CPCFTW

Credit card companies can't charge interest for balances that are paid off before month end, so you must have carried this balance through month end. Also, $10 on $400 would be 2.5%. You would have to hold a balance of $400 for close to 2 months on a typical credit card to be charged $10 of interest. You may want to contact your credit card company or revise your numbers.

haha they stole the nodding old woman from the much better cpc "our country" ad: See 0:37 in PQ ad and 0:29 in CPC ad. Who is she nodding for?!

To be fair, I said that they were supremacists... French culture supremacists. They aren't kicking anyone out of Quebec, and no one kicked the slaves out of the confederate states of america either. I wonder if we'll need an underground railroad for the anglos fleeing Quebec's newly formed Xenophobia... oops I mean Utopia... But I digress... Anyway, in the event of a secession due to a 50% + 1 vote, I would not be surprised if there were mass protests/riots in Montreal which the QC government would not have the capacity to contain. We get riots over Stanley Cup finals and insufficient tuition subsidization, I have a hard time believing 50% - 1 of Quebecers would allow the government to hold them hostage for their Canadian citizenship and homes without a fight.

Yeah where is the racism? Replace "blacks" with "anglos" and you can probably find the same quote in the PQ platform, yet only one group is labeled a hate group by the left. The sad truth is that the PQ is a supremacist party masquerading as a party that wants to preserve the french "culture".

I suppose those of you who defend Quebec's right to secede also believe in the right of the "League of the South" to secede? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_the_South Or is it only ok to be racist if you are the majority, or you have a different language, or you're socially "progressive"?

Delete

Do you have a point? All you did was quote me and add derisive comments after each quote. And you still purposely omitted the first part of my quote about hiring high school students. Isn't there a forum rule about putting people's quotes into a misleading context and/or contributing nothing but insults and derision to a thread? I think I'll just report you and find out.

This is similar to another idea I have to reduce costs. We could have a single outstanding individual pre-record the entire curriculum and classrooms could be theatres to watch the curriculum. The only job of on-site "teachers" would be to take attendance and keep children silent and focused on the recorded lesson. These "teachers" would be high school graduates making not much more than min. wage. University students could be contracted at $15/hr to provide tutoring services to children who need a more personalized education (and to help reduce student debt load).

Wow you're almost as bad as socialist! You expect me to believe that teachers have developed some extremely rare and valuable skills because they went to teacher's college for a year? Sorry, but no one's buying that crap! Yes everyone has had good and bad teachers. I contend that the good teachers are good because of their personality traits, not because they paid for a piece of paper and. To sit in a teacher's college for a year. If the skills were so unique and valuable then teachers wouldn't need a government bureaucracy and unions to protect their wages.

I have a hard time believing wyly can astutely point out anything judging from his nonsensical tirade against an argument I've never put forth. As for the rest of your post, what you statists don't understand is that the profit motivation in a competitive market is the most efficient allocation of wealth in our society.

If only you could read the sentence immediately preceeding the one that you quoted. You know, the sentence where I said to hire high school graduates? I know it's tough to keep track of more than one sentence at a time for you, but maybe if you try real hard you'll be able to do it! Or you can continue to belittle an argument that I never made. Whatever floats your boat!

Are you purposely dishonest? Or maybe you just lack reading comprehension? Or maybe you just wrote the new dumbest thing you've ever read?

No one said to stop educating the workforce, this is a discussion on how to reform the delivery of education to the workforce. You're just arguing with yourself. The problem is that the costs of our current delivery model are consuming all our wealth. As fun as it is to pat ourselves on the back, our OECD education rank will be meaningless if we're bankrupt.

Where the f*** do you or the government or unions get the authority to assign a value to other people's work and educational experience? Maybe if your educational experience involved developing some reading comprehension, you would have understood that I proposed that the market determines the value of an educator's work and education. I only suggested that the market would probably value grade 4 educators less than educators of higher grades, it could very well be the opposite. However, I would argue that janitorial work isn't particularly pleasant, but since it doesn't require any unique skills or education, the market rate of janitorial labour is low. If effectively teaching grade school children is as unique a skillset as you argue, then the market will compensate for the skillset accordingly. Faith in the intellectual arrogance of government is found on this forum too much sometimes...

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't classify most of my previous teachers as "above-average". Do you really need someone "above average" to teach fractions and long division in grade school? Teachers could be limited in their career growth based on their education, but there's no reason to mandate that grade school teachers be "above average". They should really only need average to below average intelligence, plus above average skills with children. I don't think that being able to manage children is a particularly unique or valuable skill. For instance, a hard-working high school graduate who is great with children would probably do a better, and cheaper job of teaching grade school history or geography, than would a university grad who sucks with children. If there was a highly competitve private school system, I would think that a natural result would be some "discount" schools hiring such candidates for near minimum wage. That would reduce education costs dramatically.

This reminds me of the "pentagon orchestrated 9/11" conspiracy theories... You'd think you guys would have learned by now.

Hey Cybercoma! Let's be friends! You can give me $500/yr as an incentive to remain friends! We both win!

That's a good point. Education can probably be provided through global competition if we accept online delivery and self-study (perhaps only for higher grades). I wouldn't consider most teachers to be as qualified as doctors though. I think that private competition could drive the wages of lower grade teachers way down. There's no reason to pay a grade 4 teacher 90k just because of seniority. A private education system with scarcer jobs in other sectors (due to globalization) could probably drive the costs of teaching the easier grades way down (and thereby allow for more jobs or lower costs). Teachers could move their way up through grades based on work experience and education/proficiency/performance (eg. An english grad might start at grade 4 teaching basic grammar for 35-40k, and work their way up to teaching high school in 5yrs for 50-60k [depending on the market rate for that skillset]).

Remember that the current private schools have to compete with the public system for salaries, and have to market/recruit heavily to compete with a prodcut which is offered for free. The current private school costs are therefore much higher than they would be if education was only delivered through private competition. Also I said that the government would own shares in the private companies so some profits would be captured. But another regulation for this system could be a limit on marketing expenses as a % of revenues. I'm proposing a regulated market system, rather than a completely socialized system. If you have any concerns, then try to think of possible regulatory responses.

It's become apparent for some time that public servants are too detached from economic reality to ever be effectively managed by politicians. I think it's time we re-evaluated how education is delivered to our children. My proposal is education plan insurance (EPI). I would suggest a combination of income taxes and consumption taxes to fund the plan. The plan is to essentially reconstruct the delivery of education in the same way as health care is delivered. Some of the steps I've thought of so far are: 1. Sell off all public schools to private companies. Disband the teacher's union and lay off all teachers. The provincial government would own non-voting shares in the private companies delivering education, to partake in the profit generation. Profits would go towards EPI costs. 2. Reduce personal/corporate taxes accordingly. Implement new consumption and income/corp taxes to pay for "EPI". This would be a fund which pays for private school tuition (up to a certain price level) if you have a child. The EPI tax portion of your income tax would rise if you had more than 2 children. 3. Provide low interest student loans to parents of students who are accepted into prestigious private schools with higher tuition. 4. Implement regulations regarding metrics such as class size, teacher proficiency and continuing education, licensing, student performance, etc. It's a work in progress... Comments?

No problem, chief. We're a little overstaffed now so we'll add you to the list of people being laid off "for budget reasons" in the coming months. Better update that resume!

It was all planned by the GOP and NRA to strengthen the case for the right to carry concealed weapons!! You're arguing against the anti-establishment teenager mindset that permeates the left/occupy movement. Stop trying to use logic.

The excerpt of your study seems to exclude the possibility of cutting expenditures. If tax revenue decreases by $360B, but Romney cuts expenditures by $400B, then he will have succeeded in avoiding "increasing deficits". It is mentioned in the NYT article here: But "the authors" should consider that taking free services/entitlements away from people isn't equivalent to raising their taxes. It's just giving them less of other people's money. The quote in the NYT is pretty funny. The authors' argument is that the tax cuts would "burden" middle-class taxpayers, and they say cutting spending would have this effect because low/middle-income HHs disproportionately benefit from government programs. I'd hardly call not receiving a benefit a burden any more than I would say you were "burdening" me if you were writing me a cheque for $500/mo and then decided you could not afford it any more. Entitlement mentality gone wild.

If you mean "corporate welfare", then no they don't, not even close. Take a look at the budget for once in your life. But I have a feeling you mean tax cuts/credits, as in letting people keep more of their own money, which is not an "entitlement".

The US also had among the lowest rates of unemployment for decades (which is very impressive given the US population growth rate relative to other developed economies). The US currently has a high rate of unemployment due to the recession.. What is causing this recession to persist? Anyone who follows the markets could tell you the entitlements in Europe held us back from a recovery we were experiencing in late 2010. It all comes back to entitlements. For the keynesians: if the failing eurozone countries weren't so laden with debt from entitlements, they could have invested heavily in a healthy recovery, rather than being forced into austerity by creditors. I strongly feel that in a democracy there needs to be legislated budget constraints such that the ruling government is forced to pay off debt while in an economic expansionary period. Otherwise, democratically-elected governments will just continue promising the popular lefty entitlements of the day and be left going hat-in-hand to the IMF when a recession hits.