Oh, yeah, now he’s done for. /s
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Harbergers’ original proposal is hard to track down unfortunately. There, he was trying to solve a property tax regime that was characterized more by bribery than efficiency-- the city accessors took the bribes, and the city’s tax base crumbled. Self assessment is cheaper; but some people will cheat. How to deter them?
(as for the homestead problem, single family homes are in some sense, a waste of land compared to apartment blocks and public parks.)
Devotees of Henry George played around with similar concepts. George was, of course, obsessed with the idea that people could get rich through land speculation while society had to deal with the consequences.
Anyway, my dear departed Dad used to tell me strange economic and mathematical ideas-- and this was one of them. Bit of a pain to track down the supposed references. The other faded part of the memory was that one or more Australian jurisdictions might have been seriously considering the idea… (JSTOR or no JSTOR, I don’t think I could ever pin down that detail)
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Dunno if anyone has mentioned this, too sleepy to read through everything in between, saving that for my days off. Anyway, Trump has already made it clear how he feels about not paying taxes:
We already know how he will respond, too, in the debate. He’s already answered it last election. He said of course he used loopholes, everyone does, and he will keep using them, and if we don’t want him to, close the loopholes.
Republicans cheered. End of story. This will be meaningless.
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that’s equivalent to $62,000 in 2020 dollars. what a sucker.
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Curious how the educated right would spin this, I read this marketwatch article. Its a remarkable bit of whataboutism that summarizes the NYT findings and then spends 80% of the story on how 43% of americans pay no federal income tax without any mention that that is irrelevant to the president being a tax cheat. Apparently their power of denial is unfaltering
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Of course, and nobody should be surprised. This is something to admire, for Republicans. It’s a feature not a bug.
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Isn’t that because they earn below the poverty rate, or nah?
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I think that is the interesting thing here. Trump’s non-tax paying is only legal if he genuinely lost lots and lots of money. Which he apparently did. I mean we all pretty much knew he wasn’t really rich. These documents just prove how close to broke he is.
The risk he’s taking is going flat out broke, if not ending up in jail.
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For most of them, yes. But there you go again trying to muddy the water with facts and reason
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Yeah, which makes them tax cheats AND losers to Trumpists. The loser part is the bad part, they can’t even get “being smart” credit for not paying taxes because they didn’t make enough to owe any.
Not making money, now that’s the sin.
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One of Trump’s tax refunds would pay all transgender troops’ healthcare costs for 28 years
President Trump banned transgender people from the military, saying their healthcare costs are too high.
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My fantasy debate performance would be with somebody with a sarcastic edge (ugh, so not Biden) to just needle him endlessly about his puffed up bullshit all his schoolyard-bully tactics.
“Oh wow, mr. big businessman, tell us, if you are sooo good at hiding all these incredibly profitable projects, why don’t you tell us about them? And then tell us who we can verify these with. No family members! We all played the ‘You can ask my mom’ card in 3rd grade when we didn’t really have a Barbie Dreamhouse. Not gonna fly this time.”
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Good thing he doesn’t have a big distraction, like a debate, coming up. 
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Or something like
“So, basically what you do is juggle, right? You make a business plan, make lots of money from investors, and hurriedly make another business plan before the previous one fails. Then you have the new investors giving you money while the old investors lose their money. So long as you have a new business being developed, you always have money coming in. That’s how it works, right?”
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You mean like how the sticky note fell off Trump’s computer screen? The one from Jack Mitnick that had explicit instructions, “DO NOT HAVE MICHAEL WRITE PERSONAL CHECKS TO STRIPPERS”? You mean like that, right?
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Unfortunately for us, this is an excellent incentive for him to declare the election a fraud and name himself President for Life.
At any rate, we can hope that the Biden debate prep team figures out something actually useful to do with this information by tomorrow night.
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I said the same thing. Apparently makes me a defeatist.
THEY.DO.NOT.CARE. They play by a different set of rules and do not care one iota. His base, their voters, the entire GOP just laughs and say “See he’s so smart he got one over on you!”
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I hate his voice but if this was a documentary reality show airing the fall of Trump after losing the election I would suffer the sounds of his voice happily.
New catch phrase: I’m fired?
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