What about the idea of no property taxes on RESIDENTIAL parcels?
I'm fully in favor of an exemption for the first say $25K of land being used by the owner as a residence.
And to make up that lost revenue, a raise in sales tax or sin taxes.
I don't like sales tax. It doesn't make any sense to me. If I want to sell you something, that should be a private transaction, the government has no business getting involved. It's also very difficult to enforce. About the only sales tax it's hard to evade is the one on car sales (which makes no sense to me anyway, why should we have to pay tax every time a car changes hands? if I buy a car, sell it to you, and you sell it back, why should I pay taxes twice?).
Sales tax can be modified to be very progressive, just don't tax the necessities of life while raising the rate.
A progressive sales tax is only slightly better than a flat one. And I guarantee you the rich evade sales tax much more than the poor. After all, how many people buy toilet paper over the internet?
Everything else would stay the same in regards to how it's done now, but people owning land strictly for residing on wouldn't be taxed.
All the states I've lived in have had a homestead rebate. So this wouldn't be a change (except I suppose for another increase in sales taxes, which for Florida would be horrible, we're already at 7% on just about everything in my county).
Commercial property, such as apartments, stores, renting/leasing out a house, or having an at-home business, or whatever, would stay the same as now. The logic being that since money is being made on the property in some form, it won't necessarily hurt to tax it.
What about property that just sits there being unused? Anyway, we're in agreement that there should be an exemption for a homestead, although I feel that exemption should be limited. If someone has $1 million of land they should have to pay something.
Where does the 1.3 bits per character figure come from?
Re:Chinese Room, Phenomenology, bla, bla
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
·
· Score: 1
Regarding the Chinese Room argument, isn't that just an argument that the Turing Test isn't a good measure of strong AI, rather than that strong AI is impossible?
As for the others, I'm not very familiar with them, but I can't think of any aspect of human intelligence which can't in theory be replicated by a computer. The rest, it seems, is semantics.
It's mostly the things we do unconsciously--recognize objects, interpret terrain, extract meaning from sentences
It really all comes down to learning. A baby doesn't know how to interpret terrain or extract meaning from sentences. In fact, a newborn baby probably can't even recognize objects. All these things are learned behaviors.
Of course, you still need a feedback mechanism even once you have the ability to learn, but that part's easy, as long as you don't try to take too many shortcuts. To teach a computer (which can learn) how to recognize objects, for instance, you need either a full 3-D simulation or the computer needs to be able to see and feel the real world. To extract meaning from sentences, you might be able to get away with something like IRC, but it's probably better to give the computer a voice and ears (after all, a deaf-mute baby probably wouldn't pick up human language just through an IRC chat room, you'd have to really work to teach the person properly, and a deaf-mute still has the advantage in most cases of being able to *feel* what it's like to speak which is part of the very language itself, consider for one example the word "spit").
Is it fair to compare property taxes to a school bully making a student pay for protection against another bully?
Not really, but there isn't anything wrong with charging someone for protection. If anything is wrong in the scenario you describe, it's that the school bully is a bully in the first place.
Cause a lot of people argue in favour that property taxes pay for military defense in order to protect what we own.
(Just focus on the military defense issue.)
Well, in the current system property taxes generally don't pay for our military defense, at least not directly. And being able to pay for military defense is far from the only benefit of the property tax. In fact, I think property taxes and real property are a necessity in and of themselves. I'm a big believer that people should be able to do just about anything they want on their own property. If you allowed that without having a property tax (or at least an inheritance/gift tax), you'd quickly find that a very small percentage of the population would buy up all the property in the country, and impose their own rules and laws on rest of us using that property. In other words, we'd go from a representative democracy to an aristocracy. It'd be great for those who own land, but for the rest of us, it'd suck.
In a perfect world we'd all share the land freely without any ownership at all. Unfortunately, this just doesn't work in reality. That's why we've come up with our system of limited ownership of property subject to a property tax.
I dunno, it seems the most likely bugs are going to be obvious. I suppose it's possible that running on wine will cause some calculation to be incorrect in some subtle and nonobvious way. But it seems to me extremely unlikely. Yes, it's possible, but that can be said of any accounting software. If you're handling enough business that a mistake is that costly, maybe you should double-check your figures in a different program or by hand, or pay someone to audit your books. Trusting Windows software to get something correct 100% of the time is not the right solution.
Not really. That's one of the reasons I want to reinstall everything. I mean, I've got a backup of my documents folder, but there's so much that's stored elsewhere. It wouldn't be devestating to lose that extra stuff, but I'd rather not lose it. Even then, I'm not sure how I'd go about backing up everything. It's my laptop, so I can't easily add another drive. Any backup would have to go over the network to another computer.
Probably the main thing stopping me from switching is the same thing stopping me from trying out XP. I don't want to format my hard drive, and I've only got one partition, which is NTFS. In theory I should still be able to install linux into a file in the NTFS filesystem, but I haven't had the time to bother with this.
Any website can download things that you don't want it to.
Sure, but I'd like to be able to trust google to not be one of them. Oh well, there goes that.
If your boss or the police accuse you of something, then quite frankly they are clueless and would accuse you of the same thing on even flimsier evidence.
True, and I think being worried about the police or your boss due to this is a bit paranoid. But still, having my browser automatically load pages without asking me first just strikes me as a security problem.
My property tax, while nominally 2% of the total property value, *actually* costs me the equivalent of 3.5 EXTRA monthly mortgage payments every year. How would you like to pay your rent 15.5 times every year, instead of just 12 times??
I wouldn't like it, but if they dropped sales taxes in exchange, it'd be well worth it.
Not only that, but a lot of this tax goes to schools, libraries, and parks -- which renters tend to use more than property owners. Why don't renters have to pay their fair share here?
Renters do pay their fair share. The cost of property taxes is a very big factor in the cost of rent. Renters tend to pay more than homeowners, and have nothing to show for it. So they are paying their fair share and more. Moreover, homeowners can deduct most of their costs on their tax returns. Not so for renters, though.
They pay NOTHING, yet they still get to USE the infrastructure that PROPERTY tax pays for. I hereby suggest that all renters should have to pay a "renters tax" equivalent to the property tax charged for the building they occupy.
This makes no sense. The owner of the building already pays the tax, and they pass it through to the renter.
Montana used to have an annual personal property tax.
For the reasons you describe and more, I wouldn't suggest a personal property tax, certainly not on any but the largest of items.
I disagree. I have tons of debt and I think it's great. It's allowed me to spend lots more than I otherwise would during my younger years when I'm not earning as much as I will in the future. It's allowed me to invest in myself in the form of education, which will pay off many-fold in the end. It's improved society as a whole. Rather than forcing me to work at Wendy's for the rest of my life debt has enabled me to borrow for a few years and then make back that money I would have earned at Wendy's in no time, then contributing to society in much more useful ways in the future.
It happens, it happens quite a bit, and just because it doesn't happen more than it does is more a testament to the fact that there are easier ways of scamming money from people.
We certainly agree that there are much easier ways of scamming money from people.
If it happens to an individual, it's quite a hassle for them, with potentially tragic consequences, wouldn't you agree?
Not at all. The vast majority of the time it is easily cleared up by a few phone calls. Yes, there are probably cases where a combination of factors led to it being a hassle for some individuals, but that's going to happen with any identification system.
Yours is about as stupid a statement as "all Americans are fat and never travel abroad." "No clue?" Bite me.
You hardly can claim to have a good working knowledge of how things in the US work if you don't even live here.
No, I'm saying that SSNs should not be used as either.
Yes, that's what you're saying, but you haven't given any legitimate reasons why.
They should be used as designed, which is as an attribute of an identity, which is fundamentally different.
OK, now we're arguing semantics. Credit reporting agencies only use SSNs as an attribute of an identity. There is much more to a credit report than just your SSN.
Experian doesn't know anything about your pension.
No, they don't. However, they could.
They could? WTF is that supposed to mean? They don't. They never will. They have no intention of ever knowing about it. It would make no sense for them to know it. And perhaps most importantly, they could only legally find out about it if you gave someone permission to tell them.
No one forces anyone to use experian...
I don't. I also don't patronize, knowingly, any company which utilizes their services.
Fine. So you don't borrow any money from US companies. I guess that's not so difficult, since you don't live in the US.
But you know what? When I attended UC Berkeley, a publicly funded institution, as a California resident, I had no choice but to give them my SSN and a whole lot of other information.
I'm not so sure that's true. A lot of places make you think you have to give them your SSN, but you really don't. But you know, so what? Why should the world have to adjust to the distortion you've become? Go live in another country if you don't like it. Oh, wait a second, you already have.
Partially for the legitimate reason of identifying me to Social Security
Partially? Either they need it or they don't. They can't need it partially. You admit they need it for a legitimate reason, even by your extremely narrow standard of what is a legitimate reason.
but to a large degree because they're too lazy to come up with a better mechanism
Yes, they've chosen not to waste money to fix something that isn't broken.
and too ignorant of proper ways of dealing with this information to implement proper safeguards against theft
The proper way to deal with social security numbers is to publish them in the phone book. Then no one will get the bright idea that they can use it as a password.
No, the data probably won't be used against anyone, as it's likely some crack-addict who'll sell it for a quick fix. That's not the point though, as it could have been. And that's what you don't seem to comprehend.
No, I don't understand all the ruckous about a stupid number.
I still don't understand your point. Yes, if you borrow hundreds of billions of dollars and you have high interest rates and you compound it, you eventually wind up with trillions in debt. So what?
By the way, the effect of compounding on a mortgage is generally very small, since the interest is paid on a monthly basis anyway.
How many companies have you dealt with which asked you for your SSN as proof that you are indeed Anthony di Pierro, or in my case, John Salomon?
None. And if I ever did, I'd immediately stop using their services.
A social security number is not a password. But a whole lot of organizations use it as an equivalent.
If that were true there would be way more fraud then there actually is. About the only thing you can obtain with information about a person like a social security number is a little bit of information. OK, if it would be a travesty for a crook to learn how many times you've gone to Wendy's in the past month, then maybe you've got something to worry about. But if you're that paranoid, you probably should be paying cash for everything, and go to a bank with no telephone or internet banking services.
Interestingly enough, I've never been asked for the equivalent of an SSN (AHV here in Switzerland) for stuff here that isn't related to my pension or my taxes (which are directly related to my pension.)
Wait a second. You're not even living in the US? No wonder you have no clue what you're talking about with regards to SSNs.
As to why SSNs should not be used for identification with your example of credit reporting agencies
Your examples are reasons why SSNs shouldn't be used as a password, not as identification.
My pension information is, as far as I'm concerned, my business, not Experian's.
Experian doesn't know anything about your pension. They keep records of your debts with companies (which you've agreed those companies are allowed to report, otherwise they wouldn't have given you the loan), and they keep public records, stuff like any judgements against you, any bankruptcy you've declared, etc. It's all either public information, or voluntary information.
However, I maintain that the SSN is a messy way of doing it, contrary to its purpose.
You know what. If you think you've got a better way to do it, start your own credit reporting agency. No one forces anyone to use experian, trans union, or equifax. People use these services because no one does what they do better.
Regardless of who hangs in the end for the financial liability, damage is caused.
In the most likely case, the damage will be caused by the entity most responsible for the damage (other than the thief). That is, whatever bank is dumb enough to loan someone money without verifying their identity.
The problem with your argument is the assumption of a "victimless crime"
No, the problem is that you are considering the taking of numbers to be a crime in the first place. The only crime which has occurred is the stealing of a laptop.
Even _if_ the person whose persona was thieved were proven innocent, the result would be harm to everyone in the form of tougher loan criteria, higher fees, etc.
Only for those who go to a bank dumb enough to loan someone money just for knowing a number. I don't know of any such banks.
After the ChoicePoint exploit, one African gentleman was caught only after submitting loan applications under at least 40 assumed personas, and having received approval for quite a few of them.
Apparently he got caught, though.
The loss of the SSN is not the cause per se; it is the piss-poor awareness of data protection best practices that led the data to being on a _laptop_ in the first place, and the piss-poor system that led to a perceived requirement to collect that information in a manner not necessarily directly related to social security-relevant purposes.
No, the cause is people who think that a social security number is a password. That is, the very people who think it matters that these numbers were leaked in the first place.
Sure, I think it'd be possible. We'd have to cut out just about everything but defense, and cut down considerably on defense. Even then, we'd probably have to cut out income taxes gradually, using the surplus to pay down the debt until it's gone.
And then a lot of things would fall to the states. But at least we have a choice what state to live in (not that our decision is based very heavily on taxation issues, I mean, I live in a state which derives the vast majority of its income from sales taxes).
Sorry, I have to disagree strongly. Private ownership of property is a hallmark of a free society.
Why? Because you say so? IMO absolute private ownership of real property is a hallmark of a non-free society.
You'd end up with a nation of poor renters trying to get by in life by avoiding tax, with most property concentrated in the hands of a few power barons.
If what? If we had property taxes? Umm, no, you can't mean that, since we do have property taxes. I guess you mean this is what would happen if we had no property taxes, in which case I agree.
But I notice you said renters would try to get by in life by avoiding tax, but renting doesn't avoid property taxes, it just pays them indirectly.
Furthermore, a property tax would just be another form of "the poor" (who hold equal electoral power) trying to soak the rich, just as they do under an income tax system.
No, not having a property tax is a form of "the rich" soaking "the poor" by saying that "the poor" can't use this property just because some guy's great-great-great-great-grandfather called dibs 200 years ago.
I don't think sales tax is great, either. No tax is. But by making the true cost of government extremely apparent to everyone, not just property owners, maybe everyone would petition for the return of limited government.
I'm fully in favor of limited government. In fact, I don't think we'd have to raise property taxes at all to fund the kind of government I'd like to see.
At least we're both in favor of abolishing the income tax. Replacing it with a sales tax though, I mean, besides the fact that I've seen no plan which wasn't riddled with loopholes and inconsistencies, it just wouldn't be fair.
By the way, how can you consider yourself to have absolute ownership of property if you're not allowed to sell that property without paying a tax?
Slashdot Mirror
What about the idea of no property taxes on RESIDENTIAL parcels?
I'm fully in favor of an exemption for the first say $25K of land being used by the owner as a residence.
And to make up that lost revenue, a raise in sales tax or sin taxes.
I don't like sales tax. It doesn't make any sense to me. If I want to sell you something, that should be a private transaction, the government has no business getting involved. It's also very difficult to enforce. About the only sales tax it's hard to evade is the one on car sales (which makes no sense to me anyway, why should we have to pay tax every time a car changes hands? if I buy a car, sell it to you, and you sell it back, why should I pay taxes twice?).
Sales tax can be modified to be very progressive, just don't tax the necessities of life while raising the rate.
A progressive sales tax is only slightly better than a flat one. And I guarantee you the rich evade sales tax much more than the poor. After all, how many people buy toilet paper over the internet?
Everything else would stay the same in regards to how it's done now, but people owning land strictly for residing on wouldn't be taxed.
All the states I've lived in have had a homestead rebate. So this wouldn't be a change (except I suppose for another increase in sales taxes, which for Florida would be horrible, we're already at 7% on just about everything in my county).
Commercial property, such as apartments, stores, renting/leasing out a house, or having an at-home business, or whatever, would stay the same as now. The logic being that since money is being made on the property in some form, it won't necessarily hurt to tax it.
What about property that just sits there being unused? Anyway, we're in agreement that there should be an exemption for a homestead, although I feel that exemption should be limited. If someone has $1 million of land they should have to pay something.
Where does the 1.3 bits per character figure come from?
Regarding the Chinese Room argument, isn't that just an argument that the Turing Test isn't a good measure of strong AI, rather than that strong AI is impossible?
As for the others, I'm not very familiar with them, but I can't think of any aspect of human intelligence which can't in theory be replicated by a computer. The rest, it seems, is semantics.
It's mostly the things we do unconsciously--recognize objects, interpret terrain, extract meaning from sentences
It really all comes down to learning. A baby doesn't know how to interpret terrain or extract meaning from sentences. In fact, a newborn baby probably can't even recognize objects. All these things are learned behaviors.
Of course, you still need a feedback mechanism even once you have the ability to learn, but that part's easy, as long as you don't try to take too many shortcuts. To teach a computer (which can learn) how to recognize objects, for instance, you need either a full 3-D simulation or the computer needs to be able to see and feel the real world. To extract meaning from sentences, you might be able to get away with something like IRC, but it's probably better to give the computer a voice and ears (after all, a deaf-mute baby probably wouldn't pick up human language just through an IRC chat room, you'd have to really work to teach the person properly, and a deaf-mute still has the advantage in most cases of being able to *feel* what it's like to speak which is part of the very language itself, consider for one example the word "spit").
You are aware these "external USB hard drives" cost money, right?
Is it fair to compare property taxes to a school bully making a student pay for protection against another bully?
Not really, but there isn't anything wrong with charging someone for protection. If anything is wrong in the scenario you describe, it's that the school bully is a bully in the first place.
Cause a lot of people argue in favour that property taxes pay for military defense in order to protect what we own.
(Just focus on the military defense issue.)
Well, in the current system property taxes generally don't pay for our military defense, at least not directly. And being able to pay for military defense is far from the only benefit of the property tax. In fact, I think property taxes and real property are a necessity in and of themselves. I'm a big believer that people should be able to do just about anything they want on their own property. If you allowed that without having a property tax (or at least an inheritance/gift tax), you'd quickly find that a very small percentage of the population would buy up all the property in the country, and impose their own rules and laws on rest of us using that property. In other words, we'd go from a representative democracy to an aristocracy. It'd be great for those who own land, but for the rest of us, it'd suck.
In a perfect world we'd all share the land freely without any ownership at all. Unfortunately, this just doesn't work in reality. That's why we've come up with our system of limited ownership of property subject to a property tax.
I dunno, it seems the most likely bugs are going to be obvious. I suppose it's possible that running on wine will cause some calculation to be incorrect in some subtle and nonobvious way. But it seems to me extremely unlikely. Yes, it's possible, but that can be said of any accounting software. If you're handling enough business that a mistake is that costly, maybe you should double-check your figures in a different program or by hand, or pay someone to audit your books. Trusting Windows software to get something correct 100% of the time is not the right solution.
Not really. That's one of the reasons I want to reinstall everything. I mean, I've got a backup of my documents folder, but there's so much that's stored elsewhere. It wouldn't be devestating to lose that extra stuff, but I'd rather not lose it. Even then, I'm not sure how I'd go about backing up everything. It's my laptop, so I can't easily add another drive. Any backup would have to go over the network to another computer.
What finance app can you trust 100%? The answer, of course, is none. One of the reasons they have these things called backups, you know.
Probably the main thing stopping me from switching is the same thing stopping me from trying out XP. I don't want to format my hard drive, and I've only got one partition, which is NTFS. In theory I should still be able to install linux into a file in the NTFS filesystem, but I haven't had the time to bother with this.
Your analogy is borken. I can get your license plate number and call the DMV and get your info.
I seriously doubt it. But just in case, I'll use my friends. Florida, D10 NKV. Name and address please.
No. If he's the luckiest person alive, he'd find the winning lottery ticket in the street.
how long before Slashdot is running a story with the headline "First Pre-Fectch Exploit" ?
Exactly 5 minutes after Microsoft adds the feature to IE.
Any website can download things that you don't want it to.
Sure, but I'd like to be able to trust google to not be one of them. Oh well, there goes that.
If your boss or the police accuse you of something, then quite frankly they are clueless and would accuse you of the same thing on even flimsier evidence.
True, and I think being worried about the police or your boss due to this is a bit paranoid. But still, having my browser automatically load pages without asking me first just strikes me as a security problem.
My property tax, while nominally 2% of the total property value, *actually* costs me the equivalent of 3.5 EXTRA monthly mortgage payments every year. How would you like to pay your rent 15.5 times every year, instead of just 12 times??
I wouldn't like it, but if they dropped sales taxes in exchange, it'd be well worth it.
Not only that, but a lot of this tax goes to schools, libraries, and parks -- which renters tend to use more than property owners. Why don't renters have to pay their fair share here?
Renters do pay their fair share. The cost of property taxes is a very big factor in the cost of rent. Renters tend to pay more than homeowners, and have nothing to show for it. So they are paying their fair share and more. Moreover, homeowners can deduct most of their costs on their tax returns. Not so for renters, though.
They pay NOTHING, yet they still get to USE the infrastructure that PROPERTY tax pays for. I hereby suggest that all renters should have to pay a "renters tax" equivalent to the property tax charged for the building they occupy.
This makes no sense. The owner of the building already pays the tax, and they pass it through to the renter.
Montana used to have an annual personal property tax.
For the reasons you describe and more, I wouldn't suggest a personal property tax, certainly not on any but the largest of items.
Interest rates are near all time lows, though.
I disagree. I have tons of debt and I think it's great. It's allowed me to spend lots more than I otherwise would during my younger years when I'm not earning as much as I will in the future. It's allowed me to invest in myself in the form of education, which will pay off many-fold in the end. It's improved society as a whole. Rather than forcing me to work at Wendy's for the rest of my life debt has enabled me to borrow for a few years and then make back that money I would have earned at Wendy's in no time, then contributing to society in much more useful ways in the future.
Debt is great.
It happens, it happens quite a bit, and just because it doesn't happen more than it does is more a testament to the fact that there are easier ways of scamming money from people.
We certainly agree that there are much easier ways of scamming money from people.
If it happens to an individual, it's quite a hassle for them, with potentially tragic consequences, wouldn't you agree?
Not at all. The vast majority of the time it is easily cleared up by a few phone calls. Yes, there are probably cases where a combination of factors led to it being a hassle for some individuals, but that's going to happen with any identification system.
Yours is about as stupid a statement as "all Americans are fat and never travel abroad." "No clue?" Bite me.
You hardly can claim to have a good working knowledge of how things in the US work if you don't even live here.
No, I'm saying that SSNs should not be used as either.
Yes, that's what you're saying, but you haven't given any legitimate reasons why.
They should be used as designed, which is as an attribute of an identity, which is fundamentally different.
OK, now we're arguing semantics. Credit reporting agencies only use SSNs as an attribute of an identity. There is much more to a credit report than just your SSN.
Experian doesn't know anything about your pension.
No, they don't. However, they could.
They could? WTF is that supposed to mean? They don't. They never will. They have no intention of ever knowing about it. It would make no sense for them to know it. And perhaps most importantly, they could only legally find out about it if you gave someone permission to tell them.
No one forces anyone to use experian...
I don't. I also don't patronize, knowingly, any company which utilizes their services.
Fine. So you don't borrow any money from US companies. I guess that's not so difficult, since you don't live in the US.
But you know what? When I attended UC Berkeley, a publicly funded institution, as a California resident, I had no choice but to give them my SSN and a whole lot of other information.
I'm not so sure that's true. A lot of places make you think you have to give them your SSN, but you really don't. But you know, so what? Why should the world have to adjust to the distortion you've become? Go live in another country if you don't like it. Oh, wait a second, you already have.
Partially for the legitimate reason of identifying me to Social Security
Partially? Either they need it or they don't. They can't need it partially. You admit they need it for a legitimate reason, even by your extremely narrow standard of what is a legitimate reason.
but to a large degree because they're too lazy to come up with a better mechanism
Yes, they've chosen not to waste money to fix something that isn't broken.
and too ignorant of proper ways of dealing with this information to implement proper safeguards against theft
The proper way to deal with social security numbers is to publish them in the phone book. Then no one will get the bright idea that they can use it as a password.
No, the data probably won't be used against anyone, as it's likely some crack-addict who'll sell it for a quick fix. That's not the point though, as it could have been. And that's what you don't seem to comprehend.
No, I don't understand all the ruckous about a stupid number.
I still don't understand your point. Yes, if you borrow hundreds of billions of dollars and you have high interest rates and you compound it, you eventually wind up with trillions in debt. So what?
By the way, the effect of compounding on a mortgage is generally very small, since the interest is paid on a monthly basis anyway.
I don't understand your question.
How many companies have you dealt with which asked you for your SSN as proof that you are indeed Anthony di Pierro, or in my case, John Salomon?
None. And if I ever did, I'd immediately stop using their services.
A social security number is not a password. But a whole lot of organizations use it as an equivalent.
If that were true there would be way more fraud then there actually is. About the only thing you can obtain with information about a person like a social security number is a little bit of information. OK, if it would be a travesty for a crook to learn how many times you've gone to Wendy's in the past month, then maybe you've got something to worry about. But if you're that paranoid, you probably should be paying cash for everything, and go to a bank with no telephone or internet banking services.
Interestingly enough, I've never been asked for the equivalent of an SSN (AHV here in Switzerland) for stuff here that isn't related to my pension or my taxes (which are directly related to my pension.)
Wait a second. You're not even living in the US? No wonder you have no clue what you're talking about with regards to SSNs.
As to why SSNs should not be used for identification with your example of credit reporting agencies
Your examples are reasons why SSNs shouldn't be used as a password, not as identification.
My pension information is, as far as I'm concerned, my business, not Experian's.
Experian doesn't know anything about your pension. They keep records of your debts with companies (which you've agreed those companies are allowed to report, otherwise they wouldn't have given you the loan), and they keep public records, stuff like any judgements against you, any bankruptcy you've declared, etc. It's all either public information, or voluntary information.
However, I maintain that the SSN is a messy way of doing it, contrary to its purpose.
You know what. If you think you've got a better way to do it, start your own credit reporting agency. No one forces anyone to use experian, trans union, or equifax. People use these services because no one does what they do better.
Regardless of who hangs in the end for the financial liability, damage is caused.
In the most likely case, the damage will be caused by the entity most responsible for the damage (other than the thief). That is, whatever bank is dumb enough to loan someone money without verifying their identity.
The problem with your argument is the assumption of a "victimless crime"
No, the problem is that you are considering the taking of numbers to be a crime in the first place. The only crime which has occurred is the stealing of a laptop.
Even _if_ the person whose persona was thieved were proven innocent, the result would be harm to everyone in the form of tougher loan criteria, higher fees, etc.
Only for those who go to a bank dumb enough to loan someone money just for knowing a number. I don't know of any such banks.
After the ChoicePoint exploit, one African gentleman was caught only after submitting loan applications under at least 40 assumed personas, and having received approval for quite a few of them.
Apparently he got caught, though.
The loss of the SSN is not the cause per se; it is the piss-poor awareness of data protection best practices that led the data to being on a _laptop_ in the first place, and the piss-poor system that led to a perceived requirement to collect that information in a manner not necessarily directly related to social security-relevant purposes.
No, the cause is people who think that a social security number is a password. That is, the very people who think it matters that these numbers were leaked in the first place.
Sure, I think it'd be possible. We'd have to cut out just about everything but defense, and cut down considerably on defense. Even then, we'd probably have to cut out income taxes gradually, using the surplus to pay down the debt until it's gone.
And then a lot of things would fall to the states. But at least we have a choice what state to live in (not that our decision is based very heavily on taxation issues, I mean, I live in a state which derives the vast majority of its income from sales taxes).
Sorry, I have to disagree strongly. Private ownership of property is a hallmark of a free society.
Why? Because you say so? IMO absolute private ownership of real property is a hallmark of a non-free society.
You'd end up with a nation of poor renters trying to get by in life by avoiding tax, with most property concentrated in the hands of a few power barons.
If what? If we had property taxes? Umm, no, you can't mean that, since we do have property taxes. I guess you mean this is what would happen if we had no property taxes, in which case I agree.
But I notice you said renters would try to get by in life by avoiding tax, but renting doesn't avoid property taxes, it just pays them indirectly.
Furthermore, a property tax would just be another form of "the poor" (who hold equal electoral power) trying to soak the rich, just as they do under an income tax system.
No, not having a property tax is a form of "the rich" soaking "the poor" by saying that "the poor" can't use this property just because some guy's great-great-great-great-grandfather called dibs 200 years ago.
I don't think sales tax is great, either. No tax is. But by making the true cost of government extremely apparent to everyone, not just property owners, maybe everyone would petition for the return of limited government.
I'm fully in favor of limited government. In fact, I don't think we'd have to raise property taxes at all to fund the kind of government I'd like to see.
At least we're both in favor of abolishing the income tax. Replacing it with a sales tax though, I mean, besides the fact that I've seen no plan which wasn't riddled with loopholes and inconsistencies, it just wouldn't be fair.
By the way, how can you consider yourself to have absolute ownership of property if you're not allowed to sell that property without paying a tax?
You call yourself a CPA and you don't even know what an ITIN is?
Of course I know what an ITIN is. You can't get an ITIN if you're eligible for an SSN. And as you saw, I never said I was a CPA.