US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3519

On April 02 2016 07:54 KwarK wrote:

When I say taxes should be raised that includes raised on people like me. The fact that I don't pay taxes is a testament to the problems in the system. But I need not justify myself to a social parasite like you.

Atreides -> you may've missed (or chosen to not respond to) my past request for your city/state of residence; I'd wanted to check on the health insurance market in your area in response to some things you'd said.

White House Counsel Neil Eggleston rebutted critics who’ve questioned whether the administration is truly committed to its clemency initiative.

Obama has commuted the sentences of 248 federal prisoners, mostly low-level drug offenders affected by mandatory minimum drug sentences, including 61 on Wednesday. While that’s more than the past six presidents combined, the pace of commutations since the Justice Department announced its clemency initiative two years ago has disappointed advocates. The White House has promised to pick up the pace, but so far, acceleration has been halting. That’s about to change, Eggleston said on Friday at a POLITICO Playbook Breakfast.

"No more eating, sleeping or drinking until we get all these commutations done," Eggleston recalled telling his staff after Obama met on Wednesday with people who’d had their sentences commuted in the past.

So far, Obama’s commutations have come in batches released every few months. December’s was the biggest set to date, at 95. At that time, too, administration officials promised more speed. On Friday, Eggleston said he believes the “infrastructure is now very much in place” to file and process clemency petitions.

“You're going to start seeing a lot more very quickly,” Eggleston said. “I think you’re going to start seeing them on a more regular basis. I did want to get a little out of the notion that each one had to be more than the one before because that's sort of an artificial floor."

Despite interest from tens of thousands of prisoners, it has turned out there aren’t so many federal prisoners who meet the initiative’s strict criteria for clemency, which include serving for at least 10 years and strong standards for nonviolence.\

The Clemency Project 2014, a coalition of volunteer lawyers, said it has reviewed 30,000 requests for clemency and filed nearly 600 petitions, with another 100 nearing completion. (So far, most of Obama’s commutations did not originate with the Clemency Project, but their petitions are making up an increasingly substantial percentage of the total, and Eggleston praised their efforts on Friday.)

Eggleston also directly responded to complaints lodged by former Pardon Attorney, Deborah Leff, whose January resignation letter was obtained by USA Today.

Leff complained that her office did not have enough resources to fulfill the goals of the clemency initiative and that she did not have access to the White House counsel’s office.

On April 02 2016 07:46 KwarK wrote:

Er, the money isn't taxed twice under the same owner which I assume is what you're implying because if you keep counting while it changes hands then all money is taxed billions of times because it's moving around in a fluid system.

The guy who earns the money is taxed when he earns it. Then that guy dies.
The guy who inherits the money is taxed when he inherits it.

You could call that double taxation, even though two different individuals are being taxed on two different transactions, but you'd be wrong. If you call that double taxation then I'd hate to know what you call it when I give my post tax salary to someone in exchange for goods and services and that becomes their revenue.


Additionally, an inheritance is somehow not counted as income in your world? I mean it's money that is incoming, money that you previously didn't have that now you do have. Sure, it's not earned income, it's unearned, but is that where you draw the line? It's only fine to take money from people's hard earned paychecks, if they didn't sweat for it then they get to keep all of it? Increase taxes on people who work for a living to offset tax cuts for people who inherit money?

Dozens of tribal members from several Native American nations took to horseback on Friday to protest the proposed construction of an oil pipeline which would cross the Missouri river just yards from tribal lands in North Dakota.

The group of tribal members, which numbered around 200, according to a tribal spokesman, said they were worried that the Dakota Access Pipeline, proposed by a subsidiary of the Dallas, Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, would lead to contamination of the river. The proposed route also passes through lands of historical significance to the Standing Rock Lakota Sioux Nation, including burial grounds.

“They’re going under the river 500 yards from my son’s grave, my father’s grave, my aunt who I buried last week,” said Ladonna Allard, a member of the Standing Rock nation and the closest landowner to the proposed pipeline. “I really love my land, and if that pipeline breaks everything is gone.”

“We must fight every inch of our lives to protect the water,” Allard said.

A “spiritual camp” will be set up starting Saturday at the point where the proposed pipeline would cross the river, and the tribal members plan to stay and protest indefinitely.

The group is composed of members of the Standing Rock nation as well as others from North and South Dakota nations, including the Cheyenne River Lakota and the Rosebud Sioux. They joined together to ride, run and walk from the Tribal Administration Building north to Cannonball, North Dakota, on the reservation’s northern edge.

The Missouri river is the primary source of drinking water for the tribal reservation, according to Doug Crow Ghost, a spokesperson for the Standing Rock Sioux and the director of the tribe’s water office, who joined the protest on Friday. Tribal members also fish in the river, he said.

On April 02 2016 08:24 zlefin wrote:
Atreides -> you may've missed (or chosen to not respond to) my past request for your city/state of residence; I'd wanted to check on the health insurance market in your area in response to some things you'd said.

Yeah, someone getting taxed because of another person's decisions sounds totally normal.

On April 02 2016 04:59 KwarK wrote:

You didn't answer my question at all.

Okay, you have two guys. Timmy and Tommy. Timmy works seasonal construction, his wife is pregnant and doesn't work, Timmy is doing his best to provide for his family but he pays a 20% tax on each dollar he earns.

Tommy is retired with a $10,000,000 fortune. He wants to pass that on to his son (who incidentally already had the advantages of a top class education paid for by his father, networking, growing up in an affluent area and will never have to work construction).

There is a proposal to slap a 10% tax on the inheritance Tommy's son will receive and to give Timmy a tax credit due to his pregnant wife.

Your argument is that in order to better support people who work hard to take care of their families we should oppose this proposal because Tommy worked hard to provide his son the best inheritance possible?

Money has to come from somewhere and you can't just go "Trump said that it doesn't so it's fine, cut everything". Even if you lower the budget by 90% you still need money. Is it better to tax the earned income of people working hard to support their families or their unearned windfalls?

On April 02 2016 08:53 Atreides wrote:



I live in Anchor Point, alaska I'm pretty sure blue cross blue shield is only provider and it's about 340$ a month for me.

I mean it's off the current topic quite a lot but this year I will probably either just pay it or finagle my way into some religious medishare program like all my contemporaries. It just kind of strikes me wrong that I should lie about attending a church (and get someone else to lie confirming it!) just to get (kind of) healthcare.

Not that it matters but as long as I was single with no dependents it didn't really matter to me if I died or got sick for whatever reason. (I live a much more dangerous life than average American terminal illness is in fact relatively low on the likely list of causes). If you have people dependent on you it changes the relative cost/risk analysis quite a lot.

I spent my share of time in the world most of this thread lives in during undergrad/grad school and most people just don't get that it's not the only one. In poli-sci terms I guess it's kind of the "rural" segment of the population but this thread REALLY does not get it.

On April 02 2016 09:28 zlefin wrote:


I forget, have you said what your income is? It's fine if you don't want to say. I just find case studies to be a good way of looking at problems.

On April 02 2016 04:59 KwarK wrote:

You didn't answer my question at all.

Okay, you have two guys. Timmy and Tommy. Timmy works seasonal construction, his wife is pregnant and doesn't work, Timmy is doing his best to provide for his family but he pays a 20% tax on each dollar he earns.

Tommy is retired with a $10,000,000 fortune. He wants to pass that on to his son (who incidentally already had the advantages of a top class education paid for by his father, networking, growing up in an affluent area and will never have to work construction).

There is a proposal to slap a 10% tax on the inheritance Tommy's son will receive and to give Timmy a tax credit due to his pregnant wife.

Your argument is that in order to better support people who work hard to take care of their families we should oppose this proposal because Tommy worked hard to provide his son the best inheritance possible?

Money has to come from somewhere and you can't just go "Trump said that it doesn't so it's fine, cut everything". Even if you lower the budget by 90% you still need money. Is it better to tax the earned income of people working hard to support their families or their unearned windfalls?

On April 02 2016 09:36 Atreides wrote:


As said previously I sort of agree with the overall premise here.

But this sort of analogy just demonstrates how insane some people are.

TIMMY IS PROBABLY A TRUMP SUPPORTER.

And it's not "just" because he is stupid and uneducated. It's because he goes to work every day he can, works hard (you get the feeling pretty few people in this forum have done much physical labor) and PAYS TAXES. So he resents people who do not work hard, pay no taxes, and reap greater social benefits then him from those tax dollars, despite his life being so "hard". Even more incredible to many people in this thread there is a decent chance he CHOSE this life more or less. Its a bit more nuanced then "they're racist" although that sort of bigotry is often a symptom of this kind of socio-economic feelings unfortunately. Obviously it's a bit ironic that some rich, fairly liberal historically, dude like trump managed to appeal to them so much but he played it pretty well and said some of the right things.

On April 02 2016 08:14 farvacola wrote:

KwarK is referencing Atreides having previously eaten the fine for not obtaining healthcare instead of obtaining healthcare and then having used said fine payment as a means of critiquing Obamacare.



If anything, this justifies a more radical shift in policy to account for an otherwise self-sustaining rise in inequality.

On April 02 2016 09:48 Nyxisto wrote:


If Timmy has a family and is a rural worker in the United States it is very unlikely for Timmy to pay a lot of taxes, in fact he is very likely to pay much fewer taxes than the evil liberal code monkey in California.

On April 02 2016 09:41 kwizach wrote:

Another day, another dishonest attack the Sanders campaign eagerly jumps on (I know it came from GreenPeace initially, but Sanders immediately seized it to try to attack Hillary's integrity yet again).

A few fact checks to put those donations in perspective... link 1, link 2, link 3.

On April 02 2016 10:02 IgnE wrote:


oneofthem is coming around to international socialism

President Barack Obama on Friday questioned Donald Trump’s qualifications for the presidency, arguing that the businessman’s recent comments on foreign policy suggest he “doesn’t know much” about global politics.

Obama, who has intensified his criticism of Trump in recent weeks, laid into him at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, when asked about the GOP front-runner’s remarks in a March 26 interview with The New York Times. Trump proposed withdrawing U.S. troops from Japan and South Korea, where tens of thousands of Americans are stationed, and suggested those countries should manufacture their own nuclear weapons — a reversal from decades of bipartisan consensus on nuclear disarmament.

Trump’s comments “tell us that the person who made the statements doesn’t know much about foreign policy or nuclear policy or the Korean peninsula or the world generally,” Obama said.

“People pay attention to American elections,” Obama said. “What we do is really important to the rest of the world and even in those countries that are used to a carnival atmosphere in their own politics want sobriety and clarity when it comes to U.S. elections because they understand the president of the United States needs to know what’s going on around the world and has to put in place the kinds of policies that lead not only to our security and prosperity, but will have an impact on everybody else’s security and prosperity.”

Obama described the U.S.’s alliances with Japan and South Korea as a “cornerstone” of American policy, crediting the relationships for preventing nuclear proliferation worldwide.