• Sen.Bernie Sanders introduces a bill to make college and 4-year universities free by taxing stock
    93 replies, posted
[QUOTE=RocketSnail;47753766]These bills disgust me. I guarantee that you would be against this if you had of your earnings in the stock market. I get it. Sure, it's cool to gang up against the bad guys, those dumb-ass, religious, anti-abortion, corporate republicans, but how wrong is it that the government comes after THE MONEY THAT I RIGHTFULLY EARNED? [editline]18th May 2015[/editline] I deserve to decide what happens with my money. I don't need corrupt politicians toying with my shit[/QUOTE] Well go ahead. Stop paying taxes. Let's all stop paying taxes. Hmm, what happens then... Government services stop. That's not just shit like congress or the military, no. It's also shit like road work. And schools. Sorry, but you and everyone else needs to pay their part if they want the society to stay alive. If you hoard your cash and don't contribute shit, what's the point? You're just a leach at that point.
[QUOTE=Tmaxx;47753813]Well go ahead. Stop paying taxes. Let's all stop paying taxes. Hmm, what happens then... Government services stop. That's not just shit like congress or the military, no. It's also shit like road work. And schools. Sorry, but you and everyone else needs to pay their part if they want the society to stay alive. If you hoard your cash and don't contribute shit, what's the point? You're just a leach at that point.[/QUOTE] Honestly, the state of roads and schools in the US is probably proof that people haven't been paying their taxes for decades.
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47753815]Honestly, the state of roads and schools in the US is probably proof that people haven't been paying their taxes for decades.[/QUOTE] That's exactly my point. His mindset is a cancer on this world, and sadly millions share it. It's why we're in this fucking situation that bills like this exist, and why we don't have national health care. People are just too fucking selfish like, holy shit just look out for your fellow man.
[QUOTE=Cutthecrap;47753809]I highly recommend everyone to read John Rawl's "Theory of Justice", even if it's incredibly outdated and has received some solid critiques. But at least it can make those critical thinking gears get on and make you reconsider what the state should do regarding wealth and opportunities.[/QUOTE] If people can read this outloud (recorded) and not sound like someone reading a dictionary, please do and then post it here. Rawls and Kant fuck shit up.
[QUOTE=Tmaxx;47753819]That's exactly my point. His mindset is a cancer on this world, and sadly millions share it. It's why we're in this fucking situation that bills like this exist, and why we don't have national health care. People are just too fucking selfish like, holy shit just look out for your fellow man.[/QUOTE] I wasn't seriously implying people actually, literally don't pay taxes and this is the cause.
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47753808]An uneducated populace is literally the worse thing for a country and an economy, especially for the United States. The cheaper education is, the more brains we'll have turning the cogs of the nation forward instead of stagnating because no one can get a job better than Walmart or McDonald's.[/QUOTE] Totally true. I totally think that if things are kept like how they are right now, the Chinese will somehow outpace the US in terms of knowledge production. First, they are a fuckton. Secondly, they've got free higher education which as I have said before enables a lot of people. Third, they have what the soviets lacked: The incetive of them monies and working outside. Have you heard a factory director taking 3200 employees from Russia to travel abroad? Me neither. And fourth, they've got what the Soviets had in order to make up for the lack of financial incentives: A nationalistic fervor. An extremely extense history which built a strong collective identity. And oh boy, once they get a mayority of educated people...hold onto your horses....
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47753815]Honestly, the state of roads and schools in the US is probably proof that people haven't been paying their taxes for decades.[/QUOTE] 2.77 trillion dollars in tax revenue in 2013. How are our roads and schools looking? Honestly, we're paying taxes. The government has shown time and time again that they can't spend it properly. Why should we keep paying more and more money and get less and less in return?
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;47753845]2.77 trillion dollars in tax revenue in 2013. How are our roads and schools looking? Honestly, we're paying taxes. The government has shown time and time again that they can't spend it properly. Why should we keep paying more and more money and get less and less in return?[/QUOTE] Because more people should start writing and forcing politicans to spend their money like it should be spent. Now that's the share people must do in order to things be like they want to be. [editline]19th May 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Code3Response;47753820]If people can read this outloud (recorded) and not sound like someone reading a dictionary, please do and then post it here. Rawls and Kant fuck shit up.[/QUOTE] Well, to put it into simple terms (Mind you my first language is Spanish): Rawls wanted to make a theory which would enable us to decide whether something was "fair" or not inside a society. So, how do we do this? Basically, we have to first distinguish between two kinds of goods. The natural goods, which include intelligence to some degree, health predisposition, beauty, being born with a full body and other things which society can't touch or change much. The social goods, which include food, wealth, access to knowledge, rights. Things that can, have and are changed constantly by society. What do we do then? We put ourselvers a blindfold and decide what situation we would pick, among many, if we didn't know what our future was. Would you choose a situation where there is a 10% of becoming ultra mega rich like Carlos Slim and 90% extremely poor, like, you can't fucking stop having hunger pains and you could die before the 40's thanks to SIDA? Or would you choose a situation where there is a 1% of being extremely rich, 9% rich BUT 30% of joining the higher middle class, 30% of joining the middle class, 20% of being lower middle class, 10% poor? [B]Yes, I know, everybody would choose to be born in Germany or Sweden over some African/LATAM/M.Eastern shithole. And that's the logic behind the theory of justice.[/B] Of course, It has its flaws which I won't list but anybody can easily find them and also easily understand them.
The problems we face now can be tied in to Watergate inasmuch as Watergate undermined what was a semi-trusting/favorable opinion of politics and politicians here in the US. Since Nixon, opinions of public servants and government in general have been in decline ([url]http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/07/opinion/zelizer-watergate-politics/[/url]) and as a result, parents are raising kids who a) care less about politics than previous generations (this is due to a multitude of reasons) and b) trust politicians less than previous generations (a fair opinion if backed with personal research, but that's rare). So what happens when we get bills like this, people default to a "well, it would be great if we could trust our politicians to do the right thing with the money they would take, but we can't, so fuck them taking more money." Which, again, isn't a bad opinion, just too straightforward and mistrustful if we as a society would like to progress in meaningful and partisan ways. What happens instead is this sort of bland pedagogy of "fuck politics and politicians because they're all lying cheats" creates an environment where people who would be great for their communities don't run for office because they see it as a detriment to their social standing. Why run for an office where you will automatically be labeled when you could stay in the private sector and a) make more money and b) not be vilified for your status every waking moment. Tangentially with this is the apathy of the younger generation towards politics, and their misunderstanding of its basic machinations. [url]http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/04/30/study-one-in-three-americans-fails-naturalization-civics-test[/url] So we've got a mistrustful, apathetic, uninformed populace blindly filling in check boxes each election cycle (if they even show up to the polls) and people running for office who are already predisposed to being less than honest when money is involved (as is inevitable with any political office). These are part of the reasons why good ideas like this one fail in the US. I hope this one doesn't fail, and that we do see free college tuition within our lifetimes, but unless the system is drastically overhauled (pretty much impossible) we're going to be stuck with leveraging our incomes for the ten + years after college as collateral for our degrees.
Politicians here have about the same approval ratings as cockroaches yet for some reason we don't spray capital hill to keep them away
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47753808]An uneducated populace is literally the worse thing for a country and an economy, especially for the United States. The cheaper education is, the more brains we'll have turning the cogs of the nation forward instead of stagnating because no one can get a job better than Walmart or McDonald's.[/QUOTE] And that's why they won't let this bill pass.
[QUOTE=Cutthecrap;47753854] Well, to put it into simple terms (Mind you my first language is Spanish): Rawls wanted to make a theory which would enable us to decide whether something was "fair" or not inside a society. So, how do we do this? Basically, we have to first distinguish between two kinds of goods. The natural goods, which include intelligence to some degree, health predisposition, beauty, being born with a full body and other things which society can't touch or change much. The social goods, which include food, wealth, access to knowledge, rights. Things that can, have and are changed constantly by society. What do we do then? We put ourselvers a blindfold and decide what situation we would pick, among many, if we didn't know what our future was. Would you choose a situation where there is a 10% of becoming ultra mega rich like Carlos Slim and 90% extremely poor, like, you can't fucking stop having hunger pains and you could die before the 40's thanks to SIDA? Or would you choose a situation where there is a 1% of being extremely rich, 9% rich BUT 30% of joining the higher middle class, 30% of joining the middle class, 20% of being lower middle class, 10% poor? [B]Yes, I know, everybody would choose to be born in Germany or Sweden over some African/LATAM/M.Eastern shithole. And that's the logic behind the theory of justice.[/B] Of course, It has its flaws which I won't list but anybody can easily find them and also easily understand them.[/QUOTE] woah woah woah I dont need the synopsis here. I already did my time with philosophy. I wanted someone recorded reading the theory verbatim without sounding like they're reading a dictionary.
This is going to be as successful as introducing a proposition for everyone everyone in the room to eat a shit sandwich.
[QUOTE=BigJoeyLemons;47754073]And that's why they won't let this bill pass.[/QUOTE] This bill won't pass because it's silly. It's a feel-good thing that adds more red tape when tax should be streamlined. Also it's self-defeating, because it aims to fund schools by taxing high-freuency trading, but such a tax may have an implication on HFT and end up bringing in insufficient revenue.
[QUOTE=Fhenexx;47753096]I actually physically laughed because we'll never hear of this bill again, it's going to die before it even hits the floor[/QUOTE] I hope it does. [editline]19th May 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;47753845]2.77 trillion dollars in tax revenue in 2013. How are our roads and schools looking? Honestly, we're paying taxes. The government has shown time and time again that they can't spend it properly. Why should we keep paying more and more money and get less and less in return?[/QUOTE] There are a lot of idiots here who think blindly raising taxes is going to improve things. I got news for them, your money is going to go fund bombing runs in some middle eastern country or pay for some kind of oil subsidy or military equipment for police and federal agents. If you really think this will make post secondary education free you are naive.
Let's cut more of the military budget and tax the churches and we'll be able to do tons of this good shit.
[QUOTE=Megadave;47754408]Let's cut more of the military budget and tax the churches and we'll be able to do tons of this good shit.[/QUOTE] That's impossible, Christians have a really strong persecution complex nowadays so no one can do anything to them without Rick Perry coming out of the woodwork
[QUOTE=Megadave;47754408]Let's cut more of the military budget and tax the churches and we'll be able to do tons of this good shit.[/QUOTE]Just taxing Church of sciencetology would be enough.
Honestly I think the US needs to spend more efficiently before they start raising taxes. The money they want for this program could probably easily be found elsewhere in some other useless program's budget.
[QUOTE=Fhenexx;47753096]I actually physically laughed because we'll never hear of this bill again, it's going to die before it even hits the floor[/QUOTE] that doesn't matter Bernie Gimme'dat Sanders depends on the popularity in reddit-tier hugboxes to sustain himself this policy isn't any more well thought-out than Herman Cain's 999 plan
[QUOTE=Cutthecrap;47753691]Imagine if the United States catapulted itself into the XXI century by taxing the fuck out of those companies and allowed all that population mass to have college without debting the fuck out of their lives. How would education costs drop. The same for medicine, imagine if those surgeries that cost 500% more than in Europe suddenly saw its price drop because there would be competition from private enterprises to attract customers from the statal service. If somehow the people changed its mindset and actually gave a fuck about the unions and stopped seeing contracts as the word of God where if an employer wants to abuse its employee it can. If states didn't have stupid and fucktard regulations like producer not being able to sell directly to customer and didn't stop or put stones into the path of companies like Tesla. Oh My Fucking God. The future is bright, I can see. Sanders 2016. America Awakens. Now, tell me I've convinced you.[/QUOTE] Okay, I'm down for Sanders 2016 but your posts here make him look more like a cult leader than a politician
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47756237]Honestly I think the US needs to spend more efficiently before they start raising taxes. The money they want for this program could probably easily be found elsewhere in some other useless program's budget.[/QUOTE] Whilst this is true, an average american actually pays way less taxes than the average person in my country. If tax levels would be put to the same amount as they are here in the netherlands, your country's government budget would go from 3504 billion us dollars to 4917 billion us dollars. Just imagine what a competent government would be able to provide for its citizens with that much more money.
[QUOTE=yannickgd;47757439]Whilst this is true, an average american actually pays way less taxes than the average person in my country. If tax levels would be put to the same amount as they are here in the netherlands, your country's government budget would go from 3504 billion us dollars to 4917 billion us dollars. Just imagine what a competent government would be able to provide for its citizens with that much more money.[/QUOTE] Key word here is competent. Our government can't give us proper services for our current taxes. More taxes will do nothing but give them more money to use inefficiently.
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47753808]An uneducated populace is literally the worse thing for a country and an economy, especially for the United States. The cheaper education is, the more brains we'll have turning the cogs of the nation forward instead of stagnating because no one can get a job better than Walmart or McDonald's.[/QUOTE] It's not enough to make education cheaper though, in fairness. Our educational system needs to ween itself off of this whole "train students on how to pass a test and we'll give you more monies" thing they've been doing. [editline]19th May 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47753815]Honestly, the state of roads and schools in the US is probably proof that people haven't been paying their taxes for decades.[/QUOTE] In our region it mostly means the road workers they hire are lazy as fuck. During this winter we had a freakish amount of moisture (well, more than we normally get anyway) in the form of snow. This of course lead to pot-holes, which the city had to fix. The workers they hired to fill in the pot-holes did simply that: They filled them with asphalt, and nothing more. They didn't dry out the holes (trapping moisture underneath which would freeze and simply double the size of the pot-hole they just "fixed"), they didn't pack in the asphalt, none of what they should've done. Just "Put in a shovel of asphalt until it's full, then smooth it out, move on to the next one". New Mexico roads are just a joke all around. I can recall an instance where a friend of mine and I were driving to Albuquerque, we got on the highway and it was in such a shitty condition that his iPod Nano was skipping.
[QUOTE=Zero-Point;47757635]In our region it mostly means the road workers they hire are lazy as fuck. During this winter we had a freakish amount of moisture (well, more than we normally get anyway) in the form of snow. This of course lead to pot-holes, which the city had to fix. The workers they hired to fill in the pot-holes did simply that: They filled them with asphalt, and nothing more. They didn't dry out the holes (trapping moisture underneath which would freeze and simply double the size of the pot-hole they just "fixed"), they didn't pack in the asphalt, none of what they should've done. Just "Put in a shovel of asphalt until it's full, then smooth it out, move on to the next one". New Mexico roads are just a joke all around. I can recall an instance where a friend of mine and I were driving to Albuquerque, we got on the highway and it was in such a shitty condition that his iPod Nano was skipping.[/QUOTE] That's not "lazy", that's what they are supposed to do. they are filling the holes with cold mix instead of HMA.
[QUOTE=Snoberry Tea;47753377]This kind of thinking is exactly why most bachelors degree graduates owe more money to their college than a fucking house costs, and it needs to stop. 0.5% tax on your 401k is not going to make you lose money, and if it DOES then you need to choose different stock options. Likely your custodial fees are more than this will be.[/QUOTE] I don't see the comparison you're making about college costs... As for 401k's- a majority of them are "funds" rather then stock picks. The funds are invested in stocks of which you have no control over (other then investing in another fund). On a good year a return can be 5-8%- so it's easy to see how a few .5% taxes add up in a way to induce a negative return on anything less then a good year.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;47758905]That's not "lazy", that's what they are supposed to do. they are filling the holes with cold mix instead of HMA.[/QUOTE] Perhaps not lazy, but I'm sure we can all agree given the circumstances (being that it didn't really fix anything and served no other purpose besides providing a convenient outlet for people to splatter asphalt all over their vehicles as they drive over them) that it's incredibly half-assed and inefficient.
[QUOTE=yannickgd;47757439]Whilst this is true, an average american actually pays way less taxes than the average person in my country. If tax levels would be put to the same amount as they are here in the netherlands, your country's government budget would go from 3504 billion us dollars to 4917 billion us dollars. Just imagine what[B] a competent government[/B] would be able to provide for its citizens with that much more money.[/QUOTE] Yeah see, this is where applying to the US fails. I wouldn't mind a raise in taxes if it meant the funds were used smartly, but the simple fact of the matter is the US is very inefficient with its money.
If this passed I would go back to school immediately.
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;47756237]Honestly I think the US needs to spend more efficiently before they start raising taxes. The money they want for this program could probably easily be found elsewhere in some other useless program's budget.[/QUOTE] Although on a small scale, I've got a good example for that. Up until a couple years ago, my school system had never failed a levy. [B]Never[/B]. Because they rarely asked for one, and they really spent their money spectacularly. Distributing it so that we really had a lot to offer, offered it well, but nothing was really fancy. After one levy they completely fucked all their spending promises up, cut things they said they wouldn't, spent on things they shouldn't have. They haven't passed a levy since. The US needs to do that in reverse.
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