EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 9189
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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10726 Posts
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:28 brian wrote: 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. The reason why incomes are so high in and around the DC area is because DC is where people annually decide how to spend trillions of tax dollars. Getting a piece of that pie not only leads to huge business, but is also huge business in and of itself. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
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brian
United States9620 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:31 xDaunt wrote: The reason why incomes are so high in and around the DC area is because DC is where people annually decide how to spend trillions of tax dollars. Getting a piece of that pie not only leads to huge business, but is also huge business in and of itself. so your belief is the seven hundred thousand residents in DC control the budget? | ||
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ShoCkeyy
7815 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:31 Plansix wrote: This is the moment when I question if Xdaunt has ever spent any real time around DC. Because the wealth disparity in that place is pretty startling. Highly doubt it if he believes everyone in DC makes a lot of money... | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:32 brian wrote: so your belief is the seven hundred thousand residents in DC control the budget? You're smarter than this. Try again. | ||
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brian
United States9620 Posts
no, i’m honestly asking. there are seven hundred thousand residents. and you’re stating they make money from being employed in/around congress? | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:36 brian wrote: no, i’m honestly asking. there are seven hundred thousand residents. and you’re stating they make money from being employed in/around congress? Of course not. Congress and the federal administrative state determine how the money is spent. But they don't do it in a vacuum. They do it while being surrounded by lobbyists and other persons who are actively trying to get federal dollars. Tons of businesses set up shop in DC precisely because they want to benefit from the issuance of federal contracts -- either as parties to the contracts themselves or as secondary beneficiaries. | ||
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brian
United States9620 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:41 xDaunt wrote: Of course not. Congress and the federal administrative state determine how the money is spent. But they don't do it in a vacuum. They do it while being surrounded by lobbyists and other persons who are actively trying to get federal dollars. Tons of businesses set up shop in DC precisely because they want to benefit from the issuance of federal contracts -- either as parties to the contracts themselves or as secondary beneficiaries. that’s why i said in or AROUND congress. apologies if that was unclear. well i understand why you’re confused now. this simply isn’t the case. rest assured that the seven hundred thousand residents of DC not being represented in congress are not themselves congressmen or lobbiests, but on average every day working people. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:33 ShoCkeyy wrote: Highly doubt it if he believes everyone in DC makes a lot of money... The vast majority of people do not make a lot of money in DC. Even if those people work for the goverment, the pay doesn't really make up for the ever rising cost of living. He vastly overestimates how the wealth gets distributed from outside interests coming to DC. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10726 Posts
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KwarK
United States42784 Posts
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
More stories by Dan MurtaughNovember 9, 2017, 2:07 AM MST China took steps toward its first investment in U.S. liquefied natural gas as one of its energy giants agreed to advance a $43 billion project that’s been years in discussion and already sidelined by American majors. China Petrochemical Corp., known as Sinopec Group, signed a joint development agreement with Alaska Gasline Development Corp. on the plan to pipe gas from the state’s northern shore to a proposed liquefaction terminal in the south, where it would be shipped abroad. The state of Alaska, China Investment Corp. and the Bank of China Ltd. also signed the agreement. The pact was announced among $250 billion in U.S.-China deals unveiled this week during President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing. It doesn’t include any financial commitments or gas-purchasing agreements. www.bloomberg.com Kind of preliminary but certainly potentially meaningful. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:47 brian wrote: that’s why i said in or AROUND congress. apologies if that was unclear. well i understand why you’re confused now. this simply isn’t the case. rest assured that the seven hundred thousand residents of DC not being represented in congress are not themselves congressmen or lobbiests, but on average every day working people. I understand that. However, the original argument was made that these people pay more taxes than everyone else, which is why I asked the question as to why that was the case. There's no disputing that there is a huge wealth and income disparity in and around DC. I'm only pointing out where the wealth predominantly comes from -- federal tax dollars collected from other people around the country. | ||
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brian
United States9620 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:55 xDaunt wrote: I understand that. However, the original argument was made that these people pay more taxes than everyone else, which is why I asked the question as to why that was the case. There's no disputing that there is a huge wealth and income disparity in and around DC. I'm only pointing out where the wealth predominantly comes from -- federal tax dollars collected from other people around the country. the original argument was your lack of empathy for a city of people who have no vote and bathe in the money of the rest of the country. this is only an acceptable opinion if DC, in your head, is five square blocks of city around the national mall(and if that was the whole city, you’d absolutely be right.) there is sixty miles of city beyond that, that you very obviously know nothing about. | ||
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pmh
1352 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:35 KwarK wrote: 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. Great post and I very much agree with almost everything you said here. Still I think shockeyy has a point somewhere that can also be proven more or less. If we accept that capital itself does not contribute annything to the economical pie, as capital itself can not produce anything, and if you then see that capital in the end does get say 1/3rd of the economical pie (I don't know the percentage in the states but I do assume it is around 1/3rd. In my country it is 29%) then 1/3rd of the pie is gone to people who did not contribute with labour and that goes at the expense of everyone who did contribute with labour. if its 40% in the usa then his 60k is basicly spot on. There are a lot of other things that effect this (markets beeing not fully open,which disturbs the pricing process, ecological costs often not having to be paid at all) and this is just a very rough estimate but when you look at it from this perspective, the perspective that capital itself does not contribute anything,then his number does kinda make sense. I don't know if he argues from this perspective,but from this perspective it could make sense. There are off course other perspectives,one could very well argue that capital does contribute to the pie in the end. It definitely is a means we can not do without. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10726 Posts
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JonnyBNoHo
United States6277 Posts
On November 10 2017 01:35 ShoCkeyy wrote: There needs to be a better transparent way of seeing what our taxes is used for. Most work is too specialized for outsiders to have a great grasp of what is realistically efficient. You can easily look at a job, private or public, and see waste. They try yourself and realize shit is hard, and the waste is just cost of business. Look at productivity numbers - private sector isn't improving much either. Communists did a lot of that - arrest / execute people for 'wrecking'. Doesn't mean that fraud / waste doesn't really exist, just that unless you have a real game plan to discuss you're just crabbing. | ||
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mozoku
United States708 Posts
On November 10 2017 00:04 KwarK wrote: It's the social contract that binds us together. If a man lived on an island by himself and all his possessions were crafted by his own hand I wouldn't see any reason to tax him. But within a capitalist society every rich man has become rich through the redistribution of labour from others to them. We allow capitalism to redistribute wealth because it's functionally effective for allocating resources within society but there is nothing natural about, say, land ownership. If a field in Texas is discovered to have oil underneath it it does not rationally follow that all Americans should have to collectively make the owner of the field a billionaire in order to make their commute to work. You need to recognize that the wealth capitalism awards you is simply the product of an artificial system that was created by men to help decide whether ipods or zunes were better. The fact that an employer is willing to pay you $100,000 for your labour does not mean that the intrinsic value of your labour is $100,000, it's just a bullshit number that the system produced. If you get rid of society none of this labour has any intrinsic value, it's simply a product of a set of rules we created. You're trying to combine two completely separate concepts, the individual and capitalist society and it doesn't work. You can't have capitalism on an island with one occupant. Taxation is part of the same book of rules that capitalism comes from, and neither makes any sense from an individualist perspective. I don't know how you're defining "intrinsic" value, but if an employer is willing to pay me $100,000, the market value of my labor is $100,000 (assuming efficient/competitive markets). If the market values my labor more than someone else's, it follows that (again, assuming efficient/competitive markets) society's best estimate of my labor's value is more than that other person's. Should not the fruits of society's labor be distributed, in principle, proportionally to those who created it? Especially given that, for most people, the market value of the labor is--to a pretty large degree--under their control during their lifetime? You can argue that heirs to large fortunes didn't really create the value that their fortune's create (their parents did) and I think that's fair (though there are counterarguments in favor of the estate tax as well), or that economic mobility isn't possible (I disagree), but to act like the only basis for how society's wealth should be distributed is the tyranny of the masses (who are writing the "book of rules" you're referencing--at least in a democracy) doesn't have any moral or ethical basis in favor of it. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
On November 10 2017 02:57 Velr wrote: And the wealth of lawyers comes from people/companies all around the country. Yet you don't get excluded from voting (and obviously shouldn't) The most amusing solution is to make DC residents immune to federal taxation. Not businesses, just the citizens. | ||
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