Depends on the court, but the problem is you have to go to court to challenge whether the arbitration clause is valid. Usually it’s less expensive just to engage with arbitration.
But asking a party to amend the contract after you’re in breach and the other party doesn’t know it is a good way to get your contract rewritten by the court or worse.
I think forced arbitration should be illegal. I’m suing an old employer. They had an arbitration clause hidden in the contract. It just allows them to ignore federal Eeoc laws since they can just arbitrate it.
They can. The Feds can sue on behalf of you but thy rarely do. They admitted in writing they ignore the ada since they can’t be sue. Judge still forced it to arbitration.
When I talk about working with senators. This is one of the topics I’m discussing. Federal laws should not be forced into arbitration. It allows companies to abuse federal law
Personally I don’t think forced arbitration should exist for any law. It’s a way for large corporations to avoid legal responsibility.
I always find it odd how easy it seems to be to just sign your rights away in the US.
Arbitration should only be allowed when you get something for it. They’ll give you 10k for going to arbitration or something. Otherwise it’s just abusive or you get to pick the arbitrator.
I was one of those stubborn bastards who typed out a physical letter with all the necessary information and snail-mailed it to the address they listed in that bullshit forced arbitration agreement. Though I doubt that will do me much good.
That said, I agree with you about Roku being garbage now. I used to be a big fan of their products. But that company has made it increasingly clear that they don’t respect their customers in many ways.
I’m looking at moving to something else. Maybe an Nvidia Shield? I don’t know. I don’t really like Chromecast or the Amazon stick/box options. I need to find some time to look into open source options. I have a decent Raspberry Pi sitting idle.
Anyone got recommendations or pointers to open source solutions that would give me a decent streaming box with a good UI and remote control functionality?
Honestly, a Pi or small Intel NUC running Linux + Kodi is probably all most people including yourself need just to access locally hosted/stored content as well as YouTube and netflix. It covers the basics. The only benefits things like Chromecast have is the less “techy” setup process and maybe a little more drm support foe higher quality streams.
Downside to using nonstandard hardware without Big Brother Media approved drm spyware: streams will be limited to 720p from corporate sources, and some (HBO I think?) Will refuse to work entirely.
If using a Pi you can buy an IR blaster hat so you can use traditional remotes with it, or use something like a Bluetooth keyboard/TouchPad combo. Or even remote control it from your phone using something like LinuxRemote. There’s a lot of options.
You know you've got a problem with advertising when even the banks want to become ad platforms. People complain about misinformation on social media, while behind their backs and under their feet the whole economy noisily turns into a competition to see who's best at deceiving people.
Crazy how Biden’s admin is full of people 70+ years old who are incredibly conservative and keep going against all of the things he keeps saying he wants to do…
Like, Imagine if you boss hired a bunch of shitty assholes, and when you complain about them he says “what am I supposed to do. They’re already hired!”
Like, you can fire them Joe…
When you hire someone and they consistently do things you (supposedly) don’t want them to do, you fucking fire them and hire someone who will do what you tell them.
Unless of course you don’t actually want to get anything done and what you’re telling them to do is what they’re doing.
US President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget included plans for a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01%, but that proposal has since fallen by the wayside with lawmakers in Washington preoccupied with government shutdown threats and looming funding deadlines.
In fairness, it’s hard to keep track of all the times Biden says he wants to do something to appease voters and then never tries while his appointees fight the party platform.
But Biden wanted it for America, just stopped mentioning it, and now his appointees are fighting any wealth tax from anywhere.
Yes, Biden has his own tax proposal for the wealthy. It’s a modified income tax, not a direct tax on overall wealth.
Wanting to tax the wealthy doesn’t mean he supports a wealth tax. And it definitely doesn’t mean he wants a global wealth tax. Neither of those are in the party platform.
The details matter. One Democratic proposal is to tax unrealized capital gains. So if Tesla stock went up in value, Musk would owe taxes. But unlike a wealth tax, Musk would owe nothing if the stock went down.
I can’t read this article due to a paywall, but I know that Janet Yellen has been leading an effort to set a minimum corporate tax rate worldwide. I don’t know what her stance is on wealth taxes in general, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s just trying to ensure that a minimum corporate tax rate work is not derailed by changing the target to something more controversial.
this still smells of propaganda, like it’s woven through the whole thing. “The American worker is making peace with a longer ride”.
and yet the very first example they provide is someone who works from home twice a week.
I’ll tell you this: the commute is even better when you work from home. WFH means less carbon emissions, less time wasted in traffic, and less time literally putting your life at risk from vehicle collisions.
As someone that loves going into an office, I wish they let people who didn’t stay at home.
I miss the aspect of the pandemic where people were freer to stay home if they chose, and the roads were so much emptier. It’s better for people to work how they’d like to, it’s better for me trying not to spend an hour commuting, and it’s better for the Earth to have fewer people burning carbon twice a day.
WFH means less carbon emissions, less time wasted in traffic, and less time literally putting your life at risk from vehicle collisions.
It speaks volumes that all of these problems are car-related. The whole push for WFH is a massive condemnation of how badly people actually feel about the effects of the car-oriented development that the U.S has been spending so much time championing.
a) what you say is true b) these car-related issues affect other countries just as much : I’m Canadian. c) there are other things that WFH improves as well, but they are far enough behind the car-related problems that they can seem petty by comparison. They aren’t petty at all, but they do make a convenient foil for those who argue against WFH.
If civilization is going to survive, leaving this specific problem to our descendents won't be an option. Private Equity is an us problem, and we need to treat it like one.
Friends don’t let friends use PayPal. If something goes wrong and eventually something will, you will find zero customer support. Add exploitation to the list of reasons.
Interested myself. So far I had only good experiences as a customer, though i hear they are pretty rough towards vendors. It is also widely accepted where I live (EU), which makes it very convenient.
But i am always eager to stop using a corporate product or service.
This is indeed one of the things cryptocurrencies exist for, but social media denizens around these parts have long conditioned themselves to hate it.
So a rock and a hard place, it seems. Which is more hated; the big data-harvesting corporation co-founded by Elon Musk, or a big bad NFT-hosting blockchain?
For people who are concerned about data harvesting I would recommend something like Monero or Aztec over Bitcoin, though. Bitcoin's basically obsolete at this point, coasting on name recognition and inertia, and has no built-in privacy features.
I’m not joking - if you follow your existing “should I even be using this site anyway?” signs, it’s going to typically be fine (in 2024!) to use your debit card there.
(Edit: To be clear, things have changed. Time travelers from the past should absolutely not follow this advice back in 2002!)
And when something does go wrong, you’ll get better support from your credit union than PayPal would. (You don’t still use a bank like a sucker, right…?!)
The worst case, usually, is they reverse the fraud and issue a new card to prevent further fraud.
So I guess it’s a few things:
Get a credit union, rather than a bank.
Choose one or two of debit (edit: or credit) cards for all online use. Life is simpler when fraud does occur, if I have another card that still works for gas and groceries.
Use the debit card directly, online, with any trusted site. There’s no need for PayPal to exist anymore.
Many years ago, PayPal’s innovation was treating people who shop online like actual people. The rest of the world has caught up, while PayPal lost sight of that.
Source: I worked in FinTech. It’s amazing how bad your current options are, but it tends to work out, anyway. There’s an extremely ethical and detail-oriented army of women named Karen, behind the scenes, looking out for you.
Edit: And as far as I can tell, not one of the extremely ethical and detail oriented women named Karen works for PayPal. Big tech companies rarely successfully keep that kind of no-nonsense-tolerated top talent.
I’ve heard this advice as well. It certainly doesn’t hurt, if you have credit cards, to prefer them.
I imagine it is a lot nicer to have a fraudulent item on a future bill, than an actual fraudulent deduction from a current active account. And fraud correction is prompt enough, that the bill never comes due on a CC, whereas the money is, indeed, missing immediately on a debit card.
That said, not having any credit cards, I would never open one simply for the fraud protection.
Debit card fraud correction has always been prompt and accurate, for me.
The card companies do not discriminate, currently, between corrections on credit and debit cards. Currently, that’s largely thanks to contract language with their debit card customers that prevents them from such discrimination.
I added disclaimers like crazy above, because FinTech is a constantly evolving industry with constantly changing terms of service. And because most people working in FinTech are assholes who want to scam you.
Edit: I’ve corrected the above advice with yours, thanks! There’s certainly no reason to prefer debit over credit for online use, for anyone who has both card types. I just have a bad habit of using the words interchangeably because I only carry debit cards.
In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.
I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don’t recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.
Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they’ll think about it.
So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it’s still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).
Santander and Caixa are perfect examples of how to terribly handle fraudulent payment disputes. I worked in the industry is it’s kinda well known they don’t even follow scheme (Visa/MC) requirements and when you ask them to escalate to scheme they gaslight you.
Knowing this is the hoops you have to jump through in .es means it makes sense they don’t have a robust anti-fraud process outside of .es.
I’ve generally had good experiences with Privacy.com. It seems like a decent solution when I want something from a semi-reputable website.
I particularly enjoy the bit where cards are vendor-locked, which has been interesting to observe in a couple of instances where a site seems to have had their credit card db breached and the attackers turn around and try to use the card on another site, where it is inevitably denied, but I still get an email that shows which site got hacked and where the attackers were trying to use the information.
But how can you trust them not to screw you over. ( The apparent goal of every company). Now days… Even Google has turned Evil… Meaning you can literally no longer trust Any company
Everything is transient and eventually becomes shitty, sure, but I generally trust them because they’re able to make money just from people using the service. I don’t know how profitable they are, but I am reasonably certain that as the card issuer they get a cut of every transaction. Given that they aren’t issuing physical cards and have no obvious costs other than maintaining their platform, I don’t see a reason not to trust them in the medium term.
I’ve told companies that use PayPal to register as a business, not as an individual. If you’re an individual and a lot of money comes through, they will lock you down for “regulatory reasons.” Which is hilarious because they are technically not a bank (But I think they are a NA). You’ll never see that money again.
Legit. Sick off the bluemaga bullshit. “The other guy is terrible so I don’t have to align with the ‘leftist’ views held by 60% of constituents” is all worn out.
I don’t know why you needed me to link you other comments in this post, but here you go.
A wealth tax just isn’t good policy, especially when there are better alternatives, like capital gains taxes and income taxes. Those also fix deeper issues than just a wealth tax that encourages spending outside of the country.
But really this post is just about ranting against Biden and fudging any details necessary to make it fit.
Do you just not have a reason for thinking a wealth tax is dumb? The first link just…is not whatever you think it is, its someone ranting against biden and someone else saying biden didnt mean to say wealth tax. But nothing in there criticizing a wealth tax itself. The second link i also responded to, and the third link is debating whether or not it would be legally allowed.
a wealth tax that encourages spending outside of the country.
You didnt even read the second word of the title man. This is an international proposal specifically for this reason.
It is hard to tell is that article is written to obscure or misrepresent facts accidentally or on purpose.
It says stuff like hydro “normally represents 60%” of the power generation without saying what it is now. It for sure doss not tell you if hydro generates more or less electricity now vs the past.
The closest we get to a fact that illustrates the narrative is that Quebec hydro exports are down 18% in 2023 from 2022. Again, it does not say how much was generated. Obviously there is still enough hydro power available as they are still exporting a lot of it. Does the drop have anything at all to do with caapacity?
It says that BC “imported” almost 20% of its power but does not tell us how much it exported. This tell us absolutely nothing. Why? Because of how BC uses power.
Unlike most other sources, hydro power is easily turned on or off whenever you want. You cannot control when the sun shines or wind blows. Turning coal or nuclear plants on or off is expensive.
Electricity is deregulated in the US which means that prices spike when demand is high ( daytime ) and drop when it is low ( night ). BC generates excess hydro power during the day and sells it to the US grid. At night, when prices drop, BC buys power back from the US grid ( or Alberta ) and lets the reservoirs fill back up. How much BC imports has more to do with market price than anything else.
Saying BC buys 20% of its electricity tells us nothing as a fact on its own.
The article shares important truths but does it in a biased and misleading way. I do not trust the narrative.
The most important truth is likely the mushrooming demand. The world ( not just Canada ) is requiring more and more electricity every year. It is quite likely that existing hydro power in Canada will have to be increasingly used to meet domestic demand and that new sources of electricity will need to be identified.
As a global phenomenon, we are creating much more “green” electricity than we expected to. However that has mostly gone to new demand and older power plants ( like coal ) have not always been decommissioned as planned. As a planet, we are using more fossil fuel than ever despite all the green progress made. That does not mean somehow that green power generation has not worked out or is somehow a failure. It at least we are not building coal plants to meet all the demand. I bet we are still building natural gas plants though. Still better, but still.
The “lakes drying up” story is also real and not just in Canada. I am not really debating that as a backdrop. However, in the absence of actual head to head facts showing otherwise, I call BS that hydro power plants in Canada have had to turn off or that production has materially dropped. Also, places like BC have certainly not been building coal plants and are not going to. If I did not know any better, that article would have left me with a profound misunderstanding of what is actually going on.
I read up until the word “narrative”. Anyone using that word is way too influenced by corporate controlled media to be taken seriously.
I will die on this hill, because I’ve studied the evolution of right wing propaganda over the past 30 years.
Remember “Fair”, and “Balanced”? Remember “slant”? Remember “bias”? Remember “partisan”? “Narrative” is the new black, and it serves the exact same purpose- to convey the idea that everything is a matter of personal opinion, there is no right or wrong, and by extension there is no objective reality.
The purpose is to create a general sense that nothing you hear on the news is to be trusted, because everything is presented out of some hidden agenda, and since everyone has an agenda and everyone is obviously a miserly selfish narcissist like conservatives who ever only think about themselves, then why should you trust anyone?
Republican Agenda 101:
“Scientists say that a comet will annihilate all life on Earth one week from now.”
“Yeah they say that, but I heard that they are suicidal. They want the Earth to be destroyed! Did you know that they are also gay trans monsters who eat your babies at night? How can you trust them?”
“But the science…”
“That science was made by rich fat cat academics in the pockets of the government.”
“Actually, private corporations have far more inf…”
“snicker Oh great another nut conspiracy communist fascist democrat! What did I tell you, mob, they are all the same”
everything is a matter of personal opinion, there is no right or wrong, and by extension there is no objective reality.
The purpose is to create a general sense that nothing you hear on the news is to be trusted, because everything is presented out of some hidden agenda, and since everyone has an agenda and everyone is obviously a miserly selfish narcissist like conservatives who ever only think about themselves, then why should you trust anyone?
Everything is presented with an agenda, though. That’s literally the job of the editorial board: to make sure what they’re publishing is within the agenda of the publication and the publisher.
News outlets have used jargon and targeted exclusion of facts in order to present a certain take on a story without highlighting that they’re editorializing for as long as there have been news outlets.
It’s totally fair, and healthy even, to question the motivations behind the choices made in writing or presenting the news. Just deciding that some writers or publishers are impartial while refusing to examine how they actually present stories is just picking a team and going to bed.
Sometimes the agenda at play is valuable and pro-social. That doesn’t make it not an agenda.
Reminds me of that footage of the Chinese and Indian militaries beating the shit out of eachother with wooden sticks because they were worried even small arms fire could cause enough echo to start an avalanche.
If by “avalanche” you mean “escalation of conflict”, yes. They don’t allow firearms because of one side shoots, the other side shoots back, then everyone is shooting and it’s a real war. Without guns, they have to actually go up and fight the other guy, which is much less effective fighting. A few guys beat up a few other guys, instead of dozens shooting and killing dozens.
Lol I have no reason to be in the office for my job. My company started forcing people back in January. I take the train in. It takes me 2.5 one way, 5 hours total. Doesn’t make any fucking sense that I have to make the journey, and it makes no fucking sense that the train ride takes an hour and 45 minutes
Not to mention it’s just exhausting spending 5 hours of your day in commute
That’s about 15 hours a week I could use to work and to go out with my dog, work out, actually do work more efficiently with two screens, and just idk spend some time with friends
but it’s kinda hard to mop the floors where I work from home.
Yeah, the “everyone should work from home” factions seems to forget those of us whose work requires us being able to touch the things we’re working on.
I’d love more trains and I’d love more WFH jobs, but that’s not the reality in 2024 and just declaring “trains, bitches” is not helpful or particularly cordial to all of the people who have no choice but to make long commutes to their jobs.
I would wager most people don’t actually have no choice but to make a massive commute. Often it just comes down to policy choices. As a country, we’ve made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit, just as we’ve decided homes should be treated as investment vehicles. If we built out and maintained more trains, buses and light rail, congestion could be cut down and more people could travel much more rapidly and efficiently. If we didn’t obsess over the idea that property values must go up without fail and encouraged building affordable housing, people could actually afford to live closer to where they work, rather than being pushed ever farther into the suburbs and countryside in search of a place they could afford to live in. Some people make insane commutes chasing higher pay in a neighboring region. I knew of people at one company who commuted from Philadelphia to Brooklyn every day, because NYC pay was higher and Philly rents lower. That said, that’s absolutely a conscious choice those people make.
Likewise, not every job is capable of being done from home, but many are, yet workers are still forced to come into the office anyway. This is a choice by company execs, not an inevitable fact of life.
I’m sure there are some jobs that are relatively remote, yet need to be done in person despite the long commutes. Let the people doing them be compensated accordingly, but this is absolutely not something that should be normalized for the population at large.
Individually, no, but this is the decision people have been making in aggregate for decades with the people they vote into government to represent them. You can still see it happening when people oppose any attempts to build out public transportation when they believe it would either personally bother them in some way, or give poor people an easier way to access their communities.
Heck, you saw it earlier this year where municipalities around NY have fought and ignored the mandate to build up more dense housing, or the congestion pricing being walked back now. Housing costs being unaffordable is a serious issue when it impacts them or their acquaintances, but that’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make if it keeps poor people and minorities from also being able to afford to live in their town. Something needs to be done about traffic and air quality in Manhattan, right up until it means they would either need to pay up or take the train.
The governor is taking most of the heat for these policies, bud meanwhile, people keep reelecting the same local and state officials that aggravate the problems that the public is chronically complaining of. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot if it means they can hurt others too.
This still sounds like victim blaming to me. It should be the job of the opposition to these candidates to educate the public about what they’re voting for. Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.
I would have more sympathy for them if these were new issues, but they’ve been perennial problems for more than three decades at this point. There comes a point where it’s either willful ignorance, or being so woefully stupid you probably ought to be declared a ward of the state and get a minder to make sure you don’t get caught off guard by your own saliva and drown in it.
Like, it’s utterly stupid on its face. If you have the right to vote, you’re struggling to afford to keep a roof over your head, yet you keep voting for the politicians who block the very affordable housing that your continued ability to live in your community depends on because it’ll let the “wrong kind of people” move in, or “dilute the character of the neighborhood” and bring down property values, yet you cannot understand how this is voting against your own interests without someone breaking it down for you, you make a very compelling case for the shortcoming of democracy with universal suffrage. Even then, these are topics that have been gone over to death
Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.
Emphasis mine, but the public has been told over, and over, and over again. At what point does it stop being everyone else’s responsibility that they just don’t want to hear it, or are willing to ignore it if it hurts someone else?
At this point, you’re just being disingenuous. Like, where have you been? Two seconds searching will give you article after article after article on this very topic. This has been a subject of public commentary since before people fell for trickle-down economics, and to pretend otherwise is to be entirely dishonest.
So…when they won’t read articles on the topic and won’t listen to news coverage outside the very media that’s designed to convince them to vote against their own interests, it’s still other peoples’ fault for not educating them, somehow? That is just willful ignorance on their part. That’s like saying nobody has tried to educate young earth creationists on the Earth being older than 6,000 years, because we just have articles in text books and scientific journals they don’t trust, but really, we need to get it into the bible for them to read.
Also, way to move the goalposts there. We went from
Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.
to, “Well, yeah, someone asked them to read, and people they don’t like tell them, but you need to get the media empire that convinces them to vote against their interests in the first place to tell them that’s what’s happening, or else it doesn’t count.” At what point are good faith efforts enough for you, when these people aren’t interested in them to begin with? Do we need to strap them into one of the rapid-learning machines from Battlefield Earth and just shoot the knowledge straight into their brain?
Yes, it is other peoples’ fault for not getting them out of the media bubble they have been put in all their lives, starting with the parents who raised them. You’re expecting the cult member to free will themselves out of the cult. That’s not how it works.
You cannot endlessly blame other people for failing to undo that indoctrination. They need to be open to at least considering other view points, you cannot enter their mind and flip a switch for them. Either way, that’s an entirely separate matter from your original claim, that nobody has told these people.
I do, you’re just taking an asinine position on the topic. Society should absolutely help these people to the extent they can, but we cannot change someone’s mind against their will. We can’t just go committing people to a mental hospital for being misled into believing stupid stuff, or even actively harmful stuff. They need to be amenable to at least listening to other people with an open mind. Beyond a certain point, the best we could really do would be implementing measures to be able to disregard them, but that’s predictably a rather unpopular idea, given how anti-democratic and open to abuse it would be.
Answer me two questions. First, what, if anything, could other people do that would be enough in your mind? You’re real quick to shoot down everything and anything as insufficient, so what do you propose would be adequate? Next, at what point does the obligation to help such individuals get outweighed by the harm they do to the rest of us by holding everyone else back?
As a country, we’ve made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit,
But as an individual, I need to have an income, and I need a place to live that my income will support sustainably.
I don’t get a say in where the affordable homes are in relation to where my work needs to be done. And I don’t get a say in the transportation infrastructure between those locations.
What was the fucking point of this? It seems so stupid and petty. Like why even go through the trouble?
I know there have been maritime issues between China and others within the last few years or so, but seriously - what is the fucking point of doing this?
China is probing the US’s willingness to get involved in another conflict.
“Stupid and petty” is how international bullies operate. Pointless violence is how immature people express their “strength”.
I know there have been maritime issues between China and others within the last few years or so
All of the maritime issues have been caused by China attempting to claim the entire South China Sea as their private property, in defiance of international agreements about national coastal waters. All of those issues were provoked by China trying to exert control over coastal waters that are rightfully the property of other nations, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. China is a bad neighbor.
All of those issues were provoked by China trying to exert control over coastal waters that are rightfully the property of other nations, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. China is a bad neighbor.
China is a bad neighbour, and fuck the CCP. But all the nations around the SCS have ridiculous claims of them controling huge swathes of water way outside their coastal waters. China is just by far the most aggressive about it.
I hardly think its whataboutery talking about the topic in question, the claims in the south China sea. Did you miss the parts where I explictly said China was by far the worst for this?
But you’ll also notice that even though this incident is outside the internationally recognised waters of the Philipines it is claimed by China, the Philipines and Vietnam. Despite not being near enough to any of them to properly claim it.
Considering the US literally couped Australia when their prime minister refused to give unconditional support for a spy base, this is small fry!
p.s. that military base in Australia now exists, the US has full autonomous control of it, stations soldiers there, and the antennae currently guiding the Israeli missiles leveling Gaza
I don’t think it’s valid to compare a full-scale ground invasion with smashing up a patrol boat. Ground invasions are overt acts of war, no matter how much the invader might want to label them as “special”. In this case I don’t think China wants an open conflict with the Philippines, not yet anyway. If you’re actually invading you don’t vandalize one boat with hand tools and then run off, like teenager leaving a burning bag of shit on someone’s porch.
This is about China doing whatever it wants, and international law be damned. It’s more of a Cartman-esque demand for obedience and submission.
So you do agree that it is a fairly moderated act, compared two how the other two main powers in the world operate, which is outright illegal and mass murderous invasions.
A top U.S. gun maker signed a previously undisclosed deal to put one of its rifles in the popular videogame franchise Call of Duty as part of a marketing plan to reach young customers, according to internal emails and company records.
I mean, it’s bad, but it’s not nearly the worst of the firearms industry’s sins. Look up the Bushmaster ‘Man Card’ ads - Really outlines how the confluence of toxic masculinity and gun culture is a key factor in the prevalence of school shootings in the states.
Yeah, pretty much. But of course, they deny culpability because “It’s not like we pulled the trigger” or some other limp-wrist bullshit excuse.
If gun lobbyists hadn’t pushed for a ban on the CDC studying gun violence under the pretense that the data would be construed as advocating for gun control, maybe some of those kids at Uvalde, or Sandy Hook, or any of the other hundreds if not thousands of school shootings over the last 20+ years might still be alive today.
Science says this is very much happening across the world. The ecological impact of hydroelectric power generation is very, very well studied and agrees with the general sentiment of the article.
Fuck WSJ but let’s not ignore science out of spite.
The devil is in the details here. For the super-rich, wealth is an extremely hard thing to quantify. Once a true wealth tax is established, all it will do is increase billable hours for financial professionals who know how to hide wealth in tax sheltered vehicles. And that will get litigated every year, when the bill is due. If you want to go after the extremely wealthy, I think the right place to do it is with a strong inheritance tax. That only gets litigated once, and the bill is paid by people who did not accumulate that wealth themselves. It also dilutes generational wealth, which is a good thing.
Plus, the US is unique in that it taxes citizens on their worldwide holdings, anyway. While there are offshore tax havens, they work a lot differently than the tax havens a wealth tax would target.
It’s easy to say “We should tax the wealthy”, but hard to make good policy that can’t be gamed, especially when attempting to do it across multiple wealthy countries.
It’s easy to say “We should tax the wealthy”, but hard to make good policy that can’t be gamed, especially when attempting to do it across multiple wealthy countries.
That’s literally what Yellen is refusing to participate in…
Like, the reason we can’t do it, is we’re not doing it…
If that sounds confusing, it’s because there isn’t a logical reason not to do it, besides the wealthy may donate less money to politicians
There are very real constitutional issues with explicit wealth taxes. It took a constitutional amendment to authorize the federal government to collect an income tax, and it's quite possible that it would take another to authorize a wealth tax. Particularly with this Supreme Court, Congress probably doesn't have the legal ability to impose a wealth tax even if it wanted to, to say nothing of the general complexity and costs of collecting it. There are plenty of economists who support the general idea of taxing the wealthy more but who prefer other taxation schemes.
There’s a lot of bullshit in those numbers though including things like unrealized capital gains and real estate. Trump is in trouble for wildly misvaluing his real estate (including openly lying about factual information like square footage) but it’s almost impossible to accurately value real estate outside of a sale happening - things like depreciation and local market prices fluctuations are all just guesses. Most real estate is valued as low as the owner can justify (outside dumb pride and weird tax tricks) just to dodge property taxes.
Net worth is an easy number to guess at within an order of magnitude but it’s really difficult to actually calculate - even for Americans in America… guessing at the wealth of some Bhutanese millionaire who has a deep in with the local government and can bribe officials to undervalue or misassign property would be extremely difficult.
Trump is in trouble for wildly misvaluing his real estate (including openly lying about factual information like square footage)
And people lie about income for income taxes. And then they get audited. A wealth tax doesnt have to be accurate to the dollar, its about dissuading gross wealth hoarding. A billion and 40 thousand can still round to a billion and be a very effective tax estimate.
guessing at the wealth of some Bhutanese millionaire who has a deep in with the local government and can bribe officials to undervalue or misassign property would be extremely difficult.
I dont think people in small low income countries like bhutan are going to affect this tax much. I would also assume this international tax would come with some form of international auditing.
Thats the one thing working in our favor dealing with the people that have concentrated the worlds wealth into a few hands: its in a few hands. Its easy to keep track of.
And people lie about income for income taxes. And then they get audited.
The difference here is that we definitively know how much income people make by collecting that number at several steps in the process - since wealth isn’t transferred we only have the reporting party and estimations.
If we’re okay being approximately correct that’s much more reasonable though.
guessing at the wealth of some Bhutanese millionaire who has a deep in with the local government and can bribe officials to undervalue or misassign property would be extremely difficult.
I dont think people in small low income countries like bhutan are going to affect this tax much.
Bhutan was meant to be a non-controversial example let’s instead consider Russia, do you think Russia will aide or hamper the ability for the international community to tax their oligarchs… please keep in mind that their government is entirely composed of oligarchs that are currently sanctioned by most western countries. What about Brazil, do you think some millionaire with close ties to the government is going to be accurately reported? Or do you think Brazil has a motivation to keep that money underreported in favor of bribes - bear in mind Brazil’s long history of corruption.
Wealth isn’t that hard to quantify. An assessor comes to my house every few years and quantifies what it’s worth for property tax reasons and most people’s wealth is basically their house and maybe a retirement account. Private companies almost all have a valuation. When a start up raises a round, they literally set a valuation for the round. When a traditional business gets a loan, the bank estimates what it’s worth.
But no one even wants to tax small business owners. Every wealth tax proposal is on the super wealthy who can sure as fuck value their net worth. Donald Trump just went on trial for lying about his. If we had a formal assessment system, he would have never even been able to do frauds.
Also with taxes going to the government… There is a lot of corruption designed to bring those taxes back in the form subsidies, projects, funding etc. No guarantee taxes end up where they are needed.
wsj.com
Top