If you were to write tax policy...

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In terms of money going from blue states to red states, there are two major things being overlooked.

1. Pork barrel spending by Republicans - The average Republican district has something around $1 billion more in spending than the average Democratic district.

2. Cost of living, the diferences are worse than they sound, since the cost of living is so much higher in blue areas like San Francisco, Manhatten, or Boston, then red areas like WV, ND, and NE.

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Something like.
Define the ideal after tax salary to be x=$40,000

If your actual income is i, after taxes you are left with the geometric mean of these, sqrt(i*x).

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Something like.
Define the ideal after tax salary to be x=$40,000

If your actual income is i, after taxes you are left with the geometric mean of these, sqrt(i*x).

That's a tax of more than 99% for those who make millions of dollars a year.

Yes, if you make more than $400 million per year. I'm sure that sounds tragic to Republicans like you.

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It's not tragic, but tyrannical. And will you please demonstrate how believing (a) that the Florida recount was unconstitutional, and (b) a 99% tax rate is oppressive, makes one a Republican.

Clearly that you agreed wtih Bush vs. Gore, which ended the recount, disenfranchising plenty of voters, 3 days before a non-binding deadline makes you be a Republican.

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Clearly that you agreed wtih Bush vs. Gore, which ended the recount, disenfranchising plenty of voters, 3 days before a non-binding deadline makes you be a Republican.

(A) Arguing with you seems rather pointless, but the federal safe harbor date was a binding deadline under state law, as the Florida Supreme Court admitted.
(B) Bush v. Gore ended the recount one day before the deadline, not three.
(C) The recount was unconstitutional, and violated the equal protection clause.

A. The FL Court was just trying to be nice and make the deadline
B. December 9th was THREE DAYS before December 12th. See here.
http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/sororneja/theissues.htm
C. Not counting people's votes and disenfranchising them violated the equal protection clause.

It's clear from your continued refusal to budge on the issue even though you are wrong, that you are not a Democrat.

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A. The FL Court was just trying to be nice and make the deadline

... which was binding.

It clearly was not, as Hawaii had electors appointed January 4th, 1961, and the 1876 election dragged on for 4 months.

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That's the result of an injunction, not Bush v. Gore.

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The SCOTUS ended the recount December 9th as part of their Bush vs. Gore case. Do you dispute that? If not, you are just doing some stupid spin. I'm smart enough to figure out that they ended the recount before your sacred deadline.

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No, their votes were originally counted by appropriate equal standards (the machines, etc., were obviously equal). The hand recount was unequal.
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The machines were NOT equal. Poor Democratic minority areas tended to have unreliable punchcard machines that didn't have controls on to warn that a vote would be invalid. They also tended to have too few machines. Rich Republican white areas had the far more reliable optical voting machines. Just use a #2 pencil, and you get very low spoilage rates. The fact that you support this disenfranchisement says volumes about how much a Democrat you are. This isn't to mention other problems with the FL 2000 election: Poor ballot design in Palm Beach and Duval counties, various illegal absentee ballots, and of course the scrub list, which denied people the right to vote for crimes supposedly commited in 2006. Illegal use of a time machine, no doubt.

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It clearly was not, as Hawaii had electors appointed January 4th, 1961, and the 1876 election dragged on for 4 months.

Did you read the words "state law" in one of my previous posts? Florida state law made the federal deadline binding. I quote from a decision of the Florida Supreme Court, Gore v. Harris, in refuting allegations of the Gore camp: "There is no legislative suggestion that the Florida Legislature did not want to take advantage of this safe-harbor provision."

Hawaii did not have a comparable state law making the safe harbor date an actual deadline. Furthermore, in 1876, any deadlines were specifically vitiated by an Act of Congress. There was no comparable Act of Congress in 2000. Hawaii and the election of 1876 are irrelevant.

Clearly the FL Supreme Court or the SCOTUS had the power to over-ride any supposed state deadline that you have not shown proof of existing.

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The difference in the machines was irrelevant. There was some reasonably well-defined manner in which votes were originally counted.

The recount was unconstitutional because it was carried out in a completely arbitrary fashion.
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The voting machines in Republican areas had much much higher spoilage rates. It disenfranchied many many Democrats when only their punch card didn't go 100% through,  and it was one of those "hanging chads".

He wanted a statewide recount. How is that arbitrary?


I see that you have not addressed the point I made that the SCOTUS ended the recount THREE DAYS before your sacred deadline. Nothing to say there? Cat got your tounge? Yeah, your right-wing argument has been destroyed.  Let's face it, you are a Republican who supports stealing elections.

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Clearly the FL Supreme Court or the SCOTUS had the power to over-ride any supposed state deadline that you have not shown proof of existing.

(A) I have shown proof of its existence. Did you notice the quotation from the Florida Supreme Court's ruling? In Gore v. Harris: "There is no legislative suggestion that the Florida Legislature did not want to take advantage of this safe-harbor provision." Also, to quote from the statement of facts in Bush v. Gore: "The Florida Supreme Court has said that the Florida Legislature intended to obtain the safe-harbor benefits of 3 U.S.C. § 5." Thus, the safe-harbor benefits provided by federal law were secured by state law. What more do you want, than an official interpretation of the law by the state Supreme Court?

(B) Article II prevents the courts from overriding this deadline. "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors..." Once the FL Supreme Court admitted that December 12 was a legislatively set deadline, it could not change it.

You mean a state law that they would pass after the election? But the SCOTUS said that only the laws that existed on election day must apply to the election. There goes that argument.

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What Gore wanted (a statewide recount of all votes with a uniform standard) was not arbitrary. What Florida provided (recounts in only some counties of only some votes with no standards at all) was.

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The FL Supreme Court had made a ruling December 8th, calling for a uniform statewide recount. What was the matter with that ruling?

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I've already said that the injunction was based on unsound legal reasoning. The ultimate decision that the Florida recount was unconstitutional, however, was legally sound.
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Let's get it clear. The SCOTUS ended the recount effective December 9th, 2000 in the Bush vs. Gore case. Don't give me any more bullsh**t that they ended it only after the deadline elapsed, because it only didn't make the deadline because of the SCOTUS themselves. Do you have a problem with this statement? "In the Bush vs. Gore case, the SCOTUS ended the recount December 9th, 2000, 3 days before the sacred deadline".  I'm detecting some pretty pathetic right-wing spin here.

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You mean a state law that they would pass after the election? But the SCOTUS said that only the laws that existed on election day must apply to the election. There goes that argument.

No, the intent of the Legislature prior to the election was what applied.

A few devious Florida legislators (IIRC) wanted to essentially ignore the election and appoint electors, which would obviously have been unconstitutional, as the election had already occurred, rendering the law an ex post facto one.

You really think the SCOTUS would have found that unconstitional? You really are a fool.

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No standards were specified, if I recall correctly.
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The FL supreme court called for a statewide recount with uniform standards, just like Gore had been calling for. It was just that a lot of the Republican controlled counties were dragging their feet.

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I agree. They should not have done so.

But that doesn't change my main point, that the recount was unconstitutionally conducted.
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WTF was unconstitonal about it? So you agree that there was a problem that the SCOTUS ended the recount 3 days before the non-binding deadline that you think is so ing important? Why couldn't those 5 partisan Republican assholes have waited?