a bridge to nowhere.  There is a difference between paying into social security and being taxed to support NPR or PBS or Cowboy Poetry Readings or the dating habits of girls at Syracuse Univ. 

If you are soooo laudatory about taxes, why shouldn't we be taxed at 90% of our incomes.  Right?  I mean if taxation is so good to a prosperous country as you have espoused,  shouldn't our federal income tax be 90%.  I await your answer.