sykic

As an aside I think if one doesn't view something as a tax then it shouldn't be added to the tax calculation. If one wants to say we are both taxed low and in return don't receive as much government services and so it balances out then have at it. I don't agree with that perspective either but it's a logical one to make.

If you agree with rb808 I wish you well in convincing others with your point of view.

...if we relabeled health insurance as a tax, US tax rates would be very high...

Your original comment doesn't appear to be relevant or to add to the conversation to me because VA, DOD, Medicare, and Medicaid spending are already taken into account when computing tax rates. I really don't understand what you are getting at with your original comment. The healthcare expenditures you mentioned are already part of the calculation for the tax rate in the U.S. So there is nothing to add with regard to the programs you mentioned when making the comparison to OECD average tax rates.

In comparison to our peers the U.S. is under taxed. The OECD average is 34.2%. What makes the average person feel overtaxed is the combination of federal income tax, state income tax (where it occurs), along with stagnant wages and high medical care costs. The U.S. spends far more per capita on healthcare than any other OECD nation.

It is easy to convince a significant portion of average Americans that taxes are too high. So they vote for politicians that promise to lower taxes. Except they don’t lower taxes for average people. In a properly functioning political system this disconnect between promise and actuality would be taken care of at election time. In my lifetime I’ve not seen this happen and my political memory starts with the Reagan administration.

Due to globalization and the ability of the top 0.1% to easily move money from country to country and to easily move citizenship from country to country one can no longer reasonably make the case that what is good for the top 0.1% is necessarily good for the country. The intersts of the nation as a whole and the interests of the top 0.1% are badly misaligned.

The U.S. is politically unhealthy and until this changes I see no hope for improvement. I think only a shock to the system will really change things.

I believe, but am not certain, that there is no legal basis at this time to force Facebook to run such ads but their actions indicate that perhaps there should be. If for no other reason than to avoid the Streisand effect they should not have banned the ads. It’s a bad public image at a time when should be cultivating public goodwill. But perhaps they’ve calculated that this isn’t necessary.

I don’t know enough to understand how that is possible or why someone knowledgeable about this stuff thinks this. I have basically the same conception of the brain and how it works as you do. But I’m confronted with the fact that a person far more knowledgeable than me thinks otherwise. It is that fact that causes me to persist in my view with caution. The author may be a crank. I don’t know.

Wallace-Wells hits this note in his book, too, writing, “We seem most comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness.” As uncertainty and denial about climate have diminished, they have been replaced by similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.

I certainly fall into this group. I sometimes think it’d be better to stop talking about climate change and instead talk about how we all would like to breather clean air, have plastic free rivers and lakes, and soil that isn’t contaminated. I don’t know anyone who is opposed to such things and maybe changing the conversation to these things would sidestep those who believe that climate change is a leftist hoax.

One thing from the article that I did not know and have never heard before is this:

As atmospheric carbon levels rise, plants produce more sugars and fewer nutrients—by 2050, vegetables will be turning into junk food.

Anecdotally it’s been my experience that increasingly fruit that I buy is becoming tasteless and bland. I don’t know the cause or if indeed it’s true but fruit from childhood seems to have tasted better.

I gathered that the quote I referenced means that the state of a brain at time t is not sufficient to reconstruct memories or other meaningful information. The fundamental point of contention between you and others criticizing the article appears to be that you all believe that there is a storage mechanism in the brain in a similar (analogous?) fashion as a computer. I gather the author claims this is not so. Information is not stored in neurons in such a way that one “retrieves” it by accessing a storage location.

I don’t know enough about this stuff to intelligently comment on the veracity of it. I just know that someone far more knowledgeable than me and just about everyone else commenting says that our intuition about how this stuff works is wrong. That alone is worth causing me to reconsider my intuition on this stuff.