…a few months back.
What brought it to mind is all this SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) hoopla. Here’s about the best summation I’ve seen, but buyer beware: I’m not keeping up with the world much these days.
I will say that this is the first halfway-intelligent comment I’ve ever seen attributed to Sotomayor:
“What gives the federal government the right to be concerned at all about what the definition of marriage is?”
A more-than-halfway-intelligent comment would, of course, be more along the lines of “What right does the federal government have to meddle in personal relationships?” But “The Wise Latina” can’t see that, or acknowledge it if she does. Because, like most people, she believes she has the right to meddle in anything she can get away with.
Anyway. AFAIK, our select community is the only one…ever…to ponder the proper spectrum of taxation. We, in a couple of posts, debated “flat tax” versus “flat tax with a universal deduction”. I favor a deduction for a couple of reasons, one of which is based purely on friction. It’s not worth it to collect $100 if the transaction costs are $101. And federal infrastructure is the…infrastructurest?
Anyway again. How about a universal deduction for everyone regardless of age, gender, habits, or income? (The only exceptions might be convicts and prisoners. Haven’t pondered that yet.) Every citizen gets the same deduction and…here’s the genius if I do say so myself…deductions are fungible.
Would go on with the idea, but it’s 3 A.M. here. Am taking tomorrow (oops, today) off, and Good Friday is a paid holiday, so it’s a four-day weekend. Very little of which will be spent in reading Sotomayor’s opinions.
World's Only Rational Man 
Funnily enough, I’ve had this discussion yesterday, a lot. And all the time it came down to the “supporters” of this to bring up DOMA and how civil unions didn’t have the same federal benefits as normal marriages.
Meaning: they don’t get the same monies! They wants in on the delicious pie of free taxpayer money from DC.
I can’t really blame them for it, really. Everybody wants it. Free money! Free everything! The Free $hit Army strikes again!
Now we know it’s all about getting the same federal benefits. Yay. It’s all about the money, always. Well, the tax payer money. The leftards love it and there’s plenty of it. I mean, even that ******* ****** (of a) “president” said it: if you spread the wealth around it’s good for everyone. Right?
Does a gay couple deserve the same federal benefits as a hetero couple? Now before I address this, I want to add that I’m generally against these benefits. We have them too. And it’s so bad that, when I see a mother with, let’s say, three children on the street, I quickly think “There go ~170 Euro, x3, x14 (every month a year, plus two additional) in gov child support” and that’s without counting all the other monetary support she might get, because this things aren’t counted as income under our law.
But anyway. Does a gay couple deserve the same federal benefits as a hetero couple?
Common sense answer: no.
Reason: many of those federal benefits exist for a reason. Hetero couples usually end up having offspring and more often than not one part of the family takes care of that offspring which means that they have a lower income and more expenses than couples without offspring. It makes sense on a basic level, but sadly the system gets abused all the time anyway.
Gay couples can’t have offspring. Biological fact. Thus they don’t deserve the same benefits.
Can we remedy that? Well, we could allow gays to adopt. In theory I have no issues with that. In theory. Yes. There’s this annoying thing called reality. In reality we can observe things. In reality we can see how a certain pattern develops very quickly. In reality I have issues with it because we all know this is what will happen:
1) government allows gays to adopt children
2) some gay activists will eventually get angry because they have to jump through the same hoops as hetero couples (and those are a hilarious load of hoops)
3) gay activists will start screaming “DISCRIMINATION!”
4) government will cave in and gay couples will get fast-tracked over hetero couples, standards will be lowered, there will be “positive discrimination” as the Newspeak obsessed, leftard fascists call lowering standards and ruining the system further.
What? That won’t happen?
It’s already on the table for “women in the infantry” (talk is that the girls won’t have to carry as much as the men, which totally defeats the purpose, who’s going to lug their extra gear around, the men?), it has happened every single time when such an issue arose in the past decades. For example, when women were allowed to become naval aviators they were given leeway in their training. Talk is that they were allowed several tries, while men were washed out after a lot less attempts (usually after one afaik.)
It will happen. I’m 100% sure. Simply because it has happened on every other occasion, in every other connection, on every other issue. The pattern won’t change, instead if keeps repeating itself over and over and over, again and again and again.
BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY WHINY B*TCHES ON THIS PLANET WHO CAN’T THINK STRAIGHT!
It would also help if these “activists” would actually READ the US constitution before screaming how constitutional rights are violated.
“The pattern won’t change, instead if keeps repeating itself over and over and over…”
Yep. That’s a major reason why I’m not following the “news” much these days. The word itself is a lie. “Extra, extra, read all about it! Nothing new under the sun!”
Oh, I only read stuff like the Wormcave, SOFREP, news about Japan, stuff that affects and interests me. The rest? Sorry, my time is too valuable to spend it with the same old back and forth that never changes.
As for the education, Mr W, I don’t think it should be the same education for everyone. If we’d find a genius in class, which happens, that genius kid will be bored to tears by the pace and challenges. It happens. These kids are then held back from developing their full potential. So we need to make sure that the gifted and the hard working ones are rewarded.
At the same time we need to stop punishing success and hard work, which is what all our countries are doing. The more successful you are, the more you work, which, of course means, the more money you make, the more taxes you pay. it gets as high as 50% income tax here.
An acquaintance of mine is a medical doctor. She’s an anesthetist, which means she has a lot of responsibility. She also volunteers free time with working for the ambulance service as an emergency doctor (meaning: she rides the ambulance truck and is usually the first doctor on site of accidents and other emergencies.) She gets taxed 50%. 6 months per year she works solely for the finance ministry so that they can give money to people who refuse to be productive or even remotely useful at all. Yeah, sounds about fair, right? Social justice! Now, this isn’t really it.
I still feel that any deduction means the base rate is wrong. But I have kinda strange views of percent systems.
Mechanically: The Government isn’t required to give benefits to spouses of employees, it might be expected, but, it isn’t required, it’s Congress’ choice. If it crosses into forcing other entities, against their will, to do the same it becomes questionable. So far that hasn’t been the claim made. (Nor has it happened to my knowledge, considering for instance, California state policy.)
The totality of this claim, by my understanding, is a ‘1%er’ who didn’t want to pay their ‘fair share’ of inheritance tax. (A tax the administration has said they want the deduction removed for anyways! Why are they supporting this argument?!) WTF is with everyone on the left suddenly jumping on a ‘1%er tax haven’ bandwagon?
But of course, that’s the problem. There isn’t the kind of organized, violent discrimination which justifies Government intervention, so they’re taking any straw they’re offered.
And, really, after all of that bending over backwards to make PPACA constitutional, why doesn’t DOMA get the same treatment?
Here’s a thing I read yesterday on Brandon Webb’s FB feed. Webb’s a former operator, writes for SOFREP, and he’s not one to talk crap, so I’ inclined to believe him.
The VA has a backlog of 2,000%. More than 900,000 vets are waiting for their cases to be handled and in 2012 the number of suicides among vets was higher than combat deaths.
This made me really angry.
Everyone pays more attention to the silly back and forth about gay “rights”, but nobody cares about those who put their lives on the lines to defend those rights for everyone. Vets partly have to rely on charities and nobody cares. The politicians are too busy catering to fringe minorities and smear veterans as insane across the bench rather than doing their job.
Seriously, a society that allows something like that is not fit to survive.
What’s going on in VA is horrible. Basically it’s a sacrificial cow at the moment.