Do rightists have any arguments that are not, ultimately, slippery slope?
We can make laws and set regulations in place. That's a thing.
Actually most luxury cars fall in value a little faster than regular cars. The used market is very small.
In case you haven't noticed, there's a helluva lot of Americans that are hurting. Many just one car repair from being homeless. While at the same time the right wants to take away programs that help the average person to finance huge tax cuts for the wealthy and big corp.
Pretty cheeky of you to accuse me of only using ad hominems when you edited out my other points that were not ad homs. Not a good look on you.
Bullshit. That's not what is happening. It's an incredibly stupid thing to say while the Right is actively working to cut back services to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy and big corp. If you cannot see that I cannot help you.
Wow! Taxing someone is treating them as an enemy. There's your whole attitude in a nutshell.
We’re also subsidizing Bezos but yes, more baldly, we are subsiding Musk. Not to mention paying him directly Abd giving his little band of minions fee reign to decimate government t agencies and collect the personal data of everyone who pays taxes in the US. Talk about a gift!
Did you swallow whatever Loren drinks and now must rely on denigrating any argument t against which you cannot defend by calling it religion?That's religious catechism, not economic reasoning. If a guy does not have the skill set to increase any employer's revenue enough to cover the cost of supporting himself and his family, he has a problem. When an employer buys the guy's labor at fair market value, she's solving part of his problem for him. If you solve part of somebody's problem, that does not magically make his whole problem your problem. You might as well claim his food stamps are a subsidy to his grocer because the grocer doesn't sell him $500 worth of food for the $200 he can earn himself.
Corporations pay corporate income taxes that help finance that infrastructure. You haven't shown the tax revenue is less than the cost of providing the service.
Corporations, like most other economic actors, shed positive externalities that they don't get paid for into their economic ecosystems by the boatload. The reason local governments offer tax breaks is because they want those externalities. That's only a subsidy if the externalities are insufficient to make up for the lost tax revenue, i.e., if the local government officials made a bad deal. Local officials are sometimes stupid or corrupt, sure, but often they offer tax breaks because it's a good deal for their community.
Overall, Amazon and Walmart have increased people's choices enormously.
Sure, if you are determined to portray something like equal use.
Billionaires don’t use emergency rooms, they tie up entire wards of hospitals if something ails them. They don’t use public parks. If they so desire they have their own parks and the public is verboten to use them. But that’s not strictly “consumption” so it never enters your equation.
See above. Direct use - less. Consumptive use - vastly more.
The dynamic in play in ‘Murka conceals billionaires’ consumption of “public” assets, largely by privatizing what was once accessible to the public - but that effect is never accounted for.
It's been going on for a long time. As described in the well known 18th century quatrain by that prolific author, Anon:
Nevermind
Oh for the love of god! I didn't say taxing someone is treating them as an enemy! I said taxing someone not to raise revenue but in order to hurt them -- to tax them so heavily you kill their incentive to produce more wealth and thereby reduce revenue -- is treating them as an enemy. Sanders-style 100% tax brackets and Toni-style billionaire elimination treat the uber-wealthy as an enemy. This isn't rocket science.
How exactly are "we" doing that?
You mean by buying goods and services he is selling? What's wrong with that if he has, for example, more affordable launch vehicles than the competition?
The DOGE debacle was pretty bad, I agree there. That does not mean that your idea of confiscatory wealth taxes is a good one.
There is nothing confiscatory about paying one’s fair share.
Is your argument that all land "rightly" belongs to the government and that thus any private land ownership is consuming "public resources"?
Plenty of poor and lower middle class people fly at least occasionally. They also buy goods flown by cargo planes.
Surely yachts are docked in private marinas, where handsome dock fees are paid (and taxed). I do not see how public resources are consumed here.
The argument was about consumption of public resources. When Branson eats at a restaurant, he is not consuming public resources.
I don’t regard paying one’s fair share in taxes as punitive. I believe taxing in order to raise re ensue and to encourage what is good for society and discouraging what is bad for society is proper. We give tax breaks to people raising children in order to encourage people to have children. We assess penalties for corporations which pollute, form monopolies, engage in unfair labor practices and a host of other measures to discourage such behavior and to disincentivize behavior that we find harmful.
Yeah, when I'm out hiking (normally desert, but not Mohave) I always consider what would the situation be if I got stuck out there overnight. Doesn't take a lot of extra gear to be confident that I could last the night. Other than the summer heat the only conditions out there that are a possible issue is wind.
Which is the general situation--the problem people have with the homeless is actually a dick problem. I'm pretty sure there are a few that live around here spending the night behind the transformers. (We have underground utilities, no poles means no transformers on poles, so they're in boxes which always have a wall on all sides not facing the street and always have a concrete pad--no mud, walled on three sides so the wind is considerably reduced.) I have never seen any problems from them, I haven't heard of any problems, I haven't heard of anyone complaining. The dick ones are another matter.
That's my understanding--car + gym membership takes care of most issues.
Depends on how you define "fair share".
They have a lot of market power, yes. Does not mean that it is not a winning scenario for vendors to have access to a sale portal with such market power.
If they did not have a job at all, they'd cost the government even more. Amazon has a lot of employees, and only some of them are the low-end warehouse employees. And I have shown that even those get paid $18-20 per hour in MCOL city like Atlanta. Of course it is impossible for any company to guarantee pay, especially for their low end employees, that completely eliminates the possibility of them being eligible for government services. That's because eligibility for these programs rises with household size. A family of five is eligible for SNAP up to ~48k. Does that mean that every job should pay at least that much? And what about family of 6? 7?
You are conflating at least three different things. There are a number of test flights that failed, but you don't have contracts with customers for those. Paid SpaceX launches (for both private and government clients like NASA) have been very successful, and relatively affordable.
What is that supposed to mean? Afaik there have not been any deaths on SpaceX flights, important or not. And last year SpaceX managed to rescue astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore when Boeing, the original contractor, could not.
Now you have shifted to space tourism. That's more Blue Origin than SpaceX. In any case, they pay their own money for a suborbital experience. A lot of people pay a lot of money for expensive vacations. Why do some people hate it when it involves spaceflight? Did you also hate Dennis Tito when he paid $20M to Russians for a week in space in 2001?
Some years ago I tried to work out the economics--didn't take very many years for it to go into the red.That's why people like Bezos do take capital gains and pay hundreds of millions in capital gains taxes. While borrowing against stock does happen, it is not nearly as widely used as polemics suggest.
DC FPI is not exactly the most trustworthy source here, given their biases. And that page is very superficial and does not go into any detail as to how that is supposed to work in practice.
How Wealthy Households Use a “Buy, Borrow, Die” Strategy to Avoid Taxes on Their Growing Fortunes | DC Fiscal Policy Institute
Capital gains are the profits generated from wealth such as stocks and real estate. Wealthy households can use the three-step “buy, borrow, die” strategy to get massive capital gains tax advantages.dcfpi.org
But Eisenhower’s ~91% top marginal rate didn’t seem to create a lot of enmity, or inhibit innovation, or keep the Uber wealthy from becoming even wealthier.
What's your point? Are you trying to prove you aren't shilling for Bolsheviks? I was being sarcastic. Derec wasn't shilling for the massively wealthy either.
Well hey, if we're going for hyper-literalism here, let's have a look at your other points.
That's not an argument; that's proof by blatant assertion. The second sentence, "It is the total consumption and saving opportunity gained within a specified timeframe, and serves as the foundation for measuring economic growth, assigning tax burdens, and evaluating wealth.", was asserted without argument or evidence. Why would anyone believe such brain-damaged idiocy? If that definition were correct, then if you have a rare tissue type and consequently some oligarch in a country where it's legal offers you a million dollars for your kidney, it would mean you have a million dollars of income even if you don't sell it to him and that million dollars serves as the foundation for assigning your tax burden. That is evidently not what anyone actually means by "income".
Still not seeing an argument there. Why the bejesus should you be taxed on the full sticker price of the car? The manufacturer can slap on any sticker it pleases. If you didn't pay that much for it and the game show didn't pay the manufacturer that much for it and you can't sell it for that much, what basis is there for believing that's a measure of how much value you received?