Keith Devens .com

Just a comment about my 'socialist' country :-) Retail stores can do merchandising offensive all the time if they like. BUT, there is a special form, runned twice a year, with the sole purpose of emptying the winter (respectively summer) stock. This kind of bargain is strictly managed (only for products in stock, the claimed price decresase has to be based on the price the item had one month before the clearing sale, etc.)

Did I miss the bit where 'Socialist' was redefined to mean ANY government control of individual interests.

By that definition every country in the world is Socialist to varying degrees! Where do you draw the line exactly? Building regulations? Public Health laws?

Let us keep the word Socialist to mean roughly what it has meant in the past and if you want a word with negative overtones to add a nice slur to things you don't agree with may I suggest 'naughty' or 'baaad'? ;-)

Yes, "socialist" as well as "capitalist" are terms of varying degrees. There are no perfectly capitalist countries -- all countries are socialist to some degree. If I call a country socialist I mean that it's "mostly" socialist (if it was totally socialist I suppose I'd call it communist?).

To me it seems pretty extreme that a government would dictate to retailers when and what and at what level of discount they're allowed to put items on sale. To my knowledge, France also taxes its citizens at a rate of around 60% (to support their socialized health care, etc.). To me, all of this puts it under the category of "mostly socialist", so it earns the title socialist. America isn't there yet, though we've been moving in that direction, but I'd still put America firmly within the "capitalist" category.

Keith, we have one kind of discount which is strictly regulated in order to prevent unloyal competition and customers fooling.
The tax rate you cite is not on the citizen, (for me it's around 27% regarding total brutto income / total netto). It's just a figure showed by some politicians in order to ask for less taxs. Yes those taxes support socialized health care, and a lot of "public services" (post, electricity, water, transports, unemployement, retirement, social help funds...)

Keith -

The effective tax rate in the US for certain tax brackets is around 50%. This nuber includes federal, state, sales, etc etc taxes (all of them). And we don't even get health care for that.

Yeah Dan, I know. It's too high! It's unjustly high, and Democrats complain that Republicans cater to the rich if they want to reduce the taxes on the rich at all.

Damien, thanks for the correction. I'll check on my stats.