Pardon me, but letting alone the notion that any reasonable person with the means to follow those stories would have cause to dismiss them, the Hunter Biden stories have hardly been addressed. Hard to be part of for-profit reality TV without being covered.
Its politics as usual making up whatever and that was covered on right wing for profit trash outlets. Just like now the right political media is pumping out the narrative of the VP being a horrible person. If you believe any of it ok that's you but time shows it's all fabricate political maneuvering so its all b.s.. Crap that i ignore and live life happily and far away from! Why waste time on made up crap? There's lots more in life to enjoy then plugging one self into for profit manipulated media machines where the viewer or reader can never truly verify the veracity of any of it. Only truth is the majority of it bias and for profit.
Consider how widely available high-speed broadband through Starlink might change some of these things once that makes living in the interior of the country more desirable. I think we may end up seeing a sort of reverse of the industrial revolution's migration pattern over the coming decades.
Totally possible! I hope we actually see small walkable enclaves throughout the country. Like the little mountain resort towns, but kept afloat by residents rather than tourism. Jobs are a big part of the equation with living in a city, but definitely not the only one. Food, arts, other cultural artifacts that people who live in cities care about are harder to move across the web for sure.
I grew up in Des Moines, it's a rather nice place to live and raise a family. Great amenities, pleasant(relatively) traffic, good roads, decent airport, quality schools, etc... there's plenty of compelling reasons to live there - especially at that price.
Boring at times, but it's a lively enough city and you can still park in front your destination for free, which I've always appreciated.
I love the article despite the partisan political bickering on the tail end. There's more common ground available on these issues from Trump's right wing supporters than what might appear so at first. There's an artfully constructed corporate smokescreen of fear propaganda intended to make those common interests unpursuable. It makes us mutual boogeymen and causes us to intellectually inbreed - liberals and conservatives are not healthy ideologically without good-faith interchange.
Many of you haven't noticed yet, but contemporary AAA devs realized years ago how much easier to make something compulsive than compelling and substituted addiction for fun, taking inspiration from slot machines and abandoning past masterpieces.
Shooters aren't enjoyable enough to justify this shit. Other genres are more respectful of your time, money, and efforts than to dribble content you purchased at a rate just slow enough that you'll keep playing. Your time and attention are valuable non-renewable resources. Consider how well you're spending them.
That idea isn't possible. First problem is stocks aren't easily liquidable at scale.
Lets' think on the scale of the individual first: say this hypothetical person has 50 grand in stock options from their company. It's not a ridiculous number, perhaps they've been sitting on it for 5 years or so, building a nest egg. Say they've got liquidate stock to pay a 5% on that wealth amounting to $2500.
In systems this complex you've got to play out the cascading effects, your first, second, and third order effects. It's the most complex game in the world, balance patches are tricky.
First Order problem: Liquidating $2500 in stock costs more than $2500 in stock, the share price will drop once supply floods the market. This sucks for this hypothetical worker... but this is a far larger problem than just them.
It's not just Mr. Hypothetical, everyone has to pay taxes on their stock.
Second Order problem: A significant percentage will not have the liquid cash to pay these taxes and will have to liquidate their stock. We'll have a stock market crash every April, I guarantee it. Everyone's liquidation will further devalue others' stock.
Third Order problem: the wealthiest and most solvent will plan for this - it's what they do. They'll treat this like a circa 2011 Steam Summer sale and buy everything... and I mean Everything. This hypothetical tax law designed to spite them is the greatest favor possible.
I know what we'll call it: "The Running of the Bears".
Regardless of my own thoughts on a wealth tax I don't think these arguments hold a lot of water (they're all first order effects, but I digress). A bigger argument against it is the actual mechanics, but I'll get to that.
The biggest thing about a wealth tax is that it's like the estate tax. The goal is to prevent the accumulation of most of the wealth in the economy by a small number of people, and it can be thresholded to target them. A 50k nest egg would be well below it, the numbers I think are "fair" are closer to $10 million than $50,000.
As for the mechanics of paying the tax, your first and second problem have the same solution. When you buy a house for example your property taxes are due every six months, so to avoid the hazard of not having the cash when they're due you pay into an escrow account every month (there are more details like covering the unpaid tax when transferring ownership, but whatever). One could require brokerages to provide this service, but I don't think anyone with $10 million in liquid assets is unable to come up with the cash.
A second problem is what kinds of assets can incur the tax, for example a startup might have $100 million in valuation with two founders in control of 50% of the company and they obviously don't have the ability to liquidate the business for 5% of their $25 million in wealth. I can think of a couple of ways to solve this, one being a tax deference, or graduated tax based on age of the asset (in this case shares in a recently founded company), a tax asses on the asset itself much like a home. This could create loopholes for holding companies but I'm sure someone can find a way around it.
Personally, I find the strongest argument your third. The wealthy will find a way around it. I think we can be smarter about how we assess taxes to ultimately achieve the same goal. For example, hedge funds (which only the uber wealthy can buy into) can be taxed directly and the second order effects of that tax will be quite similar to a wealth tax, without all the mechanical problems. A federal property tax might be a solution.
I don't have all the answers, all I know is that I pay what I think is a fair amount of tax on my income and assets and think it's absurd that we have an tax system that in its current form will beget a new aristocracy.
You'd pursue this despite acknowledging that the target of your spite would escape unscathed? I don't believe polite words can describe depravity that deliberate. Your proposal isn't a tax, it's an impotent tantrum bereft of solutions which fails to address any causal corruption rooting our contemporary second Gilded Age.
>The real issue is government having a monopoly on tax revenue and not pushing a penny far enough.
I definitely agree with this but is it even possible to incentivize that? Sometimes I wish we could put an honest "I" in IRS and sic 'em on the government.
This seems unlikely.