Meet your new thread, same as the old thread.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I gather that any ideology bothers you, as opposed to the clarity and honesty of voting one's own self-interest.

But when you go off on limousine liberals, I gather that the only way in which wealth factors in is that you meet these people in social situations in which you can't tell them to fuck off. I mean, if you encounter a homeless person or a Target cashier with the same views, from what you've said those views should be no less obnoxious, but they don't irk you in those circumstances.

Unless your point is that in those circumstances, liberalism is nothing more than redistributionist self-interest, and then you applaud those folks for looking out for themselves.

I've told both to fuck off, civilly. I run into union sorts almost daily, and when they start on the whole "the rich are taking advantage of the working man" bit (and they do, frequently) I'll say the same thing.

Liberalism for the hyper-rich is a way buying yourself into Heaven. Nobody gets that rich without shitting on a lot of people. They figure stopping the melting of a glacier in Antartica or getting a photo-op playing pickup basketball with black kids in a poor neighborhood makes up for it.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
It's all those principled Ds and Rs in Washington who gum up the tax code with special exemptions and credits.

Before I agree with you there, and I tend to, I have to ask... Do you think initially the tax code grew because of people gaming the system or because of its own tendencies toward creating red tape and finding new ways to squeeze money out of people? I sometimes wonder which came first and started the whole mess.

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Before I agree with you there, and I tend to, I have to ask... Do you think initially the tax code grew because of people gaming the system or because of its own tendencies toward creating red tape and finding new ways to squeeze money out of people? I sometimes wonder which came first and started the whole mess.

There's always a tension between simplicity and fairness. A truly simple tax code (e.g., a flat tax) means that people with widely differing circumstances (e.g., kids, spouse, home mortgage, whatever) will pay the same in taxes. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe a bad thing. Anyway, that creates a reason for exceptions, whether a dependent exemption, mortgage deduction, whatever. And once you have that, you'll have ever more pressure to create exceptions so that something good is not being taxed too much. And it goes and goes until you're down to oil extraction from farm land being something that should not be taxed, but in fact subsidized.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
A fair criticism. How much do some people need? When I see the hyper-rich gaming the system to keep the difference between $30 and $30.25 million in yearly income, I have to wonder WTF these people are thinking.

Of course, by saving the $250,000, the accountant justifies a fee of $100,000, and the manager justifies taking another $100,000 off the top, too, since he helped save the $250,000. And since Coltrane's a bargain, he'll only collect $50,000 for reviewing the thing. And no one ever tells the client that the $250,000 saved was before taxes anyways.

It's not about making the extra $250,000, it's about all your people doing the right thing by you.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Before I agree with you there, and I tend to, I have to ask... Do you think initially the tax code grew because of people gaming the system or because of its own tendencies toward creating red tape and finding new ways to squeeze money out of people? I sometimes wonder which came first and started the whole mess.

A game of chess is very simple at first. The pieces are laid out neatly, and even after a few moves it's quite easy to understand what is happening.

But once you get to the middle of the game, the relationship between all the pieces is quite complicated, and it's hard to understand what openings you create with each move you make.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Of course, by saving the $250,000, the accountant justifies a fee of $100,000, and the manager justifies taking another $100,000 off the top, too, since he helped save the $250,000. And since Coltrane's a bargain, he'll only collect $50,000 for reviewing the thing. And no one ever tells the client that the $250,000 saved was before taxes anyways.

It's not about making the extra $250,000, it's about all your people doing the right thing by you.

Oh, you mean all those jobs that keep fat white men in Mercedes? It's criminal a person like me was given a job making anything over $40k for what I did. My legacy is a stack of invoices and bar tabs.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Before I agree with you there, and I tend to, I have to ask... Do you think initially the tax code grew because of people gaming the system or because of its own tendencies toward creating red tape and finding new ways to squeeze money out of people? I sometimes wonder which came first and started the whole mess.

When people create complexity in the tax code, I think they either ignore the transaction costs for users and administrators, or on some level think that the complexity validates their existence.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

"Slippery slope arguments should be avoided unless there is proof that the slope is greased."

link

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
... Though I appreciate the spirit in which that guy at the Archives tried to do his job.

Leave Sandy Berger out of this.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
"Slippery slope arguments should be avoided unless there is proof that the slope is greased."

link

I love phrases like that an will use that. Thank you.

But isn't the problem that most of the time the slope is greased with clear oil that's only discernable once you're sliding down it?*


*Kind of like when the Raiders use to grease their defensive line's jerseys with Mobil Synthetic oil back in the 80s.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Leave Sandy Berger out of this.

jumbo shrimp
deafening silence
conservative governance

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield


The only smart limousine liberals I see out there in the political sphere are Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger. I'd vote for either tomorrow because I think they both have the business acumen necessary to recognize the impact of govt policies instead of getting trippedup by the ignorance and self righteousness that tends to define the classic limousine liberal.

So who does Bloomberg get to be his running mate? Since it sounds like Ahnold is out, I assume the top of the shopping list is a maverick D to bookend the maverick R thing he's got going, and that there is no desire to subject Americans to listening to Joe Lieberman drone on any more than absolutely necessary.

[SlaveNoMore]

Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I assume the top of the shopping list is a maverick D to bookend the maverick R thing he's got going...

Bloomberg was a lifelong Dem who changed party affiliations solely to avoid the NYC Democratic machine.

How anyone sees him an R, especially a maverick R, is beyond me.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
If you have a lot of money, you make other people pay for your principles.

Senators, you mean?

• I examine the differential responsiveness of U.S. senators to the preferences of wealthy, middle-class, and poor constituents. My analysis includes broad summary measures of senators’ voting behavior as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion. In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents. These income-based disparities in representation appear to be unrelated to disparities in turnout and political knowledge and only weakly related to disparities in the extent of constituents’ contact with senators and their staffs.

link (an abstract of Economic Inequality and Political Representation, by Princeton poli sci prof Larry Bartels)

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Bloomberg was a lifelong Dem who changed party affiliations solely to avoid the NYC Democratic machine.

How anyone sees him an R, especially a maverick R, is beyond me.

He's fiscally moderate. I dislike his smoking ban stuff because it signals a tendency toward interference in social behaviors, but otherwise, he's been a pretty solid cost-cutter. One could quibble with his initial property tax hike when he took office, but that was necessary. And he did pare down NYC's govt operational costs, which were given to him by Rudy. All in all, I think he's a fine candidate. My only concern is his strong support for public schooling. I think vouchers might be the better answer.

A fiscal moderate beats a fucking socialist like Hillary or Edwards, or knuckledraggers like Huckabee, Tancredo and Brownback and Big Govt Conservatives like Romney any day.

It'd be hard for me to choose between Rudy and Bloomberg. I'd like to smash them together into one person and vote for him/it.