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United States42782 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:18 ShoCkeyy wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 01:14 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 01:11 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Because I'm actually paying twice out of pocket to a company that doesn't give a shit about their users? Also if you think state and local taxes go to "good use" you're so mistaken... You're not really addressing my point. Why is 100,000 of dollars right and only receiving 60,000 of dollars while another party gets the 40,000 difference theft? You're just being ignorant now, it's not about taxing, it's about stealing our taxes.
No, I'm trying to get you to the point where you realize that the idea that you have in any way earned a specific amount of compensation through your labour is completely unsupported beyond "well that's just what the system we put together said I earned".
You no more earned $100,000 than you did $60,000. In neither case does it mean anything. These tokens aren't connected to any physical asset, nor to any specific amount of labour. If I go to work and argue on team liquid all day, have I earned the right to have dozens of Bangladeshi children make me a bunch of t-shirts? I'd argue no. I can have them do it anyway, but that doesn't mean I earned it.
If you lived alone on an island and built your hut by hand then sure, you earned that hut. If I were to kick you out of the hut then that'd be theft of your hut. I'm fine with that. But that's very much not the system we're using here. That's not how capitalism works.
Capitalism doesn't give a shit about what you earned, it's not in the business of justice, and for those of us living in the first world that is a very good thing. What capitalism tells you is what you get. You may have earned absolutely nothing and get a billion dollars. You may have earned a lot and get nothing. It's an artificial system, a set of rules created by men to help assign labour in a productive way to, as I said earlier, decide whether ipods or zunes are better. And taxation is a part of those rules.
You're approaching this as if you've earned $100k, as if that's the right amount and as if getting taxed so that you get less than that is theft. It's nonsense. Hell, once you start introducing concepts like "earned" and "theft" into the system then you very rapidly find yourself recognizing that property is theft and that the workers earn the fruits of their labour. That labour is the only real unit of value. The concepts simply don't apply, they're not a part of the system we're using.
If, after taxes, you get 60,000 conceptual units of currency then that's what you get. The system did whatever bullshit it did and it said 60,000 was the right number for you. Insisting that you earned 100,000 is meaningless. How would you even begin to show that 100,000 was the right number? What base unit would you compare the dollar to in order to show that?
Stop whining about what you earned, you can't possibly have any idea what actual value your labour has contributed to society as a whole, nor any way of measuring that against others. And stop whining about theft, especially while living in a first world country that receives vastly more manhours of labour in imports than it exports each year to sustain an astronomically imbalanced standard of living. The whole edifice is hollow, it's built on uneven distribution of resources and labour, and you're on the thieving end.
You get what the system says you get and honestly, what you got is basically winning the lottery. Most humans get fucked, you're complaining that you only get twice the median income in the richest country in the world.
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On November 10 2017 00:35 ShoCkeyy wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 00:07 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 00:05 ShoCkeyy wrote:On November 09 2017 03:58 KwarK wrote:On November 09 2017 03:54 ShoCkeyy wrote:
That tax plan they released looks good for me, but with the current tax plan, I'm getting fucked in taxes. I'm positive this year alone, I've paid 40% easily in taxes some how... And then they wonder why the "middle class" disappeared... A) Fix your withholding (or stop counting payroll taxes) B) The "middle class" hasn't disappeared. What happened was the working poor got fucked by changing economic conditions. C) Nobody paying 40% in taxes (incidentally the top bracket is 39.6% and that's marginal rate, not average rate, so even if you're paid a billion dollars in W-2 income you still won't hit exactly 39.6%) is getting fucked, what is happening is they're getting paid a fortune and only keeping half a fortune D) Cutting taxes can't be looked at in isolation, otherwise cutting taxes would always be good. Cut taxes means cut services, or increased borrowing. Either way you need to weigh that in too. If you gain $1,000 in reduced taxes and lose $2,000 in essential services which you now have to pay out of pocket you did not receive a tax cut. So I did the math, and it's actually like 30% that I'm being taken out. Then they have the nerve to say I still owe taxes when I do my income tax. This year alone, I haven't broke six figures yet, but I'm very close to, and I feel like I've only been paid half of what I made this year. And that's with taxes, I can't imagine how much more they would steal from me if I didn't have a 401k. I also gotta check on my withholding for sure. They're not stealing from you. Taxation isn't theft. Grow the hell up. Nah it's not theft to you, yet I worked harder than the shitty politicians that get paid with it and still try to fuck me over. The boston tea party happened for a reason, why do corps get tax breaks, while the people get fucked. And when I don't know where all my taxes are going, who knows maybe a secret operative that will get a green beret killed, while being requested to pay more than what I should be paying, I can consider it theft. I don't think it's about "growing the hell up", it's about seeing how shitty your government is being to the people. I don't mind paying for universal healthcare, but I know it's going to universal healthcare, yet our government doesn't care, and choose to ignore. You gotta also understand, I came from nothing, and having nothing, even lived on a the streets for a time in my life. While there are many useful things for taxes, they're definitely not being put to good use.
If you're brave enough, this is the road towards fiscal conservatism with your pre-existing social liberalism. The central conceit is they're going to spend it better (and we'll of course differ on what that looks like). The basic rebellion, and a natural one, is looking how shitty they are at spending it on things that are "good for society" compared to how you would spend it.
Calling it theft is quite natural considering the demands put on you by people that didn't earn the money. People can nitpick about the definition of theft or how it borders a big ideology on "All taxation is theft," but the human response is pretty sane.
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On November 10 2017 01:35 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 01:18 ShoCkeyy wrote:On November 10 2017 01:14 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 01:11 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Because I'm actually paying twice out of pocket to a company that doesn't give a shit about their users? Also if you think state and local taxes go to "good use" you're so mistaken... You're not really addressing my point. Why is 100,000 of dollars right and only receiving 60,000 of dollars while another party gets the 40,000 difference theft? You're just being ignorant now, it's not about taxing, it's about stealing our taxes. No, I'm trying to get you to the point where you realize that the idea that you have in any way earned a specific amount of compensation through your labour is completely unsupported beyond "well that's just what the system we put together said I earned". You no more earned $100,000 than you did $60,000. In neither case does it mean anything. These tokens aren't connected to any physical asset, nor to any specific amount of labour. If I go to work and argue on team liquid all day, have I earned the right to have dozens of Bangladeshi children make me a bunch of t-shirts? I'd argue no. I can have them do it anyway, but that doesn't mean I earned it. If you lived alone on an island and built your hut by hand then sure, you earned that hut. If I were to kick you out of the hut then that'd be theft of your hut. I'm fine with that. But that's very much not the system we're using here. That's not how capitalism works. Capitalism doesn't give a shit about what you earned, it's not in the business of justice, and for those of us living in the first world that is a very good thing. What capitalism tells you is what you get. You may have earned absolutely nothing and get a billion dollars. You may have earned a lot and get nothing. It's an artificial system, a set of rules created by men to help assign labour in a productive way to, as I said earlier, decide whether ipods or zunes are better. And taxation is a part of those rules. You're approaching this as if you've earned $100k, as if that's the right amount and as if getting taxed so that you get less than that is theft. It's nonsense. Hell, once you start introducing concepts like "earned" and "theft" into the system then you very rapidly find yourself recognizing that property is theft and that the workers earn the fruits of their labour. That labour is the only real unit of value. The concepts simply don't apply, they're not a part of the system we're using. If, after taxes, you get 60,000 conceptual units of currency then that's what you get. The system did whatever bullshit it did and it said 60,000 was the right number for you. Insisting that you earned 100,000 is meaningless. How would you even begin to show that 100,000 was the right number? What base unit would you compare the dollar to in order to show that? Stop whining about what you earned, you can't possibly have any idea what actual value your labour has contributed to society as a whole, nor any way of measuring that against others. And stop whining about theft, especially while living in a first world country that receives vastly more manhours of labour in imports than it exports each year to sustain an astronomically imbalanced standard of living. The whole edifice is hollow, it's built on uneven distribution of resources and labour, and you're on the thieving end. You get what the system says you get and honestly, what you got is basically winning the lottery. Most humans get fucked, you're complaining that you only get twice the median income in the richest country in the world.
Lol trying to belittle me with this wall of text because he thinks you should be taxed what ever the system tells you. It's more about greed and corruption than it is about the amount being taxed.
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On November 10 2017 01:28 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
They probably get shellacked with undelivered campaign promises in 2018, and we see if what Democrats do afterwards overreaches to where Trump is a serious contender in 2020. Their base likes punishing their enemies and prosecuting the culture wars.
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United States42782 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:33 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 00:04 Nevuk wrote:On November 09 2017 23:35 Danglars wrote:On November 09 2017 23:11 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When the cutoff is at $11 million for a household, clearly you can still accumulate generational wealth. It's not like they take 100% beyond that either. (Tbh, I'd personally be kinda fine with that. :D Or it should probably also depend on how many beneficiaries there are, but I don't see the fairness or benefit from any individual being given more than $5 million for 'being in the same family as someone'. So maybe rather than calculating it based on the value of the estate, have the cutoff be decided by how much each recipient gets. )
I don't see the societal benefit from individuals being billionaires. I get 'they invest and create jobs', but I've never seen any compelling evidence that one individual holding 1 billion creates more, better jobs than 200 individuals holding $5 million does. (Or that there being one company valued at $1 billion is better for the economy than 200 companies worth $5 million). All the bipartisan talk about 'small business being the backbone of american economy' really doesn't seem to match up with policy geared towards benefiting small businesses (which must, naturally, come at the expense of big business). The way I see it, it's impossible to accumulate $1 billion without having massively underpaid workers helping your company thrive, and while I prefer methods like increased worker ownership or limiting CEO pay to X amounts of entry level pay over taxation as a means of redistribution, if you do allow CEOs to make 600 times entry level pay then the redistribution must be done through other means. And if people aren't taxed sufficiently during their life times, then it has to happen at death.
Everybody idealizes the meritocracy. But a meritocracy is incompatible with an aristocracy, the US can't pretend to be the former while enacting policies that benefit the latter. The wealth you've earned and has been taxed that the government allows you to give to your children and grandchildren ... Examining how much property individuals attain in terms of net societal benefit as compared to pay cap ... catching up on presumed inadequate taxation over their lives ... allowing CEOs to make X redistribution must be done. I shudder to think you're probably talking in good faith here. No individuals but only servants of societal benefit, no unjust policies but only the ends justify the means, and so transparently the politics of envy but without attendant shame. I really hate to think this may be what we're headed towards. You aren't being taxed when you die. Your children and grandchildren are being taxed for a sudden burst of income. If you just handed them 10 million dollars that would also be subject to tax. If you don't want to give your money to anyone, it isn't taxed. Of course, it also just goes directly to the government, but that's your choice. The right of the deceased family man to dispose of his property in ways he sees fit is pretty inviolable for me. He or she earned it and was taxed on it and now it is his. The government's only interest should be to prevent gift workarounds for money exchanged for goods and services. You're buying all these assets with your after-tax income, and now these things are double taxed (or triple taxed or quadruple taxed depending on the financial asset) to bequeath it when you gain nothing. I have to hand it to the redistributionists and collectivists though: if you do not have respect for someone's property, period, a lot of these arguments flow quite easily. Your stuff is really society's stuff, some of which they allow you to hold on to for the time being, and capable of being wealth taxed or otherwise redistributed according to the shifting moral justifications by the surrounding mob. That leads to absurdities like talking 100% estate taxes and pay caps for highly paid CEOs.
Thomas Jefferson proposed that all property revert to the state upon death to be auctioned with the proceeds being distributed annually to all male citizens who reached the age of majority that year. In doing so he would guarantee that all men shared equally in the prior wealth of the nation at their birth and that intergenerational inequality was broken.
While we're at it the Trump plan placing a cap on state and local tax deductability and doubling the standard deduction massively increases double and triple taxation. If double taxation is an anathema to fiscal conservatism you'll need to somehow reconcile that with it being central to the tax plan currently being pushed.
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Let's give you this one Kwark, "Taxation without Representation". How do you think the people of DC feel about Taxes? have you asked them? Lol...
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On November 10 2017 01:45 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Let's give you this one Kwark, "Taxation without Representation". How do you think the people of DC feel about Taxes? have you asked them? Lol...
i know this isn’t directed at me but you know DC is as blue as it gets? rumor has it those dems love their taxes.
in a choice between not paying taxes anymore OR having statehood, i bet they choose state hood. (because they’ve been pushing for statehood for years while having some of the highest taxes per capita)
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United States42782 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:43 ShoCkeyy wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 01:35 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 01:18 ShoCkeyy wrote:On November 10 2017 01:14 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 01:11 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Because I'm actually paying twice out of pocket to a company that doesn't give a shit about their users? Also if you think state and local taxes go to "good use" you're so mistaken... You're not really addressing my point. Why is 100,000 of dollars right and only receiving 60,000 of dollars while another party gets the 40,000 difference theft? You're just being ignorant now, it's not about taxing, it's about stealing our taxes. No, I'm trying to get you to the point where you realize that the idea that you have in any way earned a specific amount of compensation through your labour is completely unsupported beyond "well that's just what the system we put together said I earned". You no more earned $100,000 than you did $60,000. In neither case does it mean anything. These tokens aren't connected to any physical asset, nor to any specific amount of labour. If I go to work and argue on team liquid all day, have I earned the right to have dozens of Bangladeshi children make me a bunch of t-shirts? I'd argue no. I can have them do it anyway, but that doesn't mean I earned it. If you lived alone on an island and built your hut by hand then sure, you earned that hut. If I were to kick you out of the hut then that'd be theft of your hut. I'm fine with that. But that's very much not the system we're using here. That's not how capitalism works. Capitalism doesn't give a shit about what you earned, it's not in the business of justice, and for those of us living in the first world that is a very good thing. What capitalism tells you is what you get. You may have earned absolutely nothing and get a billion dollars. You may have earned a lot and get nothing. It's an artificial system, a set of rules created by men to help assign labour in a productive way to, as I said earlier, decide whether ipods or zunes are better. And taxation is a part of those rules. You're approaching this as if you've earned $100k, as if that's the right amount and as if getting taxed so that you get less than that is theft. It's nonsense. Hell, once you start introducing concepts like "earned" and "theft" into the system then you very rapidly find yourself recognizing that property is theft and that the workers earn the fruits of their labour. That labour is the only real unit of value. The concepts simply don't apply, they're not a part of the system we're using. If, after taxes, you get 60,000 conceptual units of currency then that's what you get. The system did whatever bullshit it did and it said 60,000 was the right number for you. Insisting that you earned 100,000 is meaningless. How would you even begin to show that 100,000 was the right number? What base unit would you compare the dollar to in order to show that? Stop whining about what you earned, you can't possibly have any idea what actual value your labour has contributed to society as a whole, nor any way of measuring that against others. And stop whining about theft, especially while living in a first world country that receives vastly more manhours of labour in imports than it exports each year to sustain an astronomically imbalanced standard of living. The whole edifice is hollow, it's built on uneven distribution of resources and labour, and you're on the thieving end. You get what the system says you get and honestly, what you got is basically winning the lottery. Most humans get fucked, you're complaining that you only get twice the median income in the richest country in the world. Lol trying to belittle me with this wall of text because he thinks you should be taxed what ever the system tells you. It's more about greed and corruption than it is about the amount being taxed.
It's not about belittleing you. It's about getting you to recognize that concepts like "earned" and "theft" really aren't applicable here. The entire socioeconomic system that we live in has zero regard for any part of those concepts in any way that you'd recognize them. They're just not applicable.
If the starting point is that you earned $100k then sure, the state taking away $40k from you at gunpoint is theft. I see how you get from point A to point B.
What I'm trying to explain is that point A is meaningless and that point B is grandfathered in when you accept the system that got you the $100k in the first place.
If you were tasked with explaining to an alien why you should get 100,000 units and not 60,000 dollars you would very rapidly find yourself stuck.
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Isn't Washington DC itself not represented or at least has no actual power at all?
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United States42782 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:45 ShoCkeyy wrote:
Let's give you this one Kwark, "Taxation without Representation". How do you think the people of DC feel about Taxes? have you asked them? Lol...
Obviously I'm a fan of society as a whole dictating how tax resources are spent, I'm not a monarchist. DC not getting votes in the house is obviously nonsense.
I think you're missing the point of my argument. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have a degree of control over how their tax dollars are spent, nor that misuse isn't a problem.
My argument is that by the time we get to me sitting in my office in America typing on a Chinese computer and doing homework during work hours we are so far removed from any recognizable concept of "earn" or "theft" that they cannot be applied meaningfully. There is no legitimate basis for the starting point and therefore deviation from the starting point cannot be illegitimate. If the socioeconomic system that I'm participating within reduces the tokens I get by 40% to fund the upkeep of the system as a whole I have no foundation for arguing why that is objectively too high, or in some way illegitimate. I can argue that it may make everyone worse off by reducing the overall functionality of the system as a whole through damaging the system of incentives, but I can't make an appeal to natural law through claiming it is theft.
Any criticisms or proposed improvements to the socioeconomic system, such as changes in taxes or redistribution etc, must be argued for using logic that conforms with the fundamental nature of the system. An argument to reduce bureaucratic overhead in order to increase the efficiency and reactivity of the market would be valid. An argument to eliminate the estate tax in order to avoid double taxation would not be valid, because there is no intrinsic value to ending double taxation assumed within the system.
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On November 10 2017 01:51 Velr wrote:
Isn't Washington DC itself not represented or at least has no actual power at all?
The people aren't represented. The normal people that live, and work there. Yet they pay the highest federal income tax of out of any state or person in the union.
http://www.heritage.org/taxes/report/dc-voting-rights-no-representation-no-taxation
This is towards the bottom,
"D.C. residents complain that they are forced to pay federal income tax despite not having a voting representative in Congress. But the remedy for this problem is not a constitutionally dubious plan to make the District into a quasi-state by adding a Member of Congress to represent it (cynically trying to buy off Republican votes in the process). Rather, simply exempting D.C. residents from federal taxes would help revitalize the District--and do so in a way consistent with what the Founders had in mind for the "federal city."
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United States42782 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:51 Velr wrote:
Isn't Washington DC itself not represented or at least has no actual power at all?
Yep. They got fucked by the constitution. It was never meant to have a significant population and now that it does people are playing politics over whether the citizens living there deserve democracy (in no small part because of the skin colour of the citizens in question).
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It's hard to feel bad about DC being taxed without representation when DC is literally swimming in other people's money and is basically built upon it.
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On November 10 2017 01:56 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 01:51 Velr wrote:
Isn't Washington DC itself not represented or at least has no actual power at all? Yep. They got fucked by the constitution. It was never meant to have a significant population and now that it does people are playing politics over whether the citizens living there deserve democracy (in no small part because of the skin colour of the citizens in question).
The original reason was to avoid a local governor or state from having power over the Federal government, which was a real fear during the early 13 states. But racism has played into why that area has never gotten representation since then.
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On November 10 2017 02:04 xDaunt wrote:
It's hard to feel bad about DC being taxed without representation when DC is literally swimming in other people's money and is basically built upon it.
what?
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On November 10 2017 02:04 xDaunt wrote:
It's hard to feel bad about DC being taxed without representation when DC is literally swimming in other people's money and is basically built upon it.
It is impossible to see that as a healthy relationship between goverment and citizens that surround it.
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United States42782 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:04 xDaunt wrote:
It's hard to feel bad about DC being taxed without representation when DC is literally swimming in other people's money and is basically built upon it.
It's a city full of black (49%, with another 8% various other minorities) American citizens who don't get representation. If you're struggling to feel too bad, try harder.
Incidentally shit like this is why it's so unconvincing when you insist that really you just believe in rights and it's a pure coincidence that those beliefs keep disadvantaging certain groups.
The answer to the question "should American citizens living in America get political representation?" should be a simple one to get right.
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DCs a cool little city of 3/4 a million residents living in a suburbia within an urban infrastructure. they’re actually half black, half white, not that i think this is relevant with regards to the lack of representation. only a handful of square miles are truly urbanized.
they’re pretty normal citizens like anyone else except for the part where, on average, they PAY the most taxes (bathing in others money? sorry? come again?).
but you writing them all off is pretty impressive. really an eye opener.
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On November 10 2017 02:18 brian wrote:
DCs a cool little city of 3/4 a million residents living in a suburbia within an urban infrastructure. they’re actually half black, half white, not that i think this is relevant with regards to the lack of representation. only a handful of square miles is truly urbanized.
they’re pretty normal citizens like anyone else except for the part where, on average, they PAY the most taxes (bathing in others money? sorry? come again?).
but you writing them all off is pretty impressive. really an eye opener.
Why do you think that they pay the most in taxes? In other words, why is the income in and around DC so high?
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On November 10 2017 02:24 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2017 02:18 brian wrote:
DCs a cool little city of 3/4 a million residents living in a suburbia within an urban infrastructure. they’re actually half black, half white, not that i think this is relevant with regards to the lack of representation. only a handful of square miles is truly urbanized.
they’re pretty normal citizens like anyone else except for the part where, on average, they PAY the most taxes (bathing in others money? sorry? come again?).
but you writing them all off is pretty impressive. really an eye opener. Why do you think that they pay the most in taxes? In other words, why is the income in and around DC so high?
i’d like to hear instead you tell me how those who pay the most in taxes are being unfairly (based on your comments about not feeling bad) given the most money.
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EPT
