When you make new construction more difficult and more costly, existing apartment and housing prices also increase as a result of the decline in new construction to compete with it. See also, SF Bay area.
Nice theory, but back in reality the one school system ultimately under the governance of the Federal Government is that of Washington, D.C., where they spend $27K/student/year (twice the national average) in order to rank 2nd to last on math results and last on reading results.
Not sure our goal should be to replicate that "success" elsewhere.
Except of course that crime rates can be based on crimes reported by crime victims/observers and you can just throw out the reports directly from officer observations. No one bases crime rates on the number of criminals "caught", or where they are caught. The statistic used is where the crime reported occurred.
For your plumber example, the money was taxed in the same way before it was given to Amazon by a purchaser, then it was taxed as income for the employees getting the stock options. Same situation, same result.
If you don't think a corporation can exercise free speech on behalf of individuals, then you need to start by shutting down the NY Times, the ACLU, CNN, etc... all corporations who do exactly that.
And Congress long ago made the rules where they can claim stock options aren't an expense to Wall Street, but are an expense to the IRS. Back in reality, they're an expense directly to shareholders, by diluting the value of their stock.
The top 1% of income earners pay 39.48% of federal income taxes (2x their share of gross income), the top 10% cover 70.88% of them and the top 50% pay 97.25%. So it's not like people with a higher than average income aren't covering the vast majority of income taxes.
Yeah, there are some super-wealthy who have an ownership model which minimizes their taxes to a certain extent, but when the bottom 50% of income earners are the ones who only pays 2.75% of the total income taxes, it's going to be tough to make an argument that the "rich" aren't paying much income tax.
That said, federal corporate taxes are just passed down on employees (who can't either invest in a different country's capital market, nor buy from an out of country supplier like a consumer can). In the specific case of Amazon, their taxes are low because they've lost money (ignore the pretend accounting "profit" reported) for their shareholders by taking some of the shareholder's value in the form of stock options and giving it as an expense to their employees, which makes the shareholders' shares less valuable, but has the side benefit of aligning employee incentives better with the incentives shareholders would like them to have.
First of all, corporations aren't people, although they do represent people, which is why they are treated that way in certain circumstances (as a pass through for a person's rights, for example).
Second, Amazon's shareholders didn't "make" a real profit over time for their shareholders (the owners), despite whatever their public numbers about profit said. Their shareholders lost money by giving a bunch of it to Amazon employees via stock options, then the employees (who did actually get money in the deal) paid taxes on the value of those stock options. The stock options were only valuable because they dilute the value of the existing shareholders' stock, which is where the money for the options came from.
It would be the same if Amazon demanded stockholders give them cash as a capital contribution, then gave that cash to their employees. It's done with stock options because the shareholders and managers believe employees who can see their options will be more valuable in the future if they contribute to the company's bottom line will have their incentives aligned with what the shareholders (who also profit from the same thing) want.
And there's nothing wrong with the stock option deduction. Any stock given to employees dilutes the value of the stock of the current shareholders. The shareholders are effectively paying the employees directly, rather than through a check from the company's bank account, but they're definitely paying them, the same as if the company purchased their own stock with cash and then gave that stock to the employee. The company's money and assets are just a pass through for the shareholders in this case.
Less than 50% of the online market can't credibly be described as a "near-monopoly". Amazon doesn't even make much on their e-commerce sales. From a financial perspective, they're a cloud services provider who also does a little e-commerce on the side.
You information about the recent tax cuts is also completely wrong, so I suppose it shouldn't surprise me you aren't aware of anything you weren't able to hear in a hard-left-wing information bubble.
Vote only for politicians who declare a willingness to make our tax code more fair and less protective of the wealthy.
When "the rich" top 1% of income owners pay 2x their share of income in taxes, then the only way to make the tax code "more fair" would be to lower taxes on the rich, not to increase them. When the top 50% of income owners pay 97.5% of income taxes, then the bottom 50% who pay only 2.5% of the taxes aren't in a position to declare that's "not fair". I'm not sure you understand what "fair" means. It'd be fair if everyone contributed in taxes exactly what they got back in benefits over their lifetime, but we left that behind a long time ago in the name of envy and greed.
Taxes on profits which are specific to a company or industry are passed on to shareholders, which in turn drives investors to invest in other companies/industries with a better return on capital.
Taxes which are universal in application to all companies (like the corporate income tax) in a country with at least semi-free trade are primarily passed on to employees, then a little bit to customers and the even smaller remaining to shareholders.
If a country allows free capital flows and free trade and has a corporate tax rate much higher than that of its neighbors, investors can choose to buy shares in companies elsewhere that face a lower tax, and corporate management can choose to move operations abroad. Consumers, meanwhile, can buy from foreign suppliers. By comparison, workers are pretty immobile. It’s hard for them to switch employers, let alone countries. So the tax lands on them, in the form of lower wages and/or skimpier benefits. And as those at the top of today’s corporate hierarchies seem to have done a pretty great job of keeping their paychecks from being adversely affected, the impact is presumably greatest on those farther down in the organization.
So yeah, if your goal is to tax working people more, then increase the corporate income tax is great for that. Otherwise, it's just a stupid double-tax which is useful to politicians for disguising to people that they're getting taxed extra.
If you believe tax money creates educated people, let me introduce you to the most expensive education hellhole in the country, Washington, D.C., where they spend $28K/student per year (twice the national average) and are either the worst or second worst school system in terms of educational outcomes, depending on how you rank them (only school system to make the bottom 2 on both reading, last, and math, 2nd to last).
American citizens paying taxes are moving out of CA to other States. Non-citizens and some of those citizens who don't pay taxes are moving into CA. The non-citizen part (H1Bs, illegals, etc...) is the part which is growing CA, which is why CA can grow, but still have a net negative migration compared to the rest of the country. The most productive groups are leaving.
The top 1% of income earners still pay 39.48% of federal income taxes (2x their share of gross income), the top 10% cover 70.88% of them and the top 50% pay 97.25%. So it's not like people with a higher than average income aren't already covering the vast majority of income taxes.
Yeah, there are some super-wealthy who have an ownership model which minimizes their taxes to a certain extent, but when the bottom 50% of income earners only pays 2.75% of the total income taxes, it's going to be tough to make an argument that the "rich" aren't paying income tax.
Don't worry, the Democrats won't stop trying to ban things until they've covered their whole list, which per the AOC “Green New Deal” includes banning: all forms of plastic and fossil fuels, all carbon emissions, regardless of source, all nuclear power plants, non-union jobs related to renewable energy (or anything to do with the GND), airplanes, and famously, farting cows.
But don't worry, they'll guarantee:
Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work
And hey, they even have momentum:
Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee. o 45 House Reps and 330+ groups backed the original resolution for a select committee
There's also no good reason to not have multiple copies of your offline wallet if you have more than $10 or 20k worth in there. If you have hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars worth, then you need to be spending a lot more on your automatic replication and backup strategy to ensure nothing can happen to it.
If you're storing $137 million in a cold wallet on an encrypted laptop which only one person can decrypt, that's like leaving that cash in the trunk of the CEOs car and just hoping no one noticed and he never got rear-ended at a stoplight. Did the company have absolutely no one in charge of risk management to point these things out? The level of incompetence is just mind-boggling.
Yeah, the linked article can't even manage to be factually accurate at the most basic level. For example, Men are a majority now? Nope.
There is no institutional bias against men? The author of the article has apparently never heard of schools, or universities, who literally advertise that they don't accept men for everything from scholarships to groups and centers paid for by male student fees.
They should just pass a law that in the event of a disaster, everyone in the disaster area who wants to gets a free instantaneous teleport to anywhere else in the world. Think of all the lives that would save!
And it makes as much sense as this proposed law....
It's definitely possible. I have 5 phones right now for my family which (with the US version) are GSM & CDMA dual SIM devices from Motorola which work just fine using more than one network even. The easiest is of course to actually buy a never locked phone directly, not to rent/lease/purchase one from a carrier and then have to jump through hoops later to get it unlocked.
The below was originally written in response to an article blaming the Venezuelan economic issues on oil price declines, so you'll see references to that. I'm posting this as-is, rather than rewriting it. In the year or so since I wrote it, things have only gotten worse, in terms of lack of food and in terms of oil production (despite recently rising oil prices, up $10/barrel in that time), to the point where we're seeing news stories about treason charges for oil workers in a futile attempt to get production back up at government-run PDVSA. How bad is it according to Reuters? About 25,000 PDVSA workers resigned between the start of January 2017 and the end of January 2018, out of a workforce last officially reported at 146,000, Reuters reported last week. The resignations including high-level professionals that are now almost impossible to replace have only accelerated since Quevedo arrived, two dozen industry sources told Reuters. Disclaimers: This isn't original research, it's collating from publicly available sources. I did run the results past three people who live in Venezuela and they agreed it describes what they've seen/experienced. --- The Studebaker article contains some facts, but it also includes opinions and as Gilberto pointed out, it leaves many facts out, mostly about the government as related to the economy.
Here are some additional facts and opinions to consider:
From 1998 to 2018, oil production in Venezuela is down from 3.5 million barrels per day in December of 1997 vs 2 million in October of 2017.
So what happened in the last 20 years? From Wikipedia:
"After Hugo Chávez officially took office in February 1999, several policy changes involving the country's oil industry were made to explicitly tie it to the state under his Bolivarian Revolution. Since then, PDVSA has not demonstrated any capability to bring new oil fields on stream since nationalizing heavy oil projects in the Orinoco Petroleum Belt formerly operated by international oil companies ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Total. Chávez’s policies damaged Venezuela's oil industry due to lack of investment, corruption and cash shortages."
Probably just a fluke, though, right? I mean, steel production in Venezuela increased from 3400 tons in 1998 to about 4600 tons in 2008. The steel industry was nationalized by the Venezuelan government in 2008 and production declined to under 1600 tons. Huh, definitely a pattern forming. Similar stories of lower production and losses in the other industries after they were taken over: aluminum, cement, gold, iron, farming, transportation, electricity, food production, banking, paper and the media.
How well does the government run the nationalized oil company, PDVSA? Reuters:
"The output fall could not come at a worse time, with the economy in crisis and the socialist government struggling to pay its foreign debt." and "Compounding the situation, another eight managers and employees of state oil company PDVSA in eastern Venezuela were arrested in recent days for fiddling production figures, chief prosecutor Tarek Saab told reporters.
In a major corruption sweep engulfing the oil sector, about two dozen high-level executives have already been arrested in recent weeks, ridding PDVSA of much of its top brass."
Without the government takeover, even if oil companies were only competent enough to continue production levels and not grow them (as they've done previously over tim
Sorry I wasn't clear. I wasn't calling the county an urban area, I was comparing it to nearby urban areas and excluding nearby rural areas, which have a different leaning.
The County officials do seem to lean R overall, but the County did vote for Democratic Politicians at the State and higher levels by 3-5% in the most recent election, so I suppose they're relatively in the middle compared to the country as a whole, which would make them leaning right in comparison to the nearby cities.
Slashdot Mirror
When you make new construction more difficult and more costly, existing apartment and housing prices also increase as a result of the decline in new construction to compete with it. See also, SF Bay area.
Nice theory, but back in reality the one school system ultimately under the governance of the Federal Government is that of Washington, D.C., where they spend $27K/student/year (twice the national average) in order to rank 2nd to last on math results and last on reading results.
Not sure our goal should be to replicate that "success" elsewhere.
Except of course that crime rates can be based on crimes reported by crime victims/observers and you can just throw out the reports directly from officer observations. No one bases crime rates on the number of criminals "caught", or where they are caught. The statistic used is where the crime reported occurred.
For your plumber example, the money was taxed in the same way before it was given to Amazon by a purchaser, then it was taxed as income for the employees getting the stock options. Same situation, same result.
If you don't think a corporation can exercise free speech on behalf of individuals, then you need to start by shutting down the NY Times, the ACLU, CNN, etc... all corporations who do exactly that.
And Congress long ago made the rules where they can claim stock options aren't an expense to Wall Street, but are an expense to the IRS. Back in reality, they're an expense directly to shareholders, by diluting the value of their stock.
The top 1% of income earners pay 39.48% of federal income taxes (2x their share of gross income), the top 10% cover 70.88% of them and the top 50% pay 97.25%. So it's not like people with a higher than average income aren't covering the vast majority of income taxes.
Yeah, there are some super-wealthy who have an ownership model which minimizes their taxes to a certain extent, but when the bottom 50% of income earners are the ones who only pays 2.75% of the total income taxes, it's going to be tough to make an argument that the "rich" aren't paying much income tax.
That said, federal corporate taxes are just passed down on employees (who can't either invest in a different country's capital market, nor buy from an out of country supplier like a consumer can). In the specific case of Amazon, their taxes are low because they've lost money (ignore the pretend accounting "profit" reported) for their shareholders by taking some of the shareholder's value in the form of stock options and giving it as an expense to their employees, which makes the shareholders' shares less valuable, but has the side benefit of aligning employee incentives better with the incentives shareholders would like them to have.
First of all, corporations aren't people, although they do represent people, which is why they are treated that way in certain circumstances (as a pass through for a person's rights, for example).
Second, Amazon's shareholders didn't "make" a real profit over time for their shareholders (the owners), despite whatever their public numbers about profit said. Their shareholders lost money by giving a bunch of it to Amazon employees via stock options, then the employees (who did actually get money in the deal) paid taxes on the value of those stock options. The stock options were only valuable because they dilute the value of the existing shareholders' stock, which is where the money for the options came from.
It would be the same if Amazon demanded stockholders give them cash as a capital contribution, then gave that cash to their employees. It's done with stock options because the shareholders and managers believe employees who can see their options will be more valuable in the future if they contribute to the company's bottom line will have their incentives aligned with what the shareholders (who also profit from the same thing) want.
And there's nothing wrong with the stock option deduction. Any stock given to employees dilutes the value of the stock of the current shareholders. The shareholders are effectively paying the employees directly, rather than through a check from the company's bank account, but they're definitely paying them, the same as if the company purchased their own stock with cash and then gave that stock to the employee. The company's money and assets are just a pass through for the shareholders in this case.
Less than 50% of the online market can't credibly be described as a "near-monopoly". Amazon doesn't even make much on their e-commerce sales. From a financial perspective, they're a cloud services provider who also does a little e-commerce on the side.
You information about the recent tax cuts is also completely wrong, so I suppose it shouldn't surprise me you aren't aware of anything you weren't able to hear in a hard-left-wing information bubble.
When "the rich" top 1% of income owners pay 2x their share of income in taxes, then the only way to make the tax code "more fair" would be to lower taxes on the rich, not to increase them. When the top 50% of income owners pay 97.5% of income taxes, then the bottom 50% who pay only 2.5% of the taxes aren't in a position to declare that's "not fair". I'm not sure you understand what "fair" means. It'd be fair if everyone contributed in taxes exactly what they got back in benefits over their lifetime, but we left that behind a long time ago in the name of envy and greed.
Right... politicians aren't in the least bit responsible for how they vote in Congress, so it doesn't matter which ones are running things.
Has nothing to do with electing people and allowing them to have the power over us to decide which economic interests to favor or not.
Taxes on profits which are specific to a company or industry are passed on to shareholders, which in turn drives investors to invest in other companies/industries with a better return on capital.
Taxes which are universal in application to all companies (like the corporate income tax) in a country with at least semi-free trade are primarily passed on to employees, then a little bit to customers and the even smaller remaining to shareholders.
From the Harvard Business Review:
So yeah, if your goal is to tax working people more, then increase the corporate income tax is great for that. Otherwise, it's just a stupid double-tax which is useful to politicians for disguising to people that they're getting taxed extra.
I'm currently in Charlotte, my wife went to H.S. in Durham. NC's not bad. For the population size, NC even has some good universities.
If you look at a good list of educational quality which doesn't substitute cash for education, you'll find NC #12 of 50, with many other low tax States doing just fine.
If you believe tax money creates educated people, let me introduce you to the most expensive education hellhole in the country, Washington, D.C., where they spend $28K/student per year (twice the national average) and are either the worst or second worst school system in terms of educational outcomes, depending on how you rank them (only school system to make the bottom 2 on both reading, last, and math, 2nd to last).
NC, TX, UT, etc...
American citizens paying taxes are moving out of CA to other States. Non-citizens and some of those citizens who don't pay taxes are moving into CA. The non-citizen part (H1Bs, illegals, etc...) is the part which is growing CA, which is why CA can grow, but still have a net negative migration compared to the rest of the country. The most productive groups are leaving.
The top 1% of income earners still pay 39.48% of federal income taxes (2x their share of gross income), the top 10% cover 70.88% of them and the top 50% pay 97.25%. So it's not like people with a higher than average income aren't already covering the vast majority of income taxes.
Yeah, there are some super-wealthy who have an ownership model which minimizes their taxes to a certain extent, but when the bottom 50% of income earners only pays 2.75% of the total income taxes, it's going to be tough to make an argument that the "rich" aren't paying income tax.
Don't worry, the Democrats won't stop trying to ban things until they've covered their whole list, which per the AOC “Green New Deal” includes banning:
all forms of plastic and fossil fuels,
all carbon emissions, regardless of source,
all nuclear power plants,
non-union jobs related to renewable energy (or anything to do with the GND),
airplanes,
and famously, farting cows.
But don't worry, they'll guarantee:
And hey, they even have momentum:
There's also no good reason to not have multiple copies of your offline wallet if you have more than $10 or 20k worth in there. If you have hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars worth, then you need to be spending a lot more on your automatic replication and backup strategy to ensure nothing can happen to it.
If you're storing $137 million in a cold wallet on an encrypted laptop which only one person can decrypt, that's like leaving that cash in the trunk of the CEOs car and just hoping no one noticed and he never got rear-ended at a stoplight. Did the company have absolutely no one in charge of risk management to point these things out? The level of incompetence is just mind-boggling.
Yeah, the linked article can't even manage to be factually accurate at the most basic level. For example, Men are a majority now? Nope.
There is no institutional bias against men? The author of the article has apparently never heard of schools, or universities, who literally advertise that they don't accept men for everything from scholarships to groups and centers paid for by male student fees.
They should just pass a law that in the event of a disaster, everyone in the disaster area who wants to gets a free instantaneous teleport to anywhere else in the world. Think of all the lives that would save!
And it makes as much sense as this proposed law....
Just as true as the original headline: "Insect researchers could vanish within a century!"
The italicized word is doing a lot of work in both sentences....
It's definitely possible. I have 5 phones right now for my family which (with the US version) are GSM & CDMA dual SIM devices from Motorola which work just fine using more than one network even. The easiest is of course to actually buy a never locked phone directly, not to rent/lease/purchase one from a carrier and then have to jump through hoops later to get it unlocked.
The below was originally written in response to an article blaming the Venezuelan economic issues on oil price declines, so you'll see references to that. I'm posting this as-is, rather than rewriting it. In the year or so since I wrote it, things have only gotten worse, in terms of lack of food and in terms of oil production (despite recently rising oil prices, up $10/barrel in that time), to the point where we're seeing news stories about treason charges for oil workers in a futile attempt to get production back up at government-run PDVSA. How bad is it according to Reuters? :
About 25,000 PDVSA workers resigned between the start of January 2017 and the end of January 2018, out of a workforce last officially reported at 146,000, Reuters reported last week. The resignations including high-level professionals that are now almost impossible to replace have only accelerated since Quevedo arrived, two dozen industry sources told Reuters.
Disclaimers:
This isn't original research, it's collating from publicly available sources. I did run the results past three people who live in Venezuela and they agreed it describes what they've seen/experienced.
---
The Studebaker article contains some facts, but it also includes opinions and as Gilberto pointed out, it leaves many facts out, mostly about the government as related to the economy.
Here are some additional facts and opinions to consider:
From 1998 to 2018, oil production in Venezuela is down from 3.5 million barrels per day in December of 1997 vs 2 million in October of 2017.
So what happened in the last 20 years? From Wikipedia
"After Hugo Chávez officially took office in February 1999, several policy changes involving the country's oil industry were made to explicitly tie it to the state under his Bolivarian Revolution. Since then, PDVSA has not demonstrated any capability to bring new oil fields on stream since nationalizing heavy oil projects in the Orinoco Petroleum Belt formerly operated by international oil companies ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Total. Chávez’s policies damaged Venezuela's oil industry due to lack of investment, corruption and cash shortages."
Probably just a fluke, though, right? I mean, steel production in Venezuela increased from 3400 tons in 1998 to about 4600 tons in 2008. The steel industry was nationalized by the Venezuelan government in 2008 and production declined to under 1600 tons. Huh, definitely a pattern forming. Similar stories of lower production and losses in the other industries after they were taken over: aluminum, cement, gold, iron, farming, transportation, electricity, food production, banking, paper and the media.
How well does the government run the nationalized oil company, PDVSA? Reuters:
"The output fall could not come at a worse time, with the economy in crisis and the socialist government struggling to pay its foreign debt." and "Compounding the situation, another eight managers and employees of state oil company PDVSA in eastern Venezuela were arrested in recent days for fiddling production figures, chief prosecutor Tarek Saab told reporters.
In a major corruption sweep engulfing the oil sector, about two dozen high-level executives have already been arrested in recent weeks, ridding PDVSA of much of its top brass."
Without the government takeover, even if oil companies were only competent enough to continue production levels and not grow them (as they've done previously over tim
It takes 372 days of training on average to get a hair cutting license, compared to 33 days for an EMT.
You're really arguing that's needed? You could also just not go back to anyone who gives you a bad haircut, or even just read their reviews online....
Sorry I wasn't clear. I wasn't calling the county an urban area, I was comparing it to nearby urban areas and excluding nearby rural areas, which have a different leaning.
The County officials do seem to lean R overall, but the County did vote for Democratic Politicians at the State and higher levels by 3-5% in the most recent election, so I suppose they're relatively in the middle compared to the country as a whole, which would make them leaning right in comparison to the nearby cities.