Businesses pay taxes to pay for roads and basic services. They do pay for those services. They do pay for the environment which allows them to thrive.

On top of property taxes, taxes on profits, and the income taxes of employees, they generate even more revenue through various extortionist licences, titles, and fees. They (and their customers) ultimately pay the taxes of the people and companies whose goods and services they consume.

Obama was stressing that businesses had tons of help. This is ignorant and stupid, since businesses pay for all of that help and waste and corruption on top of it.

Obama's whole point was ignorant, insulting, and idiotic. Government didn't make any businesses (outside of corrupt ones--though we can understand why he thinks they're the norm) successful, and businesses don't only pay for the "environment" that they thrive in, they pay a disproportionate amount for it. Businesses engage in far more taxed activity than individuals consuming goods. They consume goods, create goods, and are the source of myriads of transactions which are all taxed.

The notion that businesses need to give thanks to government for roads and police is laughable and stupid. The notion that they owe government--which they already pay for--more, in order to pay for cowboy poetry festivals and Sheniqua's 9th kid, is disgusting.

I'm confused. You claimed to have an easy solution, then you failed to post what it is. What the [cluck].

Actually, if we were looking for causality and not just correlation, it would be the other way around.

Do Japanese poor immigrants do so well because of their "conservative" values or because they're poor immigrants? Obviously their values: Work ethic, cooperation, and valuing of education.

Do poor black people do poorly by comparison with poor Japanese because they're black? You can't be serious.

Ryan's no more radical than Obama.

Unless actually proposing anything to deal with our problems is radical. In the case that it is, I concede your point.

Did xeno syndicated just argue that, because poker isn't all chance, we can predict the capacity to develop technology at a certain rate?

"All people deserve to be treated the same and have the same opportunities, but given human nature the only way to achieve this is to provide some sort of assistance to those who are disadvantaged in some way."

America's poor have so much extra cash that most of them choose to pay for air conditioning (units and electricity to operate), cell phones, and cable TV.

I think that whiny little ignorant twits should stop crying about how hard life is. They don't know how hard it is because they've never done it. They have no idea what they're talking about, so they're happy to propose more taxes and expand government power so that government can so-efficiently make everything fair and just. They're too ignorant of actual costs to understand that more taxes make it harder for every hard-working person who wants to succeed in life.

Anyone who thinks finishing high school and getting a degree is hard and society should pay for it probably has neither the intellectual capacity or work ethic to achieve a successful career in professional life.

I have a degree from an expensive university (>$20,000/yr), despite having 0 parental contribution and less than $1000/year in grants (because I'm white). I graduated with less than $10,000 debt. I worked and got a looooot of scholarships. People who can't do the same (much easier, going to far less expensive schools) should stop crying about how hard it is to be successful in life, and face the fact that they are the stupid and the lazy.

Some people just can't do harder, more challenging work than flipping burgers and carrying my bags to my room. The fact is these people live better than they ever have in human history. Redistributive attempts to raise their standards of living to those of people with actual skills, talent, motivation, and intelligence inevitably result in everybody living worse than the lazy idiots of our society do now.

America's poor live like kings compared to the vast majority of Cuban, North Korean, and Chinese people. Every argument that we need to make our country more like these nations in order to help the poor is disturbingly ignorant.

Equality under the law is all that good people need to raise themselves up. Every academic's naive theories of socially engineered utopia attack the dignity of man and tax his potential for success far more than they help.

Mace,

"Many people say stuff. Blacks call themselves African-American rather than just American, despite most never having been to Africa"

Yet they don't describe themselves as Kenyan or South African unless they are, in fact, Kenyan or South African. The notion that anyone claims to be from a foreign nation when they're not is ridiculous. The notion that, because of the phrase "African-American," people confuse that with specific countries of origin is ridiculous.

"Obama may have claimed being Kenyan not because he was born there, has nationality, etc but because it is something that marks him as different. After all Americans still talk about being Scottish or Irish."

There's a clear context for Americans talking about their ethnic heritage. They're generally not confused with actually being from those nations. Harvard's literature and people who claimed to have heard it from Obama's own lips don't report Kenyan heritage, they report that he was Kenyan. From Kenya.

His father abandoned him. His Kenyan heritage wasn't exactly a defining factor in his development, because it wasn't there. He didn't have much Kenyan heritage (other than genetic), and that's not what people have reported or Harvard's literature shows either.

Einstein,

That's not fair. He got a lot of Cs too.

His use of the word "apparently" implies, from the start, that his point is a critique of human nature.

He seeks to make some claim that we're built wrong, because he idealizes a society in which humanity is built differently.

Who cares? Romney will do little different than Obama. Collapse in 2015 or 2020 is a footnote in history books.

Ryan is already useless in Congress without the majorities to get anything passed, Justinian I. As VP he could easily (mostly through Romney) have more voice than he has now. What has now, with a divided Congress, is useless beyond its effects on future elections. What he would have in the future, as VP or as Congressman, would similarly be useless without majorities. But as VP he can be louder.

I don't dispute that he's leagues better than the average Congressman, but I think resigning him to "more useful" in Congress is oversimplifying the fact that his power in Congress is limited by the same factors as his potential power as a VP--But, as VP, his voice would be louder.

He's doing his best to turn America to social/communism (toward autocracy, disguised by bureaucracy/technocracy). It has to be done incrementally for obvious reasons.

I think everyone attacking him from the left is either too stupid to understand this, or smart enough to know it looks good for him in attracting moderates (what matters) to be made to look more moderate by attracting fire from the extremes of his party's direction.

Not necessarily. With enough control of the money supply (hehe!) and getting their grimy hands into some huge banks (hehe!), they could pull whatever they wanted and play more word games to explain that they did X for the good of the people, and anyone who disagrees (aka, exposes them) is a rich elitist who wants to exploit them!

Half of the country doesn't pay income taxes. Half of the country dies with less than $10,000 to their names. As long as there are enough ignorant slaves to government to keep electing them, democratic government can tyrannically take (both wealth and freedoms) from those who don't submit voluntarily in exchange for handouts.

Sticks,

Fox often isn't as bad as other broadcast news agencies, but it's still terrible. They're in love with the status quo as much as anyone in Congress. As long as they get faux political arguments to report on and some inside contacts giving them juicy tid-bits to report on, they're happy.

Anyone not accepting the status quo on Fox gets canned as quickly as anywhere else. They pretend that Republicans and Democrats are the ends of a pretend spectrum, rather than pretty close together on the real one. They ignore the obvious hypocrisy of people who feed them information, regardless of how obvious and unmistakable the pandering and hypocrisy are. They have a few different allies and leans, but they're not radically different in how they operate.