As I posted elsewhere: ONE Circuit ruled it illegal. Two others have come to different conclusions (sometimes and always legal). Hence the trip to the SC.
I don't know that 602 is figuring as prominently in this as you think. Three Circuit Courts are split on the issue: one said it's always illegal, another said it's sometimes legal, and a third said it's always legal. If 602 was as clear cut as you propose we wouldn't have this kind of divergence.
I'd like to understand why you think it is illegal. According to the fine article, this was a legally produced book, legally purchased abroad, brought back to the US, and then sold. By default, you'd think the first sale doctrine would apply and therefore the subsequent sale is also legal. As it turns out though, there's disagreement on application of first sale in the Circuit Courts and hence the trip to the USSC. More details are available here:
"There is now a three-way split among the Circuit Courts: the Second Circuit declaring that foreign-made works can never be resold in the U.S. without the copyright owner’s consent, the Ninth Circuit ruling that such a foreign-made product sometimes can be sold in the U.S. without permission, but only after the owner has approved an earlier sale inside the U.S., and the Third Circuit deciding that such a product can always be re-sold without permission, so long as the copyright owner had authorized the first sale that occurred overseas."
And if that's the case then I would imagine that the doctrine of first sale would apply. Since it made it to the USSC though there must be some technicality not covered in the fine article.
And you wonder why climate change advocates are losing the argument? To someone who's not paying attention (and that's nearly everyone) their whole argument looks fishy:
1) It's warming, it's warming, it's warming! Well, not right now because of something you've probably never heard of called La Nina, but trust us, that's just obscuring the real change.
2) The tree ring data shows warming; look at the tree rings! Only not recent ones. Those are screwed up for some reason (which is also probably YOUR fault; stupid humans) so we're going to use other data instead.
There are good reasons for both of those changes but for people who aren't investing a lot of cycles thinking about this topic, the whole thing starts to smell funny. Then you add in the constant table pounding doomsday fetish predictions and the condescending efforts to shut down debate on the entire topic by swinging the "global consensus" club and climate change advocates really do look like unscientific kooks.
Worse for advocates of climate change, these people who aren't paying attention still have a pretty good instinctive grasp on a basic fact that seems to elude the climate change community: even if you're right nothing you're suggesting has a realistic chance of fixing the problem in the real world. China and India aren't going to risk immediate starvation and revolution on the off-chance that something bad might happen to them at some undefined date in the future.
It's this fundamental disconnect from reality, this rabid foaming-at-the-mouth howling-at-the-moon irrationality, this complete inability to accept that no matter how good the science is and how right you are, you're not proposing solutions that will work in the real world that turns people away from an already poorly presented message.
No, no, no. We'd immediately implement an exemption for people making less than 800% of the poverty level and pass an income tax credit for almost all of the rest. Thankfully the tax prep industry is tightly coupled with Washington, so you know the next version of TaxCut or TurboTax will take this into consideration.
We'll need to implement a National ID you will be required to present at the gas station so it can link to a central database to approve each purchase. We'll contract that out to private industry who will, of course, need to take just a small percentage of the transaction to cover their expenses. No point in having state issued ID's anymore so we'll just ban them.
Naturally we'll need a lot of new laws and regulations to implement this new tax. Because $5/gal tax is going to inspire a bunch of black market activity we'll have to establish a new Department of Energy Security (DES) . The DES will have to have extreme police powers to conduct their newly established war on un-taxed gas smugglers which will include para-military forces making no-knock raids on private residences. For the children; y'know.
In the end, we'll have a massive new Federal bureaucracy with a well established constituency of special interests. They'll, of course, be hiring a lot of lobbyists and every time the budget comes up for renewal we'll have a parade of our 'elected' officials telling us we can't possibly cut funding (read: give smaller increases) to the new bureaucracy or some unspecified "THEY" will win.
Since we're excluding almost everyone from the tax and we've got a new bureaucracy to pay for, it turns out we're not getting quite as much revenue as we'd like and the only option at that point will be to nationalize the entire petrochemical industry. Don't worry though, we'll pay for it all by raising the gas tax and cutting waste and fraud.
As a side note: if you ever get a chance to visit this exhibit, it is VERY impressive. It's hard not to stand next to this rocket and not be awed by the imagination required to conceive of, let alone build, this engineering marvel.
Technically the broken window fallacy doesn't apply. The BWF requires you break a previously unbroken window for the specific purpose of paying someone to fix it. It's a fallacy, in part, because it ignores the fact that you're destroying something of value at the same time you're creating all this theoretical economic benefit.
Nothing of value was destroyed in this case with the intention of creating economic activity in the recovery/salvage operation. (The loss of the booster is a sunk cost of the launch; I would imagine no recovery was ever expected.) Now, you could argue spending money to recover the booster not the most efficient way to generate economic benefit (and I'd agree) but it's not really a case of BWF.
The more interesting question to me is: what does the Law of the Sea have to say about ownership of the wreck? If it's a wreck in international waters, I would have assumed the person to salvage it would be the owner.
I see the same problems in the comment system over at the WSJ. You'd think this would be an audience with a lot of common ground and a disproportionate number of highly educated people. Never-the-less, the comments posted there are usually worthless, even if you limit it to just the registered users.
Moderation matters. I rarely find a good discussion group in it's absence.
Lifehacker's most useful comments are those from alert readers trying to prevent ER visits caused by the penny-pinching batshit crazy advice that Lifehacker serves up as "news." I finally stopped going there when someone posted an article on how to suspend an Ikea bookshelf over a staircase using screws attached to the drywall! Thankfully if one bothered to read the comments they were probably spared an entry in the Darwin Awards.
I would also strongly recommend Nothing to Envy. It's a quick read and gives some pretty chilling insights into how the North Korean regime operates. It is not a pretty picture; think 1984 and you won't be far off.
The cases you cite don't seem to support your position:
From Ableman v. Booth, 62 US 506 - Supreme Court 1859: "In the first case, it provides that `this Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land, and obligatory upon the judges in every State.'... The sovereignty to be created was to be limited in its powers of legislation, and if it passed a law not authorized by its enumerated powers, it was not to be regarded as the supreme law of the land, nor were the State judges bound to carry it into execution." (emphasis mine)
Having not read the case in its entirety it seems like a question about the jurisdiction of the federal bench, not a refutation of the tenth amendment or the idea of limited and enumerated powers. Indeed, the section I quoted above explicitly acknowledges the validity of the tenth amendment and confirms that the States are not bound by laws passed in excess of Congress' enumerated powers.
Edgar v. Mite Corp., 457 US 624 - Supreme Court 1982 doesn't help you out either; Edgar appears finds that the Illinois act in question was preempted by a valid Federal law, the Williams Act, because it "upset the careful balance struck by Congress and which therefore stand as obstacles to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress." The Court found the Act within Congress' enumerated powers, that the Illinois law frustrated the intentions of that Act, and that as a result the Supremacy Clause allowed for preemption. Nor do the dissenting opinions help; the dissents center around the question of if the dispute was moot or not.
Finally, your last link is an 11th Amendment dispute and I'm having difficulty seeing how it applies to what I believe the original poster believes is a 10th Amendment question.
If you want to talk constitutional theory then you've got to take the tenth amendment into consideration:
Amendment X "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The US government is supposed to be a government of limited and enumerated powers and the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, clause 2) is supposed to be confined to conflicts with its specifically enumerated powers.
That's the theory of course. The reality, as we well know, is much different. 200 years of stretching the Elastic Clause and the Commerce Clause have largely eviscerated the idea and reality of state sovereignty. One of the reasons that people get so worked up about PPACA (ObamaCare) is the way the Commerce Clause is being used to compel the purchase of insurance; there's little the Federal government can't do if they're allowed to use the Commerce Clause that way.
I think we may be imagining two different scenarios.
First, I was operating with the understanding that in any given tax period you are only liable for the unrealized gain since the last tax period.
Secondly, I was talking about buying and then selling a particular security/asset and I was assuming away (for simplicity's sake) dividends and re-investments thereof and any tax advantaged accounts like a defined contribution plan.
If that's the case, then the inefficiencies of administering multiple tax collection events are going to reduce the actual revenue take, not increase it.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
The limits on capital losses would have to be re-evaluated as well. If I recall correctly, capital losses are currently capped at $3K per year (in the US) although you can carry those forward. Capital gains have no such limit on taxation. At $3K a year, a sufficiently large loss can't be realistically written off in anyone's expected life-span. I'm not sure if capital gains on a primary residence are impacted by this rule though or if it only applies to stocks, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
"So when the pregnant black crack addicted ho shoes up at your Church..."
Well at least she's no longer barefoot and pregnant...
As I posted elsewhere: ONE Circuit ruled it illegal. Two others have come to different conclusions (sometimes and always legal). Hence the trip to the SC.
I don't know that 602 is figuring as prominently in this as you think. Three Circuit Courts are split on the issue: one said it's always illegal, another said it's sometimes legal, and a third said it's always legal. If 602 was as clear cut as you propose we wouldn't have this kind of divergence.
"I understand that it is illegal..."
I'd like to understand why you think it is illegal. According to the fine article, this was a legally produced book, legally purchased abroad, brought back to the US, and then sold. By default, you'd think the first sale doctrine would apply and therefore the subsequent sale is also legal. As it turns out though, there's disagreement on application of first sale in the Circuit Courts and hence the trip to the USSC. More details are available here:
Lyle Denniston @ SCOTUSblog
Here's the key bit:
"There is now a three-way split among the Circuit Courts: the Second Circuit declaring that foreign-made works can never be resold in the U.S. without the copyright owner’s consent, the Ninth Circuit ruling that such a foreign-made product sometimes can be sold in the U.S. without permission, but only after the owner has approved an earlier sale inside the U.S., and the Third Circuit deciding that such a product can always be re-sold without permission, so long as the copyright owner had authorized the first sale that occurred overseas."
And if that's the case then I would imagine that the doctrine of first sale would apply. Since it made it to the USSC though there must be some technicality not covered in the fine article.
Darn it! I came here for the Xzibit jokes and all I got was Goldschläger references. I'm very disappointed /.
And you wonder why climate change advocates are losing the argument? To someone who's not paying attention (and that's nearly everyone) their whole argument looks fishy:
1) It's warming, it's warming, it's warming! Well, not right now because of something you've probably never heard of called La Nina, but trust us, that's just obscuring the real change.
2) The tree ring data shows warming; look at the tree rings! Only not recent ones. Those are screwed up for some reason (which is also probably YOUR fault; stupid humans) so we're going to use other data instead.
There are good reasons for both of those changes but for people who aren't investing a lot of cycles thinking about this topic, the whole thing starts to smell funny. Then you add in the constant table pounding doomsday fetish predictions and the condescending efforts to shut down debate on the entire topic by swinging the "global consensus" club and climate change advocates really do look like unscientific kooks.
Worse for advocates of climate change, these people who aren't paying attention still have a pretty good instinctive grasp on a basic fact that seems to elude the climate change community: even if you're right nothing you're suggesting has a realistic chance of fixing the problem in the real world. China and India aren't going to risk immediate starvation and revolution on the off-chance that something bad might happen to them at some undefined date in the future.
It's this fundamental disconnect from reality, this rabid foaming-at-the-mouth howling-at-the-moon irrationality, this complete inability to accept that no matter how good the science is and how right you are, you're not proposing solutions that will work in the real world that turns people away from an already poorly presented message.
You're on my 'Foes' list but I agree with your thinking on this topic: there is no difference between RINObama and George 'Obama' Bush the Third.
No, no, no. We'd immediately implement an exemption for people making less than 800% of the poverty level and pass an income tax credit for almost all of the rest. Thankfully the tax prep industry is tightly coupled with Washington, so you know the next version of TaxCut or TurboTax will take this into consideration.
We'll need to implement a National ID you will be required to present at the gas station so it can link to a central database to approve each purchase. We'll contract that out to private industry who will, of course, need to take just a small percentage of the transaction to cover their expenses. No point in having state issued ID's anymore so we'll just ban them.
Naturally we'll need a lot of new laws and regulations to implement this new tax. Because $5/gal tax is going to inspire a bunch of black market activity we'll have to establish a new Department of Energy Security (DES) . The DES will have to have extreme police powers to conduct their newly established war on un-taxed gas smugglers which will include para-military forces making no-knock raids on private residences. For the children; y'know.
In the end, we'll have a massive new Federal bureaucracy with a well established constituency of special interests. They'll, of course, be hiring a lot of lobbyists and every time the budget comes up for renewal we'll have a parade of our 'elected' officials telling us we can't possibly cut funding (read: give smaller increases) to the new bureaucracy or some unspecified "THEY" will win.
Since we're excluding almost everyone from the tax and we've got a new bureaucracy to pay for, it turns out we're not getting quite as much revenue as we'd like and the only option at that point will be to nationalize the entire petrochemical industry. Don't worry though, we'll pay for it all by raising the gas tax and cutting waste and fraud.
Oh, man! I wasted all my mod points before I got to this comment! +1 Funny!
As a side note: if you ever get a chance to visit this exhibit, it is VERY impressive. It's hard not to stand next to this rocket and not be awed by the imagination required to conceive of, let alone build, this engineering marvel.
Technically the broken window fallacy doesn't apply. The BWF requires you break a previously unbroken window for the specific purpose of paying someone to fix it. It's a fallacy, in part, because it ignores the fact that you're destroying something of value at the same time you're creating all this theoretical economic benefit.
Nothing of value was destroyed in this case with the intention of creating economic activity in the recovery/salvage operation. (The loss of the booster is a sunk cost of the launch; I would imagine no recovery was ever expected.) Now, you could argue spending money to recover the booster not the most efficient way to generate economic benefit (and I'd agree) but it's not really a case of BWF.
The more interesting question to me is: what does the Law of the Sea have to say about ownership of the wreck? If it's a wreck in international waters, I would have assumed the person to salvage it would be the owner.
I see the same problems in the comment system over at the WSJ. You'd think this would be an audience with a lot of common ground and a disproportionate number of highly educated people. Never-the-less, the comments posted there are usually worthless, even if you limit it to just the registered users.
Moderation matters. I rarely find a good discussion group in it's absence.
Lifehacker's most useful comments are those from alert readers trying to prevent ER visits caused by the penny-pinching batshit crazy advice that Lifehacker serves up as "news." I finally stopped going there when someone posted an article on how to suspend an Ikea bookshelf over a staircase using screws attached to the drywall! Thankfully if one bothered to read the comments they were probably spared an entry in the Darwin Awards.
ROFL...my thoughts exactly. What a snoozer of a release.
Is it yellow cake? It's my favorite kind!
Citation, please.
Nothing to Envy
I would also strongly recommend Nothing to Envy. It's a quick read and gives some pretty chilling insights into how the North Korean regime operates. It is not a pretty picture; think 1984 and you won't be far off.
The cases you cite don't seem to support your position:
From Ableman v. Booth, 62 US 506 - Supreme Court 1859: ... The sovereignty to be created was to be limited in its powers of legislation, and if it passed a law not authorized by its enumerated powers, it was not to be regarded as the supreme law of the land, nor were the State judges bound to carry it into execution." (emphasis mine)
"In the first case, it provides that `this Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land, and obligatory upon the judges in every State.'
Having not read the case in its entirety it seems like a question about the jurisdiction of the federal bench, not a refutation of the tenth amendment or the idea of limited and enumerated powers. Indeed, the section I quoted above explicitly acknowledges the validity of the tenth amendment and confirms that the States are not bound by laws passed in excess of Congress' enumerated powers.
Edgar v. Mite Corp., 457 US 624 - Supreme Court 1982 doesn't help you out either; Edgar appears finds that the Illinois act in question was preempted by a valid Federal law, the Williams Act, because it "upset the careful balance struck by Congress and which therefore stand as obstacles to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress." The Court found the Act within Congress' enumerated powers, that the Illinois law frustrated the intentions of that Act, and that as a result the Supremacy Clause allowed for preemption. Nor do the dissenting opinions help; the dissents center around the question of if the dispute was moot or not.
Finally, your last link is an 11th Amendment dispute and I'm having difficulty seeing how it applies to what I believe the original poster believes is a 10th Amendment question.
If you want to talk constitutional theory then you've got to take the tenth amendment into consideration:
Amendment X
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The US government is supposed to be a government of limited and enumerated powers and the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, clause 2) is supposed to be confined to conflicts with its specifically enumerated powers.
That's the theory of course. The reality, as we well know, is much different. 200 years of stretching the Elastic Clause and the Commerce Clause have largely eviscerated the idea and reality of state sovereignty. One of the reasons that people get so worked up about PPACA (ObamaCare) is the way the Commerce Clause is being used to compel the purchase of insurance; there's little the Federal government can't do if they're allowed to use the Commerce Clause that way.
The skirt smoothing! How could you forget the skirt smoothing!
Megan McArdle has a pretty good post up questioning the memo's legitimacy here.
"All tax jurisdictions that I know tax the whole amount, not the unrealized amount. "
I see where you're coming from now. If that's the case then, yes, you're right a wealth tax would increase the take significantly.
Can you imagine teaming this up with a VAT? It would be a tax Armageddon!
I think we may be imagining two different scenarios.
First, I was operating with the understanding that in any given tax period you are only liable for the unrealized gain since the last tax period.
Secondly, I was talking about buying and then selling a particular security/asset and I was assuming away (for simplicity's sake) dividends and re-investments thereof and any tax advantaged accounts like a defined contribution plan.
If that's the case, then the inefficiencies of administering multiple tax collection events are going to reduce the actual revenue take, not increase it.
The limits on capital losses would have to be re-evaluated as well. If I recall correctly, capital losses are currently capped at $3K per year (in the US) although you can carry those forward. Capital gains have no such limit on taxation. At $3K a year, a sufficiently large loss can't be realistically written off in anyone's expected life-span. I'm not sure if capital gains on a primary residence are impacted by this rule though or if it only applies to stocks, etc.