lesserroneous

I will admit I'm biased: my mother died of an overdose. She was a drug addict. I, on the other hand, have a painful autoimmune disorder, but I've never taken medication. Yet every doctor I've met in the past ten years has looked at me and immediately treated me like a drug addict. Personal experience aside (as it really is not quantitatively demonstrative of anything larger) I've done my best to research this issue, and I'm still somewhat at a loss. Based on these numbers and the 2016 CDC list of leading causes of death, opiate-related deaths account for .02% of the population. On the other hand, I would guess we have quintuple that in people who suffer chronic pain. Though, I can't say how many use their medication as prescribed, I would guess it's at least more than .02% of the population. Addiction is not simple, and even people who started responsibly taking medication could develop an addiction. I don't think it's fair, however, to punish the many people who depend on pain relief. Lax laws in the 80s and 90s have now pendulum-swung to the other side. Patients are seeing their medication reduced without tapering, they are given no other option than to "suck it up," and all along, they are variously demonized or treated as though they are weak. It's a complicated situation that I am not equipped to solve. I do think there needs to be a middle ground. There needs to be a better effort that will help the entire patient population.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

I'm not convinced this is a true example of censorship. Historically, censorship relates to an institution's ability to prevent information before it becomes public, or to manipulate information to serve its own means. It assumes an almost complete control over the means of information production, whereby a populace barely even sees a glimpse of the censored information. Since Little's neo-nazi propaganda is public and is being openly discussed, he cannot truly be censored. It's more a publicity stunt by Microsoft. There is certainly censorship in the U.S., but this doesn't seem like a true example of it to me. I also think it's a slippery slope fallacy to say that removing a forum about torturing Jews (and other hate speech) will inevitably lead to totalitarian censorship of all provocative ideas. Please show me an example where a government or a private institution withdrew its support of speech like this, which then led to the wholesale censorship of free speech in a country.

Your points are really interesting. I wonder how successful it would be to tax higher wage earners more. Many of the truly wealthy receive their money via means that are largely not subject to payroll taxes. Hence, we are only over taxing the upper "working class" who then might have less incentive for their high wages. Many higher wage earners and their employers are finding clever ways to avoid salary increases through the conferral of non-cash benefits. Though these are technically required to be taxed by reporting them to the IRS, I would bet many people aren't reporting the vacation their company sponsored or their gym memberships. Additionally, many contractors form corps and are using creative ways to reduce their payroll burden (among other tax relief.) The current wage cap is around $118k. What kind of cap do you think would be effective? Or are you saying we should remove caps?