If we follow this line of reasoning, were a state can force vendors and citizens located wholly in another state to comply with the first state's sales tax laws, why can they not be forced to comply with another state's gun laws, abortion laws, marriage laws, pollution laws, welfare laws,...?
A few states have a cap on sales tax for cars, so a "more expensive" item pays a lower percentage of sales tax. E.g. "South Carolina collects a 5% state sales tax rate on the purchase of all vehicles. The maximum tax that can be charged is 300 dollars. "
They were never rare as in "not a lot of them" they were rare because they do not tend to be found in concentrated ores. They are common and ubiquitous, but good luck putting enough together to do anything on a commercial scale with them without a crapton of effort and processing.
Don't let your anti-Trump angst sidetrack you from the bigger picture; don't be surprised that Facebook, which makes it's money selling your personal data and relationships, sold to or allowed 3rd parties to collect/mine "big data".
Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
E.g., a 2012 article in Technology Review:
How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters.
by Sasha Issenberg December 19, 2012
"After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
"But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.
"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him.
From Time Magazine:
"In the final weeks before Election Day, a scary statistic emerged from the databases at Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters: half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.
"For a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.
"That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”
"The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 6
10 U.S. Code 246 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard. (b) The classes of the militia are— (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
And state code...
TITLE 38. MILITARY, EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, AND VETERANS AFFAIRS CHAPTER 2. MILITARY AFFAIRS ARTICLE 1. STATE MILITIA GENERALLY PART 1. GENERAL PROVISIONS
O.C.G.A. 38-2-3 (2006)
38-2-3. Division and composition of militia; membership of unorganized militia (a) The militia of the state shall be divided into the organized militia, the state reserve list, the state retired list, and the unorganized militia. (b) The organized militia shall be composed of: (1) An Army National Guard and an Air National Guard which forces, together with an inactive National Guard, when such is authorized by the laws of the United States and regulations issued pursuant thereto, shall comprise the Georgia National Guard; (2) The Georgia Naval Militia whenever such a state force shall be duly organized; and (3) The State Defense Force whenever such a state force shall be duly organized. (c) The state reserve list and the state retired list shall include the persons who are lawfully carried thereon and such persons as may be transferred thereto or placed thereon by the Governor in accordance with this chapter. (d) Subject to such exemptions from military duty as are created by the laws of the United States, the unorganized militia shall consist of all able-bodied male residents of the state between the ages of 17 and 45 who are not serving in any force of the organized militia or who are not on the state reserve list or the state retired list and who are, or who have declared their intention to become, citizens of the United States.
10 U.S. Code 246 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard. (b) The classes of the militia are— (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
One kid I know didn't learn to tie his shoes until he was 14 or 15. And even now it takes huge concentration and effort on his part, like Chief Brody in Jaws. He's not stupid, he just never did anything in his life that required that kind of manipulation. And yep, his handwriting is like a caveman holding a stick. Chopsticks? Hell no, seeing him use a knife and fork looks like Vikings eating in the meadhall.
Yep, what one fool rams through--bypassing Congress--via his pen and his phone, the next fool can undo with his pen and his phone. A wise man once said “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”
If a dealer sells at a gun show, he still has to do background check and process Form 4473.
Private citizen to private citizen sales at a gun show do occur, but most private gun sales are between friends and family and many are not even sales, e.g. grandpa passing down a hunting rifle. Lots of other private sales are criminal-criminal sales, for which no new "universal background check" laws would do anything to prevent.
Plus, it is already a felony to give or sell a weapon to someone you know or should have known was not allowed to possess it.
18 U.S.C. 922 (d):
It shall be unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person— (1) is under indictment for, or has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year; (2) is a fugitive from justice; (3) is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802)); (4) has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution; (5) who, being an alien— (A) is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or (B) except as provided in subsection (y)(2), has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa (as that term is defined in section 101(a)(26) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 (a)(26))); (6) who [2] has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions; (7) who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship; (8) is subject to a court order that restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child, except that this paragraph shall only apply to a court order that— (A) was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had the opportunity to participate; and (B) (i) includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or (ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury; or (9) has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
And also
(1) It shall be unlawful for a person to sell, deliver, or otherwise transfer to a person who the transferor knows or has reasonable cause to believe is a juvenile— (A) a handgun; or (B) ammunition that is suitable for use only in a handgun. (2) It shall be unlawful for any person who is a juvenile to knowingly possess— (A) a handgun; or (B) ammunition that is suitable for use only in a handgun
As an NRA Life Member, I would have no issue with requiring private sales to require background check, as long as there was an exception for family. Also need to consider actual transfers...Oregon's law is written such that if I say "Hold my rifle while I climb over this fence, then hand me both rifles, then you climb over the fence." we would both have committed illegal transfers.
"The ten-year ban was passed by the U.S. Congress on September 13, 1994, following a close 52–48 vote in the Senate, and signed into law by then President Bill Clinton the same day. The ban only applied to weapons manufactured after the date of the ban's enactment, and it expired on September 13, 2004, in accordance with its sunset provision."
Corporate taxes tend to result in downward pressure on wages and to a lesser degree dividends to shareholders.
The above-titled report from the Congressional Budget Office has this to say about the corporate income tax:
A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company, lower wages to its workers, or higher prices that consumers pay for the products the company produces. Understanding the mechanisms through which those tax burdens are transferred is crucial in determining the economic effects of the corporate income tax.
Although economists are far from a consensus about exactly who bears how much of the burden of the corporate income tax, the existing studies highlight the significant types of economic mechanisms as well as the empirical estimates necessary for further quantifying the burdens. CBO's review of the studies yields the following conclusions:
o The short-term burden of the corporate tax probably falls on stockholders or investors in general, but may fall on some more than on others, because not all investments are taxed at the same rate.
o The long-term burden of corporate or dividend taxation is unlikely to rest fully on corporate equity, because it will remain there only if marginal investment is not affected by those taxes. Most economists believe that the corporate tax system has some effect on investment decisions.
o Most evidence from closed-economy, general-equilibrium models suggests that given reasonable parameters, the long-term incidence of the corporate tax falls on capital in general.
o In the context of international capital mobility, the burden of the corporate tax may be shifted onto immobile factors (such as labor or land), but only to the degree that the capital and outputs of different countries can be substituted.
o In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
The same place were DACA should have been done. Hell, even Obama knew that when he said things like "I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true." and "I'm president, I'm not king." and "there are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president."
Unfortunately for Obama, he chained much of his legacy to executive orders and executive policy statements rather than real legislation. Those can get undone.
There is little doubt that whatever Obama accomplished via executive actions can be undone by Trump's executive actions. All these lawsuits on Trump executive actions are going to end up in SCOTUS and lose, simply because he has the authority to make these policy actions (like the travel ban)--exactly the same way that Obama had authority to implement his policies (within proper scope...Obama policies were overturned by SCOTUS several times especially cases of regulatory overreach).
Statewide gerrymandering doesn't impact Presidential elections, because with 2 exceptions, electors are determined by statewide results winner-take-all.
Washington Post article on gerrymandering in California...
"California just proved how cracking down on gerrymandering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be"
For the fourth time in 12 years, not a single one of the state's 50-plus congressional districts switched parties. Just as in 2010, 2008 and 2004, every single seat returned to the party that previously controlled it.
And if you exclude the post-redistricting election of 2012, only two California districts have flipped parties since 2004. That's two out of 314 individual races — 0.6 percent. (And one of the two was a fluke in which the GOP briefly held a blue-leaning seat thanks to two Republicans advancing to the general election in 2012.)
So why do we bring this up now? Well, partly because it wasn't necessarily supposed to be this way again. Before the last round of redistricting, Californians voted for a redistricting commission to take the process out of lawmakers' hands.
But in the end, California might be Exhibit A in the limits of redistricting reform's impact on competition. The state's population is very segmented, and drawing competitive districts isn't easy given the self-sorting that people have done.
California's districts were actually drawn irrespective of competitiveness and partisanship. The commission decided not to even look at such data when drawing its districts, preferring to focus on what it called "communities of interest" and other demographics.
Paul Mitchell, a Democratic redistricting expert based in California, said that means the results since then are no real surprise. “When you draw lines to keep communities of interest together, you wind up creating districts that, by proxy, are partisan — as partisan as if you drew them with party labels — because you’re drawing them with values that are definitive of partisan labels themselves," Mitchell said.
And that's real the takeaway here. Gerrymandering is increasingly viewed as a political ill that must be dealt with. And there is generally considerable public support for redistricting reforms whenever they are on the ballot. But given our increasing tendency to live around people with whom we share a worldview, creating competitive districts often requires its own brand of gerrymandering that doesn't jibe with grouping people who share things in common.
"At a statewide level, Wisconsin is a quintessential battleground where races are often decided by only a few percentage points. Contrast that to the state assembly map the Republicans drew: In 2012, they won 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of the two-party state-wide vote; in 2014, they won 63 seats with only 52% of the state-wide vote."
Democrats seem to self-select for denser urban population centers, which causes even more "natural" districts--e.g., when created by "colorblind" algorithms that just try to create equal-sized (population-wise), contiguous districts--to have Democrat votes way overbalanced so that you get a small number of VERY solid D districts, leaving the rest up for grabs for the rural voters, who tend to vote Republican.
The Atlantic (2013)
Many analysts incorrectly blame this partisan tilt on the extreme gerrymandering of legislative districts for partisan advantage. While gerrymandering contributes a bit to this bias, its impact is marginal -- the big culprit is single-seat, winner-take-all districts themselves, combined with the over-concentration of Democratic voters. These partisan demographics have made it far easier for GOP map drawers in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere not only to pack Democratic voters into fewer districts but also to pick off many white Democratic House members and "racialize" the Democratic Party. In 1991, white Democrats held 81 of 133 House seats in the South, but today that number has dwindled to 18 out of 145.
Again, to get to do the gerrymandering, you pretty much have to control the Statehouse which implies you've already won.
Losers don't get to gerrymander. Winners get to gerrymander once a decade, which does make it easier to win the next time.
Republicans gerrymander for Republicans AFTER winning the various Statehouses. Just like Democrats gerrymander for Democrats AFTER winning Statehouses (or do you not think that the California districts were gerrymandered by Democrats???).
Ummm, to get to do the gerrymandering, you pretty much have to control the Statehouse which implies you've already won. Gerrymandering makes it easier to win next time.
The irony that burns is that Republicans were able to put forth "We're happy to create majority-minority districts to help our state comply with the Voting Rights Act..." knowing full well that the side effect strengthened any Republican hold on the remaining districts.
Remember back when Democrats were happily using racist assumptions that blacks could only get elected from majority-black districts, which they were all too happy to gerrymander into existence?
The current Republican antics are a direct result of those racist efforts...and redrawing the districts will almost certainly dilute those majority-minority districts (again, which are racist constructs in the first place). And lots of folks will not be happy at all about districts drawn by "colorblind" algorithms that are simply trying to map equal numbers of people into right-sized districts, so the algorithms will have to be made "fair". Good luck with that.
The Atlantic (2013)
Acting under the legal strength and moral authority of the Voting Rights Act, the Democrats led the charge to draw so-called "majority-minority districts" -- ones packed so full of minority voters that they usually resulted in electing a minority representative, as intended. The number of minority representatives jumped exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s, with the number of black House members increasing from five to 24 by 1989.
But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. The Democrats had been tripped up by a classic Catch-22, as had minority voters: Even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities.
Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts for GOP advantage, as did the Bush Administration Justice Department prior to the 1991 redistricting, even as GOP activists like now-Chief Justice John Roberts campaigned against the VRA because they opposed any race-based remedies. The tipping point was the 1994 midterm elections, when the GOP captured the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 35 years and Gingrich because speaker. Many experts on both the left and the right, from The Nation's Ari Berman and prominent GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who spearheaded the 1991 effort to maximize the number of majority-minority districts), attribute the Republican success that year to the drawing of majority-minority districts; indeed, African-American membership in the House reached its highest level ever, at 40.
VRA districts undoubtedly played a role in the GOP takeover, but they were not the only factor, since Republicans made big gains that year in lots of places outside the South. But in the hardscrabble battles of the 50-50 nation, any advantage at all was embraced, and prominent Republicans like Ginsberg and Gingrich became the loudest proponents of drawing majority-minority districts.
Virtually every new drug, device, or treatment will eventually have a class-action lawsuit that will cost the company billions. Gotta factor that into the equation too. And the class action may be for minor effects, such as the one currently in vogue for a breast-cancer treatment that caused permanent hair loss or for slightly increased risk of suffering from the thing treatment was supposed to support (increased risk of depression among users of anti-depressant drugs).
Slashdot Mirror
If we follow this line of reasoning, were a state can force vendors and citizens located wholly in another state to comply with the first state's sales tax laws, why can they not be forced to comply with another state's gun laws, abortion laws, marriage laws, pollution laws, welfare laws, ...?
A few states have a cap on sales tax for cars, so a "more expensive" item pays a lower percentage of sales tax. E.g. "South Carolina collects a 5% state sales tax rate on the purchase of all vehicles. The maximum tax that can be charged is 300 dollars. "
Yep, some people should not be allowed to string words together in nonsensical patterns.
They were never rare as in "not a lot of them" they were rare because they do not tend to be found in concentrated ores. They are common and ubiquitous, but good luck putting enough together to do anything on a commercial scale with them without a crapton of effort and processing.
Cleave (as a husband to a wife) and cleave (as in use a cleaver on something).
Not to mention the common abuse of "literally" to mean "figuratively", which is the exact opposite of literally.
Come on Slashdot.
Don't let your anti-Trump angst sidetrack you from the bigger picture; don't be surprised that Facebook, which makes it's money selling your personal data and relationships, sold to or allowed 3rd parties to collect/mine "big data".
Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018
E.g., a 2012 article in Technology Review:
How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters.
by Sasha Issenberg December 19, 2012
"After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
"But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.
"Obama’s campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama’s analysts could look at the Democrats’ vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him.
From Time Magazine:
"In the final weeks before Election Day, a scary statistic emerged from the databases at Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters: half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.
"For a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.
"That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”
"The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 6
10 U.S. Code 246 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
And state code...
TITLE 38. MILITARY, EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, AND VETERANS AFFAIRS
CHAPTER 2. MILITARY AFFAIRS
ARTICLE 1. STATE MILITIA GENERALLY
PART 1. GENERAL PROVISIONS
O.C.G.A. 38-2-3 (2006)
38-2-3. Division and composition of militia; membership of unorganized militia
(a) The militia of the state shall be divided into the organized militia, the state reserve list, the state retired list, and the unorganized militia.
(b) The organized militia shall be composed of:
(1) An Army National Guard and an Air National Guard which forces, together with an inactive National Guard, when such is authorized by the laws of the United States and regulations issued pursuant thereto, shall comprise the Georgia National Guard;
(2) The Georgia Naval Militia whenever such a state force shall be duly organized; and
(3) The State Defense Force whenever such a state force shall be duly organized.
(c) The state reserve list and the state retired list shall include the persons who are lawfully carried thereon and such persons as may be transferred thereto or placed thereon by the Governor in accordance with this chapter.
(d) Subject to such exemptions from military duty as are created by the laws of the United States, the unorganized militia shall consist of all able-bodied male residents of the state between the ages of 17 and 45 who are not serving in any force of the organized militia or who are not on the state reserve list or the state retired list and who are, or who have declared their intention to become, citizens of the United States.
10 U.S. Code 246 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Mommy bought them velcro shoes.
One kid I know didn't learn to tie his shoes until he was 14 or 15. And even now it takes huge concentration and effort on his part, like Chief Brody in Jaws. He's not stupid, he just never did anything in his life that required that kind of manipulation. And yep, his handwriting is like a caveman holding a stick. Chopsticks? Hell no, seeing him use a knife and fork looks like Vikings eating in the meadhall.
Yep, what one fool rams through--bypassing Congress--via his pen and his phone, the next fool can undo with his pen and his phone. A wise man once said “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”
If a dealer sells at a gun show, he still has to do background check and process Form 4473.
Private citizen to private citizen sales at a gun show do occur, but most private gun sales are between friends and family and many are not even sales, e.g. grandpa passing down a hunting rifle. Lots of other private sales are criminal-criminal sales, for which no new "universal background check" laws would do anything to prevent.
Plus, it is already a felony to give or sell a weapon to someone you know or should have known was not allowed to possess it.
18 U.S.C. 922 (d):
It shall be unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person— (1) is under indictment for, or has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year; (2) is a fugitive from justice; (3) is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802)); (4) has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution; (5) who, being an alien— (A) is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or (B) except as provided in subsection (y)(2), has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa (as that term is defined in section 101(a)(26) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 (a)(26))); (6) who [2] has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions; (7) who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship; (8) is subject to a court order that restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child, except that this paragraph shall only apply to a court order that— (A) was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had the opportunity to participate; and (B) (i) includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or (ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury; or (9) has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
And also
(1) It shall be unlawful for a person to sell, deliver, or otherwise transfer to a person who the transferor knows or has reasonable cause to believe is a juvenile—
(A) a handgun; or
(B) ammunition that is suitable for use only in a handgun.
(2) It shall be unlawful for any person who is a juvenile to knowingly possess—
(A) a handgun; or
(B) ammunition that is suitable for use only in a handgun
As an NRA Life Member, I would have no issue with requiring private sales to require background check, as long as there was an exception for family. Also need to consider actual transfers...Oregon's law is written such that if I say "Hold my rifle while I climb over this fence, then hand me both rifles, then you climb over the fence." we would both have committed illegal transfers.
"The ten-year ban was passed by the U.S. Congress on September 13, 1994, following a close 52–48 vote in the Senate, and signed into law by then President Bill Clinton the same day. The ban only applied to weapons manufactured after the date of the ban's enactment, and it expired on September 13, 2004, in accordance with its sunset provision."
Always knew that machines were bigots.
He'd have been shot on sight as soon as they broke the door down.
Corporate taxes tend to result in downward pressure on wages and to a lesser degree dividends to shareholders.
The above-titled report from the Congressional Budget Office has this to say about the corporate income tax:
A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the
corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced
returns to investors in the company, lower wages to its workers, or higher prices that
consumers pay for the products the company produces. Understanding the mechanisms
through which those tax burdens are transferred is crucial in determining the
economic effects of the corporate income tax.
Although economists are far from a consensus about exactly
who bears how much of the burden of the corporate income tax, the existing studies
highlight the significant types of economic mechanisms as well as the empirical
estimates necessary for further quantifying the burdens. CBO's review of the studies
yields the following conclusions:
o The short-term burden of the corporate tax probably falls on
stockholders or investors in general, but may fall on some more than
on others, because not all investments are taxed at the same rate.
o The long-term burden of corporate or dividend taxation is unlikely to
rest fully on corporate equity, because it will remain there only if
marginal investment is not affected by those taxes. Most economists
believe that the corporate tax system has some effect on investment
decisions.
o Most evidence from closed-economy, general-equilibrium models
suggests that given reasonable parameters, the long-term incidence of
the corporate tax falls on capital in general.
o In the context of international capital mobility, the burden of the
corporate tax may be shifted onto immobile factors (such as labor or
land), but only to the degree that the capital and outputs of different
countries can be substituted.
o In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to
labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
The same place were DACA should have been done. Hell, even Obama knew that when he said things like "I just have to continue to say this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true." and "I'm president, I'm not king." and "there are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president."
Unfortunately for Obama, he chained much of his legacy to executive orders and executive policy statements rather than real legislation. Those can get undone.
There is little doubt that whatever Obama accomplished via executive actions can be undone by Trump's executive actions. All these lawsuits on Trump executive actions are going to end up in SCOTUS and lose, simply because he has the authority to make these policy actions (like the travel ban)--exactly the same way that Obama had authority to implement his policies (within proper scope...Obama policies were overturned by SCOTUS several times especially cases of regulatory overreach).
Statewide gerrymandering doesn't impact Presidential elections, because with 2 exceptions, electors are determined by statewide results winner-take-all.
State borders do NOT constitute gerrymandering.
“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won."
And he also said
"I've got a pen, and I've got a phone."
A different wise man once said "all who will take up the sword, will die by the sword".
Washington Post article on gerrymandering in California...
"California just proved how cracking down on gerrymandering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be"
For the fourth time in 12 years, not a single one of the state's 50-plus congressional districts switched parties. Just as in 2010, 2008 and 2004, every single seat returned to the party that previously controlled it.
And if you exclude the post-redistricting election of 2012, only two California districts have flipped parties since 2004. That's two out of 314 individual races — 0.6 percent. (And one of the two was a fluke in which the GOP briefly held a blue-leaning seat thanks to two Republicans advancing to the general election in 2012.)
So why do we bring this up now? Well, partly because it wasn't necessarily supposed to be this way again. Before the last round of redistricting, Californians voted for a redistricting commission to take the process out of lawmakers' hands.
But in the end, California might be Exhibit A in the limits of redistricting reform's impact on competition. The state's population is very segmented, and drawing competitive districts isn't easy given the self-sorting that people have done.
California's districts were actually drawn irrespective of competitiveness and partisanship. The commission decided not to even look at such data when drawing its districts, preferring to focus on what it called "communities of interest" and other demographics.
Paul Mitchell, a Democratic redistricting expert based in California, said that means the results since then are no real surprise. “When you draw lines to keep communities of interest together, you wind up creating districts that, by proxy, are partisan — as partisan as if you drew them with party labels — because you’re drawing them with values that are definitive of partisan labels themselves," Mitchell said.
And that's real the takeaway here. Gerrymandering is increasingly viewed as a political ill that must be dealt with. And there is generally considerable public support for redistricting reforms whenever they are on the ballot. But given our increasing tendency to live around people with whom we share a worldview, creating competitive districts often requires its own brand of gerrymandering that doesn't jibe with grouping people who share things in common.
"At a statewide level, Wisconsin is a quintessential battleground where races are often decided by only a few percentage points. Contrast that to the state assembly map the Republicans drew: In 2012, they won 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of the two-party state-wide vote; in 2014, they won 63 seats with only 52% of the state-wide vote."
Democrats seem to self-select for denser urban population centers, which causes even more "natural" districts--e.g., when created by "colorblind" algorithms that just try to create equal-sized (population-wise), contiguous districts--to have Democrat votes way overbalanced so that you get a small number of VERY solid D districts, leaving the rest up for grabs for the rural voters, who tend to vote Republican.
The Atlantic (2013)
Many analysts incorrectly blame this partisan tilt on the extreme gerrymandering of legislative districts for partisan advantage. While gerrymandering contributes a bit to this bias, its impact is marginal -- the big culprit is single-seat, winner-take-all districts themselves, combined with the over-concentration of Democratic voters. These partisan demographics have made it far easier for GOP map drawers in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere not only to pack Democratic voters into fewer districts but also to pick off many white Democratic House members and "racialize" the Democratic Party. In 1991, white Democrats held 81 of 133 House seats in the South, but today that number has dwindled to 18 out of 145.
Again, to get to do the gerrymandering, you pretty much have to control the Statehouse which implies you've already won.
Losers don't get to gerrymander. Winners get to gerrymander once a decade, which does make it easier to win the next time.
Republicans gerrymander for Republicans AFTER winning the various Statehouses. Just like Democrats gerrymander for Democrats AFTER winning Statehouses (or do you not think that the California districts were gerrymandered by Democrats???).
Ummm, to get to do the gerrymandering, you pretty much have to control the Statehouse which implies you've already won. Gerrymandering makes it easier to win next time.
The irony that burns is that Republicans were able to put forth "We're happy to create majority-minority districts to help our state comply with the Voting Rights Act..." knowing full well that the side effect strengthened any Republican hold on the remaining districts.
Remember back when Democrats were happily using racist assumptions that blacks could only get elected from majority-black districts, which they were all too happy to gerrymander into existence?
The current Republican antics are a direct result of those racist efforts...and redrawing the districts will almost certainly dilute those majority-minority districts (again, which are racist constructs in the first place). And lots of folks will not be happy at all about districts drawn by "colorblind" algorithms that are simply trying to map equal numbers of people into right-sized districts, so the algorithms will have to be made "fair". Good luck with that.
The Atlantic (2013)
Acting under the legal strength and moral authority of the Voting Rights Act, the Democrats led the charge to draw so-called "majority-minority districts" -- ones packed so full of minority voters that they usually resulted in electing a minority representative, as intended. The number of minority representatives jumped exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s, with the number of black House members increasing from five to 24 by 1989.
But just in time for the redistricting in 1990, some enterprising Republicans began noticing a rather curious fact: The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican. The black, Latino, and Asian representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation was coming at the expense of electing fewer Democrats. The Democrats had been tripped up by a classic Catch-22, as had minority voters: Even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities.
Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts for GOP advantage, as did the Bush Administration Justice Department prior to the 1991 redistricting, even as GOP activists like now-Chief Justice John Roberts campaigned against the VRA because they opposed any race-based remedies. The tipping point was the 1994 midterm elections, when the GOP captured the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 35 years and Gingrich because speaker. Many experts on both the left and the right, from The Nation's Ari Berman and prominent GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who spearheaded the 1991 effort to maximize the number of majority-minority districts), attribute the Republican success that year to the drawing of majority-minority districts; indeed, African-American membership in the House reached its highest level ever, at 40.
VRA districts undoubtedly played a role in the GOP takeover, but they were not the only factor, since Republicans made big gains that year in lots of places outside the South. But in the hardscrabble battles of the 50-50 nation, any advantage at all was embraced, and prominent Republicans like Ginsberg and Gingrich became the loudest proponents of drawing majority-minority districts.
Virtually every new drug, device, or treatment will eventually have a class-action lawsuit that will cost the company billions. Gotta factor that into the equation too. And the class action may be for minor effects, such as the one currently in vogue for a breast-cancer treatment that caused permanent hair loss or for slightly increased risk of suffering from the thing treatment was supposed to support (increased risk of depression among users of anti-depressant drugs).