Agreed, unfortunately. The amount of people that actually care about the national debt is near zero in reality, despite many stating otherwise.
When their party of choice comes into power, it's always "spend, spend, spend" - how else do you do all the things you want to do while in power? Then the table turns and they pretend to care while the other party takes a turn.
Round and round we go, deeper and deeper in debt, spending like a there's no tomorrow.
This is only possible because the taxation is obfuscated through debt or inflation, both of which effectively are a tax but a less obvious one allowing duping of the populace.
We don't need a new party necessarily, just a constitutional amendment that the government can only spend money from direct tax proceeds, with no pre-emptive withholding.
how so? Alupis explains the mechanism why not. In two party system, new electives are incentivized to achieve their program. Reducing spending hinders that, and loss of those voters who care about that betrayal doesn't really matter because they're a tiny group anyway, and realistically, where are they going to go, the other party? They have the same incentive, just for different program. That's the cycle.
Sure but the bigger debt gets, and the more negative impact it has on the population, the bigger that group gets. It’s not big enough yet but that doesn't mean it can’t be. We’ve seen such tipping points with other issues.
You should tax behaviours you want to disincentivise.
Taxing smoking, cars and sugar are great (but not always popular) ideas.
Taxing second homes, property ownership for companies, foreign owned property, and so on is much more important than taxing unrealised wealth, inheritance or capital gains and income.
Wealthy people find loopholes, and so you end up taxing the middle class and limiting social mobility with those initiatives.
We should figure out what they do with their wealth that makes it worthwhile amassing so much, then tax that.
EDIT: sorry, I should have echo’d the chamber instead of thinking about a situation critically.
Anything you can think of to make wealthy people cease to exist is easily bypassed, so the best way is to find ways to tax behaviour instead.
The point of money is how you use it, if you have a 50,000x tax on super yacts and private aircraft, then the ultra rich are forced to pay your tax or try skirting around it by using smaller boats or coalescing their private jets into a private airline.
But if you tax stocks, then people will invest in other ways. If you tax individuals owning large property then they’ll move their property ownership into a company, if you tax inheritance then they’ll put the money into a fund instead which has debts that will be written off in time. All kinds of fancy tricky accounting.
The other solution is to tax everyone on unrealised gains, which makes every home owner (including pensioners) suddenly liable for huge ongoing bills.
Elon himself for example is pretty cash poor, but owns a lot of stock in a “high value” company meaning his wealth on paper is pretty extreme. He takes on debt (which has no income tax) and then pays it off with stocks, where it also avoids being taxed as its never realised.
I think its a harder problem than you give it credit.
How would it work if we treated money obtained by borrowing against stock holdings as "realized gains"? That seems like a loophole that could be closed.
It would be an easy strategy to defeat - the two biggest Democratic states, California and New York, are close to the top in terms of cost of living. I know fiscally conservative doesn't mean "cheap to live" but most people see them as the same.
In a way it's just Maslow's pyramid, no? People who can't get housing, or good enough housing, don't care much about the image of the US abroad and may even support foreign aggression if they believe it'll help their situation.
Only once you're very secure and comfy in your little corner does "your image abroad" even have any meaning at all.
We have a high cost of living but we also have the highest taxes. Up to 10% depending on where you live. In return for that we get next to nothing. Public money is spent poorly, with no oversight, and no accountability.
The Republican policy has been to starve the beast for 40 years. They are willing to bury the country in unsustainable levels of debt in order to force their agenda for government because they can't reach their goal electorally. They care more about that goal than the financial health of the nation or what the impacts of destroying the financial health is on all of us. They would rather intentionally make us too broke to function so that we can't afford government than have us rich but with a functional government. This has been their publicly stated policy for 40 years.
The Republican party is wholly a party for the Rich and wealthy.
All other claims to the contrary are attempts to deceive people that this is not the case.
Is this not theoretically the libertarian party? (Of course in reality it’s often the Republican-lite party). It hasn’t proven to be a winning strategy
The Libertarian Party is solely focused on reducing the liabilities side of the balance sheet in the interest of reducing the income side by lowering taxes. Try showing up to to a libertarian convention with "give me some money to invest in a program that will benefit our whole society" and see how far you get.
I understand that claim. I will not even argue against it. But, as you pointed out - there are two options only, so they must be evaluated against each other. Ds would need to go quite a bit further in the direction of being fiscally conservative to justify overlooking their other issues (in the eyes of R voters) in order to capture significant voter counts from the R side.
"How tasty would the beer need to be to justify the burned rancid steak, to make this diner better than the other one?" -- basically
The media environment is so right wing (yes really) that Democrats don't get the credit for that kind of thing while Republicans don't get the blame for absolute ransacking of the country.
Fiscal conservatism only exists as an ideology when paired with hurting brown people. It does not exist as a meaningful political camp otherwise.
There is a reason that fiscal conservatives spend all their time on food stamps, environmental regulations, and a few random research projects and not even examining any of the top four costs that make up the overwhelming bulk of US spending.
To be fair they usually want to reduce the benefit of Social Security and Medicare, because they're "unsustainable", while tax cuts and defecit spending is apparently sustainable.
This is basically how the Democratic party is trying to operate now and it's not working. They've been trying to cater to moderate Republicans who became disillusioned with Trump and it's gotten them very little in the last decade.
To be incredibly pedantic to the point of being irrelevant: technically the sign up page 1) doesn't have a clickwrap "I agree" checkbox, and 2) there's no link to the TOS on the sign up page.
That makes the implicit TOS agreement legally confusing depending on jurisdiction.
(Not that it really matters, but I find these technicalities amusing)
2) You realize they're fake 1-2 weeks into the role. They are unreliable. They don't show up for meetings. You have trouble communicating with them
3) You fire them
But they've already won the game. They collected a single paycheck. And for an intermediate (even junior) dev position, collecting even just a single paycheck is a big pay day for them.
The main cost to the company is time wasted, needing to open the role once more to find a real candidate who can actually do the job.
I think it's incredibly rare for these candidates to actually do the job well. (They also have fake resumes, all of their experience is made up -- so if you're expecting expertise, you're likely not going to get it)
This is a little baffling to me, if you're suggesting this is an actual method people employ to make a living. Interviewing is difficult and stressful. Or maybe their approach is a shotgun strategy, so they don't care?
Sometimes experience (or more so the wisdom you've accumulated over a long career) creates mental blocks / preconceptions about risks or problems you foresee, which makes it harder to approach big scary problems if you're able to anticipate all of the challenges you're likely to hit.
Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
The most meaningful technical advances I've personally seen always started out as "let's just do it, it will only take a weekend" and then 2 years later, you find yourself with a finished product. (If you knew it would take 2 years from the start, you might have never bothered)
> Compare that to a smart engineer who doesn't have that wisdom: those people might have an easier time jumping in to difficult problems without the mental burden of knowing all of the problems upfront.
My favorite story in CS related to this is how Huffman Coding came to be [1]
This is so incredibly accurate. I see all these side projects people are spinning up and can't help but think "Sure it might work at first but the first time i have to integrate it with something else i'll have to spend a week trying to get them to work. Hell that'll probably require an annoying rewrite and its not even worth what I get out of it"
I sometimes wonder if I would feel the same about AWS if I hadn’t already invested a significant amount of time learning the entire ecosystem, nomenclatures, patterns/best practices, etc.
As someone who has worked with all three in many capacities, as is the worst by a mile. Don’t get me wrong. They are all very bad, but Azure is the king of shit.
"Their lives seem to have revolved mostly around musical concerts—not so much listening to them, as recording the audio from them like trophies to share for prestige among their peers. Mostly some kind of status-jockeying activity, as the art—such as it was, and if you've heard some of these recordings you know what I mean—seems to have been incidental. It's unclear whether anyone even listened to these recordings, but one acquainted with the material must suppose: no, not often. We speculate these concerts must have been difficult or trying to attend (again, one must agree that they were surely trying...) and so obtaining a recording of them as proof of one's attendance, and endurance of the entire trial, took on an almost hunting-trophy-like role in society.
Most of their highly-prized leisure entertainment seems to have been British and Eastern European television, plus something called 'Battletoads'."
They'll find whatever they need to find (or not find) just as we do. Its simply an impossible exercise to go back in time, carrying all of our assumptions about modern life and what we have been taught about the 'Ancient world'.
Just as they were settling into middle age far-right propaganda, conspiracy, and hate "entertainment" escaped AM radio and flooded cable news and social media.
Technology, culture, legalization of pot, adtech, covid, there are a metric ton of factors that all had significant impact on both decreasing socialization and reduction in drinking. And lowering the birth rates, and the number of healthy relationships, healthy friendships, etc.
I'm for legalizing all drugs, regulating the sale, ensuring quality and purity, and educating the public. Cognitive liberty is sacred - but the dip in drinking has a whole lot of causes.
A healthier society would be more social and get out and drink more, I think.
I'd wager how expensive it has gotten plus a year or two of lockdowns which lead to a whole generation of people not going out to get wasted as soon as they're legally allowed to had way more effect.
I also noticed a trend that happened at my old college and a number of others that I've never seen anyone write about: the great buyout of the old college area slumlords.
All the dive bars where you could black out off $10-20 I drunk at in college are gone. They all faced the wrecking ball, and were replaced in the past 10-15 years with apartments over targets and cvs and family friendly restaurants. A huge concerted effort to buy up these properties in piecemeal then destroy entire blocks at a time. I have no clue where kids at my college go to drink now. I have little interest in going back either as an alumnus as they destroyed all the places of my memories.
As one of said generation, I would chalk it up to instant communication creating innumerable shallow remote relationships that significantly replace time spent with others in person.
This whole thread is talking about BeyondMeat burgers.
If you're comparing the healthiness of a premade vegan burger patty, you need to compare it to a premade (or equivalent homemmade) beef patty. You can't take salt out of the beef patty comparison and say "look it's better"
Edit: But you can compare it to actual products on shelves. The first frozen burger brand I can think of that would be a good comparison is frozen Bubba burger. If we compare the sodium content, Beyond patty is 3-4x higher in sodium. Beef wins! :) Although Beyond has half the fat.
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