The Frankish Reich

Thanks. Not quite as unworkable as what I thought. My partially informed take on competing proposals to bring in more tax revenue, from worst to best (well, least worst): - increased tariffs. Distort not only U.S. consumer/business decision-making; also invite retaliation and raise costs on virtually everything - increase corporate income tax (assuming it is a significant increase) - the high net worth unrealized gains/minimum tax thing cited here. Economic distortions tempered by the limited applicability. - social security tax, take away the ceiling on annual income (we need to shore up the so-called trust fund, and this is the least bad way of doing it) that's just the ones I've heard in the current election season. Bad tax breaks? - really bad: no tax on tips. Let's make everything a tip! - not so bad: increase child tax credit (but beware moral hazard)

OK, thanks for explaining. I get what you're saying now. The two thoughts ran together in the initial post. I guess you could say property taxes do in general tax unrealized gains. That was the impetus behind the famous Prop 13 in California - property taxes could only go up by a certain small percentage until the property was sold, thereby allowing older folks to hold onto their homes. Second point: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/capitalgainhomesale.asp#:~:text=The seller must have owned,the capital gains tax exclusion. So yes and no = "it depends." As for the high net worth individuals: this is how I understand the Democratic proposal. Not for sale of a home, but for taxing unrealized cap gains.

First, even if your assessed value went up by $80,000, you would never pay 25% of that in increased property taxes. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/millrate.asp Second, any of these proposals would apply only to exceptionally high net worth individuals. Yes and no - if it's your principal residence for at least 2 years, no. I disagree that it's a stupid idea, as a pure idea. We tax income a whole lot on wealth very little at all. So there's a conceptual appeal. But I've got to agree on problematic to manage. In fact, I'd say impossible to manage. And as with all things taxation, it would be another accountant/tax lawyer's full employment act as wealthy people find any and every loophole to exploit to shift wealth into non-taxable forms. A bad idea that will fortunately die a quiet death.

I don't think you own a home or you would realize how wrong this is.

Gotta love how these alt media addicts are constantly pointing out that a MSM story has a misleading headline or buries the lede or some kind of journalism school error. But does anyone bother to go back and check on the accuracy of the alt media nonsense? Michelle Obama will be nominated. Kamala is just an interim figurehead. Or Bidenites will storm the convention and restore his candidacy. They are so idiotic that no one bothers to even track it. Make a bizarro wrong prediction, it will be forgotten tomorrow. Like it never happened.

They could be those noble housewives we keep hearing about! You know, the ones that the feminist Marxist are trying to force out of the home so we can send their children to the Local Trans Marxist Indoctrination Center euphemistically called the "Public School." Stupid. Stupid. Stupid article.

I'm talking about ordinary working people. Total debt as a percentage of income/assets. And yes, it does decrease with wealth, because that's kind of the definition of wealth.

And it's obvious that he has contempt for most of these "ordinary hard working Americans" and these noble men and women (you know, suckers and losers) who sign up to serve their country. Yet they think he is all about helping the common man. He is one helluva con man.

And by the way, we just had Melania's former communications stooge tell us that Trump would privately refer to his base supporters as "basement dwellers." Yeah, that's what he really thinks about his most ardent followers. Low class basement dweller losers.

Because Trump said it himself while looking out at his January 6 mob from the safety of the White House. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-mob-capitol-riots-poor-low-class-b1785099.html And sadly, she wasn't a happy hard working woman. She was a mess. She had been addicted to drugs. She fell deep into a conspiracy rabbit hole, all the way down the QAnon spiral. She was a victim of stupid, made up misinformation. She was a victim of Trumpism. https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/07/09/georgia-today-why-family-says-conspiracy-theories-led-ga-womans-death-in-jan-6

Did you read the part about credit card debt? Borrowing costs in general? Because in general, the better off you are, the less debt you have. I'm fortunate. I've worked hard and steadily for a long time. I was able to save money for retirement. I don't have any debt. I am able to invest basically risk-free at about a 5% interest rate now. Rates go down, all of a sudden I'm not doing so well. Interest rate cuts will probably hurt me. But they will probably help a younger version of me, financing a car, upgrading to a better home thanks to a lower interest rate, lowering my monthly payments on the credit card debt I'm trying to get rid of, etc.

Yeah, lower rates = lower monthly payments for people with credit card debt. Lower rates = lower mortgage payments for people buying a house or refinancing. Who would want that? Honestly, you need to read up on some basic economics and take a break from these threads until you're up to speed.

This explains the revisions and why they happen. No conspiracy. No diabolical plot to make things look better or worse. Could this revision be explained in part by recent immigrants employment? I'd have to research that, but given the difference in the two surveys that result in the revisions, I'm guessing the answer is yes. https://www.epi.org/blog/outrageous-attack-bls/

So was I wrong? Jamal Bowman pulled a fire alarm to stop a vote. Silly, childish act like a high school kid pulling an alarm to avoid taking a test. No one hurt. Meanwhile, Trump sent in a mob. People trampled to death. Police injured. One particularly foolhardy woman, high on Q Anon, shot while smashing a window into the Speaker's inner sanctum.

And to think Trump denigrated his mob as looking "low class."

A Nixonian among us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Jew_count#:~:text=The "Nixon Jew count" of,of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Hey, no fat Democrats got trampled to death when Bowman pulled the fire alarm. On the other hand ....

Thank you. Our friend has no idea what he's talking about. He spends most of his time criticizing Democrats for using standard the standard Keynesian demand pumps (not that he knows these terms) to drive spending and economic growth, only to pay the price with increased inflation in due course. But he says the Trumpists will focus on the demand side.

I just find it astonishing that people are so gullible as to believe that Trump is the adversary of the Deep State, or somehow the friend of those who would reveal all of this information about the powers who rule the world. Friends with Jeffrey Epstein, groveler at the feet of Peter Thiel and his money, schmoozer of anyone with wealth and power. Yeah, he's gonna take them on.

So who is JD Vance's sensei and leading benefactor? A little background: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html Mr. Thiel thought he could figure out how to find terrorists by using some of the paradigms developed at PayPal, which he helped found, to uncover patterns of fraud. “I was just always super annoyed when, every time you go to the airport, you had to take off a shoe or you had to go through all this security theater, which was both somewhat taxing but probably had very little to do with actual security,” Mr. Thiel said. They brought in some software engineers. “It was two and a half years after 9/11, and you’re starting a software company with people who know nothing about the C.I.A. or any of these organizations,” Mr. Thiel recalled. It was all very cloak-and-dagger, in an Inspector Clouseau way. They decided to seek out John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who was dubbed the godfather of modern surveillance; Admiral Poindexter had been forced to resign as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser after the Iran-Contra scandal broke. After 9/11, he worked at the Pentagon on a surveillance program called Total Information Awareness. *** In 2011, the hacker group Anonymous showed that Palantir employees were involved in a proposed misinformation campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and smear some of its supporters, including the journalist Glenn Greenwald. (Mr. Karp apologized to Mr. Greenwald.) Then, at least one Palantir employee helped Cambridge Analytica collect the Facebook data that the Trump campaign used ahead of the 2016 election. Total Information Awareness with Bush 43 and Rumsfeld's favorite theorist, John Poindexter. Smearing Julian Assange/WikiLeaks and taking Latter-Day Trumpie Glenn Greenwald along for the ride. Taking the Surveillance Society up a notch or ten. And then propping up JD Vance by buying him a Senate seat in Ohio, where he was ripe for the Trump picking ... so Peter Thiel himself, gay man of many wacko libertarian opinions and hence no future himself in the Republican Party can be just one heartbeat away from a surrogate presidency. There's your Deep State, you damn fools, or at least the closest personification of it you'll ever find.

Best line of the convention season.

Party politics has never been about "democracy." Trump was nominated in 2016 despite getting well under the majority of Republican primary votes. He was elected President with well under the majority of general election votes. Well, well, well, look who's citing Maureen Dowd now. What, Jack Posobiec didn't say it better?

Those damn Democrats continue to stubbornly refuse to do what Trump tells them to do! It's almost as if they want to win.

Correct. And I really don't think there's serious room for speculation. All those congressional candidates talked to their own pollsters, etc., and were convinced that the House and Senate would flip if Biden remained the candidate. He saw the writing on the wall. Lose the election and watch the party go down in flames, or withdraw and give at least the congressional candidates a fighting chance. What no one really anticipated is how quickly Kamala would be able to consolidate the base, and exactly how eager most Americans were for a candidate who is not an old fossil.