411–420 of 433 posts
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Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, and please stop using HN for ideological battle? Those things are not what the site is for, and they destroy what it is for. We ban such accounts, regardless of what their ideology is, and regardless of whether we happen to agree or disagree (actually, we don't care—we just want to have an internet forum that doesn't suck). You're welcome he…
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> It is bad to keep citing 2008 money as if it were a handout. So if I make reckless decisions because I am greedy, the govt should bail me out and then if some of my investments work out in the end I can return the govt's money. Its heads I win and tails I dont lose strategy.
That's actually the strategy, yes. It sounds like it might be bad, but...it isn't? In practice, people don't want to take risks that are irresponsible, they want to make money. I'd also point out that it was not the riskiness of the assets that the government bailed out. It was the complexity of valuation that reduced the short term liquidity in those CDOs and other collateralized and securitized debt products. When…
Yes that was the same argument used by Alan Greenspan when he said investment banks dont need regulation because they wont take risks that are irresponsible, yet Lehman and Bear Sterns and others imploded because they did not understand the risks. This is precisely why you should not socialize the losses, if they fail let them fail or else you regulate them so they they dont take excessive risks.
> It was the complexity of valuation that reduced the short term liquidity
It was so complex that the bankers themselves did not understand it.
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> How would the government have capacity to do this? It's much easier to just ... I don't find the argument that "it's hard to track and manage that" valid or compelling for an organization which includes the IRS as one of its constituent parts. Actually paying portions of mortgages would both keeps the banks solvent as well as keep the people capable of pulling through with assistance from taking the burden of the p…
>I don't find the argument that "it's hard to track and manage that" valid or compelling for an organization which includes the IRS as one of its constituent parts Doesn't this article highlight what happens if you haphazardly throw together a complicated relief effort overnight? The money ends up in the pockets of the rich anyways. >Actually paying portions of mortgages would both keeps the banks solvent Exactly, wh…
It's a somewhat subtle but I think very important distinction that needs to be considered in these discussions of the rich benefiting in these instances. It's almost impossible to prevent people other than those targeted from benefiting, and those with the most flexibility (which comes with money) are those most likely to be able to take advantage in some way of programs not aimed at them (if you help people in poor physical health by supplying money for physical therapy, companies that offer that service will benefit). Trying to prevent that at the expense of the people you're trying to help is not beneficial to anyone (especially since economically the input resources and output outcomes are not always linearly related).
I know a few upper-middle class small business owners (all non-retail sectors) whose businesses weren't substantially affected by the pandemic, but who basically got a free handout as part of the program. Two mentioned how they were initially hesitant to apply for money, but then worried that if they didn't, their business could take a downturn after it was too late. Then as long as they spent the money on payroll (w…
If you don’t show losses, and the loan was forgiven, it becomes taxable revenue. As a C corp, Trump got those taxes down to 21%, so it was only mostly free.
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I'm assuming by that they mean the value of the land. And if it's done similar to an appraisal they see what market price is for a sale (which combines the value of the building + land). Then they can estimate how much it would cost to rebuild that building if it were completely destroyed. That's the value of the improvements. The remainder is the amount someone implicitly paid for the land.
This is not great because suppose it cost relatively little to physically build a house but you sold it for a huge amount because it's in some chic architectural style that hasn't arrived yet in this city. So your house was in a crazy seller market and unexpectedly sold for crazy tons. Now you are being seriously penalized for your boldness.
Someone can always come up with a contrived example to find a short coming in a rule or law. That doesn't make the law not sound or wise.
"Speeding shouldn't be illegal. What if there is a tornado behind you and you need to rush to get away from it, but you go faster than the speed limit to save your life? See, we can't have laws for speeding."
I know a few upper-middle class small business owners (all non-retail sectors) whose businesses weren't substantially affected by the pandemic, but who basically got a free handout as part of the program. Two mentioned how they were initially hesitant to apply for money, but then worried that if they didn't, their business could take a downturn after it was too late. Then as long as they spent the money on payroll (w…
Maybe we shouldn't have had mandatory lockdowns to start with? Free choice and small government sounds nice right about now to me.
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You can always launder money to defeat such a trail. I'm not going to go into detail about how, just in case my ignorant ramblings have some novel techniques in there, but it's definitely possible. Like with banning encryption, the privacy impacts would be felt by the little people, and the big bad actors would be largely unaffected.
So we rely upon reports apparently generated from reconciled alternate accounting systems to determine whether the funds were appropriated impactfully?
When you donate to a TheGivingBlock Cause Fund, you get a tax receipt by email and the donation is privately sent to each of the multiple registered nonprofit charities included in that particular Fund.
TheGivingBlock Cause Funds map to the UN SDG Sustainable Development Goals; are categorically aligned to the #GlobalGoals Goals, but not yet (?) to specific Targets or Indicators. https://thegivingblock.com/donate/
Re: CharityNavigator nonprofit rating methodology, SDG-aligned GRI Corporate Sustainability Reports, setting up a CharityVest charitable matching fund for your employees, SDGs,: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412594 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-24412594 CharityVest feedback: https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#story-23907902
How should nonprofits be evaluated in order to invest impactfully?
If somebody says "Strategic Alignment" again, will less-impactful cashflows be eliminated?
When the government nonprofit invests in government services, nonprofits, NGOs, international aid, and for-profit entities, how do we evaluate per-investment/per-allocation ROI according to the predefined criteria at regular intervals, potentially with incremental commitment?
So, the specific fund allocation control adjustments being requested here are presumably due to feedback (sensor data and nonlinearity) which may or may not be traceable to an actual funding suggestion allocation task item in the near future, presumably
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No it doesn’t. The government doesn’t get back the principal + interest like they did from the banks. You’re considering secondary effects, which would have also happened with the money loaned to the banks.
I don't have sources that I'm willing to look up, but no, not really. Trickle down economics doesn't work like promised.
Do you even know what trickle down economics is? I’m guessing no and that’s why you didn’t post any sources. Long story short, it’s about taxation policy, which has zero overlap with “loans for banks vs handouts for poor people”.
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Yes, trillions. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/09/covid-relief-bills-us-has-sp...
That is the total amount spent not the amount that citizens took home.
844B stimulus checks, 666B unemployment compensation, 145B other income security, 828B for paycheck protection (money lent to business to pay paychecks - goes to the people nearly as directly as the stimulus, and allows business to stay afloat)....
It doesn't count the tax credits and other things that added to citizens handouts.
A lot of the other categories went also directly to paying citizens. Read some about what happened.
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The countries with the best outcomes, as noted in the article, did not give money to individuals, but to businesses. Direct payments to people let them squander it while businesses failed, leaving people unemployed. UBI feeds consumption, not production, and they are not the same thing. Lots of production is B2B and other aspects far removed from the consumption of the pipeline. Throwing a few trillion directly at pe…
What country has GDP on a better trend compared to pre-pandemic than the US?
US (growth 2.2%) is 119th out of 202 countries, with Timor-Leste at 19.5% at the top.
Lots of big countries also outgrew the US over this period: Vietnam 7%, China 5.9, Ireland 4.9%, Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, UAE, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Latvia, Peru..... It's not like the US was anything special for growth.
Did you think the US was the country with the best growth? Or even near the top?
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2...