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Just 'coz (they say) it’s legal, don’t make it right.
I like and appreciate the owner’s direction for patrons to bear witness as a means to support them.
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Unearned income is not generated by working people. The workers are paid. In most union jobs they are often paid more than they are worth, but labor laws prevent the business from firing them all and hiring replacements. Oregon is now going to pay strikers unemployment benefits to further tilt the playing field in union workers favor.
There are lots of distortions in the US tax system. The rate difference between unearned income and earned income is only one. Why does movie production qualify for lower tax rates and tax rebates? Why have agriculture and dairy price supports?
Why are federal government workers exempt from Social Security taxes? Why do railroad workers get their own system?
The spending side is just as corrupt. Government spending is out of control but congressional slime creatures focus on how much they can bring home to their district, not what’s best for the country.
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Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.
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I guess I would not be so generous with the language. Protecting unions is self-serving as most unions support Democrat candidates and provide significant campaign donations.
Having had a service contract with Walmart was a an exercise in futility. They wanted the price so low no legally-run business could make any money on the transaction. I understand their employees are treated poorly, too, so you won’t hear me defending large conglomerate like that.
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First sin is the Federal Reserve, the second being discriminatory tax system.
I think it was Michael Yon who said the cartels launder money via car washes and Mexican restaurants. Poteau, Oklahoma used to have two Mexican restaurants in 2014. There’s one on just about every corner now in a town of 7,000 people, just Mexican restaurants too. Mui normal. Move along.
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Not really as far as I can tell. It’s “made” via financialization, which is defined as “making money with money.”
The process is:
1 - The Fed and US government pump money into the system
2 - Hedgies and banksters nibble most of it away one HFT transaction and one bp at a time
3 - Profit!
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There should be a 1% tax on all stock trades. It would stop HFT dead. People would invest in companies because they saw a long-term opportunity.
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All taxation is theft. No theft is moral. Period.
Cut spending to just defending rights of the citizens. Court system, law enforcement, prisons; military to defend against attack from outside.
Lay-off all other government employees. Sell off the assets.
End Social Security, Medicare, etc.
Get government out of the role of “reshaping society” - whether to promote health or desegregation or whatever the cause du jour- the government has no right to promote one cause over another, whether we agree with it or not.
99% of spending would end.
Then people have more money to spend, without tax and regulatory burden.
Then how much money is needed to fund government operations, and how much more money do people have? It becomes a smaller problem to solve.
Taxes are not needed. There are plenty of alternative funding mechanisms debated over the decades within libertarian community.
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And it ignored the elephant in the room that authoritarian systems, whether communist or Islamic theocracy or other, trod over the rights of its citizens. That alone is sufficient to lose any claim to moral legitimacy of its government.
The ‘moral legitimacy’ of another country’s government is none of our business unless they attack us. Its the job of the citizens of THAT country to deal with an illegitimate government
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You missed the corollary … " and the 2A gives that sheep a veto…"
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I have a simple definition.
Progressive means it’s not the same rule for everyone.
The rub about progressivism is how some people think they’re so smart about how to set a finger on the scale to make the world fair.
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Largely agree.
I have noticed that there’s an unfortunate increase in people who turn green at what others have and how they got it.
If someone is willing to bet on something and I’m not, but they win their bet, who am I to say they shouldn’t win.
What I’m most disturbed by are things like the PPP or other government programs to borrow the public into the pockets of private citizens.
Related to financialization, there are many games that get played that the average person has no option to help zero out the arbitrage.
In general, I would like to see a return of interest in doing useful work for pay.
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And just like that, Daniel Davis Deep Dive gives the B2 pilots more sads by disagreeing with today’s Pentagon brief:
Good one, rich. Not what it’s supposed to be, but that’s what it is in the US.
So what do we call being in favor of what’s best for the majority?
I would guess HFT is a small % of all unearned income, that dividends paid out are a much larger amount. But I could be wrong.
Agree financialization, ie making money off of money, is a problem. For a number of reasons.
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For large public companies dividends are a small portion of what’s paid out. Most of it goes out as stock buybacks. That funnels larger amounts to management and it also makes that income capital gains so it’s taxed at the lower rate.
The HFT problem is it’s a major source of income for brokerage companies and hedge funds. They buy and sell thousands of times per day on a single stock, making their money off the fact that they can see movement nanoseconds before anyone else. A stock sales tax, even 0.1%, would stop that cold.
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Thank you! I have been trying to figure out why we have so many car wash places.
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