171–180 of 366 posts
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What country is that?
Vietnam, ranks 110 or so in transparency index
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And CC companies bank on the fact that if even a small percentage of people aren't able to pay it off in full they'll get their "rewards" back in full within a single period of interest.
no they make 1-5% of every swipe
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Having worked for some charities, there's sausage being made there too. Just like the government has spots of greater than free market efficiency. I don't think one or the other is strictly better. You point at corruption and waste wherever you find it, then you work to make it less.
You could say charities are better in the sense that: - You at least have more than one choice. If the charity you give to performs poorly by whatever metrics you value, you can give to another one next time. - It is voluntary. Nobody with guns will put you in a cage if you don't donate to a charity, as is the case if you don't pay your taxes.
And there's the rub. You don't, and won't, have that information.
To my knowledge there's one single solitary charity that provides adequate metrics to donors to support this kind of decision and for them it's on principle rather than to open up the market.
Charities as a whole are simply not incentivised to share this kind of information because they compete for funds based on marketing, not efficiency, and there is currently no mechanism to change that.
Yes, there are organisations that audit charities in small numbers and put them on approved lists, but you're still only getting a fading rubber stamp.
> It is voluntary...
He said, casually cutting the funds available for public infrastructure, welfare, health, education and the military by a couple of orders of magnitude.
> Nobody likes paying high taxes, but I don’t mind. How refreshing. I agree with him. Paying my taxes is a point of pride for me. It's a repayment for all those years I was poor and the government paid for me to live and go to school.
In the monetary policy environment we live in, having debt is the most sensible way to build wealth.
Dollars are a terrible store of value. Dollars invested in a savings account are almost as bad. Securities, real estate, and inventory are much better. Dollars invested in education and advertising to multiply the value of securities, real estate and inventory are still way better than a savings account.
In an environment where a savings account pays In such an environment, I'd be proudest paying cap gains tax at 15% than income tax updwards of 25%.
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Interest on the national debt is a small portion of the US budget: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... Even if you just look at discretionary spending, debt payments are not a large portion of spending. New borrowing is also larger than the interest payments.
There is something off with the charts on the site you refer to (they don't provide the actual numbers in the charts). Simple calculation: With $20T of debt, at 3% interest rate (30Y bond), the interest on the debt is adding 600 billion dollars to the deficit per year (and it compounds). 600 billion with respect to the 3.8 billion federal budget is almost 16%. And the interest rate is so low only because debt rates h…
So we save $30 billion by using the slightly smaller debt and $120 billion by using the interest rate of 2.4%.
$450 billion is still a huge budget item and it is a problem that interest rates will rise.
> Nobody likes paying high taxes, but I don’t mind. How refreshing. I agree with him. Paying my taxes is a point of pride for me. It's a repayment for all those years I was poor and the government paid for me to live and go to school.
Not sure if you're living in the US, but I do and I have the exact opposite viewpoint. The amount of waste, corruption and poor planning by the gov't makes me feel like I'm throwing money away. I'd rather give it a charity since then I'd know a majority of it had an impact. I think if the gov't was a bit more efficient and could be shown to be good stewards of money I'd probably hate paying taxes a lot less.
Charities and private businesses actually succumb to corruption, inefficiency, and outright fraud pretty often. How much research do you perform on your charitable contributions versus your taxes? Do you know, off the top of your head, how many cents on the dollar actually support the cause of your favorite charity, and how many are "wasted" on administration?
Debt conversations always have these weird grandpa rules of thumb and words of wisdom, as you can see in the other comments. The proper use of debt is to match the debt with the asset. If you are buying a house, a 25-year mortgage matches the value of the house. If you are buying a car, a 5-year loan matches the value of the car. If you are buying a sandwich with a credit card, well... you should pay off your credit…
The general rule, really, is more like borrow only for appreciating assets (often real estate, financing a new business) and not for consumables or depreciating assets. But both your idea and mine are still rules of thumb, notwithstanding how much you wish to elevate yours to a different status.
Note the gotcha: if enough people borrow money and buy something because they think it will appreciate, it will. In other words, according to your rule, speculation can make itself appear worthwhile.
> Nobody likes paying high taxes, but I don’t mind. How refreshing. I agree with him. Paying my taxes is a point of pride for me. It's a repayment for all those years I was poor and the government paid for me to live and go to school.
Not to mention an investment in the costs you'll impose upon the state in your dotage.
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I don't mind paying property and local taxes for this reason, but if my Federal taxes are going to go toward building that fucking wall, I will do everything I can to avoid paying them.
Serious question: were you alright in past years with your federal taxes going to the war in Iraq, as an example? Where do you draw your personal line for "this type of activity against foreign nationals is alright, but that type is where I draw the line?" Anyone can feel free to answer this one. I'm interested in where people are drawing their own lines.
> Nobody likes paying high taxes, but I don’t mind. How refreshing. I agree with him. Paying my taxes is a point of pride for me. It's a repayment for all those years I was poor and the government paid for me to live and go to school.
So you don't take any deductions? Do you pay more than you need to for taxes?