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So I came across this article about marginal tax rates and small businesses: http://www.slate.com/articles/busin...proposals_.html I have a coworker whose dad owns a fairly large "small" business with I think a couple million in revenue, and I posted the article on Facebook to essentially bait him, because he's said the same crap that article says about higher taxes making him not be profitable yadda yadda. Well he commented with this: quote:While technically accurate regarding marginal tax rates and whatnot, there are a lot of other factors for owners for C-Corps that are not addressed here. For example, while health care premiums that C-Corps pay for employees can be deducted, premiums that the company pays for the _owners_ often have to be counted as _income_ for the owners. There are many more examples of things like this that will very much effect the bottom line of many corporations and require them to drastically cut back. It sounds like bullshit to me. Even if the statement about premiums for owners not being deductible, how the hell can insurance premiums be enough of a burden to cause you to drastically cut back?
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Jul 17, 2012 16:14
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Glimm posted:What's the story on the GM plant closing? I'd hardly call that typical Fox News. It was an OpEd written by a independent contributer. Looking at her site there's not a liberal bias, but looking at her previous employment it sounds like she has a liberal slant (read: she's sane). So yeah that's on Fox News, but I wouldn't say "Fox News sez" when talking about that article.
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Aug 31, 2012 00:26
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I don't have a hard time reconciling wanting taxes to be higher with doing everything I legally can to pay as few taxes as possible, though it's an admittedly unselfish viewpoint. Looking purely as an individual I don't want any taxes. And I also want great services from the government like police, fire, schools, transportation, etc. I can understand someone not wanting free money, but me personally, I would be fine if the government gave me double my normal salary every pay period on top of my regular salary (so instead of $1000 a week I'd get $3000, $1000 from my job and $2000 from the government). But all that being said, I realize that the fewer taxes paid, the fewer services the government can provide. So my self interested means I will do what I can to make my tax bill as small as possible every year. But my altruistic voting self understands the trade off, and will do what I can to make taxation fairer and in the end revenue positive.
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Sep 6, 2012 18:53
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baw posted:T-Bill yields are low. The ~*free market*~ says that US debt is one of the safest places to put your money. Right now real interest rates are negative, so the free market is so confident in US debt that they don't even expect us to pay it all back anymore!
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Sep 8, 2012 01:43
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Golbez posted:I may have fallen under "lost cause" in this case five years ago, but look at me now. Sometimes it just takes a personal hit to knock them into sense. However, I should say, it wasn't constant debate that did it. It was a slow, mostly internal, party unconscious process. Don't get discouraged unless they're a douche about it; as long as they're discussing honestly, reciprocate. If they stop discussing honestly, then the response is to not discuss, rather than dip into it. And also call them on their dishonest bullshit. I think that was also one reason I came out the other side: I always thought of myself as "the libertarian who isn't an rear end in a top hat." Because I've known plenty of rear end in a top hat libertarians, both online and IRL, who have such an air of smug superiority with their positions that it annoyed even me. Maybe you already said it, in which case I missed it, but what changed you? Was there an epiphany of some kind, or a slow but steady stream of logic to refute your held world views?
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Oct 1, 2012 05:29
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I'll admit that I will blindly agree with just about Matthew Yglesias writes, but I have to agree with him that the free market, imperfect as it is, is the best thing we've come up with yet for allocating scarce resources. No matter what, not everybody is going to be able to get everything they want. If we're so concerned about poor people, we should just be cutting them checks (a pretty common theme of his). E: Pretend I didn't read the last few posts before I posted, because I clicked post and then left for an hour and came back. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Oct 31, 2012 |
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Oct 31, 2012 23:16
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I think he's saying that maybe you only really need 1 pack of batteries, but you're going to buy 10 instead to be safe. But if batteries were a lot more expensive you might stop and think "How many batteries do I really need?" Rationing does that in theory, but then that could just create a black market of batteries. Another one of his common themes is that yeah, specifically legislating something (like, rationing in this case) could have the expected benefit, but only if it's followed 100%, and it never is, so you just distort the market in a different way. For all the imperfections of the free market, it's still the best way to allocate resources (and I say this as a far left liberal). E: WoodrowSkillson posted:It also ignores the cost of inventory. The vendor has to pay taxes on that, and high dollar items like the oft mentioned generators or snowblowers take up a lot of space in a back room. You also have an opportunity cost there of space that can be used by inventory that will sell for sure given normal demand conditions. I'm not sure how this argument is anything other than trying to legislate what products stores do or do not carry. Why do we care what someone decides to stock or not stock? FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Nov 1, 2012 |
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Oct 31, 2012 23:56
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By no means is capitalism perfect, but I'm not sure what else to do here, practically. Putting a price ceiling is just going to create a black market and have people flaunt the law anyway. Should we have some kind of government rationing program in place to allocate these scarce resources? Something else? If the free market is good enough 51 weeks of the year at allocating resources, why isn't it good for a week in a disaster as well? I don't think having more money leaves you any more entitled to emergency supplies, but I just don't know other way there is to do it. Modifying the words of Winston Churchill, "It has been said that [strike]democracy[/strike] capitalism is the worst form of [strike]government[/strike] resource allocation except all the others that have been tried. Sir Winston Churchill British politician
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Nov 1, 2012 00:23
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Helsing posted:What do you even think a "free market" is, in this context?[quote] No no no holy poo poo no. WoodrowSkillson talked about reasons why a store might or might not stock snow blowers, implying that we should make it illegal to price gouge because then a store might (might) stock a ton of snow blowers that would take up space that could be used for other goods the store might sell, which to me sounds like legislating inventory levels. If a store wants to open in Florida selling nothing but snow blowers at $10,000 a pop, I have no problem with that. If that store wants to sell lovely snow blowers that will explode and hurt people, I have a problem with that. Dictating the quality and safety of goods sold is different from dictating what can be sold.
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Nov 1, 2012 00:27
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Holy poo poo, there's a lot of (wrong) words about how I hate poor people. I'd like to thank Cahal for at least keeping an open mind and not immediatly assuming that I'm a shithead. First, I think every poster here has put more effort into their response to this piece than Matt did writing it. The specific problem he is talking about is people over buying supplies, causing shortages. Raising prices would prevent people from over buying, but it will probably price some people out of the market. Another option (which he doesn't discuss) is rationing. But in that case people who had a legitimate need for extra supplies would be prevented from getting what they need, and be forced to turn to a black market. Now in this case the socially optimal outcome is everybody has what they need to weather the storm, and I'm not sure which of those two options is the best. Allowing merchants to charge whatever they want at least has the benefit of being 100% enforceable, while requiring rationing is not. However, I don't think leaving prices flat and doing nothing else gets anywhere near to an optimal outcome for anybody. I will also say that in general, I think the concepts of supply and demand do a better job of allocating resources than some kind of command economy. In normal cases, if the demand for batteries goes up, we can order more batteries and the factories can make more batteries. In this case the supply is almost completely inelastic, and the demand is mostly inelastic, we end up with a problem. I also don't know how much of a widespread problem price gouging is in these kinds of situations, or how many people are getting convicted vs committing it, and how much money is being fined in relation to the amount of money made by gouging. I also tend to assume that human beings are terrible people and will do whatever they can to satisfy their own needs first without considering those of others, but maybe there's a bit more humanity in situations like this.
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Nov 1, 2012 02:01
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If you assume that people will be terrible if it benefits them, then (legally) forbidding large price increase while doing nothing about rationing doesn't really help anybody (assuming people have no humanity and don't implement rationing on their own). But if stores are implementing purchase limits on their own then that's good, and preferable. But from a pure supply/demand standpoint, there's no reason to voluntarily keep prices low or ration.
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Nov 1, 2012 03:34
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rscott posted:FISHMANPET, when your interests are serving supply/demand over the interests of literal human beings, you probably should re-evaluate your priorities. God damnit stop putting these words in my mouth. First, this is all an academic exercise, and unless there's a huge problem with profiteering and people not getting needed supplies, there's no reason to change anything. There will always be people who break the law, and there will always be people who get away with it, and there will usually be people for, whatever reason, can't get what they need. Second, if you assume that human beings are terrible monsters and will only look out for themselves (as I often do), then there's no motive to ensure optimal distribution, only a motive to maximize personal gain (by raising prices as high as "the market" can stand). Now if there's any human compassion, a store owner can say "Hey, I'm gonna ration these supplies on my own, because that's the best thing to do for humanity." He has no market motivation to do that. Likewise, if there was a law about rationing, could it even be enforced during the disaster, and not merely punished after the fact? But again, it seems like there is some human compassion in play here, and the big arm of the government doesn't need to get involved any more than it is already.
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Nov 1, 2012 15:59
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I tried to dig through Wikipedia and there isn't a clear statement as to how the federal government was funded before the sixteenth amendment. However, there were plenty of income taxes before the sixteenth amendment was ratified in 1913 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History has some examples). Funny they should mention wars, income taxes were levied to pay for the War of 1812 and the Civil War. And I'm sure you wouldn't get any traction on the issue, but I'm not sure why taxing income is extortion whereas taxing property or imports transactions is totally acceptable? Americans have never kept 100% of their money, it's just a play on words to say otherwise, and it makes it look like somehow the government levied no taxes until 1913.
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Apr 8, 2013 00:26
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KernelSlanders posted:Money has no utility value except perhaps as a medium for facilitating trade. It's not like if that money weren't in a vault people could eat it or live in it. Yes, and when it's locked away in a vault it's not facilitating any trade. It's not giving anybody a job that will pay a person money that they can then use to buy food and a place to live. They've taken money out of the economy and are just sitting on it, not helping anybody (except maybe Swiss bankers?)
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Jun 4, 2013 22:04
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It's not like you can point at any one thing and say "Yup, this killed Detroit" but a huge problem right now is that they have a population of 700k supporting the pensions of enough government employees to support a city over twice that size. Also a city physically big enough to hold 1.5 million people can't be reasonably maintained with half that population. It's not as simple as someone spending the city into the ground. As an Urbanist I'd say that the suburbanization of Detroit has played a big part in ruining Detroit. Suburban areas aren't very resilient whereas more urban areas are, and most of Detroit is suburban. And then there's white flight, lot's of surrounding suburbs are still affluent and just fine financially, and they wouldn't exist without Detroit either, so they can essentially have their cake and eat it too. But someone that doesn't look at everything through an urbanist bent like I do is going to see something different as a major cause, and I don't think either one of us would be wrong. I've never seen that documentary, but from the looks of it, it doesn't have any kind of political bent. So your friend just saw a movie about how bad Detroit is, and jumped straight to blaming liberals.
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Aug 22, 2013 18:33
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CommieGIR posted:Me and this guy were arguing about 'Free Market' and how its utter bullshit, and this was his response when I pointed out things like Standard Oil He seems to mostly be concerned with issues of liability. I know I wouldn't want to live in a world you could sue everybody in a car factory if the brakes failed or something like that.
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Aug 22, 2013 22:54
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I have to say I'm amazed when people come in here looking for help with Facebook arguments with their friends and then the "friends" are posting nonsense like that. Why are these people your friends? For me personally, so many of my ideas on politics and morals heavily define who I am as a person, so in general I find myself not really wanting to spend time with people that are off the deep end.
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Aug 22, 2013 23:28
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I suppose I've moved around enough as a child that I don't have any friends I've known most of my life. On the other hand, I've only once changed someone's mind with internet arguing.
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Aug 22, 2013 23:48
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I think there's some merit to the idea of holding the leaders of banks and such accountable for the crap they pulled over the last few years, but getting rid of the legal fiction of corporations isn't the method I would pursue for that goal.
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Aug 23, 2013 17:37
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Is there anything I can read on how to be a better internet arguer? I'm in a Facebook group arguing about a local development and my tone seems to be putting a lot of people off (though they're also mostly crazy and don't listen to reason anyway). But I'd at least like to improve my tone. The link in the OP has been archived, could anyone pull that out and repost it, or link to something else of use?
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Aug 29, 2013 17:37
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Here's the infographic, and a few words talking about why it's stupid: http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/08/290530/poor-people-own-appliances-because-theyre-cheap/ Basically, a lot of those appliances save money. A fridge lets you buy groceries every once and a while and take advantage of sales, whereas without groceries you'd have to go to the store a lot more and probably end up spending more for the same products. So yeah, a fridge will feed you for 8 days, but only if you had a fridge to store the groceries you bought. E: As for a rebuttal, yes, those are all true facts. The problem is when someone comes and says "look they're not that poor they actually have all these assets." And also not having those assets makes things more expensive. And I don't care if a poor person has a TV, they're a human being, not mindless automatons that work 16 hours a day then fall asleep on the factory floor only to get up 8 hours later and start it all over again. They'll go crazy without some kind of entertainment.
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Sep 12, 2013 17:46
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Why is it a bad idea for the Democrats to "negotiate" with the Republicanss? I had an argument with a coworker and his point was that they're all politicians they should figure it out and he wouldn't accept any reasoning that it's the Republicans that need to figure their poo poo out, nor could he understand why "negotiating" on whether or not the government should run and pay it's bills wasn't negotiating at all.
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Oct 9, 2013 22:44
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I don't see anything on the IWW site, but here's an article that explains what the strikers are looking for: http://nextcity.org/theworks/entry/bart-strike-about-work-rules-more-so-than-wages-and-benefits This is the important bit: quote:Both sides were inching closer on the main economic issues that had separated them for more than six months but were still about 4 percent apart on total wage increases. And unions said they were fed up after management tried to impose new work rules to limit overtime and other costs. […] It's mostly about work rules, not pay.
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Oct 19, 2013 02:29
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Welp, in response to my saying that we elect leaders to make tough decisions, not to pander to voters, I was met with... a link to the US Constitution.
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Feb 18, 2014 04:59
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It's a Facebook group that claims to be neutral on a particular topic (development, specifically, they only support "good" development) but in reality it's a woman mad that a new apartment building is going to be built in the lot behind her coop.
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Feb 18, 2014 06:12
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There's some research that says that "gentrification" (I put it in quotes because it's a loaded word with no definite meeting) actually benefits existing residents: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/11/09/number-of-the-week-the-benefits-of-gentrification/ And if we don't want to force people out, just build enough housing so the new people can come in without displacing anybody!
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Mar 16, 2014 16:23
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I think the point Femur is making is that in theory, if people are required to vote and they are unable to, the barriers to easy voting will be better exposed and popular opinion will force the government to make it easier to vote. Install Windows is saying that we should make it easier to vote before we require people to vote. I feel like you guys are kind of talking past each other.
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May 17, 2014 03:51
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Speaking as someone who works at a public university, I think there are ways that it could be run more like a "business," but that doesn't mean it needs to make a financial product. I can't speak for the education side, but on the administration side (and specifically IT, where I work) there's not always a lot of thought about delivering value to the "business" (which in this case is research and education). It leads to a lot of shiftlessness as far as trying to figure out what direction my group should be taking. I also see a lot of process meant to protect money end up costing far more money to implement than they actually save (I've heard reports of a $12 parking reimbursement costing $50+ in staff time, though I'm sure that happens in private companies too). I've seen departments fight resulting in wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars to move a computer lab down the hall (though again, I'm sure this kind of infighting happens in private corporations too). I think there is room to approach it more like a business, but in a more general way. Not in a "raising the stock price to inflate my bonus" business way (raising tuition, slashing costs) but in a more long term holistic sense. Basically make sure that the money being spent is being spent in a way that generates returns (cost savings, increased revenue, increased quality of education or research, etc etc). But I'm just a guy talking out of his rear end.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:38
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I got a semi-related question, are there any examples of people running a business as a "market"? I mean every single mega-corporation out there, even ones with profits on the order of smaller countries and staff that could fill a good-sized city behaves like a command economy internally and most do so incredibly successfully, even when they're massive, unwieldy and horribly bogged down with bureaucratic hierarchies. I feel like I've heard of a case where a company tried this and it was just abysmal, with internal divisions fighting each other over every last scrap, and basically just went to war with itself internally.
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Oct 31, 2014 03:24
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So, I end up arguing about housing costs in quite a few circles. I come across a good number of people who basically want to abolish the housing market. To be honest, their agenda is selfish, as they own houses in the area so it's a lot of "gently caress you got mine" ladder pulling. They're mad that people want to live in the neighborhood, and they're mad that the market is reacting to that by people wanting to build apartment buildings, or people buying distressed properties and fixing them up to rent. I'm sure it won't be long before they're just mad at anybody that tries to even buy. So, in general, if the goal is to transition to some non-capitalism, non-market system, does it make more sense to try to advocate for that incrementally, or for some great revolutionary upheaval (even if it means screwing people in the interim)? I may be trying to ascribe more reason to a group of people, that are, at this point, basically insane, than they are actually capable of.
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Nov 2, 2014 08:36
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I may be ascribing more reason to the group than they're actually capable of. Their particular specific complaint is basically as followed: There's a show on DIY called Renovate to Rent, which follow a pair of investors that buy houses, renovate them, and rent them out. They work in Minneapolis, where all this is happening. However, not many episodes of homes in this neighborhood are actually aired, which is part of the conspiracy. This group represent a particular neighborhood that has felt "threatened" since the 70s. They did an "expose" this week on this pair of investors and how they own around 20 properties in this neighborhood. Now this is where it strays into fantasy, but despite nearly none of these properties being actually adjacent to each other, they're concerned that these 20 or so properties (out of at least 1000?) means that any day now they're gonna flatten the whole neighborhood and put up apartment buildings (they hate apartments, and If for some reason you want to read about the crazies here in Minneapolis, MN, here's their post on this week's "Expose:" https://www.facebook.com/notes/541182876015877/ And here's a map of the properties owned by the evil investors: https://www.facebook.com/MplsRRDC/photos/a.413386158795550.1073741828.413339398800226/539471342853697/?type=1&theater
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Nov 2, 2014 18:35
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You're not supposed to cite Wikipedia either, as its treated like an Encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not a primary source, but it (should) cite primary sources that ou can use.
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Dec 8, 2014 21:10
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E: Whoops, totally wrong thread
FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 22:53
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I'm not any kind of Biblical scholar or anything, but I don't think Jesus Christ "founded" Christianity, it was founded by his disciples later on, you know, the ones that wrote everything down.
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Dec 23, 2014 03:52
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I have totally been offered food stamps while grocery shopping once. I don't remember the details he wanted to buy me $X amount of food for me and in exchange I would give him some amount less than $X in real cash. I didn't take him up on the offer but I later saw him go through the line with somebody else and pay for their food. I've literally only seen it once and I've been shopping in the low income part of town for like 8 years now. So I'm not going to extrapolate much from that other than to say I don't think it happens very often, but it does happen. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Mar 26, 2015 02:10
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Jesus. The more things the change, the more they stay exactly the loving same.
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Apr 30, 2015 05:27
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So I'm a member on a local forum slash actual meatspace community. There's a particular poster there who I have trouble dealing with. I know he's a real person as people have met him, he actually believes the arguments he makes and positions he holds, he's not a troll, etc etc. He's a grown man with a wife and child, but he seems to approach the world with the wide-eyed wonder of a child. He takes everything that everybody says at 100% face value, which is a problem when often the issues we discuss involve the sincerity of the statements made by people in the public eye. He has absolutely no grasp of nuance. As an example, we were having a discussion about housing prices in NYC and preventing the uber rich from buying apartments and leaving them empty. Basically, I made the point that banning something like that is silly because the rich are gonna figure out a way to do what they want, and we should just tax "it" somehow (and I'm not posting this because of the content, I'm just trying to give you an idea of his reactions to things). FISHMANPET posted:I mean, short of full communism I'm just not sure there's anything you can actually do to keep the rich from getting what they want. FISHMANPET posted:I think trying to put hard limits in place via laws often just ends up shifting things around. The free market is smarter and more nimble than laws are. Look at CAFE standards and how it changed the cars that were built. The letter of the law was followed but the spirit was not. The free market decided that working around the rules was more profitable than just complying with the spirit of the law. If instead of complex CAFE standards, gas was just taxed more heavily, there may have been a different shift in vehicle production towards more fuel efficient vehicles, rather than just inventing vehicles to fit into a category that had less stringent standards. quote:Bullshit. First, the "free market" doesn't think and second, the free market isn't omnipotent and isn't God. The worship of the "free market" is what got us into the mess we're in. FISHMANPET posted:Realizing that people respond to incentives doesn't mean worship of the free market, it's just a realistic evaluation of how people interact with rules and regulations around them. quote:The "free market" is not "smarter" than laws because neither one thinks! So a few things. He can't figure out that when someone says "the free market" or "the government" or "rules and regulations" that of course these abstract entities aren't actual people, but they are helmed by real people. And I mentioned how CAFE standards caused the rise of "small trucks" especially SUVs and minivans as a side effect of trying to regulate instead of tax, and he somehow took that as me endorsing the rise of the minivan. If you look at the spectrum of American politics, him and I are basically at identical points at the far left. Where we differ is basically quibbling. In this case he thinks we should explicitly outlaw Pied-à-terres for the uber rich, and I think that while that's a desirable outcome, we're way better off just taxing the bad thing rather than outright banning it. Anyway I ended with this and he never responded to it: FISHMANPET posted:I agree that I'd rather have the station wagons. But because CAFE standards are they way they are, car makers build minivans instead of station wagons. That's the outcome of the laws setting hard limits. Maybe we'd have different outcomes if we just applied gas taxes instead. I don't know if any of this even makes any sense to anyone that hasn't read each of our thousands of posts on the particular forum, but I just don't know how to interact with this guy.
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May 1, 2015 06:56
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Buried alive posted:I..can't make heads or tails of what you two are actually arguing about. I mean, your stance seems to be something like "Regulation is ineffective because the market can work around it," with 'the market' being used as a loose substitute for private actors with lots of resources. Since regulation is ineffective, tax the hell out of things instead. Yeah, basically my stance was tax it to the point where either NYC is no longer a good place for the global elite to park their capital (the premise being that the global elite are buying expensive units and leaving them empty). That's not good for housing affordability because we should build units that people live in (and the poor aren't going to live these units but the global elite are displacing local 100 millionaires who now are buying slightly less nice apartments displacing regular millionaires etc etc). His stance was just make it illegal to buy an apartment and not live in it, which I said is reaaaaalllllly difficult to enforce. A tax would be easier to implement (kick up the property taxes to insane rates if the value is absolute $50 million or whatever) and it either makes these uber units no longer be profitable so they aren't built and bought by the global elite, or it still makes financial sense to build and buy them, but the city gets a huge pile of money for affordable housing. There was quite a bit I cut out of mine and also other people chiming in. And I made the analogy of CAFE standards having consequences that were unintended. The goal was to lower emissions but it ended up in many ways creating a market for larger vehicles that are less fuel efficient. I think a smarter move would have been higher fuel taxes, perhaps even setting a price floor on gas, and let the market react to that. But anyway I feel pretty sound on my argument there. My problem is with him specifically. And that sounds rude, but there's a group of like 10ish of us that know each other in real life and some of us have actually met this guy but we've basically all came to the conclusion that he's... off somehow. Which I guess is what I was trying to express. Like I said, it's hard to convey without dumping the thousands of posts of him and other people engaging with him. But I always come back to my analogy about losing station wagons, and all I can think is "He read all that, and somehow he got out of it that I'm glad there aren't station wagons anymore?" He just aproaches everything with this incredible naievete, and has absolutely no ability to grasp nuance or subtlty or be able to read between the lines or anything. He takes everything you say at absolute face value. Most discussions involve people talking past each other because he can't really properly engage with anyone. He has a wife and kids, a good engineering job, is active in the community (and this can all be independently verified), etc etc. He is for all intents and purposes a fully functional adult. Yet he seems to have a very poor grasp on communication. Mostly I'm here to vent, but also I'm hoping there's some small chance that there's some DSM listed condition called bad-internet-debater-itis, and/or some help engaging with him.
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May 2, 2015 03:56
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I watched about... a third of that? I mean what's the point? To be honest who cares if the symbol of the movement (hands up don't shoot) actually happened. Is it trying to make some kind of #AllLivesMatter point by saying police are awful in general instead of being awful to minorities specifically? Because that's a lovely point either way, "oh no it's fine guys cops are shitheads to EVERYONE not just black people you can go home now."
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May 6, 2015 05:07
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Isn't social security easier with a growing population? In theory you'd always have proportionally more workers paying in than retirees taking out.
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May 24, 2015 18:18
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