If you are currently paying $0 in taxes because you've found a way to dodge an audit, and the IRS figures out a way to force you to pay taxes you already owe, did they just "raise your taxes?"
If you think they did, your definition of "raise your taxes" is stupid.
These taxes already exist. People are evading them since it's currently infeasible to audit citizen's online purchasing history, but those taxes are already owed.
This isn't akin to a new tax; rather, it's as if stricter auditing were leading people to have to pay taxes they could previously dodge.
It turns out, when you staff the Justice Department based on political ideology rather than capability as lawyers, you get crappy lawyers who have the right political ideology.
Excedrin is an over-the-counter headache pain reliever, typically in the form of tablets or caplets. It contains acetaminophen, acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), and caffeine.
Turns out that taking the drug you're jonesing for helps ease withdrawal symptoms.
No, the federal Government can still call any Thing "money". But it seriously screws the States, when it chooses to use anything other than gold or silver (or, perhaps, an equivalent), because it makes their use of that Thing unconstitutional...
It seems you're having some reading comprehension issues, even when I helpfully bolded the relevant words for you.
The States are prohibited from creating legal tender, which means that they can't create their own state money. They are not prohibited from using legal tender created by the federal government.
It's hardly inarguable, since it *was* argued, and successfully, 150 years ago.
First, your argument has the time wrong, because the time of unconstitutionality wouldn't have been when the gold standard was abolished, but rather when the government started printing money during the Civil War.
More importantly, your argument claims that, because states are prohibited from making anything but gold and silver coins legal tender, that the federal Government's act of making paper money legal tender is unconstitutional when states use that money. This is, to put it bluntly, stupid. Article 1 Section 10 is a limit on state power, not federal power. Article 1, Section 8 allows Congress to coin money, and further allows borrowing in the credit of the United States, and therefore allows for the printing of fiat money.
First, it was your proposal, not mine. Please don't attribute it to me than bash it.
Fine.
Second, what you described didn't hold each and every person to a separate standard of law. It held everyone to a lower standard of law: "the law would inevitably become what people *believed* it to be," That doesn't sound like anarchy, but it sounds like a reduction of the law to a common level.
That is only the case in so far as everyone believes the law to be the same thing. If person A does not know that possession of a type of narcotic is illegal, and is therefore exempt from prosecution for that crime, but person B does know, and therefore is subject to prosecution, the law is different for A and B. It becomes shaped, not by the people acting collectively through the legislature, but by individuals (not) acting to educate themselves. Further, it provides powerful incentives to avoid knowing what is and is not illegal, as one would gain immunity from the criminal justice system just by being a dumbass.
You can compare this to the other types of mistake in criminal law: mistake of non-criminal law and mistake of fact. A misunderstanding of family law leading to an illegal bigamist marriage after a faulty divorce is generally treated as exculpatory for criminal liability, because this *doesn't* have the effect of changing the civil law in question. The person avoids criminal liability, but the civil law over which the mistake was made is still active. Similarly, if one makes an honest and reasonable mistake of fact, this will generally allow one to escape criminal prosecution, because it doesn't change the underlying fact.
They make it up regardless. When the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove it wasn't reasonable and prudent, the law was unconstitutional. When the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove it was reasonable and prudent, then the law is perfectly fine. The standard is the same. The rules the same. The only difference is the one that is most restrictive on the people and least restrictive on the government is upheld and the other is overturned.
This is completely false. A "reasonable and prudent" standard for speeding, absent any guidance at all, is not an identical rule to a "reasonable and prudent" standard where the state provides guidance on what it thinks is reasonable via a road sign. Without guidance, an individual can honestly claim "Well, 200mph seemed reasonable to me," and the State could rule that anything over 5mph was unreasonable. With a sign saying, for instance, 60mph is suggested, both 200mph and 5mph limits are shown to be absurd.
The vagueness doctrine operates as a limit on just how flexible the law can be, eliminating those laws which are actually unknowable. As the Supreme Court said, "No one may be required at peril of life, liberty or property to speculate as to the meaning of penal statutes. All are entitled to be informed as to what the State commands or forbids."*
That there exist organizations with the sole goal of making the law accessible, and that such organizations not only exist but must be "large" to work on such a goal (and, in my opinion, fail), you have proven my point.
Your point is that the law is unknowable, and what's more, it's designed to be unknowable.
How does ALI, which is an extremely influential organization whose raison d'être is to keep the law simple, prove that the law is unknowable and designed to be so? How does the fact that their products are used by literally every American lawyer, and available at any public law library, prove that the law is unknowable and designed to be so?
The problem is that you want the answers handed to you on a silver platter, not that the law is "unknowable."
Why? Thou shalt not kill. Period. Not "murder", but "kill." So wars would be against that law. We may presume it to have an im
I made no proposals. I stated that it is absurd to exclude ignorance of the law as a defense when the law is unknowable. You could have as easily asserted that I proposed to simplify the law. Yet you chose the words you did. Why?
Because "they claim," combined with the disparaging tone present in your entire post, connotes the idea that this isn't a good idea.
Isn't allowing everyone to conform the laws to be what they think they should be the cornerstone of democracy?
No. Democracy is where the rule of law is defined by the people, collectively. What you're proposing is the rule of law being defined by each individual person. That's called anarchy.
That's the standard now, but they don't accept ignorance, just confusion if you aren't ignorant, as long as it's officials of the government that have the confusion, but only when it suits the goals of the court.
The vagueness doctrine (what I assume your ramblings are referring to) exists to put a limit on arbitrary enforcement of the law. The trouble with Montana's law compared to Texas' is that, without some baseline for what is "reasonable and prudent," individual police officers or magistrates will have absolute authority to make something up.
But then, I think the legal system is supposed to be unknowable, and was designed that way.
This says more about you than it does about the law. There are huge legal associations, such as the American Law Institute, which exist to keep the law knowable and understandable. They author things like the Model Penal Code, or the Restatements of the Law.
Then there are legal encyclopedias like American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum, which exist to quickly determine what the general rules are for any given legal topic, and the resources to drill down for more information on a specific narrow question.
If not, the case law shouldn't exist, and any adjustments to the law shouldn't be made by judges, but judges should only be allowed to invalidate the law as written and remand it to the legislature for clarification.
Unless you have some sort of magical power to turn a natural languages (such as English) into a formal language (like machine code), this is impossible. Any law necessarily requires interpretation, which will necessarily generate case law of that interpretation.
Do you propose that ignorance of the law *should* be a defense?
Have you thought about the implications of that? I doubt it, because if you did, you would understand why that's a terrible idea. In a court system in which you could avoid criminal liability by proving that you didn't know your actions were illegal, the law would inevitably become what people *believed* it to be, rather than what the law actually was. In effect, your ignorance would overturn the will of the people enacted through democratic processes.
It's awfully appealing to say "There is no answer" when one's preferred answer isn't working, and the solution that will work is anathema to one's ideology. Not liking the answer doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Every dollar "spent" on tax cuts generates tiny amounts of economic activity compared to money actually spent on things like food stamps or unemployment insurance.
For instance, food stamps generate $1.73 worth of economic activity per dollar spent. Unemployment generates $1.64. Tax cuts to businesses to spur spending on capital investments (such as accelerated depreciation) only generates $.27 worth of economic activity. A lump-sum refund, like you're proposing, generates only $1.02 worth of economic activity. Increasing infrastructure spending, on the other hand, generates $1.59 worth of economic activity.
-- Mark Zandi, of Moody's Economy
Your "common sense" is what allowed this problem to grow and fester under the Bush Administration for the past eight years.
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
The construction workers then continue to spend money, which supports the economy, allowing for additional buildings to be built.
Also, building schools is not what Republicans object to.
Then why was it cut to secure Republican votes?
It's the millions to birth control programs. How does giving out condoms provide jobs?
By keeping people in the economy who would otherwise be out because of pregnancy or illness.
How is money to Amtrak going to produce jobs? Sure, it helps out the people working for Amtrak, but every passenger on Amtrak is NON-passenger on Greyhound or Delta.
Building infrastructure not only creates jobs to build the infrastructure, but also allows for development along the transit lines.
How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs?
Continuing to allow unemployed people to participate in the economy increases private spending, preserving jobs that already exist and helping the economy rebound. Every dollar spent on unemployment insurance benefits results in $1.64 in economic activity.
How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
It not only takes the property off the hands of the bank and puts it to a useful purpose, it allows low-income people to continue to participate in the economy (which is difficult if not impossible if one doesn't have a home).
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
In other words, don't let the facts cloud your preconceived judgment of "Republicans bad, Democrats good".
Perhaps you should learn a little before you assume that others are the morons.
"Bipartisanship" isn't useful in this context, because one party is working from macroeconomic theory and reason, and the other party is working from the ideological mantra of "Spending Bad. Tax Cuts Good." To the Congressional Republicans, things like school construction won't result in jobs for construction workers: apparently magic pixies will simply drop the new schools out of the sky in exchange for our money.
President Obama needs to realize that it's the U.S. Congress, not the Snuggle-Senate, and beat some heads together to get good policy through. The $800b he proposed was too small to begin with, and all of these cuts make it more likely that we're not going to have enough stimulus to do anything useful.
While there is a potential world in which the Commerce Clause is read that way, it isn't this one. As interpreted by... well, pretty much everyone (aside from people like Justice Scalia that think the Dormant Commerce Clause doesn't really exist), the DCC means that states cannot discriminate between intrastate and interstate commerce to the detriment of interstate competitors. A blanket regulation such as this one is fine so long as it is facially neutral between local and interstate commercial actors and does not have the effect of advancing the interests of the local actors at the expense of the interstate actors.
Do you also believe that all state restrictions on classes of fireworks are similarly unconstitutional under the DCC? That too "effects [sic] what manufacturers in other states can ship and sell."
Wait just a minute. A public blog? Without me having signed a model release for that image? Sorry to rain on your parade, but while they may own the image, they can't just go publish an 'identifiable photo' of me without my consent.
The right of publicity only applies to commercial exploitation.
But the mistakes in the ruling would have been caught if the judge had just showed a draft to an Internet guru and said, "Hey, can you check if there's anything wrong here?" I know, I know, that's "just not done" (and there are probably formal rules in most states against showing a draft of a ruling to a third party before publishing it, even if the third party reviewer is sworn to secrecy, as they should be). But there's nothing stopping the judge from asking a technical expert during the trial, "It seems to me that the only way to publish anonymously on the Internet would be to use forged headers in e-mail. Can you tell me if that's right before I go too far down that line of reasoning?"
Slashdot Mirror
If you are currently paying $0 in taxes because you've found a way to dodge an audit, and the IRS figures out a way to force you to pay taxes you already owe, did they just "raise your taxes?"
If you think they did, your definition of "raise your taxes" is stupid.
These taxes already exist. People are evading them since it's currently infeasible to audit citizen's online purchasing history, but those taxes are already owed.
This isn't akin to a new tax; rather, it's as if stricter auditing were leading people to have to pay taxes they could previously dodge.
Yes, because an absurdly high property tax rate is better.
Replying to the wrong post tends to cause that issue.
The exclusionary rule does not apply to evidence gathered by private citizens.
See, for instance, U.S. v. Hood, 748 F.2d 439 (8th Cir. 1984), available at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/748/748.F2d.439.84-1525.html
No, I'm saying that the people DOJ was hiring were chosen despite being bad lawyers, so long as they had the correct political ideology.
It turns out, when you staff the Justice Department based on political ideology rather than capability as lawyers, you get crappy lawyers who have the right political ideology.
See, for example, Monica Goodling.
I can't imagine why Excedrin helped:
Turns out that taking the drug you're jonesing for helps ease withdrawal symptoms.
Guess who contracts are enforced by?
No, the federal Government can still call any Thing "money". But it seriously screws the States, when it chooses to use anything other than gold or silver (or, perhaps, an equivalent), because it makes their use of that Thing unconstitutional...
It seems you're having some reading comprehension issues, even when I helpfully bolded the relevant words for you.
The States are prohibited from creating legal tender, which means that they can't create their own state money. They are not prohibited from using legal tender created by the federal government.
It's hardly inarguable, since it *was* argued, and successfully, 150 years ago.
First, your argument has the time wrong, because the time of unconstitutionality wouldn't have been when the gold standard was abolished, but rather when the government started printing money during the Civil War.
More importantly, your argument claims that, because states are prohibited from making anything but gold and silver coins legal tender, that the federal Government's act of making paper money legal tender is unconstitutional when states use that money. This is, to put it bluntly, stupid. Article 1 Section 10 is a limit on state power, not federal power. Article 1, Section 8 allows Congress to coin money, and further allows borrowing in the credit of the United States, and therefore allows for the printing of fiat money.
First, it was your proposal, not mine. Please don't attribute it to me than bash it.
Fine.
Second, what you described didn't hold each and every person to a separate standard of law. It held everyone to a lower standard of law: "the law would inevitably become what people *believed* it to be," That doesn't sound like anarchy, but it sounds like a reduction of the law to a common level.
That is only the case in so far as everyone believes the law to be the same thing. If person A does not know that possession of a type of narcotic is illegal, and is therefore exempt from prosecution for that crime, but person B does know, and therefore is subject to prosecution, the law is different for A and B. It becomes shaped, not by the people acting collectively through the legislature, but by individuals (not) acting to educate themselves. Further, it provides powerful incentives to avoid knowing what is and is not illegal, as one would gain immunity from the criminal justice system just by being a dumbass.
You can compare this to the other types of mistake in criminal law: mistake of non-criminal law and mistake of fact. A misunderstanding of family law leading to an illegal bigamist marriage after a faulty divorce is generally treated as exculpatory for criminal liability, because this *doesn't* have the effect of changing the civil law in question. The person avoids criminal liability, but the civil law over which the mistake was made is still active. Similarly, if one makes an honest and reasonable mistake of fact, this will generally allow one to escape criminal prosecution, because it doesn't change the underlying fact.
They make it up regardless. When the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove it wasn't reasonable and prudent, the law was unconstitutional. When the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove it was reasonable and prudent, then the law is perfectly fine. The standard is the same. The rules the same. The only difference is the one that is most restrictive on the people and least restrictive on the government is upheld and the other is overturned.
This is completely false. A "reasonable and prudent" standard for speeding, absent any guidance at all, is not an identical rule to a "reasonable and prudent" standard where the state provides guidance on what it thinks is reasonable via a road sign. Without guidance, an individual can honestly claim "Well, 200mph seemed reasonable to me," and the State could rule that anything over 5mph was unreasonable. With a sign saying, for instance, 60mph is suggested, both 200mph and 5mph limits are shown to be absurd.
The vagueness doctrine operates as a limit on just how flexible the law can be, eliminating those laws which are actually unknowable. As the Supreme Court said, "No one may be required at peril of life, liberty or property to speculate as to the meaning of penal statutes. All are entitled to be informed as to what the State commands or forbids."*
That there exist organizations with the sole goal of making the law accessible, and that such organizations not only exist but must be "large" to work on such a goal (and, in my opinion, fail), you have proven my point.
Your point is that the law is unknowable, and what's more, it's designed to be unknowable.
How does ALI, which is an extremely influential organization whose raison d'être is to keep the law simple, prove that the law is unknowable and designed to be so? How does the fact that their products are used by literally every American lawyer, and available at any public law library, prove that the law is unknowable and designed to be so?
The problem is that you want the answers handed to you on a silver platter, not that the law is "unknowable."
Why? Thou shalt not kill. Period. Not "murder", but "kill." So wars would be against that law. We may presume it to have an im
I made no proposals. I stated that it is absurd to exclude ignorance of the law as a defense when the law is unknowable. You could have as easily asserted that I proposed to simplify the law. Yet you chose the words you did. Why?
Because "they claim," combined with the disparaging tone present in your entire post, connotes the idea that this isn't a good idea.
Isn't allowing everyone to conform the laws to be what they think they should be the cornerstone of democracy?
No. Democracy is where the rule of law is defined by the people, collectively. What you're proposing is the rule of law being defined by each individual person. That's called anarchy.
That's the standard now, but they don't accept ignorance, just confusion if you aren't ignorant, as long as it's officials of the government that have the confusion, but only when it suits the goals of the court.
The vagueness doctrine (what I assume your ramblings are referring to) exists to put a limit on arbitrary enforcement of the law. The trouble with Montana's law compared to Texas' is that, without some baseline for what is "reasonable and prudent," individual police officers or magistrates will have absolute authority to make something up.
But then, I think the legal system is supposed to be unknowable, and was designed that way.
This says more about you than it does about the law. There are huge legal associations, such as the American Law Institute, which exist to keep the law knowable and understandable. They author things like the Model Penal Code, or the Restatements of the Law.
Then there are legal encyclopedias like American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum, which exist to quickly determine what the general rules are for any given legal topic, and the resources to drill down for more information on a specific narrow question.
If not, the case law shouldn't exist, and any adjustments to the law shouldn't be made by judges, but judges should only be allowed to invalidate the law as written and remand it to the legislature for clarification.
Unless you have some sort of magical power to turn a natural languages (such as English) into a formal language (like machine code), this is impossible. Any law necessarily requires interpretation, which will necessarily generate case law of that interpretation.
Do you propose that ignorance of the law *should* be a defense?
Have you thought about the implications of that? I doubt it, because if you did, you would understand why that's a terrible idea. In a court system in which you could avoid criminal liability by proving that you didn't know your actions were illegal, the law would inevitably become what people *believed* it to be, rather than what the law actually was. In effect, your ignorance would overturn the will of the people enacted through democratic processes.
It's awfully appealing to say "There is no answer" when one's preferred answer isn't working, and the solution that will work is anathema to one's ideology. Not liking the answer doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
See also: Keynes.
Every dollar "spent" on tax cuts generates tiny amounts of economic activity compared to money actually spent on things like food stamps or unemployment insurance.
For instance, food stamps generate $1.73 worth of economic activity per dollar spent. Unemployment generates $1.64. Tax cuts to businesses to spur spending on capital investments (such as accelerated depreciation) only generates $.27 worth of economic activity. A lump-sum refund, like you're proposing, generates only $1.02 worth of economic activity. Increasing infrastructure spending, on the other hand, generates $1.59 worth of economic activity.
-- Mark Zandi, of Moody's Economy
Your "common sense" is what allowed this problem to grow and fester under the Bush Administration for the past eight years.
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
The construction workers then continue to spend money, which supports the economy, allowing for additional buildings to be built.
Also, building schools is not what Republicans object to.
Then why was it cut to secure Republican votes?
It's the millions to birth control programs. How does giving out condoms provide jobs?
By keeping people in the economy who would otherwise be out because of pregnancy or illness.
How is money to Amtrak going to produce jobs? Sure, it helps out the people working for Amtrak, but every passenger on Amtrak is NON-passenger on Greyhound or Delta.
Building infrastructure not only creates jobs to build the infrastructure, but also allows for development along the transit lines.
How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs?
Continuing to allow unemployed people to participate in the economy increases private spending, preserving jobs that already exist and helping the economy rebound. Every dollar spent on unemployment insurance benefits results in $1.64 in economic activity.
How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
It not only takes the property off the hands of the bank and puts it to a useful purpose, it allows low-income people to continue to participate in the economy (which is difficult if not impossible if one doesn't have a home).
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
In other words, don't let the facts cloud your preconceived judgment of "Republicans bad, Democrats good".
Perhaps you should learn a little before you assume that others are the morons.
"Bipartisanship" isn't useful in this context, because one party is working from macroeconomic theory and reason, and the other party is working from the ideological mantra of "Spending Bad. Tax Cuts Good." To the Congressional Republicans, things like school construction won't result in jobs for construction workers: apparently magic pixies will simply drop the new schools out of the sky in exchange for our money.
President Obama needs to realize that it's the U.S. Congress, not the Snuggle-Senate, and beat some heads together to get good policy through. The $800b he proposed was too small to begin with, and all of these cuts make it more likely that we're not going to have enough stimulus to do anything useful.
While there is a potential world in which the Commerce Clause is read that way, it isn't this one. As interpreted by... well, pretty much everyone (aside from people like Justice Scalia that think the Dormant Commerce Clause doesn't really exist), the DCC means that states cannot discriminate between intrastate and interstate commerce to the detriment of interstate competitors. A blanket regulation such as this one is fine so long as it is facially neutral between local and interstate commercial actors and does not have the effect of advancing the interests of the local actors at the expense of the interstate actors.
Do you also believe that all state restrictions on classes of fireworks are similarly unconstitutional under the DCC? That too "effects [sic] what manufacturers in other states can ship and sell."
There's no discrimination between citizens and non-citizens for selling TVs under this plan, and therefore no Dormant Commerce Clause issue.
Lawyers don't sign non-competes because they're barred by ABA Model Rule 5.6(a).
Not that I just finished taking the MPRE or anything.
Yes, if only I had been saving my money, I could have saved up the $60,000 a year I started incurring in prescription costs when I was 16 years old.
Damn my fiscal irresponsibility, not having a high-paying job before I had graduated high-school.
Wait just a minute. A public blog? Without me having signed a model release for that image? Sorry to rain on your parade, but while they may own the image, they can't just go publish an 'identifiable photo' of me without my consent.
The right of publicity only applies to commercial exploitation.
You can control tags of you in your Facebook privacy settings.