The last commentator has the business model of investment wrong. You pay the bank interest because they accepted the RISK that you might default. If there is no risk, there is no reward for the investment.

You're not paying them because they can't invest their money elsewhere. They choose to invest their money with you deciding that the risk/reward ratio suited their needs, and they tuned the lending rate according to their perceived risk. This was not some great act of charity on their part, it was a business investment, and those are not guaranteed to be profitable.

As long as you fulfill the conditions of the loan contract, you've done nothing wrong. The contracts are very carefully spelled out; its not a loop hole you're exploiting. You're losing all the equity you put in and getting a big negative mark on your credit raking. They're getting the home, and all its potential future value until they choose to sell it, just like its spelled out in the contract.

There's logistical issues with swapping batteries. Older or improperly cared for batteries will hold less charge than newer batteries. You'd be in for an unfortunate shock if you took your brand new car with brand new battery pack, went to a swapping station and left with 5 year old battery pack.

You can deal with the economic portion of that somewhat by adding a battery wear and tear surcharge onto the swap cost, but it would have to be part of multi-station system in order to balance the wear on the communal battery packs evenly.

While convenient, I'm not sure it swapping is ultimately necessary. Newer vehicles can do quick charges to 80% capacity in less than 30 minutes. While not as quick as gas, newer models are looking at 300 mile ranges in theory, so 20-30 minutes every 4 hours on the freeway isn't horrible (probably better for your body too).

@ Rob, Your question baffles me. How do you think the Social Security Trust Fund was created without a surplus in the preceding years? This is the first year that Social Security has run a deficit (a fact I also noted in my original post). I'm not arguing that it doesn't need some changes (gradually raising the SS retirement age to account for our increased lifespans would be a start), but arguing that it isn't funded right now by SS taxes is simply denial of reality.

As for inflation, why is it that you think that problem only applies to the top tax brackets? ALL tax brackets need to be adjusted with inflation (and they do get adjusted).

This has nothing to do with the government being Robin Hood. The wealthy benefit the most from virtually everything the government does. It provides transportation, water, and electric infrastructures to allows businesses to run. It imposes tariffs and provides subsidies to protect the price of goods. It uses it political weight to prevent unfair trade practices in foreign countries from gutting local industries. It keeps workers alive and healthy(-ish) so they can keep working at otherwise unlivable wages. All these things primarily benefit corporations, and therefore those with the big payouts from corporations, far more than the average individual.

Almost every rich person out there likes to pretend their wealth is created in a vacuum, but its not. It's a product of the environment they exist in, which is provided by the government and people of the United States. If they really think there's a better environment out there for creating wealth, they'd already be there. But most choose to stay here, because they know that's where their wealth comes from, even if they won't admit it. And paying for the right to reap that reward is not asking too much.

@pooliejoe, national sales tax often sounds very simple and appealing, but it turns out to be a very regressive tax system. There is a simple base cost of staying alive that cannot be avoided (food, water, clothing, housing, transportation to and from work, etc). If you barely make enough money to meet that level (and a large number of people do), your effective tax rate is the sales tax rate. It's also been shown repeatedly that the wealthier you are, the lower your marginal spending rate is. That is, you spend less of every new dollar added to your income. That means the wealthier you get, the lower your effective tax rate is going to be, because you spend fewer of those dollars. You end up shifting even more of the tax burden on those who can least afford it, while those who can most afford it reap most of the rewards.

And BTW, despite your suggestion, the estimates they came up with to have just a national sales tax cover everything was in a baseline 20-25% range, possibly more. Sure, that might increase the effective tax rate on Warren Buffet and a handful of other rich people, but mostly it would just increase the tax rate on the poorest people, who already live paycheck to paycheck.

@Rob, First, over 90% (I forget the exact number at the moment) of small businesses make less than $250,000 a year in income (they are allowed to deduct all costs associated with running the business from their revenues, including paying their employees, meaning they have less than $250,000 in profit). So when we're talking about the marginal tax rate for wealthiest Americans, the vast vast majority of small businesses do not fall into the category being discussed.

Second, payroll taxes account for the same percentage of federal revenue as income taxes (just over 40%). Talking about what percentage of the income taxes come from each bracket is a smokescreen used to justify selfish or ignorant action. Payroll taxes go to cover the social services people most often cite (Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance), and until this year Social Security ran a surplus which was being loaned to the general fund to cover expenses that other taxes (including income taxes) could not cover.

Note also that the wealthiest Americans benefit most from the expenditures of the general funds. These go to pay subsidies to corporations, which can directly affect their income, but increases in the general economy also benefit those with large investment portfolios the most. Employment right now is just barely starting to recover, but the stock market is back above 12k and a non-trivial number of companies are reporting record profits. So who really benefited the most from economic stimulus?

Understand that all my reasoning does not come from any sense of jealous too. I AM one of the lucky ones who has a six figure salary. But paying slightly more in taxes is not going to significantly affect my lifestyle and has no perceivable effect on my happiness. And yet it can leave a large number of other people much better off, and most likely increase my stock portfolio value more than enough to offset the short term reduction.

@Talby, we do tax the poor to cover most of their services. It's call the payroll tax and it currently accounts for over 40% of federal revenues, and covers unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, etc.

@Rob, the middle class actually employs the most people. Employers of very large numbers of people are all corporations, which follow a completely different set of tax rules. Trying to argue that the personal income tax is relevant to corporations is either failed logic, or outright deception. Small businesses which are not incorporated by a vast majority have middle class incomes, and are not subject to the margin tax rates applied to the wealthiest Americans.

Corporations also don't increase employment based on how much money they have. A corporation increases employment only when it must in order to keep up with demand, because their goal in profit, not employment. If you can fulfill the demand for your goods without increasing employment, why would you hire more people?

And why would a company have more demand than they have capacity to produce? Because a large number of other people have enough money to buy their goods or services. In other words, a strong middle class drives the demand that ultimately produces more jobs. The upper class is not responsible for job creation, the middle class is.

@Alex, it's a fallacy in all these discussions to discuss income taxes in isolation. Payroll taxes currently account for approximately the same amount of federal revenue as income taxes are are paid disproportionately by people who are not wealthy because its a regressive tax system (people can debate whether that's appropriate or not, but since the amount you pay at $110K is the exact same as the amount you pay at $5M, it most definitely is).

Some will claim that the rich have gotten more money because they have done things to deserve it, but I would issue the challenge to prove to me that their productivity has increased at the same percentage rate as their income over the last 20 years. Is a CEO really 185x more productive than their average worker?

Ironically, I'm pretty sure I came across this link on Neatorama, but it provides a good summary of the relative economic positions of Americans. Like most Americans, I believe a certain level of income inequality is expected (and even desirable), but the current situation is absurd:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

CA personal income tax receipts have dropped significantly due to a very high unemployment rate (currently at 12.2%, which is an improvement sadly). During the bubble years, a large number of jobs were tied up in construction and development projects, which led the massive unemployment in those sectors during the housing crash. Many of these were middle class jobs that made a substantial contribution to the income tax base.

Also factoring into the budgetary problems is the massive drop of property values, which gutted property tax revenues. Property tax rates are frequently unusually high in CA (partly because Prop 13 has set up a system where a smaller portion of the population is shouldering the full tax burden) making the overall budget fairly sensitive to the property valuations.

Yes, this is a pretty short-sighted opinion piece that likes to do a lot of "gut feeling" analysis that's pretty inaccurate.

As much as people have been ridiculing the "end of the incandescent lightbulb", the creation of the requirement spawned new incandescent bulbs that use 30% less energy to produce the same amount of light. There was very little incentive to invest in that technology before because it was not clear there would be a market. Sure, the initial bulbs will be more expensive, but the prices will drop as the economies of scale kick in.

The government does have a very important role in changing the parameters of business (in this case reducing the risk of investing new technology) in order to let the free market do its work.

This sounds like another manufactured debate to me. All the anti-milk groups discussed have deeply entrenched interests in removing all animal products from our diet (PCRM is a vegan advocacy group) and only seem to be able to produce sporadic studies supporting their positions. Reminds me of the vaccination "debate", which isn't really a debate so much a small vocal group of people determined to find something wrong with vaccines (and often ending up proving the value of vaccines by living in clumps together allowing outbreaks of diseases that aren't seen anywhere else).

@devnet huh? Nothing about this in any way undermines the concept of evolution, nor does it challenge the accuracy of any previously dated fossils. It just provides another data point to help us understand how long certain evolutionary changes took to occur. If anything, it undermines the anti-evolutionary argument that complains about the Cambrian explosion as being too quick.

I'm fascinated that many people end their line of thinking with "and this contains genes from another species and therefore is bad". First, the claim that animal genes are in plants in itself is dubious for commercially approved food products. But, even if you accept that supposition, how is it that you KNOW that is necessarily bad? Just because a particular genetic sequence hasn't become dominate in nature yet doesn't mean its wrong, only that it didn't occur yet or offered no reproductive value at the time it did.

Genetic evolution is a process of randomized changes which are tested in the environment at a particular point in time to see if they improve chances of reproduction. Humans are part of that environment and have selectively increased the reproduction rate for plants and animals with certain traits for thousands of years. Newer microbiology methods have only increased the rate at which new genetic combinations can be tested, but all combinations are always theoretically possible.

What I generally see is a fear of what people do not understand. They don't understand how genes work; they don't understand how genetic manipulation works; they aren't sure how the changes will interact with the environment; they're not sure how it will affect them.

And that's exactly why we do research. We need knowledge, not ignorance. People are worried about fertilizer pollution; genetic engineering could allow crops to perform their own nitrogen fixation. The would also remove the need for the Haber-Bosch process which some fear so much, reducing the energy needed to produce food. If that seems too "unnatural" for you, you should know that it already occurs in some plants without human intervention.

Before you jump to conclusions about what is and isn't right, you should always consider the possibility you don't know as much as you think you do. And then do serious research; not reading blogs or websites for activist groups for any side of any issue, but technical books and technical journals. Otherwise, you don't really know what you're talking about.

@Margaryna, RPN can't be a single variable unless you're claiming very non-standard syntactic rules. Spaces are used as token delimiters, meaning "reverse", "polish", and "notation" are all separate tokens. For RPN to be a since variable, it would have to be written as "RPN" or "reverse-polish-notation" or use some other connectors to maintain it as a single token. To claim its a single variable in its current form is to imply context variable syntax rules for the language, which is not normal.

Sadly, this t-shirt isn't really correct. Reverse polish notation is stack based so this should be "I notation polish reverse <3" since the modifiers are operations on the object "notation" that change its meaning.