Friday the 13th let me down.
Seems like an anvil should fall on him today instead of a laughable penalty. He’ll figure out a way to write off the loss to pay even less than zero taxes next year.
NY law and penalty caps brought to you by the 1%.
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Didn’t he also suggest we “support” Ukraine by painting red stars on our aircraft and sending them in as air support? His grasp on the intricacies of foreign relations is… breathtaking.
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Yeah, you mean like:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/14/politics/trump-north-korea-salute/index.html
U.S. Commander in Chief saluting North Korean brass.
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How about we can select budget categories on our tax forms to specify where our taxes go, or even simpler, don’t go. By default, your taxes are distributed as they are now. But opt out of “Defense” and none of my money goes.
Seems to me that’s a pretty easy way for a country to allocate funding democratically. Direct allocation by the people.
Of course, I know nothing about macro finances or financing governments. Just spit-balling from the peanut gallery. Someone’s bound to figure a way to ruin my idea.
No, because all the things we have need funding. The apportionment should go with need, not with the whims of the voting public. The reality is that we need roads, we need public education, we need a social safety net, we need to pay the people who do the thankless jobs that keep all the many departments running that provide us with services, we need public parks, we need support for the arts and sciences, etc, etc.
We have people who have completely bought into rugged individualism (cowboy individualism, too), and are trying to take us back to a time before we had any public services, government largely only worked for corporations, and it’s pure bullshit. And of course that whole “western individualist” mindset is built on a myth, since the US government poured probably trillions of dollars over the decades to ensure that people could live out west…
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Not unfortunately, at least for these two:
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Or default to his usual donation scam touching on fake election.
Sort of boils down to a desire for lawlessness of the Old West.
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How’s about we tax for the good of the general population in lieu of southern state defense contracts for votes.
Tax benefits to everyone else. Fuck the defense industry.
See what happens.
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Your proposal isn’t too far off of the whole voucher school idea, which I think is horrible.
Living in a society means we contribute to the community chest, and “managers” allocate those contributions according to need to most benefit the community. We’re doing kind of a shit job of it since one party went batshit crazy (looking at you, Reagan), but it’s still better than leaving everything to philanthropy. Which, your idea is a kind of forced minimum philanthropy.
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A waggish physicist at work has called that “Republican Welfare”.
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Good point! No doubt there is a conservative, libertarian streak in some sci-fi (Heinlein, etc). But I think lots of the dystopias that we think of, especially in cyberpunk, tend to be warnings about our present moment.
Well, that’s my point though… THAT was a myth. Yes, there was crime and things of that nature, but towns built up during the second half of the 19th century tended to be pretty well regulated. And the government was literally giving land away to get people to move out there, and then using the military to clear the way for white (sometimes Black) migrants from back east. People like the Bundy family push this narrative of self-reliance, but none of that land would have ended up in white hands had it not been for government force.
And that’s the thing that needs to be more democratic. That doesn’t mean everyone voting on everything necessarily, but it does mean voters being more actively engaged in ways other than voting. Representatives do tend to listen to people they represent, when those people are pro-active. I think since the 70s (for a variety of reasons) we’ve lost the thread of understanding that government should be an extension of us, not something outside of us. Our distrust of government (which arose for good reasons in the 70s) has made us forget that to make government more responsive involves more than just whinging about it around the kitchen table. It’s an active process. The more we think of government as something outside of the body-politic, the easier it is to see it as something that is illegitimate rather than something that can improve our lives and make difficult tasks and projects that need to happen collectively more possible. As much as everyone has a hard-on for private space programs, none of that would be possible without the years the federal government spent building up NASA. We got where we are in space exploration not in spite of NASA, but because of it.
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Of course! I would take the baseline government services as I have here in Canada. Plus add in free college education, free childcare, 32-hour work week, school breakfast & lunch programs, etc.
So everyone contributes to support these basic services. Then we allocate/deallocate the rest of our taxes to guide spending.
But is this even possible?
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No one has it perfect, but plenty of countries around the world offer a full set of services for their citizens tax dollars, and those citizens are general happy with what they get. Canadians included.
This isn’t rocket surgery. People have come up with solutions that work. The problem are far right figures seeking to destroy democratic society.
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Yet another example of how crime does pay, if it’s a big enough crime and/or you’re rich.
There is no way Trump/the Trump Organisation didn’t make far more than $1.6 million in a decade-long tax fraud scheme.
A maximum fine for this kind of thing just gives shady fuckers a target number for still making money even if they get caught.
The fine should be at least equal to the amount they made from their fraud.
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Ukraine are thankful at this moment for the American Defense Industry.
And that puts me in the extremely uncomfortable position of defending something I hate.
Defense spending, in this timeline, I would consider a necessary evil.
And I know there are countless stories which are the exact opposite of Ukraine, in which the West are aggressors, but in this particular instance, that spending might have been used for good.
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The only good thing about this is that it’s state law….the federal consequences, now that the fraud has been uncovered, should be much higher.
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Yes, and I’d think it would include not only fines but back taxes, plus interest, which could be huge enough to do the org (and Tromp’s personal finances) some major damage.
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