kazoomonger (u/kazoomonger)

kazoomonger commented on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B investors.intuit.com/news... · Posted by u/marc__1

robomartin · 4 years ago

This isn’t going to be a popular comment, yet, it has to be said because it is painfully obvious reality escapes some.

Here it goes:

The poor do not elevate the poor out of poverty.

If you want to chip away at poverty you have to create incentives for entrepreneurs, investors, business people and, yes, the rich, to engage in favorable economic activity. One of the simplest ways to do this is through the tax code. As much as I hate using taxation to promote behavior, that’s the best way we know so far.

We have lifted more people out of poverty through these methods than any other way.

Be careful what you wish for, because government has never, in the history of humanity, elevated the poor. Quite to the contrary.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

> The poor do not elevate the poor out of poverty.

What a bizarre, paternalistic take. This is the same sort of narcissistic logic that led to Reagan's golden showers^W^W trickle-down economics.

I mean, I agree about entrepeneurs. Historically, the thing that has lifted communities out of poverty has been entrepeneurs in that community that contribute back to it. In other words, the poor very much elevate the poor out of poverty.

The rest of your comment (e.g. "and, yes, the rich") is just weird apologetics for people that don't need it, and can pay for it anyways, so why are you wasting your time doing it for free?

kazoomonger commented on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B investors.intuit.com/news... · Posted by u/marc__1

blowski · 4 years ago

That’s a “no true Scotsman” argument if ever I’ve heard one. You can’t say nobody helps the poor, then disparage the significant amount of help people do give.

I belong to a church, and the minister frequently represents vulnerable people in the local community to politicians. He’s also sponsored by the church to attend events campaigning on behalf of low-paid people in the UK. And we contribute to a fund which publishes articles and runs events to raise awareness about homelessness.

If that doesn’t count as lobbying for people then I don’t know what does. I do wish it were more effective.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

It's not a "no true Scotsman" argument because "help" is a vague term to begin with.

Lots of churches say nice things while extracting maximum revenue from their congregation. Can you point to any actual political changes that have occurred as a result, or is it just some nice words?

kazoomonger commented on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B investors.intuit.com/news... · Posted by u/marc__1

blowski · 4 years ago

They really do. Unions, churches, charities.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

They really don't. You're misusing the word "lobby".

Churches and charities don't lobby politically for poor people, they take them on as a righteous burden to bear. Some churches and charities are even used as tax breaks for rich people.

Unions used to, to some degree. They've mostly been neutered and have very limited political capital.

kazoomonger commented on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B investors.intuit.com/news... · Posted by u/marc__1

blowski · 4 years ago

It’s everybody. Politicians lobby for breaks for their constituency, as well as increasing taxes to raise revenue. Companies lobby for breaks for their industry. Issue groups lobby for breaks (or taxes) to encourage behaviours they want to see. Even the poor do this, albeit typically via unions or other collective means.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

"It's everybody" just does not capture reality.

I got a tax benefit semi-recently by buying an electric car, about $7500. It was the largest I've ever gotten. Compare that to one small crumb of Trump's tax deductions that was covered by the New York Times. A $70k tax deduction for hair styling.

It's just not the same. Wealth gives you an outsized influence on politics, which lets you accumulate more wealth, at a faster rate than those poorer than you.

kazoomonger commented on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B investors.intuit.com/news... · Posted by u/marc__1

robomartin · 4 years ago

> its designed that way to benefit the wealthy

"Design" implies intent requiring coordination and effort on the part of a group of people strategically situated to deliver a result. "To benefit the wealthy" identifies a clear and well-defined objective as the focus of such activities.

Who came up with the original idea to "design" a tax code "to benefit the wealthy"?

Was it more than one person? Names please.

What were the design principles? No hand-wavy stuff, looking for specific objectives, etc.

Over what period of time?

Can you provide a year-by-year (or close enough) summary of the progression of this design and how it met your stated purpose?

How? By this I mean: How was such a coordinated effort organized and run over, presumably, decades and through various generations of politicians participating in the process.

And, for all of the above, documentation please.

I remain puzzled about whether people just stay stuff like this or actually believe it. You don't have to make too much of an effort in digging into these ideas to fully identify them as nonsensical. Yet people believe this stuff without having one shred of proof, evidence, history or documentation. Not very different from folks who believe the COVID vaccine injects you with tiny little robots the government can use to control you (one of the things people say and I don't really know how to react other than to shrug and wish them well).

I'll add my own observation to this: No, the US tax code is not designed to benefit the wealthy. It is based on incentivizing behavior through tax breaks/credits.

For individuals the simplest example is the ability to deduct your mortgage interest from your income. Another example is the 30% solar system tax credit (I think it's down to 26% now).

At the business level you get such things as Section 179 tax credits, which allow you to reduce your tax burden by as much as 100% of the purchase value of qualifying business property. For example, when we purchased our last Haas CNC vertical machining center and all the tooling and software required to design, program and run it, we got a Section 179 tax credit of nearly $250K.

The theory behind these incentives is to promote behaviors. We bought equipment. The tax code treats this as a desirable behavior because it creates jobs. The options were: Send the IRS a check for $250K or send them $0 and use that money to buy additional machining capabilities. This is what is called a "no brainer". Everyone wins.

This is why businesses can seem to pay zero taxes. Well, if they invest enough money into things the tax code wants them to put money into, they get to pay less taxes. Yet, in certain circles, this is treated with blinding ignorance; the headlines often reading company "x paid zero taxes". Nobody bothers to understand any of it.

For the record, I don't like the idea of using the tax code to control behavior. I think this is (was) a terrible idea. It gives politicians tools they should not be able to access. Taxation should be as simple as possible, to a limit. The problems start once you try to simplify it. For example, "You must pay 10% of your income". OK, someone sets up an LLC and pay themselves very little. They pay very little in taxes. This is a very simplistic example to say that one of the reasons for which the tax code quickly gets convoluted is because, in software developer terms, it has to be a massive chain of "if-else if" statements in order to address all permutations and limit cheating to the extent possible. Once you start down that path you end-up with never-ending complexity because we don't have a way to control it.

Perhaps a simpler approach would have no income tax at all for anyone (state of federal). All the money needed to run governments at various levels comes from taxing transactions. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of options here. For example, tax every electronic funds transfer; tax every single imported good; national VAT, etc. Not a simple idea. There are no simple options. Maybe that's my point. It wasn't designed to benefit the rich, it turned into a monster that requires more and more "if else-if" statements to be added every year because we find more and more conditions that require evaluation. It's crazy. Not sure what they right answer might be. Not sure there is a right answer at all. And, no, what they do in (country) "m" has no bearing whatsoever on what is done or should be done in any other country. Tax codes evolve almost like natural selection, they respond to evolutionary pressure and each makes sense (to the extent possible) within the nation it evolved from.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

That was a lot of extra words around the crucial bit:

> It is based on incentivizing behavior through tax breaks/credits.

Who do you think has time and money to spend lobbying for new tax breaks to their benefit? Hint: it's not the poor

kazoomonger commented on Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B investors.intuit.com/news... · Posted by u/marc__1

aerosmile · 4 years ago

That's a popular view, but only true for people who don't have any deductions, depreciations, business expenses, mileage, etc. For a large group of people, the IRS can run the math only after you submit the full list of inputs.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

In sane countries, the "popular view" holds, as it should. Not so much in the US, though. The IRS knows how much I make, I want them to send me a form that says "we think you made this much, if that's true and you have no fancy deductions, sign here".

Then I just sign a form and return it instead of slogging through the bullshit that Intuit et al has lobbied for.

kazoomonger commented on JSON Schema bundling formalised json-schema.org/blog/post... · Posted by u/relequestual

akie · 4 years ago

I might be exceptionally dense, but it's hard for me to see practical applications for something like this. In the end, if you implement this in your application, you will have a mechanism to say "this input document is invalid". AND THEN WHAT? Your only option is to discard it.

I'd rather live by the old maxim "be liberal in what you accept, and strict in what you produce". But perhaps I'm overlooking an important use case here, in which I'd happily stand corrected.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

When using tooling that accepts YAML (or JSON) configuration, I always want something to say "this is what you can write that will have an effect".

As a specific example, when I'm writing a snapcraft.yaml, I want to be able to view a schema to see what all I can put in there. What's important is that the schema is actually used by snapcraft itself for validation, otherwise it's no better than the rest of the snapcraft documentation, which is pretty meh. Schemas are also easy to digest for other tooling, so e.g. my editor can automatically highlight when I make a mistake, without having to specifically write a plugin for each tool that accepts JSON/YAML

kazoomonger commented on As a virologist I’m shocked my work has been hijacked by anti-vaxxers theguardian.com/commentis... · Posted by u/ystad

hammock · 4 years ago

Fair point. An overrun issue can be mitigated if a) hospitals would not dismiss unvaccinated staff thereby leading them to be understaffed (an unstaffed bed = not a bed, which is one reason why hospitals "don't have enough beds"), and b) US medical staff would accept more of the treatment options available in other countries (Japan, India, etc) such as ivermectin.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

You cannot seriously be trying to advocate for hospitals being run with unvaccinated staff.

> We treated your asthma attack, sorry about the covid that you got while you were here, hope those two things don't affect each other

I have to agree with the other commenter that you're either not arguing in good faith, or you're so blindly ideologically driven that you've thrown basic reasoning skills out the window.

kazoomonger commented on Companies that are avoiding hiring in Colorado coloradoexcluded.com/... · Posted by u/mooreds

drstewart · 4 years ago

I'd like to see a law forcing companies to pay everyone $1,000,000/year. Then we'd all be rich. It's so easy, I can't believe no one has thought of it before. Just force people to do stuff.

kazoomonger · 4 years ago

This is a pretty lazy dismissal that doesn't even make clear the connection you're trying to make.

How is open salary information the same as paying everyone $1M/year?