Why do you think people with dependants should be taxed more heavily? Is it an overpopulation thing?
TotallyHuman
joined 2 years ago
Who let the SCP authors write headlines?
The strategy that avoids the entire system being dismantled. Imagine if there were five congressional representatives from a new Social Democracy Party. Because those five representatives are the deciding vote if it goes along party lines, they can apply pressure on the Democrats to pass healthcare reform. Hooray, everyone loves the Social Democracy Party.
They might take a few more seats from the Democrats' safe districts in the next election. But in a contentious district where the Republican candidate has a good chance of winning, if half the people who voted Democrat vote Social instead, the vote gets split and the Republican gets in. So many of those people, who want to vote Social, will realize that if they do, then healthcare gets completely gutted. So they hold their nose and vote for the Democrat.
We started deploying malaria vaccines!
Can't the Speaker shut that shit down? Especially since he's admitted exactly what he plans to do?
Mallory Chipman is wonderful.
We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.
Now we've gone from seconds to fix to hours to fix. If you wanted better I'd say to target pumping stations. If you could cause some serious damage to the pumps that push the oil, you could take the entire line out of commission for a good long while.
Of course, the pumping stations are guarded, and it isn't a good look for ecoterrorists to kill people. But maybe you could pull a Stuxnet.
I just fell off the couch.
Maybe just because we don't understand it, but the ancient Sumerian bar joke:
A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.'
This would indeed result in no more war, at all. I fail to see the problem. (Besides that it wouldn't work, of course -- but it's a nice fantasy.)
Hmm... As to the second point, I'd argue that people with dependants are contributing, by having dependants. Giving them a tax break is sort of like paying them to take care of things that the state would have to take care of otherwise, in the form of orphanages, daycares, food banks, public nursing homes, etc. At that point, it's just an efficiency question: is it better to tax parents less (so they have to work fewer hours and can take care of their kids), or is it better to run more after-school programs (so the parents can work while someone else takes care of their kids)? Should we tax them less so they can buy food and shelter, or just give them food and shelter? The answer isn't cleanly one or the other, but falls somewhere between "give them money (by taxing less)" and "give them stuff" for each thing that people provide for their dependants.
As for overpopulation, once people are already born, it's too late. Incentives should prevent people from being born in the first place, but not punish the parents of the already-born (and the already-born themselves). To do that you could do normal birth-rate-reducing things like comprehensive sex ed and ensuring easy access to birth control, or go at it from the other side: streamline the adoption process and incentivize people to adopt rather than procreate.