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Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

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Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#181

Post by rjsw »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #174
sa46 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full list of occupations ranked by fatal injuries per 100k workers. The referenced article isn't that useful because it doesn't provide any numbers to do an absolute comparison. Fatal injuries per Rank Job 100k workers ==== =============================== ================= 1. Fishers 100.0 2. Logging workers 87.3 3. Aircraft pilots 51.3 4. Roofers 45.2 5. Refuse material collectors 34.9 6. Steel workers 33.3 7. Truck…

Why is aircraft pilots so high? I'm assuming it isn't just commercial airline pilots?

Probably includes helicopters.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#182

Post by RandomTisk »

drewbug01 wrote: post #149
nullwasamistake wrote: post #127

Chicago is a financial disaster and it's dragging Illinois into the fire. The situation is worse than detriot before it's bankrupcy. It's so bad that illinois is the only state in the union with a negative population growth. And, doubly, the only state to have that honor several years in a row. The debt is unsustainable and they tax everything. Just a few years ago they started taxing soda cans, and hybrids since "th…

> Chicago is a financial disaster and it's dragging Illinois into the fire. Cook county (Chicago) and the 5 suburban counties contribute more revenue to the state coffers than the entire rest of the state combined . The rest of the state receives a higher share of that revenue than Chicago and its suburbs (ie - they get more than they put in). [1] > The situation is worse than detriot before it's bankrupcy. Highly su…

Your first source is quite flawed IMO. For one, they focus on the idea that the impetus behind the Tea Party movement was some kind of schizophrenic notion of citizens wanting both low taxes but also many high-quality public services. The Tea Party in the Boston harbor wasn't simply about taxation, it was about representation or lack there of. The modern Tea Party that sprang up under Obama was quite similar in that regard, i.e. voters felt they were being squeezed while their government provided them an inadequate voice in how they should be governed, and after the massive shift in state and local governments in 2010 after the ACA was passed, the Tea Party essentially sputtered out because the goal of representation had been achieved in a lot of cases.

Secondly, it lacks focus on cost efficiency or assessing cost effectiveness in how the tax payer's money is being spent. I don't know the situation in Chicago very well, but my inclination is to discount any source as irrelevant if it doesn't address how efficiently tax dollars get converted into desired services.

Finally it seems more concerned with diverting the reader's attention towards national politics, particularly Trump's election and why voters voted for him.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#183

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gfodor wrote: post #16
Shivetya wrote: post #14

Chicago is in the hole for nearly thirty billion dollars. They have been floating the idea of a ten billion dollar bond with the debt structured in a way which lets current politicians escape the fallout from its payment and not having to raise property taxes. The state of Illinois is not well off either with debts estimated at the low of one hundred thirty billion to two hundred fifty billion. An Illinois proposal j…

Pulling or cutting the pensions of retired public service workers (many of whom who risked their lives to protect the public) would, beyond the ethical questions, eliminate the credibility of the city's promises to those who sign up for such jobs and hence would likely greatly reduce the quantity and quality of recruits.

> Pulling or cutting the pensions of retired public service workers (many of whom who risked their lives to protect the public) would, beyond the ethical questions, eliminate the credibility of the city's promises

Well, yes. It would be a default. But more money has been spent than is there and there are only three pools to draw from: taxpayers, services and creditors. (Creditors include both pensioners and bond holders.) At this point, multiple pools have to be hosed. It’s just a matter of when and to what degree, with the hosing being less extreme the earlier it’s dealt with.

In all likelihood, the city will go bankrupt and have creditors cut services in federal bankruptcy proceedings, thereby imperilling the city’s long-term tax base. State, being unable to go bankrupt, will probably hose creditors more.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#184

Post by sokoloff »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #147
sokoloff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current pensioners didn’t recently accept their job. They accepted it decades ago and it’s on the municipality to manage the funding.

A lot of the people paying these taxes never agreed to the other end of the bargain either? I mean, you can argue that this is an integral part of the social contract, but if everyone leaves Chicago because property taxes increase astronomically there won't be any tax payers to lecture about how they have to hold up their end of the one-sided bargain. And then the whole thing collapses anyway?

When you move to or live in a city, you sign on to the things the city did/does. That you didn't personally agree to build a new library or hire Sally Jane as a Police Dispatcher is irrelevant.

I think people are leaving Chicago over solvency/funding outlook issues. I have two barely wealthy (single digit millions, almost surely) friends in Chicago who are moving to Arizona and Texas because they worry they're among the juiciest targets to be squeezed in the upcoming years.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#185

Post by ComputerGuru »

hvs wrote: post #155
rrrrreeeee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the employees and employers not pay into a separate fund that cannot be touched? I fail to see how it's the fault of the pensioners. It's absolutely archaic if the future taxpayers have to pay for a retirees pension. In Canada we have pension funds that are separately funded entities that are payed into over an employee's career.

https://reason.com/2019/02/21/illinois-cops-pension-gimmick-... https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-senate-passes-bill-b... I don't think the pensioners are free of fault here.

I don't understand how they ruled officers don't have to pay back that money. It was clearly stolen from taxpayers.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#186

Post by asah »

rrrrreeeee wrote: post #77
chrismeller wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reasonable approach, but means you don’t really ever have any idea how much you’ll have when you retire. Honestly that’s probably the only approach that will ever work longer term, but it’s not an easy thing to sell or plan for. The US Postal System has essentially this exact problem every year - they aren’t making enough to cover their pension obligations so they keep raising stamp prices (and let’s not ge…

You have an idea of the minimum you will get. Your pension will never go down, just that you don't know whether your pension will go up.

inflation means that your pension goes down by default.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#187

Post by conanbatt »

intended wrote: post #170
conanbatt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because pensions are guaranteed benefits. So if you put it on a bond, and the bond goes down, you need to draw more taxes to make the difference. Pensions are partially the outcome of wishful result-oriented thinking ("workers should have pensions they can depend on, so make the promise first and then the solution will happen").

What? How the heck is that a pension ?? That’s a bond. Why does that have anything to do with a pension ? And who in his right mind plants a bond and links it to a pension ? How does that even work? A bond is a loan. That means the firm or institution is taking a loan. A pension is the opposite of that - it’s money taken from employee payments and added to a conservative fund with a time horizon of 20-30 years. This…

Funds for pensions are usually mix of stocks and bonds, but stocks are really bad for defined benefit contributions because in a downturn you will have to oversell. This is something that actually happened in 2008 and broke some pension funds in the U.S. So bonds would not have that issue (treasury bonds, low-risk bonds) so you have no volatility.

But even they will not produce enough for the benefits that are promised: as soon as someone outlives their contribution the fund might not be actuarially safe. It turns out it is exceedingly difficult to mitigate all risk in a retirement fund, and government makes the promise that if they fail, they will pass the bill to someone else.

Pension funds are truly evil.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#188

Post by jcranmer »

sl1ck731 wrote: post #174
sa46 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full list of occupations ranked by fatal injuries per 100k workers. The referenced article isn't that useful because it doesn't provide any numbers to do an absolute comparison. Fatal injuries per Rank Job 100k workers ==== =============================== ================= 1. Fishers 100.0 2. Logging workers 87.3 3. Aircraft pilots 51.3 4. Roofers 45.2 5. Refuse material collectors 34.9 6. Steel workers 33.3 7. Truck…

Why is aircraft pilots so high? I'm assuming it isn't just commercial airline pilots?

The airline pilots who are flying from NYC to LA have a fairly safe job. It's the bush pilots flying between remote places in Alaska who are driving up the statistics; basically all of the fatal air crashes in the US are in Alaska.

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#189

Post by alpineidyll3 »

Shivetya wrote: post #14

Chicago is in the hole for nearly thirty billion dollars. They have been floating the idea of a ten billion dollar bond with the debt structured in a way which lets current politicians escape the fallout from its payment and not having to raise property taxes. The state of Illinois is not well off either with debts estimated at the low of one hundred thirty billion to two hundred fifty billion. An Illinois proposal j…

God I need to sell our apt. in Chicago...

Re: Chicago successfully taxes streaming services

#190

Post by cljs-js-eval »

sokoloff wrote: post #101
cljs-js-eval wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's archaic and should be changed, but the way the system works in the U.S. is pretty well known to its citizens, which makes it at least partially the fault of the pensioners. I live in Chicago and every retired schoolteacher and police officer I meet knows full well that they're making an exceptional amount of money in retirement. It's usually part of why they took the job.

IMO, it's no more the pensioners' fault than any other voter. If they're a resident eligible to vote, it's partly their fault. It's not their fault for accepting a job offer with certain terms broadly available.

I view it in the same terms as an elected official who willfully courts lobbyists or something else legal, but still distasteful. Members of those pension classes have known forever that their pension amounts would bleed the city dry, but they went along with it anyway. It's technically not their fault, but only in a dry legal sense. They knew they were leaving the rest of us in a bad state.
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