51–60 of 268 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going through the white house proposed budget this weekend and there are more than a few call outs (10-20%) that seem superfluous or like they should be handled by private industries as they seem constrained to benefit those private businesses. Government money also tends to raise all ships^H^H^H^H^Hprices, so many of the social welfare programs - tuition and home buying loans and assistance, for example - have…
> As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers. Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing. “Ontario opportunities fu…
Unless there is default, there’s no reason for the government to not to keep accumulating debt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers. Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing. “Ontario opportunities fu…
The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely. The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The police are allowed to "surveil" protected speech, unless you want to ban them from reading the newspaper. I really don't see the issue. This is information people knowingly release to the public, so the cops are not spying on anyone. A protest is a potential security threat, which is why the cops always show up. I see no evidence this information was abused to try to prevent people from expressing their opinions.…
I think we need a term for 'taking public information and deriving nondisclosed information from it'. It isn't really spying, but it's more than just access. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, but I think a lot of the debate here is just people arguing the semantics of what's going on.
Sure, but I don't think that was done here. People were organizing protests by Twit. All the relevant information was made public because the protesters wanted people to show up.
I can imagine similar scenarios that would be a problem, but this seems about as benign as I can imagine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, you can give extra money to reduce the deficit. You cannot redirect what you already owe so that it all goes towards reducing the deficit. So I think your point "nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!" is moot.
That sort of direction wouldn't be meaningful anyway, since money is fungible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers. Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing. “Ontario opportunities fu…
The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely. The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of direction wouldn't be meaningful anyway, since money is fungible.
It’s not like money that was previously allocated for debt service could then be moved to something else. In AZ we can direct about $4k to specific organizations and receive a 1:1 tax credit. That impacts revenues, but not how much those programs would receive otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely. The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.
[flagged]
Also, some of the above are paid by both employer and employee, which is an accounting trick to make the taxpayer think he/she is paying less.