Does your city have existing natural gas infrastructure run by private business?
There's a small distribution company that services a small part of the city. The company being set up is not going to be competing with them(IE the coop won't expand to where they currently have pipe). There have been some rumors of buying them out. The proposed cooperative would service the rest of the city, some nearby towns/villages, and overall serve about 100x the customers.
The proposed rate charges are basically the same as what the private company charges right now, it's just that the company doesn't want to expand. They were actually asked TO expand, complete with incentive packages, but didn't want to.
Why would any business invest in an area when they know that the local government can take all their customers at any time.
Because they can do it better?
I'll note that the areas that voted to have the government 'provide' internet service, normally by setting up a cooperative, have the lowest customer satisfaction rates. As a libertarian, I'll point out that a business should never be guaranteed business. If they're doing a bad enough job that a competitor can come in and take their business away from them, especially when they already have existing infrastructure, they SHOULD have that business taken away from them.
In areas where the local companies are providing a satisfactory level of service, nobody's willing to allow the tax money to be spent to create a new cooperative. It's only when people are truly and epically pissed at the companies that these votes go through.
And when the monopoly is actually larger than your relatively small town and doesn't want to sell for anything approaching a reasonable price, when their infrastructure is so bad that, because they've been stripping profit out of your region and not upgrading, it would be cheaper to just build entirely new?
That is the reason local monopolies are given. The company is the only one in the area but they must provide universal coverage within that area at set prices.
Then what do you do when, despite having the monopoly, they don't provide universal coverage and provide universally lousy service, such that a super-majority of people in the district are willing to vote to have their taxes increased to set up some competition?
If fact it happens all the time. Government IS that bad at doing things. Their inefficiency _far_ exceeds private profit.
It actually often evens out though. The USAF ended up reversing a number of privatization initiatives because what savings were realized were done so by the company hiring the USAF trained maintainers, and the moment those started running out, costs skyrocketed way beyond what doing it in house used to cost.
You have to be careful, there are actually tasks the government is more efficient on, and that can include things like maintaining vehicles.
Ideally, it'd be the former, but I've seen initiatives where it's more like the latter. Like I said though, if it's a voter led initiative, then it's what they voted for.
Right now we're doing something very similar in setting up a natural gas distribution company in my town.
Like any idealism, the ideal is a pure form. Nothing survives first contact with humanity. Our inherent greed, selfishness, and lazyness will corrupt it.
Which is pretty much why I'm only willing to call myself 'libertarian leaning', not a full-up member of the party that agrees with the entire platform.
As quint mentioned, I DO rail against the corporate welfare, the exclusive monopolistic deals signed with various levels of governments, the states forbidding local governments from setting up networks to compete with the local cable/telephone company.
In my view internet service at this point is equivalent to a utility. My favorite form of utility is a cooperative. If the communication companies manage to piss off a a local government such as a city or township to the point that they're willing to vote for a bond initiative so set up their own ISP, then by golly they should be allowed to set up said ISP. It's a way to set up said cooperative utility.
1. Makes the terrorist's job harder - it's more complex programming for the bombs. More things that can go wrong increases the odds of the bomb going off in the wrong location, such as in Russia, where the bomber went off in their own safehouse. 2. Deadman switch doesn't have the 'to the second' accuracy they want for ideal placement. For many suicide bombings, a matter of minutes, even seconds, can be the difference between dozens of casualties and none.
Thats not necessarily true there are plenty of things that make bombers and terrorists in general lives harder but should not be done.
Indeed, ideally speaking it should be like other criminal control efforts - it should disproportionately affect the actual terrorists while ideally being as transparent as possible to regular citizens.
The problem I have with 'security theater' is that normally it doesn't actually make the terrorist's job harder, while being a massive inconvenience to regular citizens.
I'm not suggesting letting the government disrupt cellphone traffic 'at will', but only when a specific realistic, and impending threat has been identified.
"most commonly" would only be about half the time. They fairly frequently will try to time secondary bombs, if they have any(single explosion is the most normal), to catch the first responders. Matter of fact, I'd rate that as about equal in probability to simultaneous detonations in multiple bomb events.
Combine that with that we do actually occasionally get intelligence about an upcoming bombing attempt and can thus take proactive action.
For that matter 'we've found a bomb, turn on the jammers!' is an option. Especially if the terrorists don't know the details of the jamming plan.
It's a tool in the box. That it might not be useful for every job doesn't detract from it's usefulness when it is.
Long and short of it is blocking communications does not make us safer, with the provision that the bombers assume it will happen.
Elsewhere I mentioned that making the terrorist's job harder isn't an unworthy effort. Fact is, they can always attack. There's always ways around. What you can, and should, do in response is to take actions that make performing an effective attack as difficult as possible.
That leads to fewer attacks, more failed attacks, etc... Remember, the bombers aren't perfectly skilled, a bomb-maker alone is an expensive and valuable resource for the terrorists. The longer he has to spend per bomb, the fewer bombs.
I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.
Yucca mountain, however, wasn't built as a prototype. It was built to be a storage facility. My point was that the federal government violated the terms of the very deal it imposed. There were concrete dates where the facility was to be open and accepting waste by.
If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.
How do you define 'lobbies hard'? They're still paying the fee, it's mandated by federal law. They've pushed congress to get a facility open. They've even sued the feds for breach of contract, and won. Still, there is no facility, so now they're entombing their older waste in above-ground casks. Given that over the course of several decades, the nuclear waste would still fit in a swimming pool*, the casks don't actually have to be big, because the rods inside are generating less than 2kW worth of heat(IE a hair dryer). They're paying a disposal fee AND paying for their own long term storage right now.
*Nuclear power plant waste cooling pools are about the size of a standard swimming pool, just extra, extra deep to absorb all the radiation. You could, with the impossible to obtain permission of the plant operators, swim in the top 5 meters or so and actually be exposed to less radiation than swimming in the ocean, outside, during the day.
Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.
Citation please? Pulling from the wiki page on her: ""anything the private sector can do, the government can do it worse."
And I'll repeat: Of course the nuclear industry is going to 'express resistance' to paying for it's spent fuel. It's like you're asking a homeowner to pay $20/week for having his trash hauled away - when he's already paid $1200 on his property taxes specifically for 'trash pickup'.
I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.
Indeed there are. Mostly here I'm talking about stuff right out of the reactor, or 'high level'. We already have disposal locations for 'low level' nuclear waste, which is for mildly radioactive stuff such as contaminated clothing, certain medical equipment, etc...
If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.
Depends on the requirements for the processing facility. It might make sense to ship the waste there(as well as fresh materials) to be reprocessed into new fuel for economy of scale.
This immediately reduces the most grave consequential threat at *a
Wifi: Lower range (and if you're looking for an internet connection, that can be shut off as well) industrial radios: More expensive, easily tracked & jammed CBs: You'd have to roll your own trigger system to avoid early detonation from random transmissions. Ham radios - more expensive, and the equipment/antenna would generally be too large. Family band - more expensive(probably), and you'll need to be careful to prevent detonation from a random transmission.
Increasing the work the terrorist has to go through to do something isn't wasted effort.
An unexpected and unwanted text message from a wireless company prematurely exploded a would-be suicide bomber’s vest bomb in Russia New Year’s Eve, inadvertently thwarting a planned attack on revelers in Moscow, according to The Daily Telegraph.
It's also happened in Egypt and a couple other countries that I'm aware of.
Oh, and some are talking about having the system 'fail deadly'. The 'easy' fix to that is that you keep the 'network connection' up, you simply disable the servers - IE no calls go into the area, nor any texts. You see signal, but all anybody calling you gets is(ideally), 4 rings and voicemail.
Wasn't it about 6 months ago that we had an article about a man being allowed to serve divorce papers via facebook, because the woman was carefully avoiding having any physical address to be served at, yet was probably still very active on facebook?
Okay, it was 'ex-wife' and just 'legal papers' seven months ago... source.
Looking at your figures, you should probably add in that there's resale value to even an old battery. Not sure what it is, but it seems that Tesla has a core charge of around $12k for one, which indicates some things.
Interesting thoughts. I agree, fewer people owning cars and instead utilizing cars on a short-term rental basis would actually increase the number of empty cars on the road. But by the same token, if you start killing the expensive downtown parking lots you can increase the density of living and working space even more by putting skyscrapers, offices, and apartments where the lots used to be. The cars themselves can use intelligent algorithms to avoid overloaded roads, especially when empty and on their way to a parking spot, even as the abilities of an autonomous car allows you to pack more onto a road before they slow due to congestion.
If traffic is to be truly reduced, it would be by that increase in density resulting in less need to call for the car because 'everything' is in walking distance. That being said, you could probably reduce traffic some by reducing the current 'deadhead' driving percentage by taxis looking to pick somebody up, as a car can be dispatched/routed when somebody calls for one.
Of course you don't do that, today. There is no global sales tax. When there is one, you don't think that the federal government would audit those who are responsible for paying it?
Of course I think they'll be audited. Trick is, individuals don't pay sales tax. The sellers do. So it'd be overwhelmingly the corporations that are audited to make sure they're collecting and submitting the tax properly.
And I don't consider a simple change from collecting income taxes to collecting a global sales tax to be "vastly different".
Unless you're expecting individuals to keep track of what they spend over the year and submit a tax return based on it, then it's about as vast of a change as I can envision while still retaining a 'usable' tax system. No matter what it'd be pretty honking huge.
Right. The 99% would stand for a direct cash handout to Bill Gates to help him pay his global sales taxes.
They sit there and let him get away with paying a lower percentage than them, so why not? We're going to be that worried that we hand him $3k or so, whatever the universal rebate amounts to? Besides, I think you underestimate the idea of 'EVERYBODY gets it, it's just insignificant for the really rich people because it doesn't scale'.
To put it another way, people aren't whining that Bill Gates gets the standard deduction.
And then the great situation where you pay no state sales tax at all but are stuck with a new global one.
Getting rid of the income tax balances that out. Also, might want to start trading out 'Global' for 'federal'. Also, it's kind of the situation where I live now - Alaska has no sales tax, Fairbanks has no sales tax, but North Pole, where I live, does. But I've also lived in areas where the state had a sales tax, as did the county and city.
Therefore, give them a rebate. That requires proving you deserve it. And that requires proof of lack of income.
No it doesn't. By giving the same amount to everyone, you make it a progressive system because the percentage you effectively pay goes up the more you earn. Taking away the rebate would require too much paperwork for not enough benefit. It's simpler and cheaper to simply tick up the percentage you collect a notch so that you recover said rebate in sales tax paid at the appropriate level.
If you try proposing a "basic guaranteed income" by giving Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Ted Turner and all the other millionaires a handout, you'll be laughed off the podium, and rightly so.
Probably, but then I wouldn't bring up that they'd be getting it. If you brought it up, I'd point out how, under my system, they're losing far larger tax breaks/loopholes, so it's 'costing' them more money. Giving them the same rebate saves YOU money.
Someone shows up at your door looking for your pulse. First you have to prove who you are. Then they'll take your pulse. Then they'll check your income to make sure you qualify for the handout. One step at a time... and it is still a federal agency that is responsible for auditing the paperwork filed by individuals in support of tax payments. Just like the IRS now.
1. Prove who you are - fine. 2. Take your pulse - you're standing there talking, pulse taking unnecessary. 3. Still pushing your own requirement onto the system, not the proposers. Most of whom would ditch their support for it if such an amendment to the bill was passed. 4. Most of the time would be doable through a public records check. IE a credit report would show, with reasonable certainty, that you're still alive.
If you are seriously suggesting such a scheme, then you seriously need to consider the impacts and the way you structure it so you aren't taken for a loon. "Everyone in the country gets free money from the government" makes you sou
They would still need to audit individuals to make sure they've paid the sales tax on things that they buy.
You don't audit individuals for that. You audit the businesses to make sure they collected and paid the sales tax to the appropriate agency.
As for the sales tax vs importation duties, well, informal wording. You can apply the sales tax to imported goods, though it would be fairly complicated. Countries with VAT tax systems do it regularly.
Implying that the IRS would become a friend of man because their job would be different is just loony. They'll still be a large, powerful tool available to the ruling party.
1. Never said 'friend'. Mostly just less concerned about the individual. 2. The ruling party argument is indeed one of the reasons why people say it'd never pass. 3. Why are we still arguing about this? I'll repeat: Income to Sales tax was only given as an extreme example of how, in the face of changing tax law, the IRS would end up becoming a vastly different agency even if you didn't change anything else. I wasn't arguing for a sales tax system being implemented at all. Did the fairtax.org people kick your dog or something?
What truth? D'oh. Do they really qualify as "poor enough" to get the sales tax rebate? Does that person who answered "yes" really even exist, or did they die two years ago? Why assets and income? To know if they are poor enough to qualify. You're making $200k a year and own a mansion and a yacht, what makes you think you'll qualify for the rebate?
1. 'Poor enough' doesn't matter, seeing as how in the schemes I've read about Bill Gates is poor enough to get it. So you're arguing against your own little customized scheme. Certainly not 'fairtax', which is the proposal I remember reading. 2. 'Really even exist/Not Dead/Etc...' - Doesn't require digging into a person's financials, just that you have a pulse.
Most of the time current tax rebates and credits are dependent upon income.
As a volunteer tax preparer, I'd say only about half of them are, other than the whole 'have to have enough income to actually have enough tax to refund'.
it will be hard to hide the fact that the 1% is benefiting from the free money intended to help the poor people.
...Interesting viewpoint you have. BTW, you gotta stop arguing against part of a proposal that YOU put in there, especially when you don't explain it first. I was kinda going 'WTF' on the eligibility tests for the rebate, because they're not IN mainline proposals. They're in YOURS, which kind of turns it into a strawman, you know? Arguing that the politicians wouldn't allow a fairtax without putting a income test on the prebate is kind of missing the point, given that the fairtax people are already tilting at windmills(IE their proposal doesn't have a chance period).
The idea behind the prebate is that it becomes sort of a BIG - 'Basic Guaranteed Income' - EVERYBODY gets it, because this cuts down on paperwork. You propose your income check to the fairtax guys, they're going to reject it, because it's a core part of their proposal. It's what makes the sales tax actually be progressive. Then Bill Gates and such go and spend oodles of money, and they pay far more in sales takes than the puny little rebate check, so it all balances out. WITHOUT a lot of the crud of the current income tax system, which is sort of the point. Somebody making(and spending) $20k a year will pay a lower effective rate than somebody making & spending $200k/year.
You don't think an audit checks your income? And I was accused of being naive because I didn't agree that it was an anal probe process.
CURRENT audits check income because it's part of how your tax owed is determined. That's part of the 'anal probe'. An audit to make sure that you're a living citizen/legal resident doesn't require your income to be checked because it doesn't matter to your return. Much like how current audits don't check to see what you had for dinner last night, because it doesn't affect the audit.
It's hard to talk about a wandering target. First it's a global sales tax, then it's not.
You fixated on 'global', I admitted it was a poor word choice for what I was envisioning.
A sales tax doesn't depend on what you carry into the country, it's on what you BUY.
If you don't buy it in the country, there's no sales tax on it, simple. Stuff you bring INTO the country may incur duty charges. Which is generally a different ball of wax.
Yeah, my mistake. I assume people say what they mean and don't try to second guess them.
I admitted it was my mistake.
The idea that a global sales tax would get rid of the IRS because it would replace the income tax.
But, poor word choice aside, I certainly hope I didn't imply that I was getting rid of the IRS, merely that if we got rid of the income tax in favor of a sales tax, the nature of the IRS would change, because it's duties would.
Well, if you want to know if they tell the truth, you will have to examine their assets and income to see.
What truth? Why assets and income? Most of the time the qualification for the rebates amounts to this: Are you a legal US Resident, Y/N? What asset and income checks are necessary to determine this? Occasionally it's 'Are you a US Citizen?'. Again, no checking of assets or income necessary.
What exemption? There is no personal exemption for sales tax. What you bought is either taxable or it isn't.
...What the heck are you arguing about? The government gets to set the rules if they were to set this up, which INCLUDES things like 'We're not going to bother charging sales tax unless you bring in more than $5k worth of goods'. Remember, this part was about people bringing stuff into the country.
You'll have to tell Customs about everything you bought (that was taxable) and pay that tax upon entry.
1. Only if you brought it back with you. 2. Only if the amount you paid/it's worth/whatever is valuable enough to charge for. 3. Maybe even only if the sales tax you already paid for it in the selling country is below the US rate.
It's not a global sales tax unless it applies to everything you buy anywhere on the globe.
Global was a poor word choice on my part. I should have said 'federal' I think. Hazards of not reviewing your writing.
They've usually just claimed that the IRS will go away, and then they create a new system that will require the equivalent to the IRS to manage.
What the heck are we even arguing about? My opening statement was that the IRS wouldn't go away, and my second statement used the 'global sales tax' as an example of how the IRS would shift form if the tax system changed substantially.
I admit, if you pass a sales tax idea with a rebate, you'll need some auditing of individuals to make sure they're not claiming extra bodies and whatnot. But even that would typically not be the pain in the butt a detailed audit of a tax return with itemized deductions. Instead you'd mostly worry about making sure businesses are being audited properly.
And you might not have been talking about audits, but I was.
So then customs would go from a relatively inobtrusive process of listing things and not worrying about it unless you bring in more than X dollars of stuff, it will be a complete listing of everything you buy while outside the country, even things you do not bring back with you, and everyone having to pay something just to come home.
Huh? You could still have that exemption. Packages coming from overseas have to go through customs as well. Have something mailed to you, customs assess the tax. Assuming that we decide we need to tax stuff coming from overseas.
A $5000 car that becomes $5500 with a ten percent sales tax is harder for a poor person to manage than a rich one.
That's true for everything though.
It isn't an anal probing now,
Signs you've never been audited... And it's a relative measure anyways.
Hardly. It would have to audit individuals to make sure they paid the sales tax (or what we now call a "use tax" that is the sales tax owed to the state you live in when you buy tax-free out of state) on that large ticket item they bought somewhere outside the US.
Nope, you'd collect it at customs.
Now, if you include a rebate rather than the usual food/medical care/rent being tax free, then yeah, you'll need some auditing. However, it wouldn't be the anal probing it currently is, it'd consist of 'Are you a party that's eligible for the rebate?'
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In many cases simply building a new network would be cheaper than the court case.
Does your city have existing natural gas infrastructure run by private business?
There's a small distribution company that services a small part of the city. The company being set up is not going to be competing with them(IE the coop won't expand to where they currently have pipe). There have been some rumors of buying them out. The proposed cooperative would service the rest of the city, some nearby towns/villages, and overall serve about 100x the customers.
The proposed rate charges are basically the same as what the private company charges right now, it's just that the company doesn't want to expand. They were actually asked TO expand, complete with incentive packages, but didn't want to.
Why would any business invest in an area when they know that the local government can take all their customers at any time.
Because they can do it better?
I'll note that the areas that voted to have the government 'provide' internet service, normally by setting up a cooperative, have the lowest customer satisfaction rates. As a libertarian, I'll point out that a business should never be guaranteed business. If they're doing a bad enough job that a competitor can come in and take their business away from them, especially when they already have existing infrastructure, they SHOULD have that business taken away from them.
In areas where the local companies are providing a satisfactory level of service, nobody's willing to allow the tax money to be spent to create a new cooperative. It's only when people are truly and epically pissed at the companies that these votes go through.
And when the monopoly is actually larger than your relatively small town and doesn't want to sell for anything approaching a reasonable price, when their infrastructure is so bad that, because they've been stripping profit out of your region and not upgrading, it would be cheaper to just build entirely new?
This isn't true in a city of 400,000; but it's certainly true in a small town of say, 100 people.
Personally, I'd add a zero to your estimate, more like 4M. My city's around 40k and they're setting up a cooperative to distribute natural gas.
That is the reason local monopolies are given. The company is the only one in the area but they must provide universal coverage within that area at set prices.
Then what do you do when, despite having the monopoly, they don't provide universal coverage and provide universally lousy service, such that a super-majority of people in the district are willing to vote to have their taxes increased to set up some competition?
If fact it happens all the time. Government IS that bad at doing things. Their inefficiency _far_ exceeds private profit.
It actually often evens out though. The USAF ended up reversing a number of privatization initiatives because what savings were realized were done so by the company hiring the USAF trained maintainers, and the moment those started running out, costs skyrocketed way beyond what doing it in house used to cost.
You have to be careful, there are actually tasks the government is more efficient on, and that can include things like maintaining vehicles.
Ideally, it'd be the former, but I've seen initiatives where it's more like the latter. Like I said though, if it's a voter led initiative, then it's what they voted for.
Right now we're doing something very similar in setting up a natural gas distribution company in my town.
Like any idealism, the ideal is a pure form. Nothing survives first contact with humanity. Our inherent greed, selfishness, and lazyness will corrupt it.
Which is pretty much why I'm only willing to call myself 'libertarian leaning', not a full-up member of the party that agrees with the entire platform.
As quint mentioned, I DO rail against the corporate welfare, the exclusive monopolistic deals signed with various levels of governments, the states forbidding local governments from setting up networks to compete with the local cable/telephone company.
In my view internet service at this point is equivalent to a utility. My favorite form of utility is a cooperative. If the communication companies manage to piss off a a local government such as a city or township to the point that they're willing to vote for a bond initiative so set up their own ISP, then by golly they should be allowed to set up said ISP. It's a way to set up said cooperative utility.
1. Makes the terrorist's job harder - it's more complex programming for the bombs. More things that can go wrong increases the odds of the bomb going off in the wrong location, such as in Russia, where the bomber went off in their own safehouse.
2. Deadman switch doesn't have the 'to the second' accuracy they want for ideal placement. For many suicide bombings, a matter of minutes, even seconds, can be the difference between dozens of casualties and none.
Thats not necessarily true there are plenty of things that make bombers and terrorists in general lives harder but should not be done.
Indeed, ideally speaking it should be like other criminal control efforts - it should disproportionately affect the actual terrorists while ideally being as transparent as possible to regular citizens.
The problem I have with 'security theater' is that normally it doesn't actually make the terrorist's job harder, while being a massive inconvenience to regular citizens.
I'm not suggesting letting the government disrupt cellphone traffic 'at will', but only when a specific realistic, and impending threat has been identified.
"most commonly" would only be about half the time. They fairly frequently will try to time secondary bombs, if they have any(single explosion is the most normal), to catch the first responders. Matter of fact, I'd rate that as about equal in probability to simultaneous detonations in multiple bomb events.
Combine that with that we do actually occasionally get intelligence about an upcoming bombing attempt and can thus take proactive action.
For that matter 'we've found a bomb, turn on the jammers!' is an option. Especially if the terrorists don't know the details of the jamming plan.
It's a tool in the box. That it might not be useful for every job doesn't detract from it's usefulness when it is.
Long and short of it is blocking communications does not make us safer, with the provision that the bombers assume it will happen.
Elsewhere I mentioned that making the terrorist's job harder isn't an unworthy effort. Fact is, they can always attack. There's always ways around. What you can, and should, do in response is to take actions that make performing an effective attack as difficult as possible.
That leads to fewer attacks, more failed attacks, etc... Remember, the bombers aren't perfectly skilled, a bomb-maker alone is an expensive and valuable resource for the terrorists. The longer he has to spend per bomb, the fewer bombs.
Won't the electrolyte need to have a component that's explosive?
The electrolyte is 80% CFl3 by volume. Sufficient?
I would look at Yucca like a very valuable prototyping exercise for a facility that goes back to the original DOE 'defence in depth' specification. I would think that some very valuable lessons were learned there and there might be some things it is suitable for.
Yucca mountain, however, wasn't built as a prototype. It was built to be a storage facility. My point was that the federal government violated the terms of the very deal it imposed. There were concrete dates where the facility was to be open and accepting waste by.
If the Nuclear Industry continues to pay that fee and lobbies hard for a proper DOE facility to be constructed then perhaps they can claim a moral victory over the coal industry. Continuing to collect fees from them to build a facility is the right thing to do.
How do you define 'lobbies hard'? They're still paying the fee, it's mandated by federal law. They've pushed congress to get a facility open. They've even sued the feds for breach of contract, and won. Still, there is no facility, so now they're entombing their older waste in above-ground casks. Given that over the course of several decades, the nuclear waste would still fit in a swimming pool*, the casks don't actually have to be big, because the rods inside are generating less than 2kW worth of heat(IE a hair dryer). They're paying a disposal fee AND paying for their own long term storage right now.
*Nuclear power plant waste cooling pools are about the size of a standard swimming pool, just extra, extra deep to absorb all the radiation. You could, with the impossible to obtain permission of the plant operators, swim in the top 5 meters or so and actually be exposed to less radiation than swimming in the ocean, outside, during the day.
Industry has a very poor record of dealing with its externalities and the Nuclear Industry has already expressed its resistance to paying for the handling of spent fuel. I don't see that happening, Dixie Lee Ray's comments decades ago highlighted the need for collecting the fees from the Nuclear Industry for spent fuel containment.
Citation please? Pulling from the wiki page on her: ""anything the private sector can do, the government can do it worse."
And I'll repeat: Of course the nuclear industry is going to 'express resistance' to paying for it's spent fuel. It's like you're asking a homeowner to pay $20/week for having his trash hauled away - when he's already paid $1200 on his property taxes specifically for 'trash pickup'.
I think that there are different grades of materials at different levels of toxicity. As long as the approach to placing and designing the disposal facility uses good scientific and engineering principles (as opposed to political and lobbying principles) then I have no problem with that.
Indeed there are. Mostly here I'm talking about stuff right out of the reactor, or 'high level'. We already have disposal locations for 'low level' nuclear waste, which is for mildly radioactive stuff such as contaminated clothing, certain medical equipment, etc...
If you consider such an infrastructure you are going to be handling both types of materials, fuel and fissile ash, in the same facility. The reason to do it that way is to be able to fuel, de-fuel, operate and, dispose of the reactor, it situ, so there is no need to use energy to disassemble it move or disturb it. You derive maximum energetic efficiency from the reactor, handle fuel containment, re-processing and, fissile ash disposal in the same facility.
Depends on the requirements for the processing facility. It might make sense to ship the waste there(as well as fresh materials) to be reprocessed into new fuel for economy of scale.
This immediately reduces the most grave consequential threat at *a
Wifi: Lower range (and if you're looking for an internet connection, that can be shut off as well)
industrial radios: More expensive, easily tracked & jammed
CBs: You'd have to roll your own trigger system to avoid early detonation from random transmissions.
Ham radios - more expensive, and the equipment/antenna would generally be too large.
Family band - more expensive(probably), and you'll need to be careful to prevent detonation from a random transmission.
Increasing the work the terrorist has to go through to do something isn't wasted effort.
It's already happened...
An unexpected and unwanted text message from a wireless company prematurely exploded a would-be suicide bomber’s vest bomb in Russia New Year’s Eve, inadvertently thwarting a planned attack on revelers in Moscow, according to The Daily Telegraph.
It's also happened in Egypt and a couple other countries that I'm aware of.
Oh, and some are talking about having the system 'fail deadly'. The 'easy' fix to that is that you keep the 'network connection' up, you simply disable the servers - IE no calls go into the area, nor any texts. You see signal, but all anybody calling you gets is(ideally), 4 rings and voicemail.
Wasn't it about 6 months ago that we had an article about a man being allowed to serve divorce papers via facebook, because the woman was carefully avoiding having any physical address to be served at, yet was probably still very active on facebook?
Okay, it was 'ex-wife' and just 'legal papers' seven months ago... source.
Looking at your figures, you should probably add in that there's resale value to even an old battery. Not sure what it is, but it seems that Tesla has a core charge of around $12k for one, which indicates some things.
Interesting thoughts. I agree, fewer people owning cars and instead utilizing cars on a short-term rental basis would actually increase the number of empty cars on the road. But by the same token, if you start killing the expensive downtown parking lots you can increase the density of living and working space even more by putting skyscrapers, offices, and apartments where the lots used to be. The cars themselves can use intelligent algorithms to avoid overloaded roads, especially when empty and on their way to a parking spot, even as the abilities of an autonomous car allows you to pack more onto a road before they slow due to congestion.
If traffic is to be truly reduced, it would be by that increase in density resulting in less need to call for the car because 'everything' is in walking distance. That being said, you could probably reduce traffic some by reducing the current 'deadhead' driving percentage by taxis looking to pick somebody up, as a car can be dispatched/routed when somebody calls for one.
Of course you don't do that, today. There is no global sales tax. When there is one, you don't think that the federal government would audit those who are responsible for paying it?
Of course I think they'll be audited. Trick is, individuals don't pay sales tax. The sellers do. So it'd be overwhelmingly the corporations that are audited to make sure they're collecting and submitting the tax properly.
And I don't consider a simple change from collecting income taxes to collecting a global sales tax to be "vastly different".
Unless you're expecting individuals to keep track of what they spend over the year and submit a tax return based on it, then it's about as vast of a change as I can envision while still retaining a 'usable' tax system. No matter what it'd be pretty honking huge.
Right. The 99% would stand for a direct cash handout to Bill Gates to help him pay his global sales taxes.
They sit there and let him get away with paying a lower percentage than them, so why not? We're going to be that worried that we hand him $3k or so, whatever the universal rebate amounts to? Besides, I think you underestimate the idea of 'EVERYBODY gets it, it's just insignificant for the really rich people because it doesn't scale'.
To put it another way, people aren't whining that Bill Gates gets the standard deduction.
And then the great situation where you pay no state sales tax at all but are stuck with a new global one.
Getting rid of the income tax balances that out. Also, might want to start trading out 'Global' for 'federal'. Also, it's kind of the situation where I live now - Alaska has no sales tax, Fairbanks has no sales tax, but North Pole, where I live, does. But I've also lived in areas where the state had a sales tax, as did the county and city.
Therefore, give them a rebate. That requires proving you deserve it. And that requires proof of lack of income.
No it doesn't. By giving the same amount to everyone, you make it a progressive system because the percentage you effectively pay goes up the more you earn. Taking away the rebate would require too much paperwork for not enough benefit. It's simpler and cheaper to simply tick up the percentage you collect a notch so that you recover said rebate in sales tax paid at the appropriate level.
If you try proposing a "basic guaranteed income" by giving Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Ted Turner and all the other millionaires a handout, you'll be laughed off the podium, and rightly so.
Probably, but then I wouldn't bring up that they'd be getting it. If you brought it up, I'd point out how, under my system, they're losing far larger tax breaks/loopholes, so it's 'costing' them more money. Giving them the same rebate saves YOU money.
Someone shows up at your door looking for your pulse. First you have to prove who you are. Then they'll take your pulse. Then they'll check your income to make sure you qualify for the handout. One step at a time... and it is still a federal agency that is responsible for auditing the paperwork filed by individuals in support of tax payments. Just like the IRS now.
1. Prove who you are - fine.
2. Take your pulse - you're standing there talking, pulse taking unnecessary.
3. Still pushing your own requirement onto the system, not the proposers. Most of whom would ditch their support for it if such an amendment to the bill was passed.
4. Most of the time would be doable through a public records check. IE a credit report would show, with reasonable certainty, that you're still alive.
If you are seriously suggesting such a scheme, then you seriously need to consider the impacts and the way you structure it so you aren't taken for a loon. "Everyone in the country gets free money from the government" makes you sou
They would still need to audit individuals to make sure they've paid the sales tax on things that they buy.
You don't audit individuals for that. You audit the businesses to make sure they collected and paid the sales tax to the appropriate agency.
As for the sales tax vs importation duties, well, informal wording. You can apply the sales tax to imported goods, though it would be fairly complicated. Countries with VAT tax systems do it regularly.
Implying that the IRS would become a friend of man because their job would be different is just loony. They'll still be a large, powerful tool available to the ruling party.
1. Never said 'friend'. Mostly just less concerned about the individual.
2. The ruling party argument is indeed one of the reasons why people say it'd never pass.
3. Why are we still arguing about this? I'll repeat: Income to Sales tax was only given as an extreme example of how, in the face of changing tax law, the IRS would end up becoming a vastly different agency even if you didn't change anything else. I wasn't arguing for a sales tax system being implemented at all. Did the fairtax.org people kick your dog or something?
What truth? D'oh. Do they really qualify as "poor enough" to get the sales tax rebate? Does that person who answered "yes" really even exist, or did they die two years ago? Why assets and income? To know if they are poor enough to qualify. You're making $200k a year and own a mansion and a yacht, what makes you think you'll qualify for the rebate?
1. 'Poor enough' doesn't matter, seeing as how in the schemes I've read about Bill Gates is poor enough to get it. So you're arguing against your own little customized scheme. Certainly not 'fairtax', which is the proposal I remember reading.
2. 'Really even exist/Not Dead/Etc...' - Doesn't require digging into a person's financials, just that you have a pulse.
Most of the time current tax rebates and credits are dependent upon income.
As a volunteer tax preparer, I'd say only about half of them are, other than the whole 'have to have enough income to actually have enough tax to refund'.
it will be hard to hide the fact that the 1% is benefiting from the free money intended to help the poor people.
...Interesting viewpoint you have. BTW, you gotta stop arguing against part of a proposal that YOU put in there, especially when you don't explain it first. I was kinda going 'WTF' on the eligibility tests for the rebate, because they're not IN mainline proposals. They're in YOURS, which kind of turns it into a strawman, you know? Arguing that the politicians wouldn't allow a fairtax without putting a income test on the prebate is kind of missing the point, given that the fairtax people are already tilting at windmills(IE their proposal doesn't have a chance period).
The idea behind the prebate is that it becomes sort of a BIG - 'Basic Guaranteed Income' - EVERYBODY gets it, because this cuts down on paperwork. You propose your income check to the fairtax guys, they're going to reject it, because it's a core part of their proposal. It's what makes the sales tax actually be progressive. Then Bill Gates and such go and spend oodles of money, and they pay far more in sales takes than the puny little rebate check, so it all balances out. WITHOUT a lot of the crud of the current income tax system, which is sort of the point. Somebody making(and spending) $20k a year will pay a lower effective rate than somebody making & spending $200k/year.
You don't think an audit checks your income? And I was accused of being naive because I didn't agree that it was an anal probe process.
CURRENT audits check income because it's part of how your tax owed is determined. That's part of the 'anal probe'. An audit to make sure that you're a living citizen/legal resident doesn't require your income to be checked because it doesn't matter to your return. Much like how current audits don't check to see what you had for dinner last night, because it doesn't affect the audit.
It's hard to talk about a wandering target. First it's a global sales tax, then it's not.
You fixated on 'global', I admitted it was a poor word choice for what I was envisioning.
A sales tax doesn't depend on what you carry into the country, it's on what you BUY.
If you don't buy it in the country, there's no sales tax on it, simple. Stuff you bring INTO the country may incur duty charges. Which is generally a different ball of wax.
Yeah, my mistake. I assume people say what they mean and don't try to second guess them.
I admitted it was my mistake.
The idea that a global sales tax would get rid of the IRS because it would replace the income tax.
But, poor word choice aside, I certainly hope I didn't imply that I was getting rid of the IRS, merely that if we got rid of the income tax in favor of a sales tax, the nature of the IRS would change, because it's duties would.
Well, if you want to know if they tell the truth, you will have to examine their assets and income to see.
What truth? Why assets and income? Most of the time the qualification for the rebates amounts to this: Are you a legal US Resident, Y/N? What asset and income checks are necessary to determine this? Occasionally it's 'Are you a US Citizen?'. Again, no checking of assets or income necessary.
What exemption? There is no personal exemption for sales tax. What you bought is either taxable or it isn't.
...What the heck are you arguing about? The government gets to set the rules if they were to set this up, which INCLUDES things like 'We're not going to bother charging sales tax unless you bring in more than $5k worth of goods'. Remember, this part was about people bringing stuff into the country.
You'll have to tell Customs about everything you bought (that was taxable) and pay that tax upon entry.
1. Only if you brought it back with you.
2. Only if the amount you paid/it's worth/whatever is valuable enough to charge for.
3. Maybe even only if the sales tax you already paid for it in the selling country is below the US rate.
It's not a global sales tax unless it applies to everything you buy anywhere on the globe.
Global was a poor word choice on my part. I should have said 'federal' I think. Hazards of not reviewing your writing.
They've usually just claimed that the IRS will go away, and then they create a new system that will require the equivalent to the IRS to manage.
What the heck are we even arguing about? My opening statement was that the IRS wouldn't go away, and my second statement used the 'global sales tax' as an example of how the IRS would shift form if the tax system changed substantially.
I admit, if you pass a sales tax idea with a rebate, you'll need some auditing of individuals to make sure they're not claiming extra bodies and whatnot. But even that would typically not be the pain in the butt a detailed audit of a tax return with itemized deductions. Instead you'd mostly worry about making sure businesses are being audited properly.
And you might not have been talking about audits, but I was.
So then customs would go from a relatively inobtrusive process of listing things and not worrying about it unless you bring in more than X dollars of stuff, it will be a complete listing of everything you buy while outside the country, even things you do not bring back with you, and everyone having to pay something just to come home.
Huh? You could still have that exemption. Packages coming from overseas have to go through customs as well. Have something mailed to you, customs assess the tax. Assuming that we decide we need to tax stuff coming from overseas.
A $5000 car that becomes $5500 with a ten percent sales tax is harder for a poor person to manage than a rich one.
That's true for everything though.
It isn't an anal probing now,
Signs you've never been audited... And it's a relative measure anyways.
Hardly. It would have to audit individuals to make sure they paid the sales tax (or what we now call a "use tax" that is the sales tax owed to the state you live in when you buy tax-free out of state) on that large ticket item they bought somewhere outside the US.
Nope, you'd collect it at customs.
Now, if you include a rebate rather than the usual food/medical care/rent being tax free, then yeah, you'll need some auditing. However, it wouldn't be the anal probing it currently is, it'd consist of 'Are you a party that's eligible for the rebate?'