171–174 of 174 posts
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> Sadly the only way to curb this spending incontinence seems to starve the state of revenues. Or reform the broken democracy at the crux of it all.
When has reforming worked? No less with democracies (which are all broken anyway)
Plus it is impolite to call for a revolution, even if we're talking about France
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Assuming US: Tax is based on income. If you find a way to avoid income, you don't have any income to be taxed. There are certainly ways to game the system, but those ways mean one isn't realizing income. Seems relatively fair to me. After all, the gov isn't supposed to be a welfare machine,and stealing from others is generally regarded as theft.
> Seems relatively fair to me. It's legal. It's hardly fair. It means the working/middle class masses get to pay the burden of taxes (including sales taxes, and others) disproportionately to their income and wealth - and of course, the money taken from them is orders of magnitude more impactful on their everyday life than if we half of Bezos income (or even half his total wealth) was taxed away. > and stealing from o…
1. Forces wealthy to liquidate assets. Impact: stock prices go down, real estate markets get excess supply floods, etc.
2. Forces income through taxable sales.
3. Theft
I fail to understand how taxing wealth is not stealing. Any time a wealthy person wants to utilize wealth to consume a product, someone somewhere is paying taxes on it. The closest that gets to not being true is when wealthy use their stock as collateral for loans and then get to take interest write offs, but the bank is still going to pay income tax on the interest income they receive.
Wealth means nothing until it is utilized, and all ways in which it's utilized are taxed.
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In America we have a credit score which is quite dystopian. America has the most prisoners and slavery in prisons. The NSA among others monitor citizens.
So?
I wake up every day in a right wing dystopia. Even worse, people like you lack the knowledge or solidarity with other workers while having too much nationalism and so on.
I’m going to assume you wouldn’t be able to explain China’s politics nor explain why Taiwan is granted sovereignty but Palestine isn’t. Both places had people before each imperialist group of people conquered land where people already lived. When’s the last time any typical westerner has ever cared about the indigenous people of Taiwan. This doesn’t contradict anything. More of a case where I’m stating the obvious. Even if you happen to actually care about the indigenous people, you’re still going to arrogantly believe Taiwan is a Democratic good guy country. Let’s not even get into Taiwan being fascist for some time…
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> If you don't have a system to track swimming pools then don't tax swimming pools. You’ll be happy to learn that France has moved in the direction to comply with your concern here.
How much do you want to bet that 1) There's a 4-5% mistake rate 2) getting a wrong conclusion of the AI turned back is a 2-year kafkaieske nightmare where you have to front all the money, and even after they admit they're wrong it takes 5 years to get your money back. And then next year you get another tax bill for the nonexistent pool and we start from scratch?