August 2006 Weddings
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
"We will balance the budget by the end of our term."
MSNBC has live coverage of a Palin rally. She just said this. Umm...how are we going to do this with more tax cuts? She mentioned the spending freeze, but that's not a long term solution - at the very least, federal employees need periodic raises. The only other cut I've heard him propose is the elimination of earmarks.
She also just said that we need to "find efficiencies" in agencies and programs - does she mean INefficiencies? I hear her use the word "efficiencies" a lot, and I always have visions of The Princess Bride - "I do not this this word means what you think it means."
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Re: "We will balance the budget by the end of our term."
McCain would certainly have a better chance of doing this than Obama!
See the WSJ lol. Basically, the idea as I understand it is that you are creating more opportunities for people to pay taxes in different ways. Think about it...if you are able to increase your number of employees, you have more people paying taxes.
Here's an interesting article about the Bush tax cuts that I just found. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118792144566207540.html
The Heritage Foundation has a good number of articles on this but I wanted to give you a well known source.
Thanks for the link. This was just the first I've heard of balancing the budget, and the McCain campaign hasn't really explained how they are going to do that. I would really like to know more details about what would be included in a spending freeze. Would federal employees not get a COLA increase, even if they were scheduled for it?
As to Alisa's comment, the reason I asked this about a McCain/Palin administration is because today was the first mention I had heard from either camp about balancing the budget. In fact, I read a big long story about Obama's economic approach in NYT, and although he's concerned about slowing the pace/reducing the nation's debt, balancing the budget is not his first economic priority. He hasn't promised to balance the budget, so I don't need to ask how he's going to do it. (That doesn't mean I'm not still concerned about it.)
I found this statement interesting: More surprisingly, the richest 1%, 5% and 10% of the taxpayers are shouldering a larger percentage of the income tax burden at the federal level than the tax estimators said they would had the Bush tax cuts never materialized. I often hear people say that the top 1%, 5%, etc. pays a disproportionate share of income tax. What I would REALLY like to see is a comparison of the percent of income to percent of income tax paid. I hope that made sense. Basically, we all know that the top 1% of earners make the vast majority of income in this country. I want to know if the percent of the tax they pay is in proportion with their income. I would expect that if a group of people earns 75% of the income, they would pay 75% of the tax.
I also wonder how much income tax (not capital gains) taxes on the rich truly affect stuff, particularly after Warren Buffet stating that he pays a lower percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary.
I've heard it used both ways in my govt work. Lean Six Sigma (from what little I know of it, I hope no one calls me out on it) is a process to find efficiencies through leaning your process to be more efficient and cost effective. It's not necessarily finding the waste, but finding a better way to do something you're already doing well. We also use "most efficient organizations" which is basically a govt vs. private competition for work-it doesn't identify what is wrong with a currently existing govt organization, but it forces them to look at how private industry does something to see if they can compete, i.e., find efficiencies. I see it both ways, but I can see how you're interpreting it too.