2024 ELECTION THREAD
The next presidential race will be here soon! Please see current Bovada odds. Thoughts?
19062 Replies
1933 was still Jim Crow
which democratic countries persecute the wealthy and confiscate their wealth?
also want to add, the government paid people for the gold they confiscated in 1933 and it did not confiscate jewelry or coins, just bullion which was compensated for at market prices
i'm not saying it was right for them to do that - but you are either outright lying about what happened or deeply misunderstand that event (which i think is far more likely because it's a commonly referenced thing in the crypto world "gubmint seized all the gold in 1933' so i'm willing to give you the benefit of doubt
again, please find some examples of democracies which persecute the wealthy and arbitrarily seize their assets
I’m not saying they are normally but it can sometimes happens .
Nationalization is one way that can happens .
Gold was an other one .
democracies can radicalize themselves and aim at the wealthy .
Nothing preventing that and it’s fine if the wealth inequality becomes unsustainable to preserve social cohesion .
Has for 1933 , they confiscate ownership of gold till 1974 and when they did it in 1933 , after they almost double the price of it , to print more money u got paid by , which obviously made you poorer .
That aint great .
I’m just saying the rich loves democracies as long they can control it in a meaningful way to their advantage .
Once it goes away u will see them being more against it when it favours more the common man then them .
nobody lost anything when the gold was seized - yes the currency was later devalued when they realized even after the seizure they still didn't have enough gold to meet the required reserve without devaluing the currency, but the wealthy don't hold their assets in currency anyway so that hurt the poor and middle class who are going to have a disproportionate amount of their wealth as savings rather than investments
and democracies that radicalize and begin seizing assets cease to be democracies ducy?
let's say venezuela, which is ostensibly a democracy which began seizing assets and nationalizing stuff but in reality everyone knows it's an authoritarian regime
and yeah of course they love how they can control it and remain exempt from seizures and higher taxes - that's precisely why the wealthy love democracies
you agree with me without even realizing it
What do you mean oligarchy?
a democracy can be extremely authoritarian, it is absolutely compatible with democracy.
a liberal, constitutional democracy with strong checks and balances will tend to be less authoritarian but even in that case it's not obvious.
not sure why you think that democracy = rights, democracies can have slavery, arranged marriages, censorship, socialism and everything else. a democracy can even have theocratic elements. it's just about what the people want
Just posting this here to see what the resident Trump sympathizers say about this yap
BTW SALT income deductions aren't loopholes, it's about which comes first to steal your money, the state or the feds.
SALT property deductions are loopholes, let me explain.
SALT sale tax deduction are too complicated to address here.
you earn 1 million. you live in a society so you have to pay taxes. who comes first? constitution doesn't clarify if the feds or the states come first. what does "come first" mean? who taxes your one million first. if the state taxes it at 10%, you never actually earned one million, you actually income was 900k, the fed should tax the 900k. it isn't a deduction in any actual sense, it's that the 100k were never yours to begin with.
instead if you pay 100k in property taxes, that's a service tax, you get benefits from that (better school, better neighborhood, better policing, and so on), so you earnt that money and spent it on a service.
sales taxes are more complicated yet.
imo NY v Yellen (2021, 2nd circuit appeal decision on the SALT cap) was partially wrongly decided on 10a grounds, because imo the 10a does apply when the constitution is unclear, and so unless the constitution specifies the feds come first to tax, and it doesn't, states do.
There are obviously endless examples of this but as the son of a LAUSD teacher and a former sub, the one that sticks out to me is the school lunches you mentioned.
As a sub, they told us to try the food on our first day. I don't know if this is some kind of hazing thing, but I had a cheeseburger that was genuinely one of the most disgusting things I've ever tasted. The cheese was this yellow goo, a bit like you'd get if you were suicidal enough to order nachos at a movie theater in the 90s, but thicker and worse. No joke, there was a pretty big bone fragment in my burger and I almost chipped my tooth. I think if I had to eat that whole burger, I would vomit. I know it sounds like hyperbole but I cannot express how gross it really was. If you offered me $100 to eat one I'd laugh in your face.
There was one teacher at my mom's school who ate the school lunches--I think they got them for free. The other teachers thought this was insane. My mom and her friends talked about it several times, laughing and just being like "I can't believe anybody would do that!"
Many of my mom's 3rd graders got school breakfast which is primarily cake. The kids actually complained about it. The school was feeding 3rd graders so much cake--for breakfast--that children complained about too much cake.
LA is obviously controlled totally by Dems, as is CA.
I'm sure everyone knows that nutrition, especially in childhood, affects physical health, mental health and long term development and bad nutrition can contribute to poor academic performance, mental illness and ultimately poverty and crime. This is a very easy and cheap fix. Could probably SAVE money serving rice and beans, fresh fruit and veggies and good soups and stews. Not counting the long term costs of things like obesity.
That's why in, say, Japan, schools have full time nutritionists who oversee the preparation of healthy, tasty meals. Heck, I've watched a lot of videos about prisons, and in some countries, including places like Croatia, the prisoners eat much better than our students. (OC our prison/CJ system is also vastly worse than any developed country).
There's a blog where American students send in pictures of their lunches.
Chicago students posted some images of the disgusting slop they were served and pleaded for decent food.
[url]https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chicago-public-schools-a
ramark-lunch-boycott_n_56686953e4b0f290e5217c3c[/url]
This is how it is done in Japan. It's just common sense that this is how it should be, but it seems almost comically exotic as an American. Watching honest people do what is obviously right as an American feels as fantastical as someone in El Salvador must have felt watching 90210.
Jamie Oliver famously went on a big quest to address this and was told to eff off. This is basically an apolitical issue. You have to be some kind of lunatic to want students to be served disgusting, extremely unhealthy food. And the cost of upgrading the food would be trivial. I haven't done an exhaustive study, but it seems like every functional country gets this right, as it is so obvious and easy. That doesn't matter here. The system is almost totally impervious to democratic influence. Your kids will eat garbage, cuz whoever makes the garbage knew who to pay. Vote in new people and the same people will pay them off too.
That is just the tip of the iceberg on how badly the schools are run: often intentionally. There was a national story when this guy with ties to Apple went into LAUSD and basically stole $1.3 billion to buy ipads that never worked. It was investigated by the feds but these people have graft and corruption without breaking the law down to a science.
Surely, he is now retired in shame or working at a Long John Silvers. Of course not. We all know how the story ends. The man who stole, or at best, squandered $1.3 billion from a single school district and gave it to his friends in the tech industry is now the head of The Bezos Family Foundation. Again, the dude stole over a billion dollars from schools and instead of doing 20 years, he got a cushy job from the industry he was in cahoots with.
On a lower level, my mom's school, which was lacking in a number of basic resources replaced their perfectly fine gymnasium floor with a new one for $80k. This is an elementary school where no serious sports are played. This just goes on and on.
Who thinks it's a good idea for a billion dollars to be stolen from schools? Only the people stealing it. Who thinks kids should eat disgusting, unhealthy food? Only the people selling it.
This has nothing to do with political ideology. I think you and Freak kinda got offtrack going back and forth on that. If our system was full of people like Amash and Bernie they would hash stuff out and we'd be fine. It's full of actual and de facto psychopaths who would have your family killed in exchange for a nice dinner and are totally indifferent to the general state of the country.
So your proof that a tax-cutting Republican like Trump didn't increase SALT taxes specifically to punish blue states...is that a tax-increasing Democrat like Sanders also supported imposing a SALT cap? Are you being serious?
punctuation?
It wasn't an "increase in SALT taxes", it was a cap on how much you can discount what you already paid to state/council in taxes, when counting how much you have to pay for the federal income tax.
Sanders is in favor of not letting taxes paid at the local level be deducted because it increases the overall tax take which for Sanders is always good.
Republicans wanted to push blue states to pay for their extravagancies themselves, not letting them freeroll the feds on that in part. The hope was they would cut their expenses because increasing taxes is often politically toxic even in blue states.
It was a punish but because of a purported unjustified previous privilege. Btw courts agreed it was constitutional (even if i disagree but my opinion doesn't matter) because it wasn't a targeted punishment as the cap affects all states.
Which is why I said "...also supported imposing a SALT cap". Reading is fundamental.
you wrote "increse SALT taxes" which was nonsense
If you put a cap on the deduction you increase the net SALT taxes owed. It's not very complicated.
No, the SALT taxes are the same, and there is no net/gross SALT taxes; what you increase is the federal income tax take on those people. But in the same bill, the very wealthy also got tax income cuts.
So they weren't worse off, just, they gained less than equally rich people living in states with lower local taxes.
Which is why it wasn't taxpayers who sued. It was blue states. Because they claimed having their citizens taxed relatively more would have cost them long term from a fiscal basis point of view.
Btw the Biden admin defended the SALT deduction cap , which is why the case got called New York v Yellen, you know the democrat secretary of the treasure nominated by Biden? yes that Yellen.
So good luck claiming it was actions to punish blue states when a blue admin defends those actions in court
I realize English may not be your first language but that's what "net SALT taxes owed" means, aka effective SALT taxes owed. You've now wasted three posts just repeating what I said regarding the SALT tax cap but insisting I didn't say it. Have you run out of other things to be wrong about?
There is NO NETTING ON SALT. You pay your SALT (which stands for state and local taxes) THEN you deduct from the FEDERAL INCOME TAX (you decreased your income by that amount for the purpose of accounting how much your federal income taxes should be). You paid 100k in SALT before and after the cap. There was no netting around SALT, there was a "discount" on FEDERAL TAXES because of paid SALT.
What happened was that you could deduct 100k from FEDERAL INCOME TAX PURPOSES, ie paying less TO THE FEDS because you had paid a lot to state and local. State and local got the same amount. There is no "netting". Now you can only deduct 10k no matter if you paid 100k or whatever. So you end up paying more in FEDERAL INCOME TAXES than you would have otherwise without the cap.
You wrote "net SALT taxes owed" which is non sense, it is not what happened.
First you wrote Trump increased SALT taxes. Now you write that "net" SALT taxes are higher. THEY AREN'T in any sense. The *total amount of taxes paid by someone living in a state or locality with high local taxes is higher", but the way that happens, is by paying more than before on *federal income taxes* , not on SALT.
Which is a net reduction on the SALT taxes owed because there would be no offsetting Federal deduction without having owed the SALT tax in the first place. You can't be this stupid. Well, I guess your posting history proves you can.
It isn't. If it was a net reduction on the SALT, states and locals would get less money, but that's not how it works. You pay the same as before to state and local given the same income or property, even with the lower cap.
You pay a different (higher) amount to the feds, that's what gets "netted" less. You are writing objectively wrong on this topic, dunno why you insist.
It was never a REDUCTION OF SALT.
Ask your accountant or a friend with knowledge on the topic about what you wrote and what i answered. You are using the words wrong.
Or wait for some on your tribe here to begrundgingly admit i am right and you are wrong (but don't worry, they will minimize because "you actually meant" something different)
Not sure what happened to my post.
It has nothing to do with how much state and locals get. It's the net amount of much the taxpayer owes, pays.
owed : to be under obligation to pay or repay in return for something received : be indebted in the sum of
Source:
What part of obligation to pay don't you understand?