You can't legislate or tax people into making a choice and, in the end, it's their choice. If they have to pay a little more, they will and they'll bitch about it but they still will buy it. I've pretty much stopped eating fast food altogether and am eating healither but I still have to satisfy the occasional craving for a sackful of cheese Krystals with onions. When that craving hits, I don't care what it costs.
For the record, I am against taxing "bad foods" just wanted to make the point that the taxes won't stop the behavior.
Actually, yes, you can legislate or tax people into making decisions. It gets done every day with cigarettes. Hell in a bunch of states, they already have minuscule taxes on soft drinks, in order to get more revenue. When the price of gas goes up, people look at more fuel efficient cars.
That's how this all works, dude.
I don't know of anyone who stopped smoking because of higher taxes but I know a lot of people that bitched about it and then bought cheaper cigarettes.
As far as cars and gas prices, you make a good point.
In what state do you live? I know the cigarette prices are prohibitively higher in some locales. I know there are billboards all over that say "I'll quit smoking when cigarettes are _____ a pack." Presumably, the cost is getting higher and use has abated.
Really, we shouldn't be stopping hardcore smokers from smoking. That's a losing war. Just get them to cut back. That's all that needs to be done. Smoking will never go completely away.
I'm in TN and hang around cops all day. They're a little more hardheaded than average people.
_________________ 06/07/2009 - Achievement Unlocked - Mile High Club - CoD4
You can't legislate or tax people into making a choice and, in the end, it's their choice. If they have to pay a little more, they will and they'll bitch about it but they still will buy it. I've pretty much stopped eating fast food altogether and am eating healither but I still have to satisfy the occasional craving for a sackful of cheese Krystals with onions. When that craving hits, I don't care what it costs.
For the record, I am against taxing "bad foods" just wanted to make the point that the taxes won't stop the behavior.
Actually, yes, you can legislate or tax people into making decisions. It gets done every day with cigarettes. Hell in a bunch of states, they already have minuscule taxes on soft drinks, in order to get more revenue. When the price of gas goes up, people look at more fuel efficient cars.
That's how this all works, dude.
I don't know of anyone who stopped smoking because of higher taxes but I know a lot of people that bitched about it and then bought cheaper cigarettes.
As far as cars and gas prices, you make a good point.
In what state do you live? I know the cigarette prices are prohibitively higher in some locales. I know there are billboards all over that say "I'll quit smoking when cigarettes are _____ a pack." Presumably, the cost is getting higher and use has abated.
Really, we shouldn't be stopping hardcore smokers from smoking. That's a losing war. Just get them to cut back. That's all that needs to be done. Smoking will never go completely away.
I'm in TN and hang around cops all day. They're a little more hardheaded than average people.
Oh, come on now. You should know better than that. People like their routines and predictable structures. There's nothing really wrong with that, but every once in a while, we need to tweak the structures.
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
You can't compare the recall of something cancer causing or dangerously fatal to the taxing something with the long term effect of making you fat (something that is avoidable and reversible). The two are not in the same atmosphere of being the same.
The fact that everyone pays in to it, doesn't mean that you can dictate personal behavior based off of it. Everyone pays into a public education system as well, that doesn't mean you try and dictate the behavior of parents and how they raise their kids simply because it contradicts the public school system. Could you imagine the outrage that the Government would incur should they start taxing people because they wished to teach their children that creationism trumped evolution; just because it went against what the public school system said was right?
The Government shouldn't alter someone's perfectly legal personal behavior simply because they use a system that everyone pays in to. Everything everyone does costs money in one way or another. I'm sorry, but in a free society you don't get to charge someone extra for their chocolate cake just because they have free health care. That's not the way it works, and not the way it should work. Just like the Government doesn't charge people more to drive cars that have a lower safety rating; or tax them because they go to church.
Slippery Slope arguments should not be dismissed. They have proven historically to be accurate. As I said before, we don't lose our freedoms in big gashes, but instead through small increments. Like the slowly boiled frog in the pot. And I'm sorry that you are choosing the immediate financial advantage of instituting taxes on legal personal behavior over the long term advantage of retaining our freedom of choice.
_________________
We Finally Found WMD's in Iraq! 9 Years of fighting = Worth it!!!
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
You can't compare the recall of something cancer causing or dangerously fatal to the taxing something with the long term effect of making you fat (something that is avoidable and reversible). The two are not in the same atmosphere of being the same.
The fact that everyone pays in to it, doesn't mean that you can dictate personal behavior based off of it. Everyone pays into a public education system as well, that doesn't mean you try and dictate the behavior of parents and how they raise their kids simply because it contradicts the public school system. Could you imagine the outrage that the Government would incur should they start taxing people because they wished to teach their children that creationism trumped evolution; just because it went against what the public school system said was right?
The Government shouldn't alter someone's perfectly legal personal behavior simply because they use a system that everyone pays in to. Everything everyone does costs money in one way or another. I'm sorry, but in a free society you don't get to charge someone extra for their chocolate cake just because they have free health care. That's not the way it works, and not the way it should work. Just like the Government doesn't charge people more to drive cars that have a lower safety rating; or tax them because they go to church.
Slippery Slope arguments should not be dismissed. They have proven historically to be accurate. As I said before, we don't lose our freedoms in big gashes, but instead through small increments. Like the slowly boiled frog in the pot. And I'm sorry that you are choosing the immediate financial advantage of instituting taxes on legal personal behavior over the long term advantage of retaining our freedom of choice.
I just want to see how long this quote tree will go.
_________________ 06/07/2009 - Achievement Unlocked - Mile High Club - CoD4
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
You can't compare the recall of something cancer causing or dangerously fatal to the taxing something with the long term effect of making you fat (something that is avoidable and reversible). The two are not in the same atmosphere of being the same.
The fact that everyone pays in to it, doesn't mean that you can dictate personal behavior based off of it. Everyone pays into a public education system as well, that doesn't mean you try and dictate the behavior of parents and how they raise their kids simply because it contradicts the public school system. Could you imagine the outrage that the Government would incur should they start taxing people because they wished to teach their children that creationism trumped evolution; just because it went against what the public school system said was right?
The Government shouldn't alter someone's perfectly legal personal behavior simply because they use a system that everyone pays in to. Everything everyone does costs money in one way or another. I'm sorry, but in a free society you don't get to charge someone extra for their chocolate cake just because they have free health care. That's not the way it works, and not the way it should work. Just like the Government doesn't charge people more to drive cars that have a lower safety rating; or tax them because they go to church.
Slippery Slope arguments should not be dismissed. They have proven historically to be accurate. As I said before, we don't lose our freedoms in big gashes, but instead through small increments. Like the slowly boiled frog in the pot. And I'm sorry that you are choosing the immediate financial advantage of instituting taxes on legal personal behavior over the long term advantage of retaining our freedom of choice.
I just want to see how long this quote tree will go.
It's already pretty impressive.
You're aware that a "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy, right?
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
You can't compare the recall of something cancer causing or dangerously fatal to the taxing something with the long term effect of making you fat (something that is avoidable and reversible). The two are not in the same atmosphere of being the same.
The fact that everyone pays in to it, doesn't mean that you can dictate personal behavior based off of it. Everyone pays into a public education system as well, that doesn't mean you try and dictate the behavior of parents and how they raise their kids simply because it contradicts the public school system. Could you imagine the outrage that the Government would incur should they start taxing people because they wished to teach their children that creationism trumped evolution; just because it went against what the public school system said was right?
The Government shouldn't alter someone's perfectly legal personal behavior simply because they use a system that everyone pays in to. Everything everyone does costs money in one way or another. I'm sorry, but in a free society you don't get to charge someone extra for their chocolate cake just because they have free health care. That's not the way it works, and not the way it should work. Just like the Government doesn't charge people more to drive cars that have a lower safety rating; or tax them because they go to church.
Slippery Slope arguments should not be dismissed. They have proven historically to be accurate. As I said before, we don't lose our freedoms in big gashes, but instead through small increments. Like the slowly boiled frog in the pot. And I'm sorry that you are choosing the immediate financial advantage of instituting taxes on legal personal behavior over the long term advantage of retaining our freedom of choice.
I just want to see how long this quote tree will go.
I do believe that 17 was the highest we ever got it to go to. After that it left off quotes
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
You can't compare the recall of something cancer causing or dangerously fatal to the taxing something with the long term effect of making you fat (something that is avoidable and reversible). The two are not in the same atmosphere of being the same.
The fact that everyone pays in to it, doesn't mean that you can dictate personal behavior based off of it. Everyone pays into a public education system as well, that doesn't mean you try and dictate the behavior of parents and how they raise their kids simply because it contradicts the public school system. Could you imagine the outrage that the Government would incur should they start taxing people because they wished to teach their children that creationism trumped evolution; just because it went against what the public school system said was right?
The Government shouldn't alter someone's perfectly legal personal behavior simply because they use a system that everyone pays in to. Everything everyone does costs money in one way or another. I'm sorry, but in a free society you don't get to charge someone extra for their chocolate cake just because they have free health care. That's not the way it works, and not the way it should work. Just like the Government doesn't charge people more to drive cars that have a lower safety rating; or tax them because they go to church.
Slippery Slope arguments should not be dismissed. They have proven historically to be accurate. As I said before, we don't lose our freedoms in big gashes, but instead through small increments. Like the slowly boiled frog in the pot. And I'm sorry that you are choosing the immediate financial advantage of instituting taxes on legal personal behavior over the long term advantage of retaining our freedom of choice.
I just want to see how long this quote tree will go.
It's already pretty impressive.
You're aware that a "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy, right?
Sure, it's listed as a "logical fallacy" because it's taken to the extreme. I don't, believe I went to any extremes, however.
_________________
We Finally Found WMD's in Iraq! 9 Years of fighting = Worth it!!!
Females from the different families in the mammal species will produce a liquid rich in nutrients required for outside of the womb growth and immunological support.
Nutrients required for growth and immunological support @ the human level: amino acids (building blocks of protein, better to digest aminos then proteins, there is lesser stress to the digestive system and cellular metabolism), fats (unsaturated and saturated), vitamins and minerals.
FATS ARE VITAL FOR OUR WELLBEING
In the gestation priod, when the baby's brain and nervous system are in full development. A demand for certain fats enters full force. These fats are omega3 (alpha linolenic acid, EPA, DHA), omega6 (alpha linoleic acid, GLA), and omega9 (oleic acid).
60% of the human brain is comprised of fats, specifically omega type 3 fats. Then omega type 6 fats and omega 9 for comprising the myelin which is a thin layer covering the brain that stimulates neural impulses, flow of reasoning, access of memory, etc.
If a pregnant woman has a lack of omega fats in the diet, her developing baby will rip all reserves the mother may have for its development. This ripping of reserves augments the possibilities of postpartum depression in women
Omega fats are responsible for:
1.Hormonal prodution: hormones like melatonin which the body produce to induce sleep at night time require healthy amounts of EFAs(Essential Fatty Acids)
2.Hormonal Regulation: growth hormones are needed for our growth, children without helathy amounts of EFAs will experience growth problems.
3.Hormonal Distribution:hormones like testosterone and estrogen require healthy amounts of EFAs for maintaining balance in the way they are distributed @ the sexual level.
Not all saturated fats are unhealthy, saturated fats are divided in three subgroups: short chained saturated fats, medium chained saturated fats, and long chained saturated fats.
Long chained fats are found in animals, short chained and medium chained saturated fats are found in plants.
Human breast milk offers two medium chained saturated fats to the newborn, because of their anti-fungal, bacterial and viral properties. They support immunology outside of the womb. These fats are: Caprilic Acid and Lauric acid. They are found in coconut oil, which is used as ingredient in baby formulas
These fats are structurally smaller then bacteria, fungi and viruses, therefore they enter those with ease and inhibit metabolism, causing the cease of activity in the pathogen.
SO THE QUESTION IS ARE YOU MAKING SURE YOUR CHILDREN GET THE BEST NUTRITION?
I say they tax they crap out of "sin" foods - candy, soda, Big Macs etc...
People that eat way too much of that garbage end up with health issues down the road - might as well force them to make a down payment on it.
After that is finished, we move on to taxing table salt, syrup, jelly, peanuts, and all other "bad" foods in the supermarket.
And after we finish raising the taxes on what people eat, we should move on to raising the taxes for people who choose to play dangerous sports such as Cheerleading and Football in High School.
And then, we should find a way to institute taxes on people who have casual sex outside of marriage, due to them CHOOSING to increase their risk of contracting an infectious disease.
Oh, and those icky people who choose to work labor intensive jobs such as construction, warehouse, or delivery people should DEFINITELY have to pay higher taxes, due to the fact that they are putting themselves at greater physical risk.
...... or we can realize that we shouldn't penalize people for choosing certain lifestyles, and that this country was founded on having the free choice to do as you please, even if that means eating an extra slice of chocolate cake after dinner.
Ahhh... the good ol' Slippery Slope argument.
LOL
Slippery Slopes are the method in which Governments slowly do things the people don't want.
Example:
When a Seat Belt law was originally passed, the voting public were told the law was only for insurance purposes. Opponents to the law said it would lead to people getting pulled over for just for not wearing a seatbelt. No no, the people were assured, this law was just to insure that if you got in an accident, the insurance companies didn't have to pay if you were reckless and chose not to wear a belt.
Within a few years, lawmakers altered the law. You could now be ticketed for not wearing a seatbelt. Some of the original opponents were outraged, but the Government assured them that you were only getting ticketed if you were pulled over for something else and also did not have a belt on. The opponents were not happy, but still, the law was changed anyway.
Then, less than 3 years later, there was a national campaign that included many check points to insure than drivers were buckled up. If they weren't they were ticketed.
The whole process took about 7 years. It was doubted as a slippery slope argument, but it went down that slope and now, you don't have the freedom to choose to not wear a seatbelt.
This is a small and simple example. There have been dozens if not hundreds of more complex cases.
Or how about this one?
The United States Patriot Act, renewed in 2006, maintained the section that allowed for "Sneak and Peak Warrants."
These are warrants that allow for the Government to break into a private home or business and poke around without ever notifying anyone.
This is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. However this was billed to Senators and the American Public as "necessary for the War on Terrorism" because, if you had to notify people then the Terrorists would find out we were on to them and change their patterns or behavior.
It wasn't billed to or even mentioned to the American public nor the Senate that this would be used to go after local drug dealers and users. If it was billed as a broad legal tool to be used on the public, and that it would essentially remove our 4th amendment rights, there was no way it would have passed.
However, just a few years later, there have been 760 Sneak and Peak warrants issued.
3 have been for Terrorism.
3 out of 760.
496 have been for routine (not kingpins) drug investigations.
If the United States Senate had gone on the floor, and debated the removing of the 4th Amendment rights of Americans, it would have been shot down easily
Senator Russ Feingold, the sole vote against Sneak and Peak warrants, pointed out that it was a slippery slope. That a law granting the police the power it wanted to go into the homes of Americans without probable cause, without telling you, just to see if they could find evidence against you, was a dangerous road to go down and that there should be a clear provision in the bill saying the warrants should only be issued for Terrorism cases.
He was rebuffed, saying stipulations would cause technicalities and red tape, and the the law would only be used against Terrorism.
Three years later the count is 3 out of 760. That's 0.39% of cases. Slightly more than 1/3 of 1% of cases.
Slippery Slope America fell down on that one, and rapidly at that.
But if you want history, I'll give you history.
The RICO (Racketeer Influenced an Corrupt Organization) Laws were originally passed to go after the Mafia. The laws say many things, among them that any 2 people discussing the crime, or the possibility of a crime, are in a conspiracy and can be charged; as well as if you commit multiple crimes within a group of the same people you can be charged with Racketeering and be sentenced up to an additional 20 years.
This was said to be only for the Mob. These laws were necessary, because we needed them to take down the Mafia.
More than 30 years later, the RICO Laws are used not on the mob, but as a method of strong-arming confessions out of people under threat of sending them to prison for much longer than the short sentence they would normally face if they were convicted. You won't find a District Attorney in America who hasn't used the RICO Laws against someone it was not intended for... it's a commonly used tool when originally it was supposed to only be used in a finite number of cases against a limited group of people.
Slippery slope. You allow a small infringement on free assembly, and a few decades later, that infringement isn't seen as an infringement, but standard when used against the public.
If we start passing "sin taxes" on things like Soda and Fast food. Mark it down, within a decade we will be taxing all foods that fall into a "bad" category.
And you know what? There will be no outrage. What's another 12 cents here, and 5 cents there? It will happen incrementally. And in the end, people will say "that's just the way it is." And maybe you're ok with your every day behavior being monitored and modified through taxes by the Government, but that's is far from OK with me. And I bet if you ask 10 random people if they are ok with the Government attempting to modify.... not just their big decisions... but their every day little decisions through taxes, fees, and penalties; I'll bet you AT LEAST 9 out of 10 will say HELL NO. Yet there will be no outrage. It is the slowly boiled frog mentality. If you do it covertly, and slowly... the frog allows itself to be boiled to death.
I do not like the idea of personal behavior being taxed. If we taxed everything that effected others, we would tax pretty much every single thing people did. And once we start down that road, there is no stopping it.
Nononononono. Really, if there's national healthcare, in which everyone pays into it and everyone benefits from it (a hypothetical arrangement in this country, of course), I fail to see what's wrong with making fast food more expensive if and only if people can get healthy food in a convenient manner. For example, there are many "food deserts" out there in the United States. A food desert is somewhere where you have to travel farther for healthy food than you do for food that's bad for you. In the grand scheme of things it makes perfect sense to me. So we eat less McDonalds and fatty foods and are healthier overall because of it. And?
No, wait, this is where you (a rhetorical you) stomp your feet and say that your rights as an individual are getting trampled because you can't have exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
The response you just posted had little to nothing to do with the point of my post. And ending it with the fallacious argument that I am immature only reflects back upon you on how underdeveloped your argumentative reasoning skills are.
My post was proving the point that laughing at "slippery slope" arguments have, in the past, proven extremely faulty; and that when we lose our Freedoms as Americans, it happens in such cases commonly throughout history. Not through immediacy, but incrementally.
The problem comes not specifically with the item you are taxing, but that you are saying it is OK with you for the Government to attempt to alter your perfectly legal behavior. That is not a path in which I wish this country to go down. And it concerns me that so many seem perfectly ok with it; but perhaps they, like you, are failing to grasp the concept as a whole... and only see the immediate dollars and cents right in front of them. That is even more concerning, for the lack of rational foresight leads to illogical long term decisions in favor of the seemingly logical short term ones.
I had a big reply, but it got eaten when the Internet connection decided to go away and it took the reply with it. You can replace the childishness in the perceived reply, but the spirit still stands. You're acting like we haven't had various product recalls (Ford cruise controls, Ford Pintos, Toyota floormats, etc.), thalidomide, DDT, agent orange, lead-based paint, leaded gas, chlorofluorocarbons, and lawn darts deemed as bad after they were initially thought to be good, and after further review, seen as deleterious. Coke and Pepsi have spent billions through the years marketing their soft drinks, but they've also been marketing the hell out of flavored water and other healthier alternatives. They see the writing on the wall, and so should you.
Especially if we go to the hypothetical single-payer healthcare system that I talked about earlier, that requires a paradigm shift where we have to reassess what's good and bad, for everyone pays into it, and everyone gets benefits from it, so we want to try and keep things as efficient as possible, and you do that with a healthy citizenry.
At its heart, the real debate is "What determines perfectly legal behavior?" Of course, that changes over time. This is where we review that again, and look at it through the social contract that we have and come up with a distilled and prescient answer for us today.
You can't compare the recall of something cancer causing or dangerously fatal to the taxing something with the long term effect of making you fat (something that is avoidable and reversible). The two are not in the same atmosphere of being the same.
The fact that everyone pays in to it, doesn't mean that you can dictate personal behavior based off of it. Everyone pays into a public education system as well, that doesn't mean you try and dictate the behavior of parents and how they raise their kids simply because it contradicts the public school system. Could you imagine the outrage that the Government would incur should they start taxing people because they wished to teach their children that creationism trumped evolution; just because it went against what the public school system said was right?
The Government shouldn't alter someone's perfectly legal personal behavior simply because they use a system that everyone pays in to. Everything everyone does costs money in one way or another. I'm sorry, but in a free society you don't get to charge someone extra for their chocolate cake just because they have free health care. That's not the way it works, and not the way it should work. Just like the Government doesn't charge people more to drive cars that have a lower safety rating; or tax them because they go to church.
Slippery Slope arguments should not be dismissed. They have proven historically to be accurate. As I said before, we don't lose our freedoms in big gashes, but instead through small increments. Like the slowly boiled frog in the pot. And I'm sorry that you are choosing the immediate financial advantage of instituting taxes on legal personal behavior over the long term advantage of retaining our freedom of choice.
I just want to see how long this quote tree will go.
It's already pretty impressive.
You're aware that a "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy, right?
Sure, it's listed as a "logical fallacy" because it's taken to the extreme. I don't, believe I went to any extremes, however.
Females from the different families in the mammal species will produce a liquid rich in nutrients required for outside of the womb growth and immunological support.
Nutrients required for growth and immunological support @ the human level: amino acids (building blocks of protein, better to digest aminos then proteins, there is lesser stress to the digestive system and cellular metabolism), fats (unsaturated and saturated), vitamins and minerals.
FATS ARE VITAL FOR OUR WELLBEING
In the gestation priod, when the baby's brain and nervous system are in full development. A demand for certain fats enters full force. These fats are omega3 (alpha linolenic acid, EPA, DHA), omega6 (alpha linoleic acid, GLA), and omega9 (oleic acid).
60% of the human brain is comprised of fats, specifically omega type 3 fats. Then omega type 6 fats and omega 9 for comprising the myelin which is a thin layer covering the brain that stimulates neural impulses, flow of reasoning, access of memory, etc.
If a pregnant woman has a lack of omega fats in the diet, her developing baby will rip all reserves the mother may have for its development. This ripping of reserves augments the possibilities of postpartum depression in women
Omega fats are responsible for:
1.Hormonal prodution: hormones like melatonin which the body produce to induce sleep at night time require healthy amounts of EFAs(Essential Fatty Acids)
2.Hormonal Regulation: growth hormones are needed for our growth, children without helathy amounts of EFAs will experience growth problems.
3.Hormonal Distribution:hormones like testosterone and estrogen require healthy amounts of EFAs for maintaining balance in the way they are distributed @ the sexual level.
Not all saturated fats are unhealthy, saturated fats are divided in three subgroups: short chained saturated fats, medium chained saturated fats, and long chained saturated fats.
Long chained fats are found in animals, short chained and medium chained saturated fats are found in plants.
Human breast milk offers two medium chained saturated fats to the newborn, because of their anti-fungal, bacterial and viral properties. They support immunology outside of the womb. These fats are: Caprilic Acid and Lauric acid. They are found in coconut oil, which is used as ingredient in baby formulas
These fats are structurally smaller then bacteria, fungi and viruses, therefore they enter those with ease and inhibit metabolism, causing the cease of activity in the pathogen.
SO THE QUESTION IS ARE YOU MAKING SURE YOUR CHILDREN GET THE BEST NUTRITION?
you have been informed by Dr. you
Good info... Now do tell the rest of the story.
another part of the story:
There are two types of intestines, carnivore and herbivore intestines.
Carnivore intestines are short because animal cells break fast and meat has toxins, this way the nutrients are absorbed and the toxins released as soon as possible.
Herbivore intestines are long because plant cells break slower then animal cells, this is because of the cell wall present only in plant cells. A longer digestive track can guarantee full nutrient absorption as the cell walls in plant cells break.
We humans carry a herbivorous intestine. Anatomically and Anthropologically
speaking a diet with more plant based foods and less animal based foods is the way to go because of how we are built.
In the Bible there is a text where "God" tells Adam that seeds and grains shall be like meat to his body. In other words, base your foods on plant based sources, specially those rich in good fats, amino acids, vitamins, minerals and fibers.
Hypertension is BULLSHIT
to prevent further BULLSHIT I will clear this now:
Nature provides us with two agents that will forever prevent hypertension. Those are good fats and vitamins(antioxidants)
FU LIPITOR and the rest of the PHARMACEUTICAL MURDER SQUAD!
Too add to that in the past 30 years our food sources have switched fom leaf based to a grain and bean based diet. Animals like cows, pigs and chicken used to eat field grasses and leafs but now are mostly corn and grain fed.
The reason this is important is because Omega3 are found in plants in the spring. It concentrates in leaves and grasses. Omega3 fats collect aound the bodys most active organs. The most prevalant source these days are plant eating Ocean fish.
It is also believed that Omega3 fats are what cause plants to grow in the spring and omega6 fats cause them to go dormant in the fall. If you feed animals Omega6 fats instead then their tissues will store it and that is what you eat instead of the Omega3 fats that should be there.
What happens when you supplant Omega3 with Omega6?
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