For most people without houses, the standard deduction is the way to go. A really small house won't generate enough of a mortgage interest deduction to really affect taxes, since typically it won't push itemized deductions much above the standard deduction.
when everything blew up in 2007, it would have all been gone anyway.
Assuming investments that aren't excessively risky, what would have happened is that your stock values sagged greatly and then recovered. It would have really sucked to have to get money out of your investments for a few years, but I don't see that I lost much of anything permanently with the crash.
I intend to keep doing things during retirement. What I want is less stress. I really like my job, but it requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, and there's pressure to get my work done in a timely fashion. I'm envisioning scheduling volunteer time (I've got a charity and role picked out), and working on stuff I feel like working on at my own speed.
It was never designed to be for "retirement" which didn't exist for most people back then;
I wasn't around for the 1940s, but in the 1960s the expectation was that you'd work for most of your life at one place and you'd retire with a livable pension. There had to be enough people doing that for it to be the expectation.
Granted those happen- but buying too much house, eating out too much, buying too much car, traveling too much, buying clothing that's too nice, drinking after work, starbucks, and many other activities enjoyed by the young do not help.
People have been told to buy too much house for decades. The rest looks like it could be a reaction to increased stress and uncertainty. If you don't think you'll ever be able to retire, why not live it up now while you're reasonably healthy? The only reason why you'd save is that you think you'll benefit from it later.
When I was a kid, the standard family had a mother, a father, and kids (and were white, of course), and the father worked and bought a house and the mother stayed home and did the housework, including the cooking. (There were exceptions, but approximately nobody not personally involved cared that much about them.) That doesn't work any more. Having a house, a usable car, and kids on one income is a lot harder than it used to be. Therefore, careful shopping and home cooking is not so much part of the daily routine as it is squeezed around other things.
The plan you're criticizing depends upon saving a percentage of income. It doesn't require an above-average salary. If you save 10% of income, you're buying a year of spending every 9 years (assuming 0% inflation and 0% rate of return). If you save 25%, you're buying 1 year of spending every 3 years. Percentages don't care if you're bringing in $100k or $50k.
And it gets a lot easier to increase your savings rate with a higher income. If you have $50K a year, and try to save 25%, you're living on $37.5K with most of the taxes of a $50K income. The marginal value of a dollar is considerably higher then than if you're doing it with $100K/year.
It's also easier to weather bumps with the higher income. Unexpected expenses are easier to absorb, and are less likely to hurt your savings plan. In the US, you're a lot more likely to have good medical insurance at $100K than $50K, and that can be the difference between savings and bankruptcy.
Your biggest issue is probably a medical emergency being a lot more expensive than you're prepared for. Check where your investments are, also: those are usually subject to extreme bad luck. (I knew a guy who got out of Enron right after the crash, and stuck his money into another big business temporarily - Worldcon or something? - and it died before he decided what to do with it.)
Do you realize how many generations have had that same idea? When I was eighteen, my generation was going to take power shortly and do things right. I'm not mentioning here what generation that is (you can probably tell from my posting history), because it really doesn't matter.
And I've been paying into the system for the past 43 years, and if I don't get something out of Social Security I'm going to be pissed, along with tens of millions of other people with leisure time to lobby their representatives and who tend to vote. Whether Social Security was a good idea or not, whether it was set up properly or not, there are lots of moral and political reasons why it can't just be dropped.
The fund was intended to lend out money at interest, because keeping it under some gigamattress is stupid. Lending it to the US Government isn't a problem (although I've heard the interest rate is low). The change in the fund from having more to less money to lend is going to be big, through.
In what way does "The Congress shall have Power To...provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States" not imply the power to promote the general welfare? The founders undoubtedly didn't see what was coming, but they explicitly made it possible. Courts do consider original intent, but not typically to override what's printed in black and white.
You cite items 12, 13, and 14 of the appropriate section to show that Congress can maintain armies and a navy. They say nothing about an Air Force. The only way that can be Constitutionally justified is by the provision of the common Defense in item 1.
Invest. When you're young, you can take more risks. As you get older, index funds and bonds are more attractive.
My investments tanked when Wall Street messed up. Now, they're back. If I'd been in risky investments, I'd have lost a lot of them, but I didn't have much invested in them. If I'd had to start drawing money from my stocks during the crash, it would have been unpleasant, but most companies will come back from bad times.
The basic physics says that, when we burn fossil fuels and raise the CO2 content of the air, we'll warm up without a corresponding decrease in solar input and/or an increase in what we radiate into space. The naive conclusion is that burning lots of fossil fuels creates global warming. This should be comprehensible to most people. Some of the other things are understandable: more energy in the atmosphere causes more severe weather, the melting of land ice increases sea level (there's also the increase from the oceans getting warmer), and it changes the climate from what it historically has been. Are you having trouble with these concepts?
Your other problem with global warming is that you don't like some politicians? And some sort of investor website ignores the science involved? You do realize that you can get summaries from actual climate scientists, don't you? And that a politically or financially motivated scientific conspiracy that involves scientists the world over is really, really far-fetched? And that any climate scientists who comes up with other theories that fit the evidence will win big in their careers?
Stallman has helped create a free operating system that's quite successful, among other things. He provides practical solutions to many problems.
I don't see that it matters if Free Software idealism wins, as long as it exists. I run an operating system that I can examine and modify as I like, and it didn't cost me anything significant. I can get implementations of all sorts of computer languages for free. That's not how things tended to work in the 1980s and before, and Stallman is a very important reason for the change.
Stallman is right a surprising amount of the time. Over the decades, I've come to realize that, when he warns about something, it's best to listen and take heed.
I don't fully agree with his philosophy, but by acting on it he has helped to create great things. We're all better off because of the Gnu project. Some very good and useful software has been released under a variation of the GPL.
I'd think the most popular distribution of the most popular OS kernel would be Android. Linux is very successful for servers and embedded software, and has well over a 1% market share of desktops/laptops.
You can't legally put GPLv3 software in the App Store, since it requires that the user not only have source code, but the keys to install it. I've read that GPLv2 software can't go into the App Store, but I really don't see it when I reread GPLv2.
Writing Lisp without a parenthesis-aware editor is really painful. I tried that a few times. When you use an editor like Emacs (which I pretty much use only for Lisp), you don't keep track of the parentheses so much as the shape of the function you're writing or editing.
Some people who disagree with me are intelligent and thoughtful people who make good arguments. Many of these have different value systems that I respect.
Some are idiots. I disagree with a lot of people because they are idiots.
Riots, looting, and violent political actions are overwhelmingly carried out by leftists (and I include fascists in that), not by conservatives or libertarians.
There's so many kinds of wrong in that, but I've found it's useless to try to correct you with facts.
Deporting people who are not citizens is required if they are not properly authorized by our government to be here. This is not just for the benefit of the people who live here, but most importantly it is also for the benefit of the people who are here illegally.
Right. We're tearing you away from your community and family and sending you somewhere you have no prospects, and it's for your benefit. If this benefited the illegal immigrant, they'd have left already. Deportation of those here illegally is for the benefit of those here legally, and nobody else.
If you want illegal immigrants to be legal, change the law. Until then, uphold the law.
Because the law is always fair and just. Right. Got that. I knew someone who lived in Nazi Germany while it was still there; would you give her the same advice?
You are talking about being tolerant of illegality.
Which is sometimes the right thing to do. As another extreme example, some people were tolerant of the illegality of helping slaves escape to Canada.
That you are content with the virtual slavery that some immigrants experience while here is particularly telling.
Who's content with that? Republicans, mostly, as far as I can tell. Why do you think there's crackdowns on individual illegal immigrants, while places that employ them thrive? If we put teeth into the employment laws, whether by new laws or enforcing what we've got, illegal immigrants would be unable to find work and would go away. It looks to me like the single best thing we could do to keep illegal immigrants out. We can't stop them, and we can't find all of them, but we can make it much more difficult to gain from showing up sans documentation.
You are the one trying to "destroy America and everything is stands for," sir.
I'll give you a heads up here. Approximately nobody in this country is trying to destroy America and everything it stands for. People have different ideas of what America is and what it stands for, and often wildly different ideas of how to get there. This creates conflict, such as people thinking America stands for Christianity versus those who want to keep church and state thoroughly separate, but the conflict is because of different sincerely held views (mine's right, of course) rather than wanting to destroy America.
Which is why Hispanics and Muslims would be natural Republicans if the Republicans would accept them. When they vote Democrat, it's because Democrats are more accepting of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Land in a developed area is more valuable than land in an undeveloped area anyway, no matter what (if anything) is erected on it.
For most people without houses, the standard deduction is the way to go. A really small house won't generate enough of a mortgage interest deduction to really affect taxes, since typically it won't push itemized deductions much above the standard deduction.
That sounds less like irresponsibility and more like despair to me.
Assuming investments that aren't excessively risky, what would have happened is that your stock values sagged greatly and then recovered. It would have really sucked to have to get money out of your investments for a few years, but I don't see that I lost much of anything permanently with the crash.
I intend to keep doing things during retirement. What I want is less stress. I really like my job, but it requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, and there's pressure to get my work done in a timely fashion. I'm envisioning scheduling volunteer time (I've got a charity and role picked out), and working on stuff I feel like working on at my own speed.
I wasn't around for the 1940s, but in the 1960s the expectation was that you'd work for most of your life at one place and you'd retire with a livable pension. There had to be enough people doing that for it to be the expectation.
People have been told to buy too much house for decades. The rest looks like it could be a reaction to increased stress and uncertainty. If you don't think you'll ever be able to retire, why not live it up now while you're reasonably healthy? The only reason why you'd save is that you think you'll benefit from it later.
When I was a kid, the standard family had a mother, a father, and kids (and were white, of course), and the father worked and bought a house and the mother stayed home and did the housework, including the cooking. (There were exceptions, but approximately nobody not personally involved cared that much about them.) That doesn't work any more. Having a house, a usable car, and kids on one income is a lot harder than it used to be. Therefore, careful shopping and home cooking is not so much part of the daily routine as it is squeezed around other things.
And it gets a lot easier to increase your savings rate with a higher income. If you have $50K a year, and try to save 25%, you're living on $37.5K with most of the taxes of a $50K income. The marginal value of a dollar is considerably higher then than if you're doing it with $100K/year.
It's also easier to weather bumps with the higher income. Unexpected expenses are easier to absorb, and are less likely to hurt your savings plan. In the US, you're a lot more likely to have good medical insurance at $100K than $50K, and that can be the difference between savings and bankruptcy.
Your biggest issue is probably a medical emergency being a lot more expensive than you're prepared for. Check where your investments are, also: those are usually subject to extreme bad luck. (I knew a guy who got out of Enron right after the crash, and stuck his money into another big business temporarily - Worldcon or something? - and it died before he decided what to do with it.)
Do you realize how many generations have had that same idea? When I was eighteen, my generation was going to take power shortly and do things right. I'm not mentioning here what generation that is (you can probably tell from my posting history), because it really doesn't matter.
And I've been paying into the system for the past 43 years, and if I don't get something out of Social Security I'm going to be pissed, along with tens of millions of other people with leisure time to lobby their representatives and who tend to vote. Whether Social Security was a good idea or not, whether it was set up properly or not, there are lots of moral and political reasons why it can't just be dropped.
The fund was intended to lend out money at interest, because keeping it under some gigamattress is stupid. Lending it to the US Government isn't a problem (although I've heard the interest rate is low). The change in the fund from having more to less money to lend is going to be big, through.
In what way does "The Congress shall have Power To...provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States" not imply the power to promote the general welfare? The founders undoubtedly didn't see what was coming, but they explicitly made it possible. Courts do consider original intent, but not typically to override what's printed in black and white.
You cite items 12, 13, and 14 of the appropriate section to show that Congress can maintain armies and a navy. They say nothing about an Air Force. The only way that can be Constitutionally justified is by the provision of the common Defense in item 1.
Invest. When you're young, you can take more risks. As you get older, index funds and bonds are more attractive.
My investments tanked when Wall Street messed up. Now, they're back. If I'd been in risky investments, I'd have lost a lot of them, but I didn't have much invested in them. If I'd had to start drawing money from my stocks during the crash, it would have been unpleasant, but most companies will come back from bad times.
The basic physics says that, when we burn fossil fuels and raise the CO2 content of the air, we'll warm up without a corresponding decrease in solar input and/or an increase in what we radiate into space. The naive conclusion is that burning lots of fossil fuels creates global warming. This should be comprehensible to most people. Some of the other things are understandable: more energy in the atmosphere causes more severe weather, the melting of land ice increases sea level (there's also the increase from the oceans getting warmer), and it changes the climate from what it historically has been. Are you having trouble with these concepts?
Your other problem with global warming is that you don't like some politicians? And some sort of investor website ignores the science involved? You do realize that you can get summaries from actual climate scientists, don't you? And that a politically or financially motivated scientific conspiracy that involves scientists the world over is really, really far-fetched? And that any climate scientists who comes up with other theories that fit the evidence will win big in their careers?
Stallman has helped create a free operating system that's quite successful, among other things. He provides practical solutions to many problems.
I don't see that it matters if Free Software idealism wins, as long as it exists. I run an operating system that I can examine and modify as I like, and it didn't cost me anything significant. I can get implementations of all sorts of computer languages for free. That's not how things tended to work in the 1980s and before, and Stallman is a very important reason for the change.
Stallman is right a surprising amount of the time. Over the decades, I've come to realize that, when he warns about something, it's best to listen and take heed.
I don't fully agree with his philosophy, but by acting on it he has helped to create great things. We're all better off because of the Gnu project. Some very good and useful software has been released under a variation of the GPL.
I'd think the most popular distribution of the most popular OS kernel would be Android. Linux is very successful for servers and embedded software, and has well over a 1% market share of desktops/laptops.
You can't legally put GPLv3 software in the App Store, since it requires that the user not only have source code, but the keys to install it. I've read that GPLv2 software can't go into the App Store, but I really don't see it when I reread GPLv2.
Writing Lisp without a parenthesis-aware editor is really painful. I tried that a few times. When you use an editor like Emacs (which I pretty much use only for Lisp), you don't keep track of the parentheses so much as the shape of the function you're writing or editing.
Some people who disagree with me are intelligent and thoughtful people who make good arguments. Many of these have different value systems that I respect. Some are idiots. I disagree with a lot of people because they are idiots.
I see your knowledge of the Civil Rights movement is as sound as your knowledge of fascism and the rise of Hitler.
There's so many kinds of wrong in that, but I've found it's useless to try to correct you with facts.
Some people do post toxic sludge. On my wall, it looks more like a right-wing phenomenon, but I can't speak for all of Facebook.
Right. We're tearing you away from your community and family and sending you somewhere you have no prospects, and it's for your benefit. If this benefited the illegal immigrant, they'd have left already. Deportation of those here illegally is for the benefit of those here legally, and nobody else.
Because the law is always fair and just. Right. Got that. I knew someone who lived in Nazi Germany while it was still there; would you give her the same advice?
Which is sometimes the right thing to do. As another extreme example, some people were tolerant of the illegality of helping slaves escape to Canada.
Who's content with that? Republicans, mostly, as far as I can tell. Why do you think there's crackdowns on individual illegal immigrants, while places that employ them thrive? If we put teeth into the employment laws, whether by new laws or enforcing what we've got, illegal immigrants would be unable to find work and would go away. It looks to me like the single best thing we could do to keep illegal immigrants out. We can't stop them, and we can't find all of them, but we can make it much more difficult to gain from showing up sans documentation.
I'll give you a heads up here. Approximately nobody in this country is trying to destroy America and everything it stands for. People have different ideas of what America is and what it stands for, and often wildly different ideas of how to get there. This creates conflict, such as people thinking America stands for Christianity versus those who want to keep church and state thoroughly separate, but the conflict is because of different sincerely held views (mine's right, of course) rather than wanting to destroy America.
Which is why Hispanics and Muslims would be natural Republicans if the Republicans would accept them. When they vote Democrat, it's because Democrats are more accepting of them.