Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Sheds Thousands of Employees After Touting GOP Tax Plan, Giving Out Bonuses (appleinsider.com)
Prior to Christmas, AT&T and DirecTV gave layoff notices to a large number of landline, legacy service, and home installers spanning the country. "It is not clear if the firings relate to the pending AT&T and Time Warner acquisition, or how it specifically relates to the announcement that the company was giving $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 employees in commemoration of the tax overhaul signed just before Christmas," reports Apple Insider. Slashdot reader deadwill69 writes: Just more doublespeak after they announced their bonus program to justify the tax cuts. Seems they really didn't mean it after all. "Technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies, and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we're adjusting our workforce in some of those areas as we continue to align our workforce with the changing needs of the business," AT&T said in a statement to the Chicago Tribune. "Many of the affected employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they'll be offered another job with the company, and we'll work to find other jobs for as many of them as possible." Let's hope they keep that promise. On a bright note: their service really couldn't get much worse?
The expiration of some of the tax cuts is a budget rules gimmick to be able to use reconciliation in 2017. No one expects them to actually expire because there is bipartisan support for renewing them. That already played out once with the Bush tax cuts and Obama. The people reporting otherwise are those trying to come up with partisan talking points. It makes it pretty obvious where you get your opinions from.
The top 1% already pay more federal income taxes than the bottom 90% pay. If you're going to cut Federal income taxes, without a lot of contortions (some of which they did include in this bill for that very purpose), the people who actually pay the majority of taxes are likely to pay less taxes.
In terms of borrowing money, Federal government spending per capita in constant dollars has increased by 4x over the last 60 years. During the same time, federal government income per capita in constant dollars has increased by 3.5x.
The deficit is a result of government spending growing much faster than the increase in revenue has increased. It can't be attributed to less revenue because there is way more tax revenue over time. Saying "we are borrowing money to give it away to the ultra rich" is ridiculous. We're borrowing money to pay for excessive government spending.
P.S. Your personal attacks are completely off the mark and appear to be mostly projection on your part....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I'm looking for a good alternative to Slashdot.
Things haven't always been good around here, but I think they're looking bleaker than they have in a long time....
Basically what I want is a site that:
* Is focused on technology, science, mathematics, engineering, computing, programming, and relevant stuff like that. ...I don't think that Slashdot can be salvaged...
* Allows anonymous commenting, because having to create an account is fucking stupid.
* Has little to no censorship, since the best discussion is free discussion where people don't fear being silenced for expressing their own opinion....
I agree things look bleak on Slashdot and it's probably not salvageable... I would also like an alternative, but I haven't found it yet. However related to your criteria I think Slashdot's anonymous commentary and utter lack of censorship has handed this site over trolls and extreme opinions which have driven away the field experts who used to participate on this site. Slashdot's ideological stand against censorship has allowed the trolls rule, reduced most discussion to nonsense and opened the door to more politically-slanted submissions. There is an area between censorship and enforcing rules to foster discussion/community, which Slashdot has completely failed at.