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SpaceNut,
That was your entire take-away from my response to the nonsense from CBS that you "re-tweeted"?
Yes, houses are taxed on appraised values because it's assumed that someone else could buy the house and live in it.
The difference between the stock and the house is that the house is a thing of tangible value, whereas the stock is not.
Now... Let's get back to my question about what the assumed value of $127 billion dollars in IOUs happens to be?
Sure, let's force Bezos to "pay taxes" on his stack of IOUs.
Q: What does he do to "pay his taxes"?
A: He sells his stock in his own company.
Q: Who does he sell it to?
A: The government, obviously. If he does not, then some other person is obviously paying taxes on those "unrealized gains". One way or another, the government gets ownership of the business, or the business simply doesn't have the capital to operate, and then it doesn't operate.
Q: What's the definition of communism?
A: The government owns the means of production and distribution of goods and services.
Q: What are we attempting here?
A: Communism, obviously.
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Appraisals are some ones opinion as to what it is worth and not what it was bought for just like stocks....its unrealized gains which I have not gotten as I am living in it still.
Stocks sold by Bezo for cash is his problem to convert so he will just print more just like the cash we keep doing.
Army Corps of Engineers withdraws SpaceX application to expand Starship facilities in Texas
Rules are in place and your money can not break these rules... Submit your paper and get over it "to minimize harm to wetlands, water, and wildlife."
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SpaceNut,
I know that you will never figure this out, but this latest idiocy from radical leftists will play out in one of two ways:
1. The government somehow manages to take their money. If the government took 100% of their money, we could not afford to fund our government for 2 lousy months. That's how much our government overspends on all its ridiculous entitlement and military programs. Democrats keep offering free / this / that / the other, and people like you (their economics-illiterate voter base) keep getting poorer.
Afterwards, the investors who invested into our businesses won't invest in our businesses anymore. That means people like you and I won't have jobs, because they own the store, not you or I. There won't be any point to investment if our government confiscates the profits. These people don't build businesses for the express purpose of making you or I wealthy. All that retirement money from investments into stocks / bonds / commodities / securities goes away, too. Government gets larger, at least temporarily, and you get poorer.
2. The business owners turn around and raise prices on people like you and I, and then they keep their money while we become poorer. They can afford to do this because their material needs have been met and they own the store. You and I cannot, nor do we "own the store".
Since Bezos can't "just print more money" the way the banks do, Amazon will raise prices on their goods and services to cover any losses. Bezos can afford to walk away from Amazon. His employees cannot. You naively think you can "punish" people like Bezos or businesses by taking their profits, but they use those profits to pay salaries to people like us. Raise their costs and they raise your costs. You raise his taxes, he raises his prices to cover their "realized losses". Furthermore, kill the profit incentive and you kill the investment incentive at the same time. That's how the real world works.
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SpaceNut,
One final point about this, and then I feel what needs to be said about the matter has been said. We can argue the minutia, but not the end result. We know, in no uncertain terms, that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. If you want to blame the rich for that, all well and good, but know that you can't make yourself wealthy by making them poorer. If the goal is to make everyone equally poor, how would that benefit you? I'd wager that if you made everyone equally wealthy using all of the "unrealized gains" from the rich, then within about 10 years the same people who were wealthy before would be wealthy again, and the same people who were poor before would be poor again.
Jeff Bezos wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, mind you. His first job was working at McDonald's. Furthermore, success with business and money hasn't meant personal success, either. His wife is gone now, along with half of what he previously owned. Some or all of that might have been his own doing, or maybe not, but there's no real way to know for sure. Anyway... If you split Jeff Bezos' $127 billion dollars equally between 320 million people, then each person ends up with $396.875. Take every last cent that every billionaire in this country has, and all of us might be able to afford a single mortgage payment on a $200,000 house. However obscenely wealthy that handful of billionaires happens to be, holding them all at gunpoint and robbing them won't come close to solving your financial problems, nor correcting the root cause of our nation's monetary problems.
The underlying problem is that our government spends vastly more money than it could ever take in, by way of taxation, every single year. There has never been any point since the Federal Reserve was established where our government paid back all of what it owes to its debt holders, nor is there any realistic possibility of ever doing so at this point. There have been a handful of times where the rate of public debt increase slowed, however briefly, but at no point since I've been alive was there any hope of paying it all back without drastically decreasing government spending.
Look at that graph and tell me if you actually think we can afford to pay 50% to 100% of every dollar our entire economy generates to make that government spending problem go away. As much money as our billionaires have, all of them combined have no hope of ever paying that back. None of them created that problem. They didn't promise people "free stuff" that they had no credible way to pay for. They didn't vote to start or continue those ridiculous 20-year-long overseas wars in the Middle East.
I guess you could argue that the rich created the real estate bubble, but only if you accept that Congress literally forced them, by law, to lend money to people they knew could never pay it back. I'll put that red ink in their column, though, since they did actually sign off on the loans. Apart from that idiotic game that everyone played with "mortgage-backed securities", they're not causing the runaway inflation. They didn't decide to shut down our global economy during COVID, and they certainly didn't cause COVID. You can thank our own government for that idiocy for paying the Chinese to tinker with a lethal and highly contagious virus in a lab with a shoddy safety record to circumvent both Congress and Executive Orders.
Now take a look at this chart from Visual Capitalist - Purchasing Power of the U.S. Dollar Over Time:
If more government spending was going to solve the wealth gap issue, then it would have done so by now. That hasn't happened and it's not going to happen. Our government is not running their printing presses 24/7 because they're concerned about your wealth inequality, relative to Jeff Bezos. They're making you poor by flooding the market with cash so we can continue this charade for at least one session of Congress past the one where they have to be there and answer to the people. Jeff adjusts his prices according to the government's printing activity, because he's not going to become less wealthy merely because the people we elected can't run a lemonade stand in a desert and make money.
So... Both US GDP and public debt is about $25 trillion dollars. Who is that debt owed to? Well... Basically, it's a stack of IOUs to everyone in this country and a bunch of other countries. For some crazy reason, they invest in America because they still think America is their best bet for global economic prosperity. What does that tell you about their own economic outlook wherever they live (a discussion for another topic)? As you demand more money from "the government", that stack of IOUs gets larger, and you get poorer. Why is that? Well, that's the wealth that everyone would have had if our government hadn't spent it all on not even "god" knows what. Shoveling more money into the government bonfire only assures that we all get poorer as a result. How exactly do you expect to become wealthy, or even simply "not quite as poor" off your own money (your own lost "buying power", that was lost through the printing of money and attendant inflation caused by flooding the market with paper not backed by an economic activity that generated something of tangible value) by handing it to someone else who doesn't spend it on what you want it spent on?
The "printing your way to prosperity" logical fallacy fails every time it's tried. It doesn't matter how long the process takes to play out, because the end result is always the same. The poor lose what little they have, the rich take a bath but still own the means of production, and the government is ultimately replaced with the next batch of ideologically-motivated idiots who simply cannot wait to repeat the same cycle of insanity that the last batch engaged in. It's exactly like a game of "Global Thermonuclear War"- the only winning move is not to play. There is no other way to win the game. Trust me, many have tried. Eventually, even the computer figures that out, but for some reason the people never do.
I assert that you don't need a government to figure out how to spend your money. If you don't know how to best spend your money, then it's a pretty safe bet that nobody else knows, either. There's always someone waiting with their hand out to take it from you, but they're not giving any of it back to you. If you do eventually recover some of your money, then it's guaranteed to be less than whatever you would have otherwise made if you were allowed to manage your own money. Money managers don't work for free.
Anyway, this is your government's idea of "managing our money". I guess they think everyone else is too ignorant to see the results. The media clearly does a great job of distracting people like you from the root cause of the problem. In short, they make everyone poorer by making the money as worthless as they can without inciting a violent revolution, so that they can spend more money that we don't have on things that we don't need. If you think taxing the rich is going to fix this sort of problem, then I don't see it. If doing more of the same was also your plan for fixing this, then it's not a very good plan. All the money that all our rich people actually have (not the stock options that become worthless the moment the government confiscates the means of production, but real property that could be useful to someone) won't come within a country mile of funding 1 year of our government's spending. The Federal Reserve printed about 20% of all dollars that ever existed in 2020, or about $4 trillion dollars. 80% of all US dollars were printed over the last 22 years. $4 trillion dollars is about as much money as all the billionaires in America have, combined (real property plus paper wealth that only translates into real wealth when someone is willing to accept the stock in trade for something of tangible value). Assume that the Federal Reserve will print at least that much money over the next 3 years to cover government spending, because they have to in order to pay the interest on the national debt. Now do you see the problem? The businesses that the rich people own will continue to raise prices on the goods and services, or people like you and I won't have a job for very long.
So... Take every last cent that those billionaires have, but you will be in far worse financial shape by the very next year, only this time there won't be another Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to come along and figure out how to create more jobs by creating new goods and services that people actually want to buy (real organic, non-GMO, grass-roots economic growth). Why would they bother to try? Even if they succeed, under your plan all of it would be confiscated by our government anyway. Are you going to force them to work in factory at gunpoint, the way the communists did? That's worked out so well everywhere else it's been tried. What could possibly go wrong?
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The radical left-wing attack against freedom of speech and Elon Musk continues. Now Democrat shills on MSNBC are bringing on "guests" (paid actors) calling Elon Musk a racist, claiming that Tesla is a racist company, and that Elon has some sort of "nostalgic memories" of Apartheid-era South Africa. Elizabeth Warren called Elon Musk the "world's richest freeloader, and very thin-skinned", about 3 months ago, which was also covered by Joy Reid. Naturally, anyone on the left who never watches Tucker Carlson doesn't know that, because they wear their blinders 24/7 to avoid examining their own demagogic belief systems. Once again, far-left-wing Democrats are proving that they have in abundance, the qualities that they wish to attribute to their political adversaries.
Any attempt to present another viewpoint besides their own, however minor, is met with immediate accusations of racism or bigotry, because their ideas are so weak that they will not withstand cursory logical examination of their merits, of which they have precisely none. Censorship is something that rich and powerful people do to protect themselves. That's why dictators like Vladimir Putin, and the wannabe-dictators of the Democrat Party, especially the donors to the Democrat Party, spare no effort to shut down any speech they disagree with. It's a petty schoolyard bully tactic, that never seems to work for very long against anyone who merely has the courage to speak plain truth in the public square, as Elon Musk so often does in his own snarky manner.
Democrats have figured out that they can't control or co-opt Elon Musk, in much the same way that they could not control or co-opt Donald Trump. Such people are dangerous to Democrats because they do not kowtow to party ideology, they say what they actually think, and they're beholden to no one. If you're a wannabe-dictator control freak, then such people are your worst nightmare. Elon Musk, much like Donald Trump, did an end-run around the Democrats.
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Well if they didn't hate him already for moving out of California
They really are going to hate him now?
'Elon Musk: Americans Must Buy Guns to Protect against Tyrannical Government'
https://newspunch.com/elon-musk-america … overnment/
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Mars_B4_Moon,
Private American citizens need guns to protect themselves against violent criminals, because our government is a miserable failure at doing their #1 job most of the time. Lots of people on the right think "Eek! The government is coming to get me!", whereas lots of people on the left think, "Eek! Nobody from the government is coming to get me!" In this particular instance, the left is totally correct and the right is totally wrong. We can see just how correct the left was, in this instance. The Police milled around outside the school building while this little twerp mass murdered a bunch of grade school children using a rifle.
Unfortunately, the left's proposed "solution" to that problem is the exact opposite of what any sane and rational person would do if they truly believed that nobody was coming to "save them" from a violent criminal assault. The Democrat solution to mass starvation is to make food more expensive. Only a moron or a profoundly evil person would assert that making food "harder to get" is "the solution" to mass starvation, yet that's exactly what the Democrat politicians and media and pundits are expecting people to believe, as it relates to firearms. People with zero first-hand knowledge of self-defense or weapons or what real street violence actually looks like, are vehemently asserting that they "know better", even when it's obvious to people who do actually "know better", that they don't.
The inanimate objects better known as "guns" are neither the problem nor the cause of wanton violence, which is religiously ignored when it happens to minorities unless it can be perverted even further into some form of racism or a way to promote disarming law abiding citizens. Allowing funny farm patients to roam American streets, even after they tell the entire world via social media about their sick plans to mass murder people, is the heart of the problem. Someone who threatens to mass murder people they don't even know is the dictionary definition of "criminally insane", and making such a threat is, in point of fact, a federal felony that should disqualify someone from owning any type of firearm.
All the places around the world with high crime rates and a disarmed citizenry still have high murder rates, they still have mass murders, and the government still doesn't give a crap about it. Why would they? All of the potential victims are powerless to stop their continued victimization, so the government can then do whatever it pleases, secure in the knowledge that nothing will change without a violent revolution that gets way, way more people killed than some school shooting. The lesson here is that freedom is dangerous, and sometimes deadly, but it's wildly more dangerous and deadly when only the criminals have guns.
In this case, even after said threat was made, the FBI passed him on his background check when he purchased his firearms. What's the purpose of having more gun laws restricting the rights of the law abiding when the FBI is rubber stamping handing over firearms to total nutjobs who have already threatened to mass murder people, via social media?
The liberal-regressive media incessantly runs stories about how Police Officers did nothing or nothing effective, and wants to de-fund the Police (that idiocy is 100% coming from the left), and then think the average sane and rational American citizen sees stuff like that and thinks to themselves, "Gee, I'd sure like to be totally defenseless against violent heavily armed felons, knowing full-well that nobody from the government is coming to do anything except draw a chalk outline around my corpse."
If the Democrats truly believe that to be a "feather in their cap", in support of their version of "gun control", specifically confiscating firearms from everyone who follows our laws to ensure that violent criminals can victimize law abiding citizens at their leisure, which is what "Bozo" O'Rourke said he would do if elected Governor of Texas, then excuse the rest of us for opting out of their total insanity, even if that "makes perfect sense" to liberal-regressive Democrats. Even when Democrats manage to correctly identify the problem, which is not often these days, all of their so-called "solutions" are totally wrong, assuming the end goal is to make the problem better rather than worse.
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So basically, Democrats are using the Texas shooting to try and push legislation that will allow them to use security services to harrass and bully their political enemies, i.e White Supremacists. The political Left are naturally autocratic. In both America and Europe, the far left are only interested in using democracy to destroy it. And they use every tragedy they can find to do just that.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-27 19:21:26)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Nearly an hour by those with the skills did nothing to save even 1 child with the gun which they held....
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SpaceNut,
If Uvalde Police waited 1 hour to do anything for the kids in that school, then they clearly didn't have any skills that they were able to demonstrate. Again, this does not help the Democrat narrative that the rest of us should be unarmed while armed violent criminals are allowed to roam our streets, especially if our Police do nothing effective about it. I don't define "effective" as standing by and watching the carnage unfold, but that's just me.
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So how will giving out more guns to those to inept to use them, which is already the issue.
Parents in the crowd pleaded and wanted to go in with the guns that the police held... they could have done no worse than the waiting did.
Police are in most areas of our country are trained for a fight and not to be Barney Fife from Marbary....
There is no democratic narrative to remove guns only to insert some common sense and then reduce the unlawful guns in the hands of those that should not have them.
What we know, minute by minute, about how the Uvalde shooting and police response unfolded
Details of how long it took for officers to reenter the school after their first confrontation with the shooter — about 1 hour and 15 minutes — have also sparked widespread outrage and criticism.
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SpaceNut,
Giving out guns to people who care about the end result (the parents) is night-and-day different than handing out guns to people who don't care about the end result (anyone in our government). The government exists to protect and perpetuate itself. It doesn't exist to protect you or I, as private citizens. If you think otherwise, then you're totally wrong. I was in the government, and that is the absolute truth of the matter. If the Police stood by and watched, then they weren't trained to do anything worth doing. Anyone can stand by and watch. We don't need to pay people to do that.
Democrats don't have any common sense. All of their proposed "solutions" illustrate that they don't. If your idea of "common sense" is to attempt to disarm the victims of these psychotic murders, then they have no common sense from my point of view. You're not going to go house-to-house and disarm hundreds of millions of people, so any such idiotic proposition is laughably absurd. When Russia sent a bunch of psychotic murderers to Ukraine, we armed the living hell out of the Ukrainians, we did not look for ways to disarm their victims.
If the Police aren't naturally suspicious and don't want to know what's going on after someone starts shooting, then maybe they're not really "Police". Liberals and Democrats continually confuse performative art with objective reality. I can understand an actor's desire for fantasy or role-playing, but "acting" is not the same thing as "being". Wearing a uniform doesn't make you a soldier. Anyone can put my uniform on. Nothing magical happens after they do that. They won't suddenly become who I am. Any expectation that they will is stupid, period.
The same applies to picking up a gun. You don't instantly become a gunfighter. Gunfighting has never been the super-exciting and interesting TV show drama that Hollyweird so frequently portrays it as. There's nothing "cool" or "romantic" or "inspiring" about it, and there never will be. It's a very ugly business where there are no winners, merely those who survived and those who did not. Often times those who survived also wished they had not.
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Politicians v. Billionaires: What Elon Musk's Twitter Poll Results Show
Newsweek says people trust the government less than billionaires, so then the Democrats came out with their own poll, and received the exact same results. Naturally, Democrats are ignoring whatever they don't want to hear.
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From Elon Musk's Twitter Poll:
Who do you trust less? Real question.
Politicians - 75.7%
Billionaires - 24.3%3,399,953 votes
Final results
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No wonder there is such much de-fund the police when all they do is watch. If the police do not know how to use the gun they are given hand out tasers instead as at least they know how to use them.
https://www.pstc.nh.gov/faq/index.htm
not one word of active shooter training or tactical response.
did find a city that did do so but seems that its not standardized
https://www.londonderrynhpd.gov/168/Training-Unit
no wonder states have so many problems
I also could care less that Pelosi's husband was caught DUI. through the book at him.
As far as the poll goes I do not trust either as they both have forgotten in some case where they have come from and whom they are supposed to be representing and serving.
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SpaceNut,
If your side wants to defund the Police because they're not doing anything effective, then why do you think my side is going to give up their guns so that they can eventually watch the Police watching our children being slaughtered?
What the hell does Pelosi's husband getting a DUI have to do with Police not doing their jobs?
This isn't about Pelosi's husband. This is about Senator Pelosi herself, and in a broader context, the unwillingness of Congress to do anything mildly useful for the rest of us peons that they look down their noses at. I'm tired of them screwing us over, and I won't be part of a cheerleading squad for their dumb ideas, such as disarming the general public while our Police refuse to engage violent armed criminals.
I trust my own government even less than my fellow private citizens, whether that's you, Elon Musk, or nearly anyone else who is not a known convicted felon.
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Elon Musk - National Debt and Taxing Billionaires
US national debt is ~$28,900 billion or ~$229k per taxpayer.
Even taxing all "billionaires" at 100% would only make a small dent in that number, so obviously the rest must come from the general public. This is basic math.
Spending is the real problem.
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How many tax payers are there in the US as I am sure that number is smaller which will make the per tax payer even higher?
He will wiggle out of the charges....
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SpaceNut,
This is a basic math problem, as Elon Musk has stated. Take every cent he has, and you'll never come close to paying for all the spending our government has done and is doing.
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You mean like every tax payer is a person living in the US, as in whether they are rich or poor all paying in at the same rate regardless of income not equal dollars to be paid in per person.
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SpaceNut,
Every tax payer does NOT pay in at an equal rate. The richest amongst us pay the overwhelming majority of all taxes paid to federal and state governments. That is simple provable fact, and not subject to your interpretation. You think they should pay more. I think you refuse to accept that there are limits on how much money our government can sustainably spend, and that we've long since passed that point.
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People of no or low income do not pay in taxes at all below the zero table value, those that are on social security as well do not pay in taxes. Even the rich do not pay in there taxes so stated by Trumps 750 amount that he would pay in for making millions.and yet making just a mer 60,000 you end up paying way more....
Not all rich twist the taxes in there favor to keep there money. 2021. Tax Table.
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SpaceNut,
The poorest amongst us do not pay federal income taxes. They do pay sales taxes and other forms of taxes.
This doesn't have anything to do with President Trump. PRESIDENT TRUMP DID NOT MAKE OUR TAXATION LAWS! Get off your TDS already!
The richest amongst us pay nearly all of the taxes. That is a fact, you can look it up if you don't believe it, and I've already provided links to that type of data, which is collected by our IRS, and won't waste any more of my time on it because it's been addressed.
You don't have a math-based argument to make here. Your argument is emotional, which means it's not based in logic or basic math. Our government spends too much money, period. You could take 100% of everything that every billionaire owns and never come close to paying for all the spending that our government has done and continues to do. All finite systems have limits, our government spends well past that limit as it applies to America's GDP, and it's time to drastically curtail government spending before it bankrupts everyone in the country, as well as hurts everyone in the rest of the world.
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Not all state have sales taxes and those that have bed and breakfast taxes are not rich enough for the ready to eat versions which means the poor are still not paying in taxes.
[url=https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/14rpoverthetopbournerosenmerkel.pdf]How Tax Returns Show that the Very
Rich Are Different from You and Me[/url]
The math is twisted as New OMB-CEA Report: The analysis from OMB and CEA economists estimates that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in America paid an Average Federal Individual Income Tax Rate of Just 8.2%
The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
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