Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Da Geezer]

......Free health care, free education, free housing. All supplied by a government that the US has attempted to choke since 1960 and who lost its number one trade partner when the Soviet Union collapsed. Compare that to the wealth disparity in the US and the cost of health care, housing and education. Red baiting be damned!

Stan, if you believe health care, education and housing are free goods, then maybe you can see why the right-wing reactionaries fled the island. They tended to be the producers, whose labor and property were stolen in the name of "social justice".

And Jeff, the income distribution in the US is nothing like the Marxist pyramid-shape. It is more like a diamond.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that if you took all the wealth of the 1%, and then shot them just so they would never harm you again, then there would be another 1% immediately upon the first 1%'s demise, Of course, you could continue this hypothetical process until you have Cuba. Or Detroit.

[Rocky Bleier]

I still don't know. I do know, and disagree with, your position on taxation.

https://mises.org/blog/hillarys-huge-estate-tax-hike

[Jeff Buchanan]

^^^ Interesting read but a little over the top:

By contrast, when the rich are allowed to retain ownership of wealth, much of it becomes the capital that is invested in business enterprises where it provides jobs for non-rich Americans and produces goods and services that uplift society’s standard of living.

I may have to dig around (assuming I'm remotely interested in doing so today) but I'm pretty sure this economic assumption can be proven to be absolutely wrong.

The other problem I see in this piece is that the Founders were uniformly against the accumulation and preservation of wealth through estates passed from generation to generation. The piece is old but the stuff in it never gets old:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers

[Rocky Bleier]

Some guy on the Internet:

"It's money which has already been taxed once (income), certainly twice (inflation), likely third time (capital gains/interest earned/corporate), the inheritance tax would be the forth time, followed by the fifth time (sales tax), and possibly a sixth time if the money was spent on a product or service that it taxed additionally (like gasoline, cigarettes, imports, etc)."


Ron Paul:


"If you truly own your property, you have the right to dispose of it any way you wish. You can sell it, give it away, or direct who will receive it when you die. This control is the essence of property rights. If you can’t control what happens to your property, you don’t really own it.
That’s why the estate tax is so destructive. Since people don’t want the government controlling their property when they die, they twist themselves into pretzels finding ways to avoid turning assets over to the IRS. Some create elaborate trusts to minimize their taxes, supporting the economically wasteful estate-planning industry. Others simply lose their entrepreneurial spark, stop working, and spend their money – succumbing to a “die broke” attitude."

[SeattleLionsFan]

My big problem with Paul's take as written above, is that your property rights end at death. Once Rocky dies, he cannot own property. So Rocky should have no right to control property after death. Give away your stuff before you die if it's so important. (This should not be read to be support for property automatically escheating to the govt).

I don't necessarily disagree that estates shouldn't be taxed. Were it up to me, I'd explore allowing free transfers of real property, in whole, without any stepped up basis. Then when it is sold, paying normal tax rates. I'd also tax the rest of the inherited property as income to the heir. I don't know why inherited wealth should be given priority treatment over earned wealth.

[Dr. Strangelove]

[ame]https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/782222958555267072[/ame]

[drok]

Jeff is that article for real? Asking the question of what is the cost of the Cuban government's meddling in international affairs? What do you think the cost would look like if you evaluated the US in the same way in the last 5 years? How about 10 or 40? And would that answer change if it was a Russian, US, Japanese, Iraqi, British or Saudi journalist? And how would the loan calculations look for other similarly sized poor countries? They don't provide any context? How much does Israel owe the US for weapons? Castro's demand is obviously propaganda...not unlike the US terms of freedom and liberty. Not sure why it's taken literally here.

Look, Cuba is by no means perfect and has a lot of problems. It's a complicated place full of contridictions. And make no mistake that the people there are poor beyond what we can understand. But to equate loss of property of thousands of families equalling hundreds of millions of dollars (by the way, you would likely only need to look at 5 families, ahem companies, to get to the same number) to the real poverty that was experienced by the vast majority of the people before the revolution is comical. The average Cuban person is much better off than pre-revolution. And lol at Da Geezer - the whole point of the system is that everyone is both a contributor and beneficiary. But socialism = evil so whatever.

The reality is that the average Cuban has a much better life than the average carribean resident in pretty much anyway you want to measure it. The Castro's are responsible for that.

What's going to be interesting is to see how things are going to change in the next 20 years. As is always the case with Cuba, the answer will be complicated and political.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

[Rocky Bleier]

I'd also tax the rest of the inherited property as income to the heir. I don't know why inherited wealth should be given priority treatment over earned wealth.

I don't know why it isn't enough that I already work four months for the government every year.Big government is like the mafia don who gets his cut of everything the wage slaves earn/receive so he can live the easy life. Your tax money isn't making life fair and equal for the needy. It's making life easy for the greedy. It's not by accident that some of the wealthiest zip codes in America are just outside of Washington D.C.

Nineteenth century French economist Frederic Bastiat nailed it when he said, "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

[Rocky Bleier]

https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/statu...22958555267072

That is hardly as bad as using a private server from home to mishandle classified documents, lying to the FBI about the use of that server, deleting thousands of incriminating e-mails, using charity money for your slush fund, or attacking the women who your husband raped. Yeah, she holds the moral high-ground. Trumps is an ass. Hillary is plain evil. Choose your authoritarian on November 8th!

[Jeff Buchanan]

Drok, my point was that the world's lender nations have carried Cuba to the tune of trillions of dollars since 1959. This point was made in response to both your post and Stan's that seemed to praise the Socialist Castro regime for the array of public services that exceed those of the US for one and I'd expect both of you would say most of the Western capitalist countries. Maybe I misunderstood where you were both coming from.

Cuba and the Castros, left to their own devices, would not have survived. Their regime would have collapsed. None of the social service benefits that you and Stan are praising would have been remotely achievable. I have a problem with that praise being given to them without acknowledgement of how it happened.

The second part of the article I posted a link to discusses the cost of meddling I think you are commenting on. That's not related to my point.

[froot loops]

That is hardly as bad as using a private server from home to mishandle classified documents, lying to the FBI about the use of that server, deleting thousands of incriminating e-mails, using charity money for your slush fund, or attacking the women who your husband raped. Yeah, she holds the moral high-ground. Trumps is an ass. Hillary is plain evil. Choose your authoritarian on November 8th!

That's an interesting take to say the least, you might want to check out the Trump Foundation, that is a true slush fund.

[Rocky Bleier]

I'm sure they're both friggin' crooks. Like I've been saying, I believe the only reason Trump is in the game is so Hillary gets elected. She and Bill have scandals all the way back to Arkansas, but people don't seem to care because the alternative is The Donald. Great setup for what H.L. Mencken called the booboise.

[froot loops]

The scandals going back to Arkansas have been thoroughly investigated and they found nothing. but that never stops the Fox news folks to keep on investifating.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Somebody leaked Trump's 1995 tax returns to the NY Times. He reported a loss of over $900 MILLION...which likely would've been enough of a write-off to avoid paying taxes for the next 15+ years

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html?_r=0

[UMStan White]

"Or Detroit."

Comparing Detroit to Cuba. What a moron! Post after post you display your racist tendencies and total lack of empathy. I thank the Lord every day that I don't share your views.