The rest was shipped overseas because a lot of the software, ideas, and administration is happening overseas. What right does the UK government have to the value people create outside the UK?
They made tons of profits... and then paid them out to their employees as bonuses, leaving them with no net profit. No laws were broken.
If there is one unfortunate thing about it, it's that the UK government actually gets more in taxes that way than they would have through corporate taxes on profits.
You realize that tax will still be paid, whether by you-the-corporation or you-the-individual.
Most people who have successful businesses spend a large amount of their income on stuff related to those businesses. Incorporating lets them handle these expenses as business expenses, meaning they are not taxed as profits. And that is as it should be.
Profit is what's left when every expense has been subtracted. If you don't have anything left after paying your employees, you made no profit and don't have to pay tax for it.
The point is that the UK government gets its taxes either way, whether Facebook keeps the profits and pays corporate tax, or gives out the profits as bonuses to employees and those employees pay income tax.
Ah, what is the world coming to! After spending $100000 on a Tesla, people can't find recharging spots. Obviously, "for the environment", we must mandate more more recharging spots, so that the poor, environmentally conscious "middle class" of Silicon Valley can recharge their cars.
(Actually, a far bigger problem with Teslas and other electric cars is that people get quiet "insane" acceleration and start driving like mad men.)
So you're saying you want larger more incomprehensible bills then?
As should be obvious to any minimally politically literate person, my suggestion was somewhat tongue in cheek and just served as a straw-man illustration of the point I was making. In practice, there are probably better ways of limiting political power of representatives (e.g., replacing seniority with popularity).
None of that fixes the fundamental problem with representative democracy, namely that political office disproportionately attracts crooks and liars.
Seriously? You have behind the scenes deals, government propaganda and all the rest as well as a hopelessly corrupted system.
You draw a distinction between "a hopelessly corrupted system" and "behind the scenes deals, government propaganda and all the rest" as if the latter weren't corruption, but the latter are corruption of government just as much as money. Having private money in politics doesn't eliminate "behind the scenes deals, government propaganda and all the rest", but it balances it out. If you take private money out of politics, you only make the system more corrupt and imbalanced.
I expect you on the other hand believe that the person contributing $100,000,000 is doing it out of the kindness of their heart and a sense of patriotic duty
Yes, I think it's mostly because they want to make a difference, both among Republican and among Democratic donors.
Take that eternal whipping horse of the left, the Koch brothers. David Koch is 75 years old, has recurring prostate cancer, and worth $41 billion. What kind of "consideration" do you think he expects, or would make any difference to him? Spending $100 million is spending 0.25% of his net worth; that's like a $500 donation for regular people. He's donated $100 million to MIT, $150 million to Sloan Kettering, $100 million to the Lincoln Center, $100 million to New York Presbyterian, and on and on. The Koch borothers have supported libertarian and free market causes for many decades. David Koch ran as a libertarian candidate against Reagan; do you think that's a good way of buying political favors? And $100 million is really a drop in the bucket to them: I can tell you: if I had a few billions in my bank account and was diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn't hesitate donating $100 million to help defeat a candidate like Obama or Hillary and get out a libertarian message, and I wouldn't give a damn whether I got a dime back on my "investment".
Anybody who thinks that these people expect "consideration" is seriously out of touch with reality. But, yeah, that about describes progressives.
A corporation has zero ethics and zero empathy, and only is concerned with quarterly dividends.
And a government has zero ethics and zero empathy, and in addition to that has zero concern for economic success.
I don't understand why anyone would want their government run like that.
What I don't understand is why anybody would harbor the delusion that politicians somehow are a better, more moral, more caring class of people.
Fact is that both businessmen and politicians are primarily concerned with their own well being. However, businessmen are held in check by their quarterly statements: that is, if they lose too much money or if people don't buy their products, they go out of business. Politicians are not so constrained: they can keep screwing up and running the country into the ground as long as they have enough political savvy and skill to keep getting reelected.
So, your premise is wrong: it's not that conservatives and libertarians want "government run like a business"; that is generally one of those empty promises progressives make. Conservatives and libertarians want as much of government replaced by actual businesses operating in an actual free market, businesses that either deliver on their promises or fail.
If that is the case, then the answer might be to break up the US into a bunch of smaller, more manageable sizes?
You mean like 50 states that happen to share defense and guarantee free trade and free movement of people between them? That is what the US was supposed to be. Think of the US like the EU, except with originally stronger limits on central authority.
I believe the problem is less the size of the govt and more the size of the country
When people talk about "the size of the govt" in national debates, they are talking about the size of the federal government. And when they are talking about reducing that size, they are not talking about cutting government massively at all levels, they are talking about returning functions assumed by the federal government back to state and local control, for exactly the reason you list: the more local decision making is, the more accountable politicians are.
That kind of more local control is generally what conservatives and libertarians in the US advocate. It's progressives and liberals that simultaneously advocate increasing the size of the federal government and complain about its corrupt and unaccountable nature.
Ahh, another self-described Homo economicus. Where would Slashdot be without the powerful man who is 100% rational, informed, and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm sorry, you don't understand. Let's say I'm only "50% rational, informed, and self-made". An elected politician or government bureaucrat is on average no better than me on any of those dimensions. But worse yet, their rationality isn't focused on my benefit, it is focused on their own benefit.
Let's fix some of these problems. Mandatory voting anyone?
What problem is that supposed to fix?
All-in-all the process was troubling, and clearly neither Republican enjoyed the overall support of the electorate.
Perhaps what we should do instead is limit the amount of power of politicians based on the total percentage of voters voting for them? Every percentage point of the electorate that votes for a governor lets him sign one bill, and every percentage point for a representative lets them vote for one bill?
Most of the Conservatives whom I've pointed this out to, blame it squarely on the government for being so easily bribed.
It's not "blame", because that implies that it's fixable. Elected government is always corrupt, and no amount of legislation is going to fix that. The only thing we can do is reduce the harm that government corruption causes, namely by making government as small as possible and as local as possible.
If you think our governance is not hopelessly corrupted by money in politics, then I've got a bridge you might be interested in.
Oh, politics is corrupted by money. But that's still better than being corrupted by behind the scenes dealings, government propaganda, and party machines, which is what you get when you limit campaign contributions by law.
The point I think is that once elected representatives are more likely to legislate in favour of their donors than their constituents.
Of course, in reality, people just give money to politicians whose policies they happen to agree with. When those politicians win, it's no big surprise that they legislate in a way that their donors wanted them to.
Unless they're directly buying votes, then that remains true. I'm not sure why we're equating advertising dollars with votes, because they aren't the same thing.
It's because progressives believe everybody who disagrees with them is either a mindless slave to propaganda and advertising, or a greedy selfish prick trying to maximize their wealth. Since the majority of Americans do not actually believe in progressivism and do not like progressive candidates, the only possible explanation to progressives is that their minds are being manipulated.
As opposed to the local school board that can never find money to reduce class sizes and buy supplies for teachers, but has no trouble finding money to build a brand new football fieldl? I can't tell you how many times I've seen that played out in California
The more you put the federal government in charge of education, the more you will replicate California's failures across the country.
Under conservatives and liberals alike the damn monster just gets bigger and hungrier. Bush Junior grew the damn government like never before. He was a disaster and the one that followed him has continued driving the car over the cliff with the pedal to the metal.
Yes, I agree with both statements. I think partisan voting is pointless; you have to look at each candidate and the context in which they operate. I think the best we can hope for is making the least bad choice among a bunch of idiots. The thing about federal power is that it tends to erode on its own anyway with new technologies and growth; all we really need is someone who is unable to keep up. From that point of view, senile/incompetent relics like Sanders and Carson may well be good choices...
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The rest was shipped overseas because a lot of the software, ideas, and administration is happening overseas. What right does the UK government have to the value people create outside the UK?
They made tons of profits... and then paid them out to their employees as bonuses, leaving them with no net profit. No laws were broken.
If there is one unfortunate thing about it, it's that the UK government actually gets more in taxes that way than they would have through corporate taxes on profits.
In the US, shares are taxed as income at the time of granting. It's almost certainly the same in the UK.
Most people who have successful businesses spend a large amount of their income on stuff related to those businesses. Incorporating lets them handle these expenses as business expenses, meaning they are not taxed as profits. And that is as it should be.
The point is that the UK government gets its taxes either way, whether Facebook keeps the profits and pays corporate tax, or gives out the profits as bonuses to employees and those employees pay income tax.
Ah, what is the world coming to! After spending $100000 on a Tesla, people can't find recharging spots. Obviously, "for the environment", we must mandate more more recharging spots, so that the poor, environmentally conscious "middle class" of Silicon Valley can recharge their cars.
(Actually, a far bigger problem with Teslas and other electric cars is that people get quiet "insane" acceleration and start driving like mad men.)
As should be obvious to any minimally politically literate person, my suggestion was somewhat tongue in cheek and just served as a straw-man illustration of the point I was making. In practice, there are probably better ways of limiting political power of representatives (e.g., replacing seniority with popularity).
None of that fixes the fundamental problem with representative democracy, namely that political office disproportionately attracts crooks and liars.
Yes, just like the US used to work. The Swiss Constitution was written in 1848 and influenced strongly by the US Constitution.
The US abandoned that principle in a wave of progressivism and passed the 16th Amendment in 1913, which allowed unapportioned direct taxes.
So, which superior system of government do you have?
How exactly would that work, given that dinosaurs probably didn't have penises?
You just illustrated my point.
You draw a distinction between "a hopelessly corrupted system" and "behind the scenes deals, government propaganda and all the rest" as if the latter weren't corruption, but the latter are corruption of government just as much as money. Having private money in politics doesn't eliminate "behind the scenes deals, government propaganda and all the rest", but it balances it out. If you take private money out of politics, you only make the system more corrupt and imbalanced.
Yes, I think it's mostly because they want to make a difference, both among Republican and among Democratic donors.
Take that eternal whipping horse of the left, the Koch brothers. David Koch is 75 years old, has recurring prostate cancer, and worth $41 billion. What kind of "consideration" do you think he expects, or would make any difference to him? Spending $100 million is spending 0.25% of his net worth; that's like a $500 donation for regular people. He's donated $100 million to MIT, $150 million to Sloan Kettering, $100 million to the Lincoln Center, $100 million to New York Presbyterian, and on and on. The Koch borothers have supported libertarian and free market causes for many decades. David Koch ran as a libertarian candidate against Reagan; do you think that's a good way of buying political favors? And $100 million is really a drop in the bucket to them: I can tell you: if I had a few billions in my bank account and was diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn't hesitate donating $100 million to help defeat a candidate like Obama or Hillary and get out a libertarian message, and I wouldn't give a damn whether I got a dime back on my "investment".
Anybody who thinks that these people expect "consideration" is seriously out of touch with reality. But, yeah, that about describes progressives.
And a government has zero ethics and zero empathy, and in addition to that has zero concern for economic success.
What I don't understand is why anybody would harbor the delusion that politicians somehow are a better, more moral, more caring class of people.
Fact is that both businessmen and politicians are primarily concerned with their own well being. However, businessmen are held in check by their quarterly statements: that is, if they lose too much money or if people don't buy their products, they go out of business. Politicians are not so constrained: they can keep screwing up and running the country into the ground as long as they have enough political savvy and skill to keep getting reelected.
So, your premise is wrong: it's not that conservatives and libertarians want "government run like a business"; that is generally one of those empty promises progressives make. Conservatives and libertarians want as much of government replaced by actual businesses operating in an actual free market, businesses that either deliver on their promises or fail.
You mean like 50 states that happen to share defense and guarantee free trade and free movement of people between them? That is what the US was supposed to be. Think of the US like the EU, except with originally stronger limits on central authority.
When people talk about "the size of the govt" in national debates, they are talking about the size of the federal government. And when they are talking about reducing that size, they are not talking about cutting government massively at all levels, they are talking about returning functions assumed by the federal government back to state and local control, for exactly the reason you list: the more local decision making is, the more accountable politicians are.
That kind of more local control is generally what conservatives and libertarians in the US advocate. It's progressives and liberals that simultaneously advocate increasing the size of the federal government and complain about its corrupt and unaccountable nature.
So is Sanders. Banks love strict government regulation of financial services because it destroys their competition.
I'm sorry, you don't understand. Let's say I'm only "50% rational, informed, and self-made". An elected politician or government bureaucrat is on average no better than me on any of those dimensions. But worse yet, their rationality isn't focused on my benefit, it is focused on their own benefit.
What problem is that supposed to fix?
Perhaps what we should do instead is limit the amount of power of politicians based on the total percentage of voters voting for them? Every percentage point of the electorate that votes for a governor lets him sign one bill, and every percentage point for a representative lets them vote for one bill?
It's not "blame", because that implies that it's fixable. Elected government is always corrupt, and no amount of legislation is going to fix that. The only thing we can do is reduce the harm that government corruption causes, namely by making government as small as possible and as local as possible.
Oh, politics is corrupted by money. But that's still better than being corrupted by behind the scenes dealings, government propaganda, and party machines, which is what you get when you limit campaign contributions by law.
Of course, in reality, people just give money to politicians whose policies they happen to agree with. When those politicians win, it's no big surprise that they legislate in a way that their donors wanted them to.
It's because progressives believe everybody who disagrees with them is either a mindless slave to propaganda and advertising, or a greedy selfish prick trying to maximize their wealth. Since the majority of Americans do not actually believe in progressivism and do not like progressive candidates, the only possible explanation to progressives is that their minds are being manipulated.
Good! Money is not the ideal mechanism for selecting candidates and giving them visibility, but it sure beats party machines.
The more you put the federal government in charge of education, the more you will replicate California's failures across the country.
Yes, I agree with both statements. I think partisan voting is pointless; you have to look at each candidate and the context in which they operate. I think the best we can hope for is making the least bad choice among a bunch of idiots. The thing about federal power is that it tends to erode on its own anyway with new technologies and growth; all we really need is someone who is unable to keep up. From that point of view, senile/incompetent relics like Sanders and Carson may well be good choices...