First time today … meaning after that more times today?

There are already large numbers of treaties in place for countries to cooperate in tracking down tax evasion. It might not be as expensive as you think. If you think of it from a practical standpoint, we have lists of the richest people in the world. That’s an excellent starting point, isn’t it?

If some billionaire is claiming that they actually aren’t a billionaire, and that the lists are wrong, when some government is trying to tax them at an exorbitant rate, it’s likely that they will give all of their banking details to said government to prove it. Or they will hide those banking details, and they’ll be forced to pay the taxes.

In point of fact, mark to market taxation already does exist for various individuals and certainly for large numbers of businesses. Your long comment suggests that you don’t know what that is, and if you’re interested you could read up on it.

The short story is that depending on the situation, a person or a business might pay taxes each year on the value of their assets, assuming said assets had been purchased on January 1st and sold on December 31st, even though in reality nothing was bought or sold. This system is already in place in various ways. It exists. There’s no theoretical problem with expanding it.

Of course that’s not true. We have data from around the world showing it’s not true. It’s not even true within the United States if you look at state taxes.

Why are you arguing against reality? In the world today, some states and countries tax the rich at higher or lower rates than other states and countries, and it’s certainly not true that the rich all leave the high tax rate places. The data doesn’t lie. You can argue about why they don’t all leave, but the facts are there for you to see.

You don’t need uniformity around the United States or the world in order to tax the rich effectively. But people like to say what you said, so that you don’t even try to tax them.

But I think it would be fun to run an experiment. Why don’t we jack up taxes on the ultra-rich across the United States. If the ultra rich move to Venezuela, then all of the savings they have in the US stock market will be taxed at an even higher rate and we will actually get more money from them. And if they were working any cushy CEO jobs, those jobs will now be open for other American citizens, and I’m sure there were plenty of people willing to apply… Of course it doesn’t have to be the US. Pick any country, try the same experiment, and get back to us.

FTP

Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!

What makes you think a post has only one point? It’s a curious notion, but I would imagine the vast majority of posters have multiple reasons for sharing what they share.

Obviously people are often posting things they think others might care about, but that doesn’t tell us anything about anything at all.

Ah, but didn’t Biden throw the train union under the bus? I think he did. And neither Biden nor Obama pushed to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, and also to key it to the cost of living.

Even though Biden’s regulators did take some positive action, a lot of that was this calendar year. Why did he wait so long? A cynic would say he didn’t believe in what he was doing, but even a non-cynic would say that it was a bad way to campaign, because you can’t erase 3 years of incompetence with 1 year of regulation.

It’s not hard to explain. It’s not about vibes. The DNC is pro-corporate, which means they’re anti-worker. They push few policies that benefit the average person.

Take the housing plan, for example. Raise the limit on the tax break for first-time home owners. Is that good? Sure it’s better than nothing, but if a home that used to cost $200K now costs $800K, an extra $30K won’t make it affordable. But more money might help the banks a little bit. Or take the federal minimum wage. It should be $25, but it’s not, because the DNC just doesn’t care, and they never will.

Maybe so, but if it’s guaranteed shittiness vs. possible improvement, obviously people will make their own decisions about gambling.

I think it’s a bad gamble, but I understand it. And also, one major point is that many people think “it’s going to suck either way, fuck it, I’m staying home”.

Of course you didn’t provide your own. That’s typical, sadly enough. We all know there are varying definitions, and if you’re going to undercut someone else’s, which may be a reasonable thing to do, why not bring yours to the table? … But only if you care to continue the conversation.

It’s legally unclear if he’s able to pardon himself for state crimes. He’s the president of the United States, not the president of New York.

But I hope he tries to pardon himself for anything, just so we can get this before the Supreme Court, because I think they would side with him but I sure want to see it play out. In reality he’s in such bad health and so old that I think he’s probably going to die before he would face any prison time, so the best we can hope for is that the Supreme Court makes greater fools of themselves, or somehow miraculously surprises us and does the right thing, which I don’t expect but you know it’s theoretically possible.

What Harris could have done is besides the point. What she did and didn’t do is a matter of record.

But look, focus on what I wrote. If it’s your friend or family member then of course you are going to have a simple and strong reaction. It’s fine to try to explain away the badness, and there is some truth to what you wrote, but if someone just lost their cousin, or their daughter’s house was just bombed, they aren’t going to listen to you. That’s natural; that’s reality.

I said the same thing about people like you before the election, and I’ll repeat it again. The laser focus on single issue voters was and will always be mostly an excuse to blame someone else.

To look at it another way, if this one issue actually decided the election, why didn’t Harris change her strategy two months ago? … Maybe it’s because this wasn’t the determining issue. Or it was, and her staff was incompetent. Take your pick.

I understand the general feeling you’re presenting, but I encourage you to be far more precise. You said everyone lets their civic duty go, and that’s just not true. I know many people, including myself, who have tried hard to effect change for the past few years or decades. Basic honesty suggests that you shouldn’t diminish our existence simply because we didn’t get the results that you wanted.

Well yeah. Trump was campaigning on discrimination. I don’t know how you can measure what percent of it was racism and what percent of it was sexism plus a little bit of xenophobia and various other such b*******.

I do think there is hope for women candidates because there’s a lot of women in the country and you don’t need to get the majority of men to vote for you. If Harris or Hillary had a platform as good as Bernie Sanders, I think either of them could have won, easily. Of course that’s just my opinion, and the only way to actually find out would be to give that a go next time around.

If you have a friend or family member, living or dead in Palestine, how could you vote for her? Even knowing Trump would probably be worse, it’s hard to imagine the pain it would cause to choose her name, knowing what she supported, and would have continued to encourage.

(Others mentioned other reasons, and I won’t repeat theirs.)

Like you. :-)

I think that is an oversimplification. He won the popular vote, but that’s the majority of voters, not the majority of people, right? So we cannot accurately say that the majority is fascist. We can only say that the voting majority is fascist.

And then we need to look at who was conned, and how. Of course people who got conned need to work harder to avoid that in the future. We all agree on that. At the same time, the con artists and the people who enable the con, we also need to identify them and figure out what’s making them successful. If we talk about major newspapers and TV networks failing to cover how bad Trump actually was, or putting Harris on unrealistic pedestal, newspaper owners refusing to allow newspaper editors to endorse a candidate, the way Fox News preys on people who grew up trusting TV news and now have only watched Fox for the last two decades, open lies about who’s eating cats and dogs, a DNC that pushes centrist candidates even after 2016 when the weakness was exposed, and it’s clear that many left-wing voters are wildly unhappy, those are all things that smaller groups have done to help create the situation that we saw yesterday. And that’s just a short list.

So what I hope we can do, is I hope we can avoid saying something trite like, this is what the American people wanted, full stop. If you want to make that a conversation starter, go for it. But it shouldn’t be a dismissive conversation ender, because it ignores what actually happened and What will continue to happen in the future.