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U.S. Politics: Gar Nicht Trump's Traumschiff!


Tywin Manderly

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21 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

The loans have to be paid back at some point. You seem to think it’s free money.

Your estate pays off the loans. So you, while you're alive, never have to pay them off. Your inheritors did nothing to earn that wealth so they have no cause for complaint. The loan also calculates against your net worth of the next year, which means if you are progressively taking out more loans to pay taxes your net worth keeps shrinking to the point where you still have billions in assets, but a Net worth considerably smaller than the value of your assets. So to keep paying substantial amounts in wealth tax you have to be continuing to accumulate capital greater than the amount of the tax loans you are taking out.

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15 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

The loans can be paid back by taking out more loans. As long as you get enough of a good interest rate on your investment in your  company - and you're presupposing these billionaires are awesome, so they should, right? - you can easily get back enough value in your stock to easily redo a loan. 

Even at Warren's incredibly horrible, obviously evil 6% tax per annum, that means you simply have to have more than 6% return on your investments. Are you saying that the mighty Bezos and Gates and Musk don't get 6% return? 

We are missing each other I think. When you refer to interest, I take it you mean the appreciation in the share value, and not the interest charged on the loan by the financing provider.

Share prices don’t keep appreciating forever. And don’t increase consistently from one year to the next. Sometimes they decline rapidly in a short space of time.

Bezos is on record that Amazon will go bankrupt eventually. The goal is to delay that for as long as possible.

So the only time you can attach a confirmed value to your shareholding is when you sell it and get real money in return. 

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2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

We are missing each other I think. When you refer to interest, I take it you mean the appreciation in the share value, and not the interest charged on the loan by the financing provider.

Share prices don’t keep appreciating forever. And don’t increase consistently from one year to the next. Sometimes they decline rapidly in a short space of time. 

But then you wouldn't have to pay as much tax, so it's a win-win!

2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Bezos is on record that Amazon will go bankrupt eventually. The goal is to delay that for as long as possible. 

And when it does, he won't owe any money! Yay!

2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

So the only time you can attach a confirmed value to your shareholding is when you sell it and get real money in return. 

So you're in agreement that no one should be able to get any loans on any shares ever, and all this 'wealth' they actually have is meaningless? 

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17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

But then you wouldn't have to pay as much tax, so it's a win-win!

And when it does, he won't owe any money! Yay!

So you're in agreement that no one should be able to get any loans on any shares ever, and all this 'wealth' they actually have is meaningless? 

So you are worth $40bn in one year and have to pay 6% of that in wealth tax. That’s $2.4bn. You take out a loan to pay that as you suggest.

The next year your shares grow in value by 6%, bringing your net worth back to $40bn, even though you owe $2.4bn to the bank plus a year’s interest on the unpaid loan. So you get hit with another 6% tax - another $2.4bn which you pay by extending your debt to around $5bn.

Then in year three the share price crashes and your shares drop down to $10bn in value. Suddenly the bank gets anxious and forces you to pay off the loan immediately as the erstwhile $40bn security is now worth only a fraction of that.

You now have to sell half your shares to pay the loan, and with the founder selling half his stake the market takes that as a sign of no confidence and a run on the shares is the result, tanking the shares further, and the company goes under.

But hey, at least Warren made $5bn from the deal, which vanished into the black hole of social spending with little to show for it.

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Just now, Free Northman Reborn said:

So you are worth $40bn in one year and have to pay 6% of that in wealth tax. That’s $2.4bn. You take out a loan to pay that as you suggest.

The next year your shares grow in value by 6%,

But surely you're a better businessman than that? A 6% gain in stock values? Come on, man. That's nothing!

Just now, Free Northman Reborn said:

bringing your net worth back to $40bn, even though you owe $2.4bn to the bank plus a year’s interest on the unpaid loan. So you get hit with another 6% tax - another $2.4bn which you pay by extending your debt to around $5bn. 

Then in year three the share price crashes and your shares drop down to $10bn in value. Suddenly the bank gets anxious and forces you to pay off the loan immediately before your company goes bankrupt. 

And you get to mark ALL of that off as a loss and get to carry that forward for the next 10 years as accrued losses, meaning your tax value is nothing for, like, ever.

Just now, Free Northman Reborn said:

You now have to sell half your shares to pay the loan, and with the founder selling of half his stake the market takes that as a sign of no confidence and a run on the shares is the result, tanking the shares further, and the company goes under. 

Alternately, you just take out a riskier loan, which is what businesses and actual people with wealth do. Very, very rarely is anyone forced to sell off their shares to pay back a loan like this. 

Just now, Free Northman Reborn said:

But hey, at least Warren made $5bn from the deal, which vanished into the black hole of social spending with little to show for it.

yeah, other than things like the internet, the space race, universal health care, the military-industrial complex, what have the romans ever given us?

 

And you, as usual, avoided answering the question - are you in favor of being able to take loans out on assets or not? Because you said that the stock is effectively worth nothing until sold which is a profoundly anticapitalist and anti-freemarket point of view.

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1 minute ago, Kalbear said:

But surely you're a better businessman than that? A 6% gain in stock values? Come on, man. That's nothing!

And you get to mark ALL of that off as a loss and get to carry that forward for the next 10 years as accrued losses, meaning your tax value is nothing for, like, ever.

Alternately, you just take out a riskier loan, which is what businesses and actual people with wealth do. Very, very rarely is anyone forced to sell off their shares to pay back a loan like this. 

yeah, other than things like the internet, the space race, universal health care, the military-industrial complex, what have the romans ever given us?

 

And you, as usual, avoided answering the question - are you in favor of being able to take loans out on assets or not? Because you said that the stock is effectively worth nothing until sold which is a profoundly anticapitalist and anti-freemarket point of view.

No, you didn’t answer my question. I said you don’t pay tax on a loan you take against your house as security. You replied that you do. I disagree. Can you elaborate?

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1 minute ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

No, you didn’t answer my question. I said you don’t pay tax on a loan you take against your house as security. You replied that you do. I disagree. Can you elaborate?

You still didn't answer my question, but okay, let's go with this. The short answer is that usually personal loans are not taxable income. Now, it depends a lot on whether Mr. Bezos is taking a loan out personally, or he's taking a loan out for his company. It depends on whether the loan is forgiven somehow (which in business happens a weirdly large amount more than you'd think). Like this example:

Quote

 

Sometimes, yes. That’s exactly what happened to Jonathan Landow. Landow took out a 90% loan against securities he put up as collateral. The loan was non-recourse—meaning that Landow could not be sued personally if he defaulted. Yet the securities were pledged as collateral. 

In fact, the lender had the ability to sell the securities in ways that were unusual for garden-variety loans. And that’s just what the lender did, even though Landow later claimed he had no idea his securities would be sold. Landow didn’t pay off any of the $13.5 million principal amount of the loan.

He also didn’t report the “loan proceeds” as income. The IRS claimed the loan transaction wasn’t a loan at all and instead was a sale. The Tax Court agreed with the IRS, treating the putative loan as a highly orchestrated transaction. They court thought everyone knew the transaction would be documented as a loan but really amounted to a sale.

 

We can summon @Mlle. Zabzie to tell you how many different ways both you and I are grossly immature about what you're talking about and wrong, but loans when you're talking about billions of dollars are usually not equivalent to a Stafford loan. You simply don't have the base education to even start to understand them. 

Now, are you going to state whether or not you think Mr. Bezos SHOULD be able to leverage his nonexistent imaginary value into cash? 

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4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

You still didn't answer my question, but okay, let's go with this. The short answer is that usually personal loans are not taxable income. Now, it depends a lot on whether Mr. Bezos is taking a loan out personally, or he's taking a loan out for his company. It depends on whether the loan is forgiven somehow (which in business happens a weirdly large amount more than you'd think). Like this example:

We can summon @Mlle. Zabzie to tell you how many different ways both you and I are grossly immature about what you're talking about and wrong, but loans when you're talking about billions of dollars are usually not equivalent to a Stafford loan. You simply don't have the base education to even start to understand them. 

Now, are you going to state whether or not you think Mr. Bezos SHOULD be able to leverage his nonexistent imaginary value into cash? 

Yes, he should of course be able to. In his personal capacity. A financing institution will do a risk assessment based on the assets he can put up as security, and charge him a risk based interest rate. Why should he not have that right like any other person? That doesn’t change the fact that share values are volatile and it is inappropriate to levy tax at someone based on the current, unrealized market value of the shares.

Also your understanding of accrued loss in your earlier reply appears wildly off the mark. His capital gain at time of selling the shares is the difference between the original acquisition cost - which was presumably close to zero if he was the founder - and the eventual selling price. So dropping from a former market value of $40bn to $10bn is not a loss if it is still worth $10bn more than when he started the company.

A good demonstration of this conflation between capital appreciation and income that the wealth taxers seem stuck on.

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2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Yes, he should of course be able to. In his personal capacity. A financing institution will do a risk assessment based on the assets he can put up as security, and charge him a risk based interest rate. Why should he not have that right like any other person?

Hey, you're the one that said that his assets had no concrete value until he sells them. You tell me! You said this:

"So the only time you can attach a confirmed value to your shareholding is when you sell it and get real money in return."

Since his shareholding is effectively worth nothing unless he sells it, how can you justify making loans on it? 

(PS: there is such a thing as attaching values to assets in the tax code; for example, if you are given a car, that counts as income, even though a car is not strictly considered money and it increases or decreases in value depending on what kind of car it is). 

2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

That doesn’t change the fact that share values are volatile and it is inappropriate to levy tax at someone based on the current, unrealized market value of the shares.

But it's appropriate to take loans out against them? How does that logic work? Here's a newsflash: every non-cash based asset is volatile. And yet if you get more, you normally have to pay taxes on it. 

2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Also your understanding of accrued loss in your earlier reply appears wildly off the mark. His capital gain at time of selling the shares is the difference between the original acquisition cost - which was presumably close to zero if he was the founder - and the eventual selling price. So dropping from a former market value of $40bn to $10bn is not a loss if it is still worth $10bn more than when he started the company. 

If you're evaluating his taxable wealth based on his stocks, it's exactly relevant. That's sort of the point. He can say with accuracy that he lost this much money in value, and therefore he does not have to pay any particular tax. If his net 'wealth' dropped 10bn in a year, his wealth tax is zero. 

Depends a lot on implementation of course, but as the tax rules are right now it'd be easy to make that a massive writeoff - either as the owner of a business losing that much or as a personal loss. 

2 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

A good demonstration of this conflation between capital appreciation and income that the wealth taxers seem stuck on.

I'm personally on the opinion that a wealth tax is simply not going to work very well for a lot of reasons, notably that it hasn't worked out well in other countries that have tried it. I would rather put a tax on large personal loans that people use, tax estates WAY more than they are, and tax corporate profits significantly more. I'd also tax transactions more highly. But that's complicated stuff. 

But the notion of mere capital gains/losses reflecting wealth in the stock market is obviously meaningless when things make money when they don't, ya know, actually exist. That mattered a lot when you were talking about tangible assets like factories and mills and whatnot; nowadays, the main values are in branding, monopsonies and intellectual property. Our entire taxing system is absurdly unprepared for a digital based economy, and the result is incredible inequity as people get massively rich on stock valuation without actually producing a whole lot of value. In addition, because this stock is not actually taxed in any meaningful way (especially stock options), you get a second set of currency evaluations and trading that has absolutely no taxable value, yet has monetary value. 

So you get the incredibly weird situation where a person can be 'paid' 10 million in stock options, take a loan out for 5 million, buy a house with it and live on the rest, and pay literally zero taxes on any income because they have no actual income relative to their loan. They got 'paid' that 10 million in stock options and that's like being paid 10 million in fairy dust. How exactly is that fair? 

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Hey, you're the one that said that his assets had no concrete value until he sells them. You tell me! You said this:

"So the only time you can attach a confirmed value to your shareholding is when you sell it and get real money in return."

Since his shareholding is effectively worth nothing unless he sells it, how can you justify making loans on it? 

(PS: there is such a thing as attaching values to assets in the tax code; for example, if you are given a car, that counts as income, even though a car is not strictly considered money and it increases or decreases in value depending on what kind of car it is). 

But it's appropriate to take loans out against them? How does that logic work? Here's a newsflash: every non-cash based asset is volatile. And yet if you get more, you normally have to pay taxes on it. 

If you're evaluating his taxable wealth based on his stocks, it's exactly relevant. That's sort of the point. He can say with accuracy that he lost this much money in value, and therefore he does not have to pay any particular tax. If his net 'wealth' dropped 10bn in a year, his wealth tax is zero. 

Depends a lot on implementation of course, but as the tax rules are right now it'd be easy to make that a massive writeoff - either as the owner of a business losing that much or as a personal loss. 

I'm personally on the opinion that a wealth tax is simply not going to work very well for a lot of reasons, notably that it hasn't worked out well in other countries that have tried it. I would rather put a tax on large personal loans that people use, tax estates WAY more than they are, and tax corporate profits significantly more. I'd also tax transactions more highly. But that's complicated stuff. 

But the notion of mere capital gains/losses reflecting wealth in the stock market is obviously meaningless when things make money when they don't, ya know, actually exist. That mattered a lot when you were talking about tangible assets like factories and mills and whatnot; nowadays, the main values are in branding, monopsonies and intellectual property. Our entire taxing system is absurdly unprepared for a digital based economy, and the result is incredible inequity as people get massively rich on stock valuation without actually producing a whole lot of value. In addition, because this stock is not actually taxed in any meaningful way (especially stock options), you get a second set of currency evaluations and trading that has absolutely no taxable value, yet has monetary value. 

So you get the incredibly weird situation where a person can be 'paid' 10 million in stock options, take a loan out for 5 million, buy a house with it and live on the rest, and pay literally zero taxes on any income because they have no actual income relative to their loan. They got 'paid' that 10 million in stock options and that's like being paid 10 million in fairy dust. How exactly is that fair? 

I don’t understand the fixation on loans. A loan doesn’t make you wealthier. It just give you access to cash by reducing your asset value in exchange. 

Why do you want to tax loans?

You seem to suggest that because someone can fund a certain lifestyle from debt, he should be penalized for it. Why? 

Borrowing money against your assets is a fundamental principle of our economic system. 

Sounds more like a lifestyle tax to me.  Turn it around and answer this: What do you gain by disincentivizing borrowing? Say Bezos stops taking out loans then. How does that benefit the left’s agenda?

He still owns $100bn worth of stock. All you achieve is forcing him to not live like he owns that much. So is it about penalizing him for spending his money then? So the poor don’t feel bad seeing his high life style? It’s ok if he owns $100bn, as long as he doesn’t spend it?

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5 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I don’t understand the fixation on loans. A loan doesn’t make you wealthier. It just give you access to cash by reducing your asset value in exchange. 

Why do you want to tax loans?

I want to tax certain types of loans because they're based on assets that should have been taxed. 

5 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

You seem to suggest that because someone can fund a certain lifestyle from debt, he should be penalized for it. Why? 

Because it provides no value to the economy or community. It is anticapitalist. 

5 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Borrowing money against your assets is a fundamental principle of our economic system. 

To invest in other things, not to live a life of luxury. 

5 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Sounds more like a lifestyle tax to me.  Turn it around and answer this: What do you gain by disincentivizing borrowing? Say Bezos stops taking out loans then. How does that benefit the left’s agenda? 

Well, then he'd have to either sell his stock to maintain his lifestyle or actually earn a living and live off of his actual salary. Both of which would be actually taxed.

5 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

He still owns $100bn worth of stock. All you achieve is forcing him to not live like he owns that much. So is it about penalizing him for spending his money then? So the poor don’t feel bad seeing his high life style? It’s ok if he owns $100bn, as long as he doesn’t spend it?

You're the one who said that his assets are worthless, not me. Why should he get to live well off of worthless assets? 

There's a few things that owning stock and not being able to work against it as an asset helps. For starters, it helps treat stock as less of a be-all, end all and more of a representation of ownership in a company. You're less incentivized to sell that stock off and more incentivized to actually make the company more successful by putting things back into it. You are also not as incentivized to GIVE PEOPLE STOCK OPTIONS IN LIEU OF SALARY. Which is sort of the god damn point. It's not that stock shouldn't necessarily be an asset - it's that it is not considered nearly as much of a taxable asset as a whole lot of other things, and it is only taxed at the value of the stock or option when it's received. This makes it absurdly lucrative as both a commodity to give out (as it can be literally worth nothing at that time) and as a commodity to receive (ditto) even though it could be crazily worth money - and that money is never, actually, taxed until death.

So I guess if you want to do 100% estate taxes after the first million I'm cool with that too. But evading taxes by getting paid in stock? That's bullshit. That the only people who can afford to this are the ultra rich? even more bullshit. 

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4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I'm personally on the opinion that a wealth tax is simply not going to work very well for a lot of reasons, notably that it hasn't worked out well in other countries that have tried it.

I'd asked Ran before so I'll ask you too: what is this assertion based on? In fact, is it based on anything at all?

Since my country had a national debate on the topic in the wake of Macron's recent -partial- abolition of the -very popular- wealth tax I've been looking for evidence that wealth taxes don't work and have found nothing conclusive.
The one reason that makes wealth taxes unefficient is that they are unenforceable, i.e. rich fucks can simply apply for another nationality and dodge it.
Except if they're Americans that is, because the US is the only county in the world which undeniably has the power to get its citizens to pay their taxes regardless of where they live.

In 2010, Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act meaning that anyone being a de facto US citizen had to file their taxes with the IRS regardless of where they lived. In the following years Washington signed deals with many other countries to ensure that foreign banks would track down and send info on US customers. If said foreign banks did not comply they incured severe penalties/fines.
Needless to say everyone complied and in 2014 American citizens living in France started receiving letters informing them they had to regulate their situation with the IRS or lose a number of banking services (with some banks deciding to cease some or all of their services unilateraly).

The US implementing a wealth tax would be a game-changer for the entire world. Since the US can enforce a wealth tax, it could also help other countries do the same. Countries could start mutually recognizing their wealth taxes, hence drastically decreasing fiscal evasion and possibly even laying the groundwork for a global wealth tax as envisioned by Piketty, Saez & al. Instead of countries competing to attract the rich fucks countries would start cooperating to tax their wealth. Global inequality would finally start going down again...

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16 hours ago, DMC said:

Yeah the Orleans margin stood out to me as well Saturday night

In terms of the margins, it's actually not much higher than 2015, but MUCH higher than pre-Katrina numbers.  OTOH, turnout was unsurprisingly much higher pre-Katrina.  The Dems' gain of 3.3% from 2015 to 2019 seems clearly generated by an increase in turnout of over 30,000 votes. 

Sort of.  Edwards also won 56% of the vote statewide in 2015, compared to 51% this time.  And while an increase from 86% to 90% isn't huge, that still means that the share of Republican voters went down by more than 25%, which is pretty crazy given that the statewide race got more competitive. 

Quote

So, the key in urban areas is to maintain/encourage minority enthusiasm.  But let's not forget that the big pickups in 2018 came from the shift in the suburban vote, driven in large part with Trump's deep unpopularity among women - including soccer moms.  Obviously, ideally you do both and hopefully the Dems can walk an chew gum at the same time - plus the third prong, which is mitigating the increased 3rd party vote from 2016.  In that regard, though, I do agree that focusing on minority turnout is more important.  According to the 2018 exit polls, both 2016 3rd party voters and 2016 non-voters accounted for 8% of the 2018 electorate.  3rd party voters went Democrat 54-41.  Good, but non-voters went Dem 70-28.  Doesn't take a statistician to see which one is more important to replicate from 2018.

 

IMO there are two segments of voters that are clearly going to favor Democrats go a greater extent than they did in 2016.  The first happens every election, which is that the young voters are more diverse and more democratic than the older voters they're replacing through organic change in the electorate.  This isn't nothing, but we shouldn't overstate this importance, since it happens every election.  The second and IMO more important is suburban, well educated voters.  These voters have consistently swung away from the Republicans in the 2017-2019 elections and it is happening even once you account for the statewide shift. 

Look at Florida, Trump won it by 1.1% and Desantis won it by 0.4%.  But the maps show some noticeable changes.  Trump won Pinellas County (Tampa Suburb) and Duval County (Jacksonville metro and suburbs) by 1% each.  Two years later, Gillum won both by 3-4%, giving him a lead of combined 30k votes over DeSantis.  That story of a 2-5% shift towards Democrats can be seen in virtually all the big Florida suburbs. 

Then why did Gillum come up just short?  Because for whatever reason (and plenty Florida Democrats point to voter suppression), the margins Democrats were able to run up in the urban areas in 2018 did not match their 2016 benchmarks.  In Miami-Dade county, Clinton won by 29 points, in a county that accounted for almost a million votes (out of 9.4 million statewide), with a net gain of 290k votes.  Gillum only won by 20, and gained just 170k.  Considering he lost by just 30k votes, if he had been able to come within even 5 points of Clinton's margin in this one county, he is governor right now. 

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I took the Washington Post's "Which Democratic Candidate Do You Agree With the Most?" quiz. It's only 10 questions and they're not the most nuanced, but, be that as it may, I was rather surprised to find that apparently I'm closest aligned with Andrew Yang. Got 8/10 with him, no one else was higher than 6/10.

Quiz here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/quiz-which-candidate-agrees-with-me/

I'm not more inclined to vote for Yang in the primary, my sole criteria continues to be who do I think has the best chance of beating Trump, but I found it interesting nonetheless. I haven't really paid any attention to him, other than knowing that he's the UBI guy.

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The NYT just did a great story about how FedEx went from paying $1.5 B in taxes to paying $0. Basically they bought new planes and a few other things and the 100% write-off combined with the big rate drop meant no taxes. The big question was, did they increase capital spending, like the Trump administration said companies would if they gave companies the tax breaks. The answer, of course, was a resounding No. Not just FedEx, but corporate America invested less, using the money to buy back shares (making the shares held by insiders more valuable) and increase dividends (putting more money in the pockets of all those insiders who get paid with hundreds of thousands of shares each year). FedEx even spent less than they budgeted for.

It makes the whole battle over protecting billionaires from that nasty wealth tax argument you guys just had even more hilarious.

First of all, all, or at least most, of those billionaires own special classes of shares that hold more power than the hundreds of millions of shares the general public owns, because those shares carry 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 votes each, meaning that their special voting shares will always give them control of the company, no matter how many of the regular shares they sell. They don’t need to rely on their share price going up, they’ll just give themselves more shares in compensation.

And with companies spending the money they saved on income taxes to buy back shares, they drive their share price up anyway. FedEx buys backs billions of dollars of shares every year.

The founder of FedEx, and Chairman, spent years lobbying for lower taxes, which Obama refused to do. He then threw $20 or $30 M in lobbying Trump and voila, tax code changes were made. With FedEx saving $1.5 B in taxes that was the best $30 M they ever spent. Trump, after all, is a billionaire and was simpatico. Obama was just a working stiff.

If you recall reading or seeing the book or movie about Zuckerberg, one of the ways the Zuck screwed over his fellow student and co-founder/creator of Facebook was by getting a group of directors with more votes to pass a resolution converting their Fb shares into super-voting shares, then booting out the co-founder because they didn’t convert his shares.

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1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

This whole conversation of needing to protect billionaires looks especially stupid considering the breaking news that Amazon paid no federal income taxes in 2018.

I know right, but according to Bezos he"s now teetering on the edge of bancruptcy. Apparently because.....reasons nshit!

His half a trillion fortune will just evaporate he says if he has to pay 20 million or so in taxes.

He's just the ultimate Trillionaire VICTIM doanchyaknow.

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3 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Sort of.  Edwards also won 56% of the vote statewide in 2015, compared to 51% this time.  And while an increase from 86% to 90% isn't huge, that still means that the share of Republican voters went down by more than 25%, which is pretty crazy given that the statewide race got more competitive. 

I don't really get your point here.  The GOP candidate actually got 300 more votes in Orleans in 2019 compared to 2015.  The reason their proportion of the vote went down by more than 25% is because the Dem candidate got 32,900 more votes in 2019 compared to 2015.  That's an overall 35% increase in turnout in Orleans, which is definitely not solely due to population growth (having visited New Orleans every year since..2013, no way there's been near that much of a population increase).  The GOP vote basically stayed stagnant while virtually all the non-voters from 2015 voted Dem in 2019.  That's what I was saying, and is pretty much basic arithmetic.  And, of course, that net increase of over 32 thousand votes in one parish was huge considering Edwards' margin of victory statewide in 2019 was only about 40 thousand votes.  

3 hours ago, Maithanet said:

The second and IMO more important is suburban, well educated voters.  These voters have consistently swung away from the Republicans in the 2017-2019 elections and it is happening even once you account for the statewide shift. 

Agreed this is much more important than the natural demographic shifts.

3 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Because for whatever reason (and plenty Florida Democrats point to voter suppression)

Yeah just because Gillum didn't hit his turnout targets in urban areas does not mean the Dems can't make those gains in other states.  I definitely would not cite Florida as a primary example when discussing the ability to increase minority turnout.

3 hours ago, Fez said:

It's only 10 questions and they're not the most nuanced, but, be that as it may, I was rather surprised to find that apparently I'm closest aligned with Andrew Yang. Got 8/10 with him, no one else was higher than 6/10.

Heh, fun quiz, thanks.  I got Booker at 8/10, then a bunch at 6/10.  Sanders was only at 4/10, and somewhat surprisingly Biden was only at 3/10.  Gabbard was lowest at 2/10, which makes me feel good.

Anyway, yeah, the questions weren't the greatest - especially the first one.  Do I want private health insurance to eventually be phased out?  Yes, definitely.  Should the current Dem candidate be supporting that?  No, definitely not.  I answered with the latter in mind, but that's a very difficult question to put so simply.  And then question 9 - what Democrat is against abolishing the electoral college (although according to them apparently Yang is)?  Seems a silly question to ask when you only got ten items.

3 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said:

Thanks for the extra details from your links, there are a few wrinkles there that I wasn't aware of. :thumbsup:

:cheers:

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1 hour ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I know right, but according to Bezos he"s now teetering on the edge of bancruptcy. Apparently because.....reasons nshit!

His half a trillion fortune will just evaporate he says if he has to pay 20 million or so in taxes.

He's just the ultimate Trillionaire VICTIM doanchyaknow.

Well to be fair, and with care for his mental well-being, he has lost his status as the richest man alive. Gates has regained his throne.

Moral of the story, some affairs simply aren’t worth it, and no affair is worth 75 billion dollars.

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