I haven't hear anyone claim that the US gov doesn't want to pay its debts, and it constitutionally must pay them so it is moot point. I sure wasn't saying that nor was I trying to imply that and was merely pointing out for the uninformed how things are structured and how we got there. There are problems facing the government once the bond redemption starts in earnest and those are mostly ignored which is the other point I was trying to make. The budget is already a mess and Social Security is just going to gradually make a bigger mess but I doubt anyone would know the difference.
I wouldn't say Social Security is properly funded for decades as the date the trust fund runs out is in 2033 according to the last Trustees Report which is the point at which it will be unable to pay full benefits. So less than 2 decades which means you will likely be caught up in it. The point at which it starts to take in less in taxes and interest and begin to draw down the trust fund.
So the decisions that one wants to make is how to deal with the problem and there really are a finite number of solutions. They could:
1. Raise taxes to ensure social security is fully funded. (democrat plan)
2. Decrease the rate at which benefits increase. (Republican plan)
3. Some combination of 1 & 2
4. Ignore the problem and in 2033 just fully fund it out of the general fund. (what will happen from 2017 to 2033)
5. Ignore the problem and in 2033 tell all social security recipients to fuck off and enjoy their 75%. (what the current plan out of the US government is)
I understand that and figured that is what happened, but with such a simple tax form it should have taken 10 minutes to do the audit not a couple of hours.
It is just struck me as a colossal waste of time, especially since all of the info I had, except form 1040EZ, gets sent independently to the IRS as well. Even at that they already had a copy of my 1040EZ because I sent it to them when filing my taxes which is what they were checking so I didn't need to be there. I could understand if they found a problem having me go through the song and dance but this was just wasteful.
Not good enough. I have stated that H-1B employees should be the highest paid people doing work at the company they are performing the work for or are employed by. We are always told that companies can't find a single US worker who has these skills and that they can't train someone up to do the job so these must truly be special people and thus deserving of extraordinarily high compensation. Companies seem to function just fine when a member of the board leaves before a replacement is founds so if these people are so critical they should be compensated better than even the members of the board. I also mean total compensation: wages, bonuses, relocation benefits, medical, stock options, use of corporate transport, vacation, etc.
Make that law and I will believe the companies when they make these statements about a lack of workers or not having the right skillset.
Another idea someone else had was to make it mandatory that for each H-1B a company brings on they have to hire an American to shadow and learn these rare skills from them and eventually take over their job. Again, make this law and I will believe the BS flowing from the corporate talking heads.
Hell if I heard that I would have started looking for a new job immediately and about 10 minutes before tender my 2 week notice I would have forwarded all the info on the issue to US ICE and the FTC and let them open an investigation into the company.
Well this issue is already lumped in with immigration. There was an article back about a week and a half ago about how an amendment to the current immigration bill was going to have a higher cap on H-1B visas of like 195k. So maybe it will get striped or killed, I don't know but one of my senators is one of the ones who has been pushing the higher cap for a while now.
People like AC don't want to save now for the future. Why live with less now so you have more later when it just prevents them from having fun. These are also the same people who would have bought as much house as they could have gotten a loan for just before the crash.
They are republicans they don't believe in evolution. Now that I have that barb out of the way it is basically applicable to all side but I find it somewhat interesting that in this case we have 2 republicans in support of American jobs and higher pay of American workers while one of the main supporters of expanding the H-1B program is a Democrat from Minnesota.
If I remember correctly the cuts that were proposed weren't what normal people consider cuts, but were decreases in the rate of increase which in Washington D.C. translates to someone took a chainsaw it. Then I could be remembering it incorrectly but that was a while ago.
The problem is that structurally Social Security and Medicare have problems. Depending on what side of the aisle you are on it is either they have been too generous with benefits or haven't been funded like they needed to be. Either way it is going to be a political mess when the trust fund runs out, but even before that things are going to get painful for the government.
In years when Social Security was running surpluses that extra money went to purchase the bonds for the trust fund so that money went into the general fund to pay for other stuff. Since the trust fund is really just government bonds that will get redeemed from the general fund you are going to see either increased taxation, decreased spending on other programs, or more likely higher deficit spending. When that is gone then the hard decision comes as Social security will only be able to pay out ~75% of the benefits it had been paying out. The government doesn't have a choice in this because the constitution states, in not so few words, that the debts will be paid. At this point the US federal government will either have to directly fund the difference out of the general fund (basically it will be the same amount that was spend on the previous month paying off the last batch of redeemed bonds), or tell the peasants to piss off and accept that they can't pay benefits in full.
While I am not sure about what class you fall into the one time I was audited was my 3rd year in college. The only two deductions I claimed were the standard one and the tuition tax credit and only had one job and was still able to use for 1040EZ. Still I ended up having to take the entire day off from work and school to go up to their office in the Twin Cities (I forget if it is in Minneapolis or St. Paul) to be audited. It isn't like this was a difficult set of taxes like what I have now as it probably took longer to go down to the Mankato post office to get it stamped and mailed than it did to fill out but the audit took a couple of hours. It isn't like they don't already have their own copies of the same documents plus the ones I mailed to them. The whole time I ended up feeling like they were looking to find something I missed or entered wrong which is pretty hard to do when the only pieces of paper are the 1040EZ, a single W-2, and my tuition statement. The auditor would ask questions about each entry, hem and haw, get up to go check things. In general it was a giant waste of everyone's time. I could understand auditing taxes like the ones I have filled out now since it it a byzantine mess with kids, wife who is a teacher, child care, investments (foreign and domestic), some foreign income taxes, retirement savings, property tax, a mortgage, at least 2 W-2s, some 1099 MISC, and what ever else, that ends up with a stack of paper about an inch thick I need to keep for my records that takes 4 hours to fill out even though I am pretty sure I know what I am doing.
After doing my current set of taxes I would welcome a simpler tax code with fewer deductions and rules. What is wrong with a few good brackets (like 5, one for each household quintile), some wildly popular deductions that are used to encourage things society wants (home ownership, education, dependent care), and treating all income the same from an income tax perspective. I'm sure a simplified tax code for businesses could be created as well that still has the encouragements that the current one purports to have while not being so byzantine that investing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in accountants can result in millions or billions of dollars in tax savings.
Hey I am thankful for the Illinois Nazis. Without them there wouldn't have been the important US Supreme Court free speech ruling that made it clear that even offensive speech is protected speech.
Schools in the US have all sorts of special privileges probably because they are treated as having legal custody of the children under their supervision, or that is my understanding of it.
This makes me wonder if those crap minimum wage jobs still offer a perk like the one I worked at had. If you were going to college and maintained at least a 2.0 GPA they had a "scholarship" program that would provide you an extra $1/hr. This was with a regional gas station chain years ago and the thinking was that while this is a shit job it would be better to have a competent person working it for a few years who will work hard, show up, but eventually move on than a warm body who may or may not show up but won't quit and will have to be fired. The best part of that job was picking up the overnight shifts as there was usually about 6 customers in 8 hours and apart from mopping and cleaning the drink bar you had a lot of time to study, got the $1/hr scholarship money, and a $0.75 shift differential for the overnight.
We still need plumbers/electricians/carpenters/mechanics/welders in this country and those kinds of jobs should pay well enough to put a family in the middle class.
They often do. I remember years ago reading about a shortage of tool and die makers and that journeyman (basically just out of tech school) were getting jobs for like $150k a year.
The biggest problem I have seen is that high schools teachers and councilors push the 4 year degree as the only way to get ahead and that no one should get a 2 year degree or learn a trade if they want to succeed. While they are correct in that a high school diploma basically ensures that you will live in poverty working minimum wage jobs hoping to get promoted to overnight manager they miss the point that you need to have skills. Skilled labor is what is needed and it does pay well. One of my buddies used his army benefits to go to the tech/community college near me and learn how to be an electrician. He now earns enough that he can support his family on just his income but is saving up for a down payment on a house. I have another fried who went and learned carpentry and makes a good enough living he can live like a college student working about 6 months of the year with hiking and camping in the summer and skiing in the winter. Hell I even use the tech/community college near me to learn new skills every couple of years since they do offer courses in the practical instead of the theoretical.
Better yet just up the output on one of these things. It isn't like they aren't already on a heavy vehicle with a large engine capable of outputting several hundred KW. Since it would be used against drones you don't have to worry about the rules of war and what you can use against people. On second thought the very existence of one capable of taking out a drone would mean it would get used against people.
I understood your point and yes most people aren't proactive about their security as evidenced by their willingness to hand out their poorly chosen passwords like candy. Then they wonder why someone hacked their accounts, the whole photo hacking of apple's cloud storage thing should have taught people to choose better passwords. Companies do also share some of the blame for things poor security if they are getting hacked and having passwords and other account information stolen but it does seem to rarely wake people up.
Well most of the people who's passwords are guessed and accounts cracked are dumb. About a month ago I went to try and log into my bank account to pay some bills and found the account had been locked. The password is 24 random characters as are the answers to the 5 security questions so it is highly unlikely that it would be broken. When I called to get the account unlocked they also asked one of the security questions. So long as the bank can manage to not leak the info I should be good. Granted that is a big if but it is a credit union so their customers are their shareholders so it is at least receptive to concerns mentioned by customers.
If they were actually smart they would just use TrueCrypt containers. The computation necessary to break that should make it secure enough (heat death of the universe provided TrueCrypt was implemented properly). Then for some shits and giggles just to make the feds waste a bunch of resources make some TrueCrypt containers filled with cat pictures, the text of the US constitution, the Declaration of Independence, goatse, etc. or just dump out a bunch of data from/dev/random or random.org to a file.
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I haven't hear anyone claim that the US gov doesn't want to pay its debts, and it constitutionally must pay them so it is moot point. I sure wasn't saying that nor was I trying to imply that and was merely pointing out for the uninformed how things are structured and how we got there. There are problems facing the government once the bond redemption starts in earnest and those are mostly ignored which is the other point I was trying to make. The budget is already a mess and Social Security is just going to gradually make a bigger mess but I doubt anyone would know the difference.
I wouldn't say Social Security is properly funded for decades as the date the trust fund runs out is in 2033 according to the last Trustees Report which is the point at which it will be unable to pay full benefits. So less than 2 decades which means you will likely be caught up in it. The point at which it starts to take in less in taxes and interest and begin to draw down the trust fund.
So the decisions that one wants to make is how to deal with the problem and there really are a finite number of solutions. They could:
1. Raise taxes to ensure social security is fully funded. (democrat plan)
2. Decrease the rate at which benefits increase. (Republican plan)
3. Some combination of 1 & 2
4. Ignore the problem and in 2033 just fully fund it out of the general fund. (what will happen from 2017 to 2033)
5. Ignore the problem and in 2033 tell all social security recipients to fuck off and enjoy their 75%. (what the current plan out of the US government is)
I understand that and figured that is what happened, but with such a simple tax form it should have taken 10 minutes to do the audit not a couple of hours.
It is just struck me as a colossal waste of time, especially since all of the info I had, except form 1040EZ, gets sent independently to the IRS as well. Even at that they already had a copy of my 1040EZ because I sent it to them when filing my taxes which is what they were checking so I didn't need to be there. I could understand if they found a problem having me go through the song and dance but this was just wasteful.
Not good enough. I have stated that H-1B employees should be the highest paid people doing work at the company they are performing the work for or are employed by. We are always told that companies can't find a single US worker who has these skills and that they can't train someone up to do the job so these must truly be special people and thus deserving of extraordinarily high compensation. Companies seem to function just fine when a member of the board leaves before a replacement is founds so if these people are so critical they should be compensated better than even the members of the board. I also mean total compensation: wages, bonuses, relocation benefits, medical, stock options, use of corporate transport, vacation, etc.
Make that law and I will believe the companies when they make these statements about a lack of workers or not having the right skillset.
Another idea someone else had was to make it mandatory that for each H-1B a company brings on they have to hire an American to shadow and learn these rare skills from them and eventually take over their job. Again, make this law and I will believe the BS flowing from the corporate talking heads.
Hell if I heard that I would have started looking for a new job immediately and about 10 minutes before tender my 2 week notice I would have forwarded all the info on the issue to US ICE and the FTC and let them open an investigation into the company.
Well this issue is already lumped in with immigration. There was an article back about a week and a half ago about how an amendment to the current immigration bill was going to have a higher cap on H-1B visas of like 195k. So maybe it will get striped or killed, I don't know but one of my senators is one of the ones who has been pushing the higher cap for a while now.
People like AC don't want to save now for the future. Why live with less now so you have more later when it just prevents them from having fun. These are also the same people who would have bought as much house as they could have gotten a loan for just before the crash.
They are republicans they don't believe in evolution.
Now that I have that barb out of the way it is basically applicable to all side but I find it somewhat interesting that in this case we have 2 republicans in support of American jobs and higher pay of American workers while one of the main supporters of expanding the H-1B program is a Democrat from Minnesota.
What you describe is the difference between a statesman and a politician. Sadly we have far too few statesmen.
Burn heretic!
To quote the late George Carlin:
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
If I remember correctly the cuts that were proposed weren't what normal people consider cuts, but were decreases in the rate of increase which in Washington D.C. translates to someone took a chainsaw it. Then I could be remembering it incorrectly but that was a while ago.
The problem is that structurally Social Security and Medicare have problems. Depending on what side of the aisle you are on it is either they have been too generous with benefits or haven't been funded like they needed to be. Either way it is going to be a political mess when the trust fund runs out, but even before that things are going to get painful for the government.
In years when Social Security was running surpluses that extra money went to purchase the bonds for the trust fund so that money went into the general fund to pay for other stuff. Since the trust fund is really just government bonds that will get redeemed from the general fund you are going to see either increased taxation, decreased spending on other programs, or more likely higher deficit spending. When that is gone then the hard decision comes as Social security will only be able to pay out ~75% of the benefits it had been paying out. The government doesn't have a choice in this because the constitution states, in not so few words, that the debts will be paid. At this point the US federal government will either have to directly fund the difference out of the general fund (basically it will be the same amount that was spend on the previous month paying off the last batch of redeemed bonds), or tell the peasants to piss off and accept that they can't pay benefits in full.
...and the other half would be in jail.
While I am not sure about what class you fall into the one time I was audited was my 3rd year in college. The only two deductions I claimed were the standard one and the tuition tax credit and only had one job and was still able to use for 1040EZ. Still I ended up having to take the entire day off from work and school to go up to their office in the Twin Cities (I forget if it is in Minneapolis or St. Paul) to be audited. It isn't like this was a difficult set of taxes like what I have now as it probably took longer to go down to the Mankato post office to get it stamped and mailed than it did to fill out but the audit took a couple of hours. It isn't like they don't already have their own copies of the same documents plus the ones I mailed to them. The whole time I ended up feeling like they were looking to find something I missed or entered wrong which is pretty hard to do when the only pieces of paper are the 1040EZ, a single W-2, and my tuition statement. The auditor would ask questions about each entry, hem and haw, get up to go check things. In general it was a giant waste of everyone's time. I could understand auditing taxes like the ones I have filled out now since it it a byzantine mess with kids, wife who is a teacher, child care, investments (foreign and domestic), some foreign income taxes, retirement savings, property tax, a mortgage, at least 2 W-2s, some 1099 MISC, and what ever else, that ends up with a stack of paper about an inch thick I need to keep for my records that takes 4 hours to fill out even though I am pretty sure I know what I am doing.
After doing my current set of taxes I would welcome a simpler tax code with fewer deductions and rules. What is wrong with a few good brackets (like 5, one for each household quintile), some wildly popular deductions that are used to encourage things society wants (home ownership, education, dependent care), and treating all income the same from an income tax perspective. I'm sure a simplified tax code for businesses could be created as well that still has the encouragements that the current one purports to have while not being so byzantine that investing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in accountants can result in millions or billions of dollars in tax savings.
6 more years of Putin without a shirt.
Hey I am thankful for the Illinois Nazis. Without them there wouldn't have been the important US Supreme Court free speech ruling that made it clear that even offensive speech is protected speech.
Schools in the US have all sorts of special privileges probably because they are treated as having legal custody of the children under their supervision, or that is my understanding of it.
This makes me wonder if those crap minimum wage jobs still offer a perk like the one I worked at had. If you were going to college and maintained at least a 2.0 GPA they had a "scholarship" program that would provide you an extra $1/hr. This was with a regional gas station chain years ago and the thinking was that while this is a shit job it would be better to have a competent person working it for a few years who will work hard, show up, but eventually move on than a warm body who may or may not show up but won't quit and will have to be fired. The best part of that job was picking up the overnight shifts as there was usually about 6 customers in 8 hours and apart from mopping and cleaning the drink bar you had a lot of time to study, got the $1/hr scholarship money, and a $0.75 shift differential for the overnight.
We still need plumbers/electricians/carpenters/mechanics/welders in this country and those kinds of jobs should pay well enough to put a family in the middle class.
They often do. I remember years ago reading about a shortage of tool and die makers and that journeyman (basically just out of tech school) were getting jobs for like $150k a year.
The biggest problem I have seen is that high schools teachers and councilors push the 4 year degree as the only way to get ahead and that no one should get a 2 year degree or learn a trade if they want to succeed. While they are correct in that a high school diploma basically ensures that you will live in poverty working minimum wage jobs hoping to get promoted to overnight manager they miss the point that you need to have skills. Skilled labor is what is needed and it does pay well. One of my buddies used his army benefits to go to the tech/community college near me and learn how to be an electrician. He now earns enough that he can support his family on just his income but is saving up for a down payment on a house. I have another fried who went and learned carpentry and makes a good enough living he can live like a college student working about 6 months of the year with hiking and camping in the summer and skiing in the winter. Hell I even use the tech/community college near me to learn new skills every couple of years since they do offer courses in the practical instead of the theoretical.
Better yet just up the output on one of these things. It isn't like they aren't already on a heavy vehicle with a large engine capable of outputting several hundred KW. Since it would be used against drones you don't have to worry about the rules of war and what you can use against people. On second thought the very existence of one capable of taking out a drone would mean it would get used against people.
I understood your point and yes most people aren't proactive about their security as evidenced by their willingness to hand out their poorly chosen passwords like candy. Then they wonder why someone hacked their accounts, the whole photo hacking of apple's cloud storage thing should have taught people to choose better passwords. Companies do also share some of the blame for things poor security if they are getting hacked and having passwords and other account information stolen but it does seem to rarely wake people up.
What did you say about my mother?!
Well most of the people who's passwords are guessed and accounts cracked are dumb. About a month ago I went to try and log into my bank account to pay some bills and found the account had been locked. The password is 24 random characters as are the answers to the 5 security questions so it is highly unlikely that it would be broken. When I called to get the account unlocked they also asked one of the security questions. So long as the bank can manage to not leak the info I should be good. Granted that is a big if but it is a credit union so their customers are their shareholders so it is at least receptive to concerns mentioned by customers.
Well that makes it 10x as secure or possibly ~70x as secure depending on allowable values
If they were actually smart they would just use TrueCrypt containers. The computation necessary to break that should make it secure enough (heat death of the universe provided TrueCrypt was implemented properly). Then for some shits and giggles just to make the feds waste a bunch of resources make some TrueCrypt containers filled with cat pictures, the text of the US constitution, the Declaration of Independence, goatse, etc. or just dump out a bunch of data from /dev/random or random.org to a file.
Punch cards won't protect you. Of all the places that would still be making use of them the US federal government seems the most likely.