This isn't a problem with percentages, it's a problem with the woefully uninformed, thanks to the media. But people seem to be entirely happy to be very badly informed. Every time I talk about the US budget, I tend to get totally nonsensical replies.
For example, how much money would the government save if we eliminated social security? Just, tomorrow, removed it all.
The correct answer is actually 'none at all', unless you're operating in some strange universe where we would keep collecting social security taxes without paying it out. (In fact, it would end up increasing the debt as we stopped having the current surplus to borrow from.)
It's the same with Medicare. People aren't going to keep paying insurance premiums unless it actually pays out. And it's pretty clearly a 'tax increase' if you force them to keep purchasing imaginary insurance.
I'm of the opinion that almost all discussion about the US budget is total uninformed nonsense.
For example, the Republican's latest nonsense about '63 billion'...those cuts were in imaginary money in the first place, money that got allocated each year but not actually spent. If I give you ten dollars to go buy lunch, and you spend $4 at Wendys and give me back $6 each day...I can't claim I saved $5 if I reduce your lunch budget to $5. But that's what the Republican did. It's all well and good to cut that, but won't do a damn thing about the deficit.
This is what's baffling to me. There are hypothetical circumstances where it is reasonable to torture, just like there are hypothetical circumstances where it is reasonable to, for example, nuke Denver. (Perhaps self-replicating nanotech has escaped a lab there, and within a day the entire planet would be eaten.)
This does not mean we need to make nuking cities _legal_.
If you truly, honestly, have to save the damn world by doing something illegal, you just _do_ the illegal thing and trust history to vindicate you. If enough people are around afterward to give you a trial, that's _why_ we're tried by a jury of our peers, and it's why we have pardons even if convicted.
If you torture someone and find out how to stop a nuke, I won't convict you if I'm on the jury. If you torture someone and _don't_ find it out, I won't either. Hell, I might not even convict you if you tortured the _wrong_ person, as long as your suspicions of that person had some basis in fact and there actually was such a nuke.
But I sure as hell don't want it legal for you to wander around claiming 'Hey, there might be a nuke, I'm going to torture...this guy. Come with me, please.'.
There are emergency circumstances when you can act outside the law to try to stop horrible things. And afterward, you show up _in court_ and justify why you did those illegal things.
We do not make those things _legal_. We certainly don't secretly make doing them in secret legal.
And, strangely, everyone knows this. It's a fricken standard trope in television called Good Cop, Bad Cop.
You have someone 'bad' show up, he is the 'stick'. Maybe he does some screaming, maybe some threats, maybe he's just a guy with a clipboard who stay silent in the corner and can be pointed at. He doesn't even have to be physically present, he can just be some vague 'other'. It can be a 'my boss'. If it's the CIA doing the questioning, the 'bad cop' can be the military.
And then you have the 'good cop', the carrot, who's like, 'Dude, I'm here to help. If you tell me stuff, and it turns out that stuff is true, I can get you a better situation. If you don't, well, I have to turn you over to that other guy. He stick you in a tiny cell the rest of your life, or worse. As long as you give me useful information, any useful information, I can keep him away from you. We already know pretty much everything anyway, but as long as you tell me true things, even if we already know them, the rules say he can't get to you.'.
It sounds absurd and cheesy, and I'm sure I'm explaining a simplified version of it, but it sure as hell works, and the CIA can do it like no one's business.
Or, you know, they can stick needles under fingernails because they were told to, and drive detainees insane by not letting them sleep. One or the other.
I will agree with "Clearly an objective standard is at least *useful* in determining the boundary conditions." But it's nearly moot. The government, frankly, doesn't need a hell of a lot of land.
If we'd stop *giveaways* to public-private 'partnerships', we'd really have no actual problems in the first place. That's not to say we _couldn't_ have such problems, but all of them currently are based in that.
For some reason, everyone seems to address this issue facing the wrong way, worried about the process instead of the end result. The end result is just as bad if they had use an entirely different process. I don't know why you tried to nitpick my examples, but there are literally hundreds of ways the government can operate to the benefit of a few people, and the expense of all, that have nothing to do with eminent domain.
The government *has* the power of force, and while I know a lot of libertarians don't think this is good, tough. The government can always take stuff from people.
If you _don't let_ the government do idiotic public-private ventures, then it can't 'take land from some people and give it to other people', because it cannot give it to those people. It's hardly going just start _collecting_ land.
There are two steps there, one of them a legit government function, and one of them not. Fight the one that isn't legit.
The government's legitimate role in economic development is making loans available and building infrastructure and public services, and I'm for doing more of those. And none of this bullshit tax breaks or repurposing land or building stadiums.
I'm pretty certain the GOP's acceptance of Dixecrats and the later Southern Solution is the GOP's fault, and there's really no possible claim otherwise. Liberals leaving the GOP _is_ the GOP's fault.
And someone is about to make a comment about 'classic liberals'...that's exactly whom I'm talking about. Classic liberals don't put up with racism. The liberals on the left have just gotten strangely infected with progressivism, but there is no real difference between them and classic liberals.
Affirmative action isn't the GOPs, fault, though. It's just the sort of nonsense you get when all the people actually trying to solve problems end up in one political party, instead of spread between two and fighting it out.
In fact, that's a pretty good summation of the last three decades of America. A hell of a lot of the problems have been caused by the left not being opposed by people with any solutions, so the choice was between 'a crappy solution' and 'no solution at all'.
AA is an unholy mix of a liberal problem and a progressive solution, after they got thrown together in the 50s. It's insane. What _should_ have happened, if liberals and progressives were separate political parties, were:
Liberals fight for very strict anti-discrimination laws. The merest hint of the 'voter id' poll tax crap, or whatever, should have them leaping into action with pitchforks. They would also demand state-level education funding, period, so that whole areas aren't left to rot.
Progressives, meanwhile, should be doing something about generational poverty, and demanding that the government help people _of all races_ out of it, with 'affirmative action' to give jobs to poor people attempting to betting their life. They should be demanding free vocational training, better education, etc.
In fact, the two sides should actually be somewhat fighting with each other, as liberals demanded exact equal treatment of everyone, period, and progressives attempt to give a hand to the poor. 'We must treat everyone the same!' 'No, the poor need extra help!', etc.
Instead, because the Republican party went batshit crazy and became anti-liberal, the liberals ended up with the progressives in the same party, and it all got mushed together, and we now have this insane mixture of 'affirmative action' that doesn't work either way, and causes an untold amount of resentment and suspicion.
You can't reduce racism by more racism, and you can't reduce the poor by only helping minorities out of it...white people aren't stupid, they see that if the poverty rate stays the same, and less of them are minorities, obviously more of them will be white.
You’re screwing the corpus of the taxpaying public in that scenario, but you have at least allowed the individual homeowner the ability to determine their own price for their home.
No you haven't. What if the local government taxes at at six bajillion dollars a year? Hey, look, you just lost your house, and the government didn't use eminent domain at all.
Oh, or what if the government purchased the house using eminent domain, and used it to build a toll road...and used those tolls to make a tax loophole for people making over 5 million dollars, which happened to be one guy?
There are two entirely orthogonal issues here. This is the thing that drives me crazy when trying to talk to conservatives. There are two issues here, and they really are not related at all.
One is them is 'What can the government take from you?'
The other is 'How does the government use what it's taken?'
The first merely requires some level of fairness and due process. This doesn't happen when governments write weird exceptions and loopholes in the tax code.
The second is where almost _every single_ injustice comes from. It's not even close to a contest. It's where the injustice in Kelo was from. It's when the government illegally pays for wiretaps. It's...everything.
The right seems to have them linked somehow in their minds, and this is why so much pushback over Kelo, and why it's aimed in entirely the wrong direction...people in this country have been trained that it's somehow permission for governments to hand out big fat blobs of money and land and tax reductions to private industry.
It's just, this time, it was newly acquired land. Apparently, no one would have any problem if it was land that had been consensually purchased by taxpayers over the last decade. It's okay to just _give out_ their money on hypothetical bullshit 'increased tax base', it's just a problem...hell, I don't even know what's triggering 'a problem' for you guys, finally.
Public-private joint projects are just a way to funnel taxpayer resources into private hands. They have always been that. Don't be surprised they've started funneling land there also.
As I tried to point out the last time this was talked about, the problem isn't eminent domain _at all_. Would we be better off if the city had collected large amounts of tax money, purchased the property voluntarily from the owners, and _then_ sold it cheap it to a developer for 'economic development'? No, we wouldn't. It would be exactly the same sort of theft.
The problem isn't what property governments can and cannot take, or for what reasons. The problem is 'sweetheart deals' under a justification of 'this private development will make things better for the community'. If _that_ stops, all this nonsense stops, and there's not any _reason_ for governments to run around taking private property and giving it to other people.
Eminent domain laws are fine. The problem is the government letting people walk off with stuff. It doesn't matter if that money is taxpayer gained or from eminent domain or what.
Incidentally, this is exactly where libertarians get blamed for this sort of nonsense, because it's exactly that sort of public-private arrangements that they like, usually under the guise of 'privatization' of one thing or anything.
Aka, they say that we don't need the government to fix this broken neighborhood, or stop the massive amounts of crimes, we can have private industry do it. Now let us look the other way while private industry please lines up for handouts of property to do it...
That second part is not a libertarian idea, but somehow 'libertarians' often seem to end up standing right next to it, promoting the 'we don't need the government to fix this, private actors can fix it if the government will let them' idea, and ignoring the rest of what's happening.
The fact that this city needed to be taken over by the state (Actually, it needed to have the state step in earlier and actually correct things, but whatever.) does not mean that a _properly_ run city that finds tax revenue has dropped and they don't have a lot of funds should be taken over by the state, and it certainly doesn't mean that a city should be taken over because that is just _claimed_ to be true.
Saying 'You're either for or against this law' is like saying 'You're either for or against the police being allowed to arrest people'. Well, no, I'm in favor of some sort of actual process to do that, and checks and balances so the system doesn't get abused.
Not just the governor saying 'Hey, throw that guy in jail.' Even if, in this specific case, this guy _did_ need throwing in jail, and everyone agrees.
It's fine for a state to have emergency powers to take over cities. Cities do not actually have any sovereignty at all. What is not fine is crouching such powers, and allowing them under, 'fiscal problems'. If a city literally cannot pay their bills, fine, he state can step in, but not vague unspecified 'the governor says they have problems'.
Especially with the slam at unions by Mackinak. Did unions have anything to do with this city's problems? Not at all. In fact, this city's problems had nothing to do with money at all, they had to do with a total failure of management.
Boys operate in a world of verbs, girls in a world of nouns. The theory goes back to hunter-gatherer days and has to do with out the eye develops in the different sexes. Boys are more focused on movement (hunting) and girls on the details center-frame (gathering). As such, the toys that appeal to boys are largely the ones that do things or that you can do things with (cars/trucks, guns, balls) while the ones that appeal to girls needn’t do anything but must be purposeful and nuanced (dolls, stuffed animals, flowers).
I think another way of saying that is that boys roleplay problems and them being fixed, whereas girls roleplay 'normal' situations. To see this, hand them both a box of legos. Not one of the pre-collect boxes for specific things, just a random pile.
Watch what they do with them. The boys will make vehicles to attack each other or crash or save people, or they will make some situation where things need fixing, like people attacking somewhere.
The girls will make things, but those things seem to be just fine as they are. It's a house, or a car, or whatever, but it's how it's supposed to be.
Now, I have no idea if this is social or genetics, but I suspect genetics, because adult men and women do sorta the same thing, so much that good general advice to men is 'Sometimes your girlfriend/wife isn't expecting you to try to solve her problem, so just shut up and listen and don't make suggestions until she asks.'.
Of course, the things girl imagine seem fine from mine, a male POV. I suspect what's actually going on is that women solve problems in non-physical ways, and if I watched a little girl play house with legos, there would be just as many problems, all of them solved by talking.
In fact, I sorta suspect that it's inherent sexism that doesn't let us see 'caring for a toy baby' as 'doing something'. Maintaining an imaginary social environment with a bunch of dolls and stuffed animals, having conversations with them and making them happy when they get upset with each other, is probably as much work as rescuing someone from the clutches of evil.
As I mentioned above, the “natural born Citizen” requirement in the Constitution has never been adjudicated by any court in the United States
I have absolutely no idea why you think this.
'It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, and the jurisdiction of the English sovereign; and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.' -Minor v. Happersett
Moreover, the very first Congress thought they could define people as natural born citizens by making them citizens at birth: ...the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens...
I quote the Congressional Research Service: 'Considering the history of the constitutional qualifications provision, the common use and meaning of the phrase "natural-born subject" in England and in the Colonies in the 1700s, the clause's apparent intent, the subsequent action of the first Congress in enacting the naturalization act of 1790 (expressly defining the term "natural born citizen" to include a person born abroad to parents who are United States citizens), as well as subsequent Supreme Court dicta, it appears that the most logical inferences would indicate that the phrase "natural born Citizen" would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship "at birth" or "by birth".
I might not have been clear above, but the problem is that there has not been any adjudication of what “natural born citizen” means in our Constitution. There have always been competing theories for what those words mean: born in the jurisdiction only? born of one citizen parent? two citizen parents? what about dual citizen parent(s)? citizen parents traveling abroad at the time of birth? There’s no conclusive answers to these questions with respect to the NBC clause.
I don't know what you're talking about, because most of those have never been theories. No theory based on number of citizens parents has _ever_ been proposed, and that seems like a strange thing to bring up now, except as part of 'Let's challenge Obama'. In fact, we've already _had_ presidents where only one parent was a citizen. I'm pretty certain we've had them where neither was a citizen.
And dual citizenship can't have anything to do with anything, the requirement isn't that you _aren't_ something, it is that you _are_ a natural born citizen. (In my mind, it might be a good idea to require that the president renounce any other citizenship before taking office, or even have that as part of the oath, but such a requirement does not exist currently.)
And most of the debate about 'what that phrase means' is over people who weren't paying attention in history. A lot of people seem to think it's related to the 14th amendment, that only people under that amendment can be elected, but that's clearly nonsense, or we wouldn't have had a president until 1868. For the first 100 years of this country, the constitution made _no one_ a citizen, just laws, so that requirement _can't_ be saying 'Only people who are constitutionally citizens, aka, born in the US, can be president'.
What the courts have suggested, and what appears to be the _only_ possible theory for what 'natural born citizen' means, is 'legally a citizen at time of birth'. If the law (or, now, the constitution) makes you a citizen as you're born, you can be president. Whereas if it makes you one later, if you naturalize, you cannot.
You can imagine there are 'competing' theories all you want, but there are not. While it is a slightly baffling term by itself, there's only actually been _one_ suggestion as to what it means, 'citizen at time of birth', and the courts accept it. No other theory is even slightly plausible, and the only one that is suggested is the anachronistic one that the 14th amendment is relevant, which it can't be. (There is one interesting 14th amendment question, as it made a lot of people citizens, and the question is, was that intended to be retroactive back to their birth, and if so, are they eligible for president? I believe the answer would be yes, as the intent clearly was to give everyone ever born in the US _full_ rights, not 'naturalize' them. But none of them ever ran, and now they are all dead.)
I don't see why that would be hard. In fact, taxing capital gains and investments would be trivial, and, again, we could use the entity providing them to do the taxes. They know how much money goes to which people.
The only thing that would be _slightly_ hard is taxing the self-employed, and, duh, we just give them a trivially simple form, an big 'amount of income' space and nothing else. As that's still _much easier_ than the existing setup, I don't see what's hard about it.
Incidentally, I'd also be in favor of getting rid of the sole proprietorship model of businesses. If you want a 'business' that is just you selling things, or contracting yourself out, whatever.
But if you want to only pay taxes on profits, and not on all income, you have to set up a separate legal identity for it, period, no more running that through your personal finances and deducting business expenses.
We can make 'setting up a business legal identity' an even simpler process than it is now, but it does need to be separate from you, and it pays taxes, including the ones on your income. (Like all other businesses would pay on their employees's income.)
Actually, tying _all_ income tax to unemployment levels wouldn't be that crazy. It'd result in us doing automatically sane things like raising taxes when the economy is good, and cutting them when it'd bad.
So all you have to do is have some percentage of the tax rate based on general unemployment, and some percentage based on 'that specific job' unemployment, on a sort of running average where it didn't jump around too much but did follow trends. Like instead of a 15% tax bracket, we had a 20%-(general unemployment/3)-(specific unemployment/10).
Yeah, the major problem is existing deductibles, which, by the way are utterly insane. I don't just mean how many there are, I mean the _structure_, which is idiotically _regressive_.
Let us say I make $30,000 a year and you make $300,000 a year. And we both install $1000 worth of solar panels on our house, and the government wants to reward that behavior for this, so has a 50% deduction for it. Well, they've now knocked $1000 off our income, which saves me 15% of $500, or $75, and saves you...33% of $500, or $167? And let's not even talk about the guy who makes $5,000 a year, who gets no reward at all.
Can anyone pretend that makes any damn sense at all? Shouldn't they at least get _equal_ reimbursement for doing what the government wants them to do? (An argument could even be made that the poor should get more, because it's more costly, opportunity-wise, but we can just leave it at 'equal' for now.) If we're going to pay people to do things, let's just pay them to do things, it would be a hell of a lot more transparent. You get 10% of the solar panels back, period.
You're right that we'll have to phase the deductions out slowly, but we _really_ need to just utterly change the system.
So for a while we'd have to switch to a payroll system and yet have people keep filing a tax return to get money back from imaginary 'deductibles', as we slowly got rid of them. Each year less and less people would bother. If we do it the other way around, if we try to phase them out first, we will be here forever.
As for the 'field' bonus, it certainly should _only_ be short term. What I would actually like to see is some sort of automatic system set up that triggers when there's 3% less unemployment for people qualified in that field, vs. general unemployment, that stops being in effect as soon as there are more job seekers.
Somewhere in that vast US government is a place where every single field of employment has 'job seekers' vs 'open positions' statistic, and it should be possible to vary tax rates based on that.
The state of Hawaii has produced a document stating that Barack Obama was born there. They have confirmed the document Barack has shown people was actually produced by them.
Q.E.D, that's it, that's the end of the story. Arizona is _required_ to accept that as evidence that he was born in Hawaii. They do not get to make any other qualifications as to that.
Now, if it was just for their own use, they could choose to...um...not recognize he existed, even without a birth certificate. There's a difference between 'recognizing it as a document' and 'it producing some sort of legal results under state law'.
It's like with gay marriage...Georgia wouldn't recognize the marriage itself, but it can't pretend two guys with a marriage license from Massachusetts aren't married _in Massachusetts_, if that ever needs to be legally decided in Georgia. (I.e, if one spouse tries to sue the other for theft, and the second spouse points out it was purchased while they were married in Massachusetts, and hence is jointly theirs, and the first spouse claims that the marriage 'doesn't exist' under Georgia law...yes, it _does_, even if the marriage confers no privileges in Georgia.)
So if there was an _Arizonian_ law saying 'Someone needed a birth certificate of a certain kind' to gain a privilege in Arizona, that would be okay.
However, the Presidency is a Federal office, and the requirement isn't 'a birth certificate', it is, more sanely, to be _born_ here. (For the purposes of this discussion.)
An argument can be made that Arizona has the right to determine who is eligible to be on the ballot for that office (Although that itself is debatable!), as the responsibility for that is not spelled out in the constitution and _someone_needs to do it, but they can't pretend that the state of Hawaii does not assert he was born there (No matter what sort of paper they print it on), and thus he is allowed under that that constitutional qualification.
The state of Hawaii has _repeatedly_ made itself very clear about this, going well above any documentation generally released to the point of making official government statements about it, and Arizona _must_ accept their word on this.
And adding extra qualifications to any Federal office is _already_ declared to be unconstitutional, witness the fail efforts at state attempts to impose term limits on their congressional representatives. The only ground AZ possibly has to keep someone off the ballot is they fail the _Federal_ requirements for the office.
While I'm utterly against making it a flat %, as that would be very regressive, it would be trivial to do what you said and leave it progressive.
Remove all deductions, remove everything except 'If you make X, you pay Y'. That's it. And then turn it into something like sales tax, where it's entirely the job of business to keep it and turn it in.
The only people who'd owe any extra taxes would be people working multiple employers, because they'd end up getting taxed at the wrong tax bracket by one of them. And no one would have to 'file' anything...if that happened, the IRS would send them a bill.
And I don't mean a giant bill the next year, I mean, the minute the IRS gets two of the monthly tax payments for the same social security number, it mails out an explanation of what's going on, that they are undertaxed, and lets them set up a direct deposit for the extra amount. (I was about to say 'or have it taken out of one of the paychecks', but, hell, let's keep this simple. Having it taken out extra requires complicated back channels from the IRS back to the employer, which has to keep special information to tax to take a little extra money from that guy. No. Either direct deposit, or the taxpayer can mail in a check every few months.)
If we actually want to incentivize behavior, if we must still have some 'deducatables', we can have forms people can fill out and turn into to get cash or whatever, but this would have nothing to do with actual income taxes. We want to reward people for putting up solar panels, they can turn in a receipt and government rebate form and get a check in the mail. (Not that I'm saying that's a good idea, but I think we'd be a lot clearer about 'deductions' if we treated them that way.)
In fact, we'd almost certainly want to set up something for retirement investments. Although, instead of getting a 'deduction', how about we just have the government provide a matching percentage that basically exists to offset taxes? Save $100 in an account you can't get to until you're 65, the government puts in $2. Which you obviously have to pay back if you get it out early. Stop trying to do it on the 'income tax' side, just have the government subsidize the investments.
As a bonus, it suddenly becomes much easier to incentivize some stuff we never could before without weird deductions, because now that businesses are doing income tax, we can have different tax rates for different _fields_, because we can selectively lower the rate for each. How about a slightly lower tax rate for medical general practitioners, or registered nurses, for example, considering the shortage of them? A business just sends in a tiny bit of documentation saying it employs someone in that field, and the IRS say 'Okay, you can tax them at these rates instead:'.
This is much easier than trying to have weird deducatibles on medical school loans for practicing doctors, which is, IIRC, how that happens now. That requires documentation from _at least_ three sources...the doctor, the medical school, and the place they're employed at.
Of course it exists; however, doing business with pre-existing relationships and going with higher cost options on the basis that the people you are doing business can execute the deal are not breaches of fiduciary duty. You seem to find a lot of wrongdoing where I think little exists.
You seem to be inventing a lot of what you think I've said. I have no objection with businesses going with other companies they have worked with before. I have no objection to whatever sort of _business_ qualifications that companies make deals within, or if they use pre-existing relationships as one of the criteria, or even the sole criteria. (Well, I have no legal objection, but it is sorta stupid and I wouldn't invest in such a company.)
I objected to business relationships, in a publicly traded company, existing because of _personal acquaintance_ with the CEOs of other companies, not because the last work done with them was good. Because that is, tada, illegal.
You assume way too much, especially that shareholders take that level of interest of sub-senior level management decisions.
Um, no, I _specifically_ said that shareholders are not paying attention. This does not make such behavior legal.
Sure, fraud exists, but your conflating fraud with ordinary business relationships is troubling.
Your conflating personal relationship of executives with 'business relationships' is much more troubling. That is not a business relationship.
A business relationship is IBM and Microsoft, not Samuel J. Palmisano and Steve Ballmer. IBM and MS have a long and weird history, and it's perfectly acceptable for IBM not to start a new joint project with MS, considering how screwed over they got on their last joint project of OS/2, and instead go with, for example, Apple Computers. (Which they actually did with the PowerPC thing.)
It is not acceptable for IBM to not enter a joint contract with MS and go with Apple because Palmisano and Steve Jobs were both in Beta Theta Pi at Johns Hopkins, and they're good friends. (Note: Not Steve Job's actual history, it is a hypothetical.)
Your assertions that this is illegal without citations, links or examples to support your claim is even more troubling.
I gave an example, something you utterly ignored while attempting to generalize my statements to things they did not apply to, and attempting to gloss over the actual _fraud_ that is being committed. You have attempted to turn my clear statement that 'making corporate agreements with friends instead of what is in the best interest of the corporation' into a statement where I claim the sole possible 'best for the corporation' factor is price, which I did not say at all.
And, strangely, in my example, I named the actual tort. I will repeat:
Someone deliberately wasting their company’s money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a ‘Breach of Fiduciary Duty’ against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud.
The reason I didn't 'cite' anything is because that's a _state tort_ except for a few Federal industries like banks, and hence rather hard to meaningfully cite the actual law, and the civil law will just say 'Breach of Fiduciary Duty', because that's usually defined by case law. The example I gave is pretty clearly breaching a Duty of Loyalty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_Loyalty
Tortious interference, as I understand it, mainly applies when a third party interferes with an existing business relationship. Even if it can be applied to a situation where no relationship exists
You perhaps need to do a little more research. Please read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
and notice the _second_ type of 'Tortious interference', which is fraudulently interfering in a business relationships between two other parties in hopes they will stop working together (or never start) and one of them will work with you instead.
you’ll be hard pressed to prove that I’ve harmed Company A by not choosing to deal with them on the basis that I think another party is a more suitable fit for the transaction.
Except that's the _explicit premise_ of the tort of 'tortious interference with a business relationship'. That is what that means, you claim you were harmed because someone fraudulently kept you out of an business relationship, and, yes, it's perfectly reasonable to sue someone _at_ the business you didn't end up in a relationship with if they committed fraud to keep you out of it. Like I said, do a little reading on this topic.
However, you’re making wild ass claims about the illegality of things which are clearly legal and typically done in the course of business.
The fact that they are 'typically done' does not make them legal.
If you wish to disagree, feel free but rather than tell me what we do is illegal, provide the necessary evidence. You haven’t even begun to build a case.
I've repeated named the legal theories under which such behavior is illegal.
Perhaps instead of imagining I'm talking about whatever you think I'm talking about, you should actually read the examples I gave, and not hallucinate that I said 'It is not legal to make business deals on other considerations', and instead read my actual example, which was 'It is not legal for officers (or directors of the board, while we're at it) of publicly traded companies to give discounts on business deals to friends.'
Likewise, instead of just _guessing_ what sort of duties that corporate officers of publicly traded companies are required to follow, you should investigate those duties, and then explain why my actual example in the previous paragraph is not a breach of them.
And, like I said, all these are torts, not 'crimes', per se. They are civil offenses, not criminal...however, such a systematic and structured pattern of torts is certainly enough to qualify under RICO, which actually is a crime.
Just making up hypothetical justifications for a Breach Of Fiduciary Duty does not mean such a thing does not exist, nor it does mean that it isn't fraud.
And we're talking _million dollar deals_, not hiring someone to wash windows, where trustworthyness might be important. They aren't _supposed_ to be doing business with 'a fly-by-night guy' or 'a trusted guy', they aren't doing business with _people_ at all, they're doing business with _giant corporations_, and it shouldn't make the tiniest bit of difference who the guy at the top is.
Stockholders do not 'prefer' a 'low-risk option' when CEOs choose who supplies their computers or whatever. They prefer contracts that put all the costs of failure on the damn business that fails to live up to their end of the bargain,with assurances on quality and whatnot. You know, like businesses _already_ do.
And then after that, they prefer the CEO goes after the _cheapest_ deal that fits the qualifications, instead of manipulating the process so the company buys computers that cost 20% more to throw some business towards an old friend.
Because that is _fraud_. And it is _illegal_. And it is utterly and completely unpunished, and is used a goddamn _justification_ for the system of insane executive bonuses we have.
The system is, literally, a extortion racket. Not a metaphorical one, an actual, criminal extortion racket. It is an implicit threat to cause a tort, aka, Tortious Interference, against a company if they don't do something. It is racketeering, it is a violation of RICO.
'Sure, you could hire some random business major to run the company, but I'm afraid all the other CEOs will just choose not to make any deals with your company, because they don't choose to do what's best for their company, as required by law, but instead choose what to do based on who they know.'
Someone deliberately wasting their company's money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a 'Breach of Fiduciary Duty' against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud.
It is also 'Tortious Interference' against both the company they work for and the company that _didn't_ get the contract, as that hypothetical business relationship has been interfered with using fraud.
Depending on state laws, a single instance of those may or may not be prosecuted under criminal fraud law and may just be a tort. Notice that these are both actions against the company itself, and the corporate veil does not apply, the executive can be personally sued.
However, a conspiracy to commit such a thing, a system in place that repeatedly does that, is a RICO violation, which _is_ a violation of criminal law.
Oh, and unrelated to that, let me address this huge CEO pay thing, or, at least, a common justification for it.
'Sure, it's unfair, but all those CEOs went to school with each other, and play golf with each other, and all know each other and can get good deals from each other, you have to hire one of them.'
Let's just think about this for a second. It's always presented as 'getting good deals for the company', from that direction. But as a _system_, that's outright admitting that sometimes that the CEO _we're_ hiring will give 'good deals' to other CEOs based on personal friendship.
Which is _criminal malfeasance_ for a company officer. People are _justifying_ the absurd pay because the leaders of the business company is operating a blatant _criminal conspiracy_ that, apparently, the stockholders have no problem with.
This is because the stockholders on the board are CEO of other corporations, so those shareholders never complain. But it is still actually, literally, criminal.
The next time someone attempts to justify executive pay by talking about how the executives 'know' people, ask who they know, does this person they know commonly waste company money on people they 'know', and do the shareholders of _that_ company know it?
It's like me being a cop, and saying "If you want to get out of a ticket, hire me as security for fifty dollars and I'll come to your hearing with you. When a police officer shows up with the witness, the ticketing officer often gets 'busy' and fails to show, so the case is thrown out."
While this article is very insightful, it missed the _other_ problem that causes mismanagement of corporations, and that fixing would lead to a huge decrease in utterly stupid decisions by management.
Namely, that half the owners of a corporations wish to see stock prices temporarily go up so they can sell some stock and make a profit. That is their 'corporate goal'. So corporations bring in someone who will raise stock prices by making incredibly stupid long-term decisions, like lay off half the company or threaten a union or whatever, stock prices go up, tada, they get a bonus, everyone is happy.
A year later, of course, stock prices drop back down as the stupid decisions catch up with the company, but wait, neverfear, the current stockholders have found the next SuperCEO to leap in and do something stupid to temporarily bump up stock prices. Rinse, repeat.
So we have _two_ layers of stupidity. We have the middle management which could usually have 90% of them removed with no effect on productivity, and who's major job is to justify themselves. And we have the top management who don't give a damn about 'producing things', they care only about 'getting people to want our stock'.
It's amazing American company produce anything at all, we're so...*hold hand to ear like Jon Stewart*...oh, I'm being told American companies do not produce things anymore, my mistake.
I have a plan that sounds insane: Stock must only be traded once a quarter. Each quarter, the company issues that quarter's dividends, and then come out with the next quarter's projection, and, a few days after that, everyone puts in buy and sell orders that are all resolved at a single instant at the end of the day, and that's it. No one can buy or sell the rest of the quarter.
No short sales, no speculation, no nothing. You pay your money, and you get three months worth of profits. You like it, you keep owning it, otherwise, you sell it. The purpose of the stock is not to sell the stock, the purpose is to actually share in the profits.
If public unions go on strike—esp police and fire—people will die.
If corporations do not produce weapons for our police, people will die. If they do not produce firetrucks, people will die. If drug companies do not produce needed medication, people will die.
Strangely, no one ever seems to want to _require_ them to do this or be dissolved by the government. Odd, that.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Percentage Sign as a Signaling Device”
This isn't a problem with percentages, it's a problem with the woefully uninformed, thanks to the media. But people seem to be entirely happy to be very badly informed. Every time I talk about the US budget, I tend to get totally nonsensical replies.
For example, how much money would the government save if we eliminated social security? Just, tomorrow, removed it all.
The correct answer is actually 'none at all', unless you're operating in some strange universe where we would keep collecting social security taxes without paying it out. (In fact, it would end up increasing the debt as we stopped having the current surplus to borrow from.)
It's the same with Medicare. People aren't going to keep paying insurance premiums unless it actually pays out. And it's pretty clearly a 'tax increase' if you force them to keep purchasing imaginary insurance.
I'm of the opinion that almost all discussion about the US budget is total uninformed nonsense.
For example, the Republican's latest nonsense about '63 billion'...those cuts were in imaginary money in the first place, money that got allocated each year but not actually spent. If I give you ten dollars to go buy lunch, and you spend $4 at Wendys and give me back $6 each day...I can't claim I saved $5 if I reduce your lunch budget to $5. But that's what the Republican did. It's all well and good to cut that, but won't do a damn thing about the deficit.
On “A Narrow and (so far as I can tell) Untraveled Path on Torture”
This is what's baffling to me. There are hypothetical circumstances where it is reasonable to torture, just like there are hypothetical circumstances where it is reasonable to, for example, nuke Denver. (Perhaps self-replicating nanotech has escaped a lab there, and within a day the entire planet would be eaten.)
This does not mean we need to make nuking cities _legal_.
If you truly, honestly, have to save the damn world by doing something illegal, you just _do_ the illegal thing and trust history to vindicate you. If enough people are around afterward to give you a trial, that's _why_ we're tried by a jury of our peers, and it's why we have pardons even if convicted.
If you torture someone and find out how to stop a nuke, I won't convict you if I'm on the jury. If you torture someone and _don't_ find it out, I won't either. Hell, I might not even convict you if you tortured the _wrong_ person, as long as your suspicions of that person had some basis in fact and there actually was such a nuke.
But I sure as hell don't want it legal for you to wander around claiming 'Hey, there might be a nuke, I'm going to torture...this guy. Come with me, please.'.
There are emergency circumstances when you can act outside the law to try to stop horrible things. And afterward, you show up _in court_ and justify why you did those illegal things.
We do not make those things _legal_. We certainly don't secretly make doing them in secret legal.
"
And, strangely, everyone knows this. It's a fricken standard trope in television called Good Cop, Bad Cop.
You have someone 'bad' show up, he is the 'stick'. Maybe he does some screaming, maybe some threats, maybe he's just a guy with a clipboard who stay silent in the corner and can be pointed at. He doesn't even have to be physically present, he can just be some vague 'other'. It can be a 'my boss'. If it's the CIA doing the questioning, the 'bad cop' can be the military.
And then you have the 'good cop', the carrot, who's like, 'Dude, I'm here to help. If you tell me stuff, and it turns out that stuff is true, I can get you a better situation. If you don't, well, I have to turn you over to that other guy. He stick you in a tiny cell the rest of your life, or worse. As long as you give me useful information, any useful information, I can keep him away from you. We already know pretty much everything anyway, but as long as you tell me true things, even if we already know them, the rules say he can't get to you.'.
It sounds absurd and cheesy, and I'm sure I'm explaining a simplified version of it, but it sure as hell works, and the CIA can do it like no one's business.
Or, you know, they can stick needles under fingernails because they were told to, and drive detainees insane by not letting them sleep. One or the other.
On “The Czar of Benton Harbor”
I will agree with "Clearly an objective standard is at least *useful* in determining the boundary conditions." But it's nearly moot. The government, frankly, doesn't need a hell of a lot of land.
If we'd stop *giveaways* to public-private 'partnerships', we'd really have no actual problems in the first place. That's not to say we _couldn't_ have such problems, but all of them currently are based in that.
For some reason, everyone seems to address this issue facing the wrong way, worried about the process instead of the end result. The end result is just as bad if they had use an entirely different process. I don't know why you tried to nitpick my examples, but there are literally hundreds of ways the government can operate to the benefit of a few people, and the expense of all, that have nothing to do with eminent domain.
The government *has* the power of force, and while I know a lot of libertarians don't think this is good, tough. The government can always take stuff from people.
If you _don't let_ the government do idiotic public-private ventures, then it can't 'take land from some people and give it to other people', because it cannot give it to those people. It's hardly going just start _collecting_ land.
There are two steps there, one of them a legit government function, and one of them not. Fight the one that isn't legit.
The government's legitimate role in economic development is making loans available and building infrastructure and public services, and I'm for doing more of those. And none of this bullshit tax breaks or repurposing land or building stadiums.
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I'm pretty certain the GOP's acceptance of Dixecrats and the later Southern Solution is the GOP's fault, and there's really no possible claim otherwise. Liberals leaving the GOP _is_ the GOP's fault.
And someone is about to make a comment about 'classic liberals'...that's exactly whom I'm talking about. Classic liberals don't put up with racism. The liberals on the left have just gotten strangely infected with progressivism, but there is no real difference between them and classic liberals.
Affirmative action isn't the GOPs, fault, though. It's just the sort of nonsense you get when all the people actually trying to solve problems end up in one political party, instead of spread between two and fighting it out.
In fact, that's a pretty good summation of the last three decades of America. A hell of a lot of the problems have been caused by the left not being opposed by people with any solutions, so the choice was between 'a crappy solution' and 'no solution at all'.
I point to the ACA as the most obvious example.
"
AA is an unholy mix of a liberal problem and a progressive solution, after they got thrown together in the 50s. It's insane. What _should_ have happened, if liberals and progressives were separate political parties, were:
Liberals fight for very strict anti-discrimination laws. The merest hint of the 'voter id' poll tax crap, or whatever, should have them leaping into action with pitchforks. They would also demand state-level education funding, period, so that whole areas aren't left to rot.
Progressives, meanwhile, should be doing something about generational poverty, and demanding that the government help people _of all races_ out of it, with 'affirmative action' to give jobs to poor people attempting to betting their life. They should be demanding free vocational training, better education, etc.
In fact, the two sides should actually be somewhat fighting with each other, as liberals demanded exact equal treatment of everyone, period, and progressives attempt to give a hand to the poor. 'We must treat everyone the same!' 'No, the poor need extra help!', etc.
Instead, because the Republican party went batshit crazy and became anti-liberal, the liberals ended up with the progressives in the same party, and it all got mushed together, and we now have this insane mixture of 'affirmative action' that doesn't work either way, and causes an untold amount of resentment and suspicion.
You can't reduce racism by more racism, and you can't reduce the poor by only helping minorities out of it...white people aren't stupid, they see that if the poverty rate stays the same, and less of them are minorities, obviously more of them will be white.
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You’re screwing the corpus of the taxpaying public in that scenario, but you have at least allowed the individual homeowner the ability to determine their own price for their home.
No you haven't. What if the local government taxes at at six bajillion dollars a year? Hey, look, you just lost your house, and the government didn't use eminent domain at all.
Oh, or what if the government purchased the house using eminent domain, and used it to build a toll road...and used those tolls to make a tax loophole for people making over 5 million dollars, which happened to be one guy?
There are two entirely orthogonal issues here. This is the thing that drives me crazy when trying to talk to conservatives. There are two issues here, and they really are not related at all.
One is them is 'What can the government take from you?'
The other is 'How does the government use what it's taken?'
The first merely requires some level of fairness and due process. This doesn't happen when governments write weird exceptions and loopholes in the tax code.
The second is where almost _every single_ injustice comes from. It's not even close to a contest. It's where the injustice in Kelo was from. It's when the government illegally pays for wiretaps. It's...everything.
The right seems to have them linked somehow in their minds, and this is why so much pushback over Kelo, and why it's aimed in entirely the wrong direction...people in this country have been trained that it's somehow permission for governments to hand out big fat blobs of money and land and tax reductions to private industry.
It's just, this time, it was newly acquired land. Apparently, no one would have any problem if it was land that had been consensually purchased by taxpayers over the last decade. It's okay to just _give out_ their money on hypothetical bullshit 'increased tax base', it's just a problem...hell, I don't even know what's triggering 'a problem' for you guys, finally.
Public-private joint projects are just a way to funnel taxpayer resources into private hands. They have always been that. Don't be surprised they've started funneling land there also.
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As I tried to point out the last time this was talked about, the problem isn't eminent domain _at all_. Would we be better off if the city had collected large amounts of tax money, purchased the property voluntarily from the owners, and _then_ sold it cheap it to a developer for 'economic development'? No, we wouldn't. It would be exactly the same sort of theft.
The problem isn't what property governments can and cannot take, or for what reasons. The problem is 'sweetheart deals' under a justification of 'this private development will make things better for the community'. If _that_ stops, all this nonsense stops, and there's not any _reason_ for governments to run around taking private property and giving it to other people.
Eminent domain laws are fine. The problem is the government letting people walk off with stuff. It doesn't matter if that money is taxpayer gained or from eminent domain or what.
Incidentally, this is exactly where libertarians get blamed for this sort of nonsense, because it's exactly that sort of public-private arrangements that they like, usually under the guise of 'privatization' of one thing or anything.
Aka, they say that we don't need the government to fix this broken neighborhood, or stop the massive amounts of crimes, we can have private industry do it. Now let us look the other way while private industry please lines up for handouts of property to do it...
That second part is not a libertarian idea, but somehow 'libertarians' often seem to end up standing right next to it, promoting the 'we don't need the government to fix this, private actors can fix it if the government will let them' idea, and ignoring the rest of what's happening.
"
The fact that this city needed to be taken over by the state (Actually, it needed to have the state step in earlier and actually correct things, but whatever.) does not mean that a _properly_ run city that finds tax revenue has dropped and they don't have a lot of funds should be taken over by the state, and it certainly doesn't mean that a city should be taken over because that is just _claimed_ to be true.
Saying 'You're either for or against this law' is like saying 'You're either for or against the police being allowed to arrest people'. Well, no, I'm in favor of some sort of actual process to do that, and checks and balances so the system doesn't get abused.
Not just the governor saying 'Hey, throw that guy in jail.' Even if, in this specific case, this guy _did_ need throwing in jail, and everyone agrees.
It's fine for a state to have emergency powers to take over cities. Cities do not actually have any sovereignty at all. What is not fine is crouching such powers, and allowing them under, 'fiscal problems'. If a city literally cannot pay their bills, fine, he state can step in, but not vague unspecified 'the governor says they have problems'.
Especially with the slam at unions by Mackinak. Did unions have anything to do with this city's problems? Not at all. In fact, this city's problems had nothing to do with money at all, they had to do with a total failure of management.
On “Societal Constructs Often Result In Sub-Optimal Leisure Options”
Boys operate in a world of verbs, girls in a world of nouns. The theory goes back to hunter-gatherer days and has to do with out the eye develops in the different sexes. Boys are more focused on movement (hunting) and girls on the details center-frame (gathering). As such, the toys that appeal to boys are largely the ones that do things or that you can do things with (cars/trucks, guns, balls) while the ones that appeal to girls needn’t do anything but must be purposeful and nuanced (dolls, stuffed animals, flowers).
I think another way of saying that is that boys roleplay problems and them being fixed, whereas girls roleplay 'normal' situations. To see this, hand them both a box of legos. Not one of the pre-collect boxes for specific things, just a random pile.
Watch what they do with them. The boys will make vehicles to attack each other or crash or save people, or they will make some situation where things need fixing, like people attacking somewhere.
The girls will make things, but those things seem to be just fine as they are. It's a house, or a car, or whatever, but it's how it's supposed to be.
Now, I have no idea if this is social or genetics, but I suspect genetics, because adult men and women do sorta the same thing, so much that good general advice to men is 'Sometimes your girlfriend/wife isn't expecting you to try to solve her problem, so just shut up and listen and don't make suggestions until she asks.'.
Of course, the things girl imagine seem fine from mine, a male POV. I suspect what's actually going on is that women solve problems in non-physical ways, and if I watched a little girl play house with legos, there would be just as many problems, all of them solved by talking.
In fact, I sorta suspect that it's inherent sexism that doesn't let us see 'caring for a toy baby' as 'doing something'. Maintaining an imaginary social environment with a bunch of dolls and stuffed animals, having conversations with them and making them happy when they get upset with each other, is probably as much work as rescuing someone from the clutches of evil.
On “Pop Quiz”
As I mentioned above, the “natural born Citizen” requirement in the Constitution has never been adjudicated by any court in the United States
I have absolutely no idea why you think this.
'It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, and the jurisdiction of the English sovereign; and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.' -Minor v. Happersett
Moreover, the very first Congress thought they could define people as natural born citizens by making them citizens at birth: ...the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens...
I quote the Congressional Research Service: 'Considering the history of the constitutional qualifications provision, the common use and meaning of the phrase "natural-born subject" in England and in the Colonies in the 1700s, the clause's apparent intent, the subsequent action of the first Congress in enacting the naturalization act of 1790 (expressly defining the term "natural born citizen" to include a person born abroad to parents who are United States citizens), as well as subsequent Supreme Court dicta, it appears that the most logical inferences would indicate that the phrase "natural born Citizen" would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship "at birth" or "by birth".
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I might not have been clear above, but the problem is that there has not been any adjudication of what “natural born citizen” means in our Constitution. There have always been competing theories for what those words mean: born in the jurisdiction only? born of one citizen parent? two citizen parents? what about dual citizen parent(s)? citizen parents traveling abroad at the time of birth? There’s no conclusive answers to these questions with respect to the NBC clause.
I don't know what you're talking about, because most of those have never been theories. No theory based on number of citizens parents has _ever_ been proposed, and that seems like a strange thing to bring up now, except as part of 'Let's challenge Obama'. In fact, we've already _had_ presidents where only one parent was a citizen. I'm pretty certain we've had them where neither was a citizen.
And dual citizenship can't have anything to do with anything, the requirement isn't that you _aren't_ something, it is that you _are_ a natural born citizen. (In my mind, it might be a good idea to require that the president renounce any other citizenship before taking office, or even have that as part of the oath, but such a requirement does not exist currently.)
And most of the debate about 'what that phrase means' is over people who weren't paying attention in history. A lot of people seem to think it's related to the 14th amendment, that only people under that amendment can be elected, but that's clearly nonsense, or we wouldn't have had a president until 1868. For the first 100 years of this country, the constitution made _no one_ a citizen, just laws, so that requirement _can't_ be saying 'Only people who are constitutionally citizens, aka, born in the US, can be president'.
What the courts have suggested, and what appears to be the _only_ possible theory for what 'natural born citizen' means, is 'legally a citizen at time of birth'. If the law (or, now, the constitution) makes you a citizen as you're born, you can be president. Whereas if it makes you one later, if you naturalize, you cannot.
You can imagine there are 'competing' theories all you want, but there are not. While it is a slightly baffling term by itself, there's only actually been _one_ suggestion as to what it means, 'citizen at time of birth', and the courts accept it. No other theory is even slightly plausible, and the only one that is suggested is the anachronistic one that the 14th amendment is relevant, which it can't be. (There is one interesting 14th amendment question, as it made a lot of people citizens, and the question is, was that intended to be retroactive back to their birth, and if so, are they eligible for president? I believe the answer would be yes, as the intent clearly was to give everyone ever born in the US _full_ rights, not 'naturalize' them. But none of them ever ran, and now they are all dead.)
On “The Return to Normalcy Budget”
I don't see why that would be hard. In fact, taxing capital gains and investments would be trivial, and, again, we could use the entity providing them to do the taxes. They know how much money goes to which people.
The only thing that would be _slightly_ hard is taxing the self-employed, and, duh, we just give them a trivially simple form, an big 'amount of income' space and nothing else. As that's still _much easier_ than the existing setup, I don't see what's hard about it.
Incidentally, I'd also be in favor of getting rid of the sole proprietorship model of businesses. If you want a 'business' that is just you selling things, or contracting yourself out, whatever.
But if you want to only pay taxes on profits, and not on all income, you have to set up a separate legal identity for it, period, no more running that through your personal finances and deducting business expenses.
We can make 'setting up a business legal identity' an even simpler process than it is now, but it does need to be separate from you, and it pays taxes, including the ones on your income. (Like all other businesses would pay on their employees's income.)
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Actually, tying _all_ income tax to unemployment levels wouldn't be that crazy. It'd result in us doing automatically sane things like raising taxes when the economy is good, and cutting them when it'd bad.
So all you have to do is have some percentage of the tax rate based on general unemployment, and some percentage based on 'that specific job' unemployment, on a sort of running average where it didn't jump around too much but did follow trends. Like instead of a 15% tax bracket, we had a 20%-(general unemployment/3)-(specific unemployment/10).
But that's way too clever an idea to actually do.
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Yeah, the major problem is existing deductibles, which, by the way are utterly insane. I don't just mean how many there are, I mean the _structure_, which is idiotically _regressive_.
Let us say I make $30,000 a year and you make $300,000 a year. And we both install $1000 worth of solar panels on our house, and the government wants to reward that behavior for this, so has a 50% deduction for it. Well, they've now knocked $1000 off our income, which saves me 15% of $500, or $75, and saves you...33% of $500, or $167? And let's not even talk about the guy who makes $5,000 a year, who gets no reward at all.
Can anyone pretend that makes any damn sense at all? Shouldn't they at least get _equal_ reimbursement for doing what the government wants them to do? (An argument could even be made that the poor should get more, because it's more costly, opportunity-wise, but we can just leave it at 'equal' for now.) If we're going to pay people to do things, let's just pay them to do things, it would be a hell of a lot more transparent. You get 10% of the solar panels back, period.
You're right that we'll have to phase the deductions out slowly, but we _really_ need to just utterly change the system.
So for a while we'd have to switch to a payroll system and yet have people keep filing a tax return to get money back from imaginary 'deductibles', as we slowly got rid of them. Each year less and less people would bother. If we do it the other way around, if we try to phase them out first, we will be here forever.
As for the 'field' bonus, it certainly should _only_ be short term. What I would actually like to see is some sort of automatic system set up that triggers when there's 3% less unemployment for people qualified in that field, vs. general unemployment, that stops being in effect as soon as there are more job seekers.
Somewhere in that vast US government is a place where every single field of employment has 'job seekers' vs 'open positions' statistic, and it should be possible to vary tax rates based on that.
On “Pop Quiz”
The Full Faith and Credit Clause is the big one.
The state of Hawaii has produced a document stating that Barack Obama was born there. They have confirmed the document Barack has shown people was actually produced by them.
Q.E.D, that's it, that's the end of the story. Arizona is _required_ to accept that as evidence that he was born in Hawaii. They do not get to make any other qualifications as to that.
Now, if it was just for their own use, they could choose to...um...not recognize he existed, even without a birth certificate. There's a difference between 'recognizing it as a document' and 'it producing some sort of legal results under state law'.
It's like with gay marriage...Georgia wouldn't recognize the marriage itself, but it can't pretend two guys with a marriage license from Massachusetts aren't married _in Massachusetts_, if that ever needs to be legally decided in Georgia. (I.e, if one spouse tries to sue the other for theft, and the second spouse points out it was purchased while they were married in Massachusetts, and hence is jointly theirs, and the first spouse claims that the marriage 'doesn't exist' under Georgia law...yes, it _does_, even if the marriage confers no privileges in Georgia.)
So if there was an _Arizonian_ law saying 'Someone needed a birth certificate of a certain kind' to gain a privilege in Arizona, that would be okay.
However, the Presidency is a Federal office, and the requirement isn't 'a birth certificate', it is, more sanely, to be _born_ here. (For the purposes of this discussion.)
An argument can be made that Arizona has the right to determine who is eligible to be on the ballot for that office (Although that itself is debatable!), as the responsibility for that is not spelled out in the constitution and _someone_needs to do it, but they can't pretend that the state of Hawaii does not assert he was born there (No matter what sort of paper they print it on), and thus he is allowed under that that constitutional qualification.
The state of Hawaii has _repeatedly_ made itself very clear about this, going well above any documentation generally released to the point of making official government statements about it, and Arizona _must_ accept their word on this.
And adding extra qualifications to any Federal office is _already_ declared to be unconstitutional, witness the fail efforts at state attempts to impose term limits on their congressional representatives. The only ground AZ possibly has to keep someone off the ballot is they fail the _Federal_ requirements for the office.
On “The Return to Normalcy Budget”
While I'm utterly against making it a flat %, as that would be very regressive, it would be trivial to do what you said and leave it progressive.
Remove all deductions, remove everything except 'If you make X, you pay Y'. That's it. And then turn it into something like sales tax, where it's entirely the job of business to keep it and turn it in.
The only people who'd owe any extra taxes would be people working multiple employers, because they'd end up getting taxed at the wrong tax bracket by one of them. And no one would have to 'file' anything...if that happened, the IRS would send them a bill.
And I don't mean a giant bill the next year, I mean, the minute the IRS gets two of the monthly tax payments for the same social security number, it mails out an explanation of what's going on, that they are undertaxed, and lets them set up a direct deposit for the extra amount. (I was about to say 'or have it taken out of one of the paychecks', but, hell, let's keep this simple. Having it taken out extra requires complicated back channels from the IRS back to the employer, which has to keep special information to tax to take a little extra money from that guy. No. Either direct deposit, or the taxpayer can mail in a check every few months.)
If we actually want to incentivize behavior, if we must still have some 'deducatables', we can have forms people can fill out and turn into to get cash or whatever, but this would have nothing to do with actual income taxes. We want to reward people for putting up solar panels, they can turn in a receipt and government rebate form and get a check in the mail. (Not that I'm saying that's a good idea, but I think we'd be a lot clearer about 'deductions' if we treated them that way.)
In fact, we'd almost certainly want to set up something for retirement investments. Although, instead of getting a 'deduction', how about we just have the government provide a matching percentage that basically exists to offset taxes? Save $100 in an account you can't get to until you're 65, the government puts in $2. Which you obviously have to pay back if you get it out early. Stop trying to do it on the 'income tax' side, just have the government subsidize the investments.
As a bonus, it suddenly becomes much easier to incentivize some stuff we never could before without weird deductions, because now that businesses are doing income tax, we can have different tax rates for different _fields_, because we can selectively lower the rate for each. How about a slightly lower tax rate for medical general practitioners, or registered nurses, for example, considering the shortage of them? A business just sends in a tiny bit of documentation saying it employs someone in that field, and the IRS say 'Okay, you can tax them at these rates instead:'.
This is much easier than trying to have weird deducatibles on medical school loans for practicing doctors, which is, IIRC, how that happens now. That requires documentation from _at least_ three sources...the doctor, the medical school, and the place they're employed at.
On “Free Market as Forest”
Of course it exists; however, doing business with pre-existing relationships and going with higher cost options on the basis that the people you are doing business can execute the deal are not breaches of fiduciary duty. You seem to find a lot of wrongdoing where I think little exists.
You seem to be inventing a lot of what you think I've said. I have no objection with businesses going with other companies they have worked with before. I have no objection to whatever sort of _business_ qualifications that companies make deals within, or if they use pre-existing relationships as one of the criteria, or even the sole criteria. (Well, I have no legal objection, but it is sorta stupid and I wouldn't invest in such a company.)
I objected to business relationships, in a publicly traded company, existing because of _personal acquaintance_ with the CEOs of other companies, not because the last work done with them was good. Because that is, tada, illegal.
You assume way too much, especially that shareholders take that level of interest of sub-senior level management decisions.
Um, no, I _specifically_ said that shareholders are not paying attention. This does not make such behavior legal.
Sure, fraud exists, but your conflating fraud with ordinary business relationships is troubling.
Your conflating personal relationship of executives with 'business relationships' is much more troubling. That is not a business relationship.
A business relationship is IBM and Microsoft, not Samuel J. Palmisano and Steve Ballmer. IBM and MS have a long and weird history, and it's perfectly acceptable for IBM not to start a new joint project with MS, considering how screwed over they got on their last joint project of OS/2, and instead go with, for example, Apple Computers. (Which they actually did with the PowerPC thing.)
It is not acceptable for IBM to not enter a joint contract with MS and go with Apple because Palmisano and Steve Jobs were both in Beta Theta Pi at Johns Hopkins, and they're good friends. (Note: Not Steve Job's actual history, it is a hypothetical.)
Your assertions that this is illegal without citations, links or examples to support your claim is even more troubling.
I gave an example, something you utterly ignored while attempting to generalize my statements to things they did not apply to, and attempting to gloss over the actual _fraud_ that is being committed. You have attempted to turn my clear statement that 'making corporate agreements with friends instead of what is in the best interest of the corporation' into a statement where I claim the sole possible 'best for the corporation' factor is price, which I did not say at all.
And, strangely, in my example, I named the actual tort. I will repeat:
Someone deliberately wasting their company’s money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a ‘Breach of Fiduciary Duty’ against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud.
The reason I didn't 'cite' anything is because that's a _state tort_ except for a few Federal industries like banks, and hence rather hard to meaningfully cite the actual law, and the civil law will just say 'Breach of Fiduciary Duty', because that's usually defined by case law. The example I gave is pretty clearly breaching a Duty of Loyalty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_of_Loyalty
Tortious interference, as I understand it, mainly applies when a third party interferes with an existing business relationship. Even if it can be applied to a situation where no relationship exists
You perhaps need to do a little more research. Please read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
and notice the _second_ type of 'Tortious interference', which is fraudulently interfering in a business relationships between two other parties in hopes they will stop working together (or never start) and one of them will work with you instead.
you’ll be hard pressed to prove that I’ve harmed Company A by not choosing to deal with them on the basis that I think another party is a more suitable fit for the transaction.
Except that's the _explicit premise_ of the tort of 'tortious interference with a business relationship'. That is what that means, you claim you were harmed because someone fraudulently kept you out of an business relationship, and, yes, it's perfectly reasonable to sue someone _at_ the business you didn't end up in a relationship with if they committed fraud to keep you out of it. Like I said, do a little reading on this topic.
However, you’re making wild ass claims about the illegality of things which are clearly legal and typically done in the course of business.
The fact that they are 'typically done' does not make them legal.
If you wish to disagree, feel free but rather than tell me what we do is illegal, provide the necessary evidence. You haven’t even begun to build a case.
I've repeated named the legal theories under which such behavior is illegal.
Perhaps instead of imagining I'm talking about whatever you think I'm talking about, you should actually read the examples I gave, and not hallucinate that I said 'It is not legal to make business deals on other considerations', and instead read my actual example, which was 'It is not legal for officers (or directors of the board, while we're at it) of publicly traded companies to give discounts on business deals to friends.'
Likewise, instead of just _guessing_ what sort of duties that corporate officers of publicly traded companies are required to follow, you should investigate those duties, and then explain why my actual example in the previous paragraph is not a breach of them.
And, like I said, all these are torts, not 'crimes', per se. They are civil offenses, not criminal...however, such a systematic and structured pattern of torts is certainly enough to qualify under RICO, which actually is a crime.
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Just making up hypothetical justifications for a Breach Of Fiduciary Duty does not mean such a thing does not exist, nor it does mean that it isn't fraud.
And we're talking _million dollar deals_, not hiring someone to wash windows, where trustworthyness might be important. They aren't _supposed_ to be doing business with 'a fly-by-night guy' or 'a trusted guy', they aren't doing business with _people_ at all, they're doing business with _giant corporations_, and it shouldn't make the tiniest bit of difference who the guy at the top is.
Stockholders do not 'prefer' a 'low-risk option' when CEOs choose who supplies their computers or whatever. They prefer contracts that put all the costs of failure on the damn business that fails to live up to their end of the bargain,with assurances on quality and whatnot. You know, like businesses _already_ do.
And then after that, they prefer the CEO goes after the _cheapest_ deal that fits the qualifications, instead of manipulating the process so the company buys computers that cost 20% more to throw some business towards an old friend.
Because that is _fraud_. And it is _illegal_. And it is utterly and completely unpunished, and is used a goddamn _justification_ for the system of insane executive bonuses we have.
The system is, literally, a extortion racket. Not a metaphorical one, an actual, criminal extortion racket. It is an implicit threat to cause a tort, aka, Tortious Interference, against a company if they don't do something. It is racketeering, it is a violation of RICO.
'Sure, you could hire some random business major to run the company, but I'm afraid all the other CEOs will just choose not to make any deals with your company, because they don't choose to do what's best for their company, as required by law, but instead choose what to do based on who they know.'
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There's no way we can 'seriously consider' that as a society. That communism, you know!
It's not, of course, no redistribution of wealth by the government is communism, there's functionally no such thing as 'wealth' under communism.
But the American people have been very well programmed against the system you propose.
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Um, that would be because they have to buy politicians or the right will destroy unions. You know, like they're trying right now?
'Look at that idiot, he wasted all his money on self-defense.'
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Someone deliberately wasting their company's money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a 'Breach of Fiduciary Duty' against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud.
It is also 'Tortious Interference' against both the company they work for and the company that _didn't_ get the contract, as that hypothetical business relationship has been interfered with using fraud.
Depending on state laws, a single instance of those may or may not be prosecuted under criminal fraud law and may just be a tort. Notice that these are both actions against the company itself, and the corporate veil does not apply, the executive can be personally sued.
However, a conspiracy to commit such a thing, a system in place that repeatedly does that, is a RICO violation, which _is_ a violation of criminal law.
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Oh, and unrelated to that, let me address this huge CEO pay thing, or, at least, a common justification for it.
'Sure, it's unfair, but all those CEOs went to school with each other, and play golf with each other, and all know each other and can get good deals from each other, you have to hire one of them.'
Let's just think about this for a second. It's always presented as 'getting good deals for the company', from that direction. But as a _system_, that's outright admitting that sometimes that the CEO _we're_ hiring will give 'good deals' to other CEOs based on personal friendship.
Which is _criminal malfeasance_ for a company officer. People are _justifying_ the absurd pay because the leaders of the business company is operating a blatant _criminal conspiracy_ that, apparently, the stockholders have no problem with.
This is because the stockholders on the board are CEO of other corporations, so those shareholders never complain. But it is still actually, literally, criminal.
The next time someone attempts to justify executive pay by talking about how the executives 'know' people, ask who they know, does this person they know commonly waste company money on people they 'know', and do the shareholders of _that_ company know it?
It's like me being a cop, and saying "If you want to get out of a ticket, hire me as security for fifty dollars and I'll come to your hearing with you. When a police officer shows up with the witness, the ticketing officer often gets 'busy' and fails to show, so the case is thrown out."
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While this article is very insightful, it missed the _other_ problem that causes mismanagement of corporations, and that fixing would lead to a huge decrease in utterly stupid decisions by management.
Namely, that half the owners of a corporations wish to see stock prices temporarily go up so they can sell some stock and make a profit. That is their 'corporate goal'. So corporations bring in someone who will raise stock prices by making incredibly stupid long-term decisions, like lay off half the company or threaten a union or whatever, stock prices go up, tada, they get a bonus, everyone is happy.
A year later, of course, stock prices drop back down as the stupid decisions catch up with the company, but wait, neverfear, the current stockholders have found the next SuperCEO to leap in and do something stupid to temporarily bump up stock prices. Rinse, repeat.
So we have _two_ layers of stupidity. We have the middle management which could usually have 90% of them removed with no effect on productivity, and who's major job is to justify themselves. And we have the top management who don't give a damn about 'producing things', they care only about 'getting people to want our stock'.
It's amazing American company produce anything at all, we're so...*hold hand to ear like Jon Stewart*...oh, I'm being told American companies do not produce things anymore, my mistake.
I have a plan that sounds insane: Stock must only be traded once a quarter. Each quarter, the company issues that quarter's dividends, and then come out with the next quarter's projection, and, a few days after that, everyone puts in buy and sell orders that are all resolved at a single instant at the end of the day, and that's it. No one can buy or sell the rest of the quarter.
No short sales, no speculation, no nothing. You pay your money, and you get three months worth of profits. You like it, you keep owning it, otherwise, you sell it. The purpose of the stock is not to sell the stock, the purpose is to actually share in the profits.
On “Labor Roundtable: The Labor Movement, Redistributive Justice, and Procedural Fairness”
If public unions go on strike—esp police and fire—people will die.
If corporations do not produce weapons for our police, people will die. If they do not produce firetrucks, people will die. If drug companies do not produce needed medication, people will die.
Strangely, no one ever seems to want to _require_ them to do this or be dissolved by the government. Odd, that.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.