democracy, taxes and other reasonable transparency measures, and prosecution of rich fraudsters
shrug. I don’t post into the void so I avoid having the void post through me.
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Then please don’t accuse me of copping out. Thank you.
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Pardon me for interjecting. But we can’t in good faith blame these things on inanimate objects (or concepts like ‘socialism’ or ‘terrorism’). That’s how we got things like Prohibition, the Red Scare, and The War on Drugs and a lot of our other problems - targeting inanimate objects or ideas, rather than the people that create trouble with them.
That’s not saying that we don’t have a problem. But the problem’s not the inanimate objects, or even what they were created for, it’s what people do with them. It’s not the drugs, but what people do regarding them. It’s not the ideas, but what people do because of them.
The older I get, the more I feel like blaming things instead of people is wrong, but at the same time, the older I get, the more I realize how hard it is to control people. How much easier it would be to just control guns, drugs, and ideas. But also how wrong that is.
Still, I’m fairly certain that we need to think people first, not inanimate object first, or abstract idea first. We may not have the solutions yet, because they’re harder, but that’s the direction we should be aiming for. If we can get the people in the right state of mind, then things like guns, drugs, and ideas should not be such a danger.
The way people behave with guns is concerning though. Could say the same for religion and drugs.
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Thank you.
“Death rays don’t kill people - people kill people!”
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“Goddamn white people.”
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“The difficulty for me is that I believe in permanent revolution. I believe that once you change the power structure and you get an oligarchy that is trying to keep itself in power, you have all the illiberal features of the previous regime. What has to keep on happening is a constant process of criticism, renewal, protest and so forth.” - Germaine Greer, 2008.
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All I know is that one is supposed to live off the interest and not the capital. My mom told me that once.
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I have some thoughts on that, but I don’t really know what all of 'em are yet.
However, one stands out pretty clear. If I invest some money over the years into the Hokey Pokey Fund, and then decide to sell out of that and put all the money into the Yogi Bear Fund, then I haven’t actually gained any income at all. It’s all still invested. But now I have a tax liability. I think the cost basis should carryover in an investment account until you actually withdraw from it. Same for dividend reinvestment. Currently you pay taxes on those, even though you never see the money.
I can imagine that would be hard on accountants, due to the way they have to track things. But it’s kind of not necessary. If it was just “here’s an investment account, $X was put in, $Y was taken out, tax the difference.” then it wouldn’t need to be very complicated.
Luckily(?), I’m poor enough that none of that really affects me. I’m still in the 0% capital gains bracket. And if I ever end up rich enough to actually have to pay taxes on it, I’d just be happy to be that well off. I wouldn’t mind the taxes.
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Isn’t there’s a difference between long and short term capital gains? Seems to me the short-term gains are taxed at a higher rate, to sort of penalize people who are shuffling money around full time (to the detriment of the small stock investors as you describe). But the penalty is minimal.
A fairer system would be to tax at the inverse of the time the stock is held. If you’re doing it to make gobs of money by using computer programs that shuffle stocks by the millisecond, then tax at 99%. If you hold the stock for your retirement and make adjustments once in a while, tax at 1%.
This will never happen of course.
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My nextdoor just complains about the chipmunks.
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oh man, mine is a hot mess. from the usual garage sales and local events and politics, there’s long argumentative threads about national politics, back-and-forth accusations of racism (and there are definitely lots of racists), reports of break-ins, random conspiracy theories …on and on.
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