Yes, I do realize that. But you've got to start somewhere, right? Personally I think that the school should only be serving balanced, healthly un-processed fresh food, and if you want to feed your kid pizza pockets everyday for lunch, that's your prerogative and you can pack that lunch yourself. But the school should not be in the position that it is now where it is enabling unhealthy diets by serving frozen pizza and French fries everyday and calling it a full serving of vegetables.

As I said before, the school has a legal responsibility to take care of your child during school hours and serving crap food and sugar milk is absolutly skirting that responsibility. If you think that's a healthy thing for your child to be ingesting, you're more than welcome to pack their unhealthy lunch and send them on their merry way, the school won't stop you.

I'm sorry Ken, but you're way off base on this one. That stuff that they call chocolate milk is mostly just milk with malt flavoring and more sugar than a can of coke. Not to mention that all those studies about the benefits of chocolate that you're referring to are talking about dark chocolate, not milk chocolate or chocolate milk.

But the real issue is that you're up in arms about the school deciding to stop serving it. If someone feel they just HAVE to get some sugar laden milk into their childs belly, they're still perfectly welcome to pack it in their lunch. Unless I'm reading this wrong and they're instituting a total ban even on packed lunchs, in which case you're right this is totally dumb. But the school not serving it because it's too unhealthy is just them looking out for the health and development of your child, which they have legal obligation to do.

You want to shove crap down your kids throat, pack a lunch.

So, here's a question, if you find an almost dead salmon flopping about in the grass because it swam upstream into a field, do you still need a fishing license to take it home?

"Fine tune wall street", you mean with regulation? Durr, that sounds like socialism!!!

It also sounds exactly like what all those people camping out in Zucotti park are talking about too.

How exactly does cutting funding for something give people confidence in it again?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't tuition prices going up by a far bigger percentage than this bump in the minimum wage?

I'm not sure you quite grasp who "the other guy" is in this equation. The "other guy" isn't your neighbor, or your pastor, or your local farmer, it's the megacorporations of america. Capitalism, for them, means giving the least amount of product away for the most amount of your money. And they're way better at this game than you could ever hope to be. So, if you feel like you could really just stop giving them your money, by all means show us by example. I sure hope you like foraging for berries in the middle of winter in the yukon and shivering to sleep under animal skins in your cave.

We've consistently looked the other way for the past 75 years as corporations chipped away at the regulations that were put in place to prevent them from controlling our economy, politics, and our lives. Throughout all that process, the rallying cry has always been that ANY regulation was against the spirit of the free market. But what they won't tell you is that the "free market" would sell you into slavery in a heartbeat if it could get away with it. General Electric or Goldman Sachs any of them don't care one measly bit about you or me, they couldn't care less if we got cancer and died using their products, in fact, they'd just invest in cancer drug companies to make money on both ends of the deal.

Capitalism is fine until the other guy runs out with all your money.

"You are being presumptuous. This entirely a matter of tax rate, something I did not address at all." Well, one assumes that when moving to a flat tax system that, at the very least, we would be maintaining roughly the same level of revenue for the government. Right now we have various different tax rates applied in brackets, the rate is lower on the low end of the income scale and higher on the high end. To transition this to a flat tax system you would effectively be increasing the rate for those at the bottom of the income scale and lowering it for those at the top. The only way that you could say that the tax rate wouldn't nessessarily go down for those on the top end of the scale was if you simultaneously raised the overall tax rate to above that of the current top tax bracket. So unless you are saying we should move to a flat tax AND increase the flat tax rate to over 30%, then a flat tax equals a massive tax rate drop for the rich on the backs of the people on the bottom of the income scale.

"The fair thing to do is tax everyone the same (equally) in terms of tax rate. Across the board. One rate. Zero exemptions." So, it's more fair to take a dollar from someone who has 10 than ask for a little more from those who have millions or bilions?

Let's play a little excercise, let's say, for the sake of arguement, that there were someone who had managed to make himself extremly well off. This person had somehow figured out a way to personally earn 50% of GDP (~7 trillion), now, under a flat tax system, say 10%, a person making $10,000 a year would have to cough up $1,000 in taxes, which could mean the difference between having electricity or food or not. However the other guy making $7,000,000,000,000 would have to pay $700,000,000,000, leaving him with only a measly $6,300,000,000,000, how could he ever survive? At some point you have to realize that the people at the top are not contributing to the economy in the same way that the people at the bottom are. You take $1,000 out of the hands of a poor person and you're taking $1,000 out of the economy, but you take another trillion from mister 50% of GDP and your not taking a trillion dollars out of the economy, he wasn't going to spend that money, maybe he would invest it, but that's not quite the same a spending it. Don't you think we should have a tax system that's more built around the idea of growing the economy rather than letting the wealthy stockpile more cash out of circulation?

You obviously don't know any poor people do you, otherwise you'd know that getting paid over the table is the exception rather than the rule. How much money do you think it would cost to send an IRS agent around to the homeless shelters and bully everybody into coughing up a months worth of food money? Probably quite a bit more than it costs to send one agent to some dudes mansion and collect a hundred million bucks in back taxes.