DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
22d ago
Second buyer doesn't get taxed on the appreciation; the developer pays FairTax out of the first “retail” sale if the first sale occurs after the FairTax is legislated into existence, otherwise the govt. already got embedded taxes a myriad of ways. Sell at a loss, the govt. doesn’t pay anything.
As a renter, you’re already paying the income taxes of your landlord and property mgmt company’s hirelings, embedded in the price of your rent, similar to “utilities included”. This is a market distortion which is expected to be compensated for by rentals dropping 23% and then having the 23% added back in (30% exclusive) on the receipt as FairTax.
Used homes not being FairTaxed (except renovation/remodel costs) is a philosophical reward similar to owning DVDs costing less than renting them a dozen times or paying streaming and rarely watching. Besides, the homeowner will be paying FairTax on everything they’ll use for upkeep in the future.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
NATO was (since the 70’s) a Disneyland vision of Europe propagated by American thinktanks and intelligence, propped up by US aid and USAID. A place for young PMC progressives to take a summer break, as real as Cabo or Cozumel.
The Ukraine war is the culmination of Europeans believing that fantasyland. A million dead with almost no gains and Nordstream 2 gone. Do not believe my country’s military/industrial decisionmakers. We cannot hold your borders locked in their postwar positions forever.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
I do find myself occasionally wondering if the local abandoned Walmart (shoplifting killed it) might be a fine place for a novel nonprofit to set up an indoor tent city for the local homeless, with security guards and nurses on staff, a doctor dropping by every day for prescriptions, and the in-store pharmacy restored to full functionality. The big outdoor parking lot might be additional space for the hardier hobos willing to rough it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
This makes me wonder if “Shakespeare’s women roles were always played by men in theatrical drag” was solely due to the oft-claimed patriarchal misogyny caused by rigid religious sensitivities about putting women on display, or if transwomen and/or crossdressing gay men convinced society to let them monopolize the parts. I’m guessing some mix.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
FairTax as the fairest tax
The concept of a market as a business fascinates me. It's a business that's a container for other businesses.
The ur-example is a hair salon in a strip mall (business apartment). The manager of this strip mall business (who may or may not be the proprietor/owner of the business) rents one of the suites to the proprietor of this salon. The salon in turn furnishes each of the salon booths and rents them to the individual hairdressers, each one an independent contractor. This salon has a single payment system where the money is divided between this hairdresser and the salon, but any tips you give the hairdresser are theirs to keep. (This example is not how all salons operate.)
In this example, is the hairdresser paying the salon a booth rental out of the total cost of the haircut, or is the customer paying the salon a fee for getting a haircut there instead of having the hairdresser come to her home and cut her hair in the bathroom?
I've decided it makes the most sense to call the salon's cut a "market fee", a part of the price which the customer pays but the hosted business doesn't get to keep. It's a true three-way transaction, not a pair of two-way transactions.
So how does this become a conversation about taxes?
Three simple models of taxation
Philosopher Robert Nozick famously came up with a way to philosophically justify private property in a society, but failed to find a way to justify taxes, which derive from private property, other than the sheer necessity. (His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a magnificent book.)
- The King's Due: The king is the rightful owner of all that's in the kingdom his army protects, and so he has the right to tax your wealth as a subset of his. He makes sure to tax the wealthy more so they can't afford to raise an army against him and become the new king.
- The Common Pot: The people of the community each give a share of what they all have, and usually the ones who earn more give more. This way they can pay an army to keep them safe.
- The Market Fee: The country is a meta-market, paying an army to create a safe place where businesses and marketplaces can exist safely, without fear of disruption by foreign armies. They and their customers pay a portion of their economic activity to fund the army, proportional to the business they do.
(Please note, whichever model of taxation you prefer or use internally, modern-day taxes can be seen as any or all of these. This is a simplistic philosophical model.)
In cases 1 and 2, the obligation of the nation's people to pay taxes is based on what other people want (1) or need (2), and only respects personal property if there are safeguards in place, and only while the king or the people respect those safeguards.
The FairTax is a Market Fee form of taxation which automatically respects private property by only taxing business transactions, and by allowing anyone to resell property that has already been FairTaxed once without ever paying tax on it again. It even builds in a dividend for the people, the owners of the national market, equal to the taxation they'd pay at the poverty level, making the government free on the net calculation for the poor.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.
The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
He’s a showman and a patriot.
He’s the reincarnation of PT Barnum, running a rally at Barnum’s own Madison Square Garden. He’s a dealmaker from Queens. He’s someone who took the silver spoon he was given and made the most of it. He’s the average non-ideological American who never really thought about partisan politics until it started affecting him.
He’s a husband and father whose family saw him almost get killed several months ago.
He’s a political moderate who came in as an outsider at a time when Americans wanted an outsider and Bernie had been taken down by the ultimate insider, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. He’s an anti-woke political moderate who’s seen the beast from the inside, and wants another stab at its blackened heart. He’s the kind of man who believes in strength and power and expects to be lauded for using them for common-sense win-win goals. He’s the kind of American the founders imagined standing next to kings and holding his own.
When everyone else is playing chess, he’s prepping a pro-wrestling move that’ll knock the board over. If Ted Cruz is Batman, Trump is Superman.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
The ACA was designed to make private health insurance so onerous a hassle and so hideous an expense that the public would overwhelmingly approve Hillary’s single-payer she’d been working on since the 90’s.
Then Trump won, tried to kill the ACA, and was stopped by McCain’s spiteful deathbed vote. So it endures.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
Babylon Bee headline satirizing the bias: “CNN: ‘Clumsy Trump Hits Head On Bullet’ ”
Videos of the incident and the shooter: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
What erosion of democracy do you believe Donald Trump, avatar of your outgroup, to want?
Steelmanning voting concepts, I have observed that my fellow Americans either want:
- zero fraudulent ballots cast at the cost of stringent and sometimes onerous requirements that may result in fewer legitimate ballots being counted, or
- zero legitimate voters prevented from having their ballots cast and counted, even if that may result in a few illegitimate votes being included in the count.
Accordingly, I refuse to countenance the strawman of “Republicans just want to suppress the legitimate vote” without the flip strawman, “Democrats just want to stuff the ballot box.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
An intriguing new theological heresy came to me as I was preparing to sleep.
I'm a Trinitarian Christian and a geek, so I can't help getting nerd-sniped by discussions of the Trinity's internal "economy". My Triessentialism philosophy started from praying that God would resolve the apparent logical contradiction of the Trinity, and seeing an answer which has satisfied me for over twenty years. I've listened to the Trinities podcast (which turned out to be run by a blatant unitarian) and discussions of different formulations of understanding God's Trinitarian nature.
Now, I'm a fan of the Lutheran Satire channel's videos because of the hilarious and interesting ways they puncture heresies. Their most famous video, St. Patrick's Bad Analogies, source of the "That's modalism, Patrick!" meme, is a must-watch on or around St. Patrick's Day.
So this is the thought which came to me at bedtime and put a wide grin on my face. What if each Person of the Trinity is the only One Who exists, truly God before all and above all, but each in a different one of the three overlapping realms of the Physical, Logical, and Emotional? What if none of the Persons of the Trinity has ever met the others, but would have had to infer their existence through their effects on humans were He not omniscient?
It would make a fun and fascinating cosmological foundation for a fictional work of high fantasy, but here in our universe it's an obvious heresy, and I don't believe it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
As a fanatic for stories, a fan of the best SF stories, this resonates heavily with me.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
If thousands of Ukrainians are deported to Ukraine, especially if fighting is still ongoing or resumes in the near future (more likely than not given Russia's stated territorial ambitions), I wonder if this event will be remembered in the same way turning Jewish arrivals by boat prior and during WW2 is remembered.
Why (outside of naked partisan historical shaping) would turning over refugees to be press-ganged to the Eastern Front be remembered this way, but not paying for there to be an Eastern Front in the first place?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
8mo ago
There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into.
It seems to me that if each claim in that extensive list has an advocate diving deep into it, yet still convinced, that’s meta-evidence that more than one scheme might have been used. Instead of a single silver Biden bullet, perhaps it makes sense to look for a spray of silver shotgun pellets.
As for neutral sources on the validity of the claims, the moment any reputable news source even hints that they think a single Trump-positive election fraud claim has enough merit to consider possibly investigating, their editor will forever be branded a MAGA Republican in the bag for Trump. This is how political tribes work, and how they capture without explicit conspiracy: likemindedness, singularity of purpose.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
TriWest was a southwestern US insurer for veterans and their families. Valid claims just sailed through with minimal administrative overhead because their claims system was well automated and optimized.
They were good and not-scummy.
UnitedHealth bid a lower cost for the contract, won it, and promptly started denying most claims on the first pass. Only clinics which sent appeals would get paid, and almost always did.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
How the world would be different if Spielberg hadn't deferred to Lucas and instead had taken the helm he'd been offered! Three fantastic films, the build-up of the chosen one, only to see him fall to the Dark Side in bits and pieces, obsessed by the loss of the attachments in his life which he'd been told to eschew from the start.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
A 2011 South Korean study with unique methodology for the time suggested autism rates are naturally about 1 per 38, or about three percent, assuming no difference in rates by race. This research came at a time of greater awareness of high functioning autism at nonclinical levels:
The South Korean study probably produced such a high figure because it screened a lot of kids who seemed to be doing OK and included in-person evaluations of any child suspected of having autism, Grinker says. "Two-thirds of the children with autism that we ended up identifying were in mainstream schools, unrecognized, untreated," he says.
American rates have ended up about the same 1/38.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
My darkest conspiracy theory is:
- those were the vaccinated
- they’d developed the vaccine with the virus
- the heart attacks were a known side effect
- the big delay in getting the already-existing vaccine out was twofold: to tweak the formula to reduce the vax heart attacks to a level less than the worst strain of the bioweapon, and to have lockdowns until Trump “lost.”
I put my pattern recognition at 10% likelihood because I’ve lost most trust in the fed gov being able to pull off a scheme like that.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
To steelman the “European Civil War” concept, the monarchies of Europe involved in WWI were basically cousins from the same elite family.
As for WWII being similar, a case could be made that the onerous restrictions on Germany were basically a continuation of the same war but without bullets.
(Not that I believe either.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
4mo ago
Interesting! Mayhaps the Alt-Right (2016-2020) was three-foundationers who left the Left because they were getting too six-foundation Holier Than Thou? This would be a fantastic look at the Culture War in a longer write-up.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1mo ago
It’s more along the general theme of Galt’s pirate radio speech in Atlas Shrugged.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
3mo ago
There’s more sanity to some of these lines than people think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Geography
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
“Sounds like someone controlled by an oligarch to me…” (sarcasm)
But seriously, this is a major shift in Cthulhu swimming leftwards and making people go insane. If every right-wing win is de facto evidence of Russian election interference and every right-wing loss is a victory for democracy, the rules-based world order is screwed.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2mo ago
Happy May the Fourth! Here’s a scene Grok wrote for me from Galen Erso, architect of the Death Star, in the style of (and with the morals of) Ayn Rand. I made a few tweaks here and there for accuracy and to emphasize certain points. May the Force be with you.
My mind is my own, and no force in the galaxy can claim it. The Empire, with its blasters and its threats, its bureaucrats and its banners, believes it can chain a man’s reason to its will. They took my body, dragged me from Lah’mu’s quiet fields, murdered Lyra, and held Jyn’s shadow over me like a blade. They thought they could seize my intellect, bend it to their machine of death. Fools. They do not understand the nature of a mind that creates. They cannot fathom the fire that burns in a man who knows his own worth. I am Galen Erso, and my mind is not theirs to command—it is mine, inviolate, eternal.
In the sterile halls of Eadu, surrounded by the timid and the compromised, I labored under their gaze. They demanded a weapon, a Death Star, a monument to their collectivist nightmare—a machine to crush the individual beneath the weight of fear. They could have built it without me eventually, with blood-thirsty sycophants managing the output of scientific minds cowed by fear. They thought my equations, my crystals, my genius would serve their purpose more quickly, and they were right.
But purpose is not theirs to dictate. Purpose is the province of the creator, the man who thinks, who dares to see beyond the violent herd’s clamor. They gave me kyber, the heart of the stars, and expected me to forge a club for their brutality. Instead, I wove a trap. In the reactor’s core, I hid my truth: a single exhaust port, unshielded, able to cause reactor overpressure; a whisper of defiance that could bring their monstrosity crashing down. This was not sabotage—it was justice. It was the assertion of my right to create, to define the terms of my work, to refuse their perversion of my mind’s fire.
Let them parade their TIE fighters and their Moffs. Let Krennic strut with his cape and his lies. They are nothing—parasites who produce no value, who exist only to steal the creations of better men. I saw their world, a galaxy of gray submission, where the individual is ground to dust for the sake of their “order.”
I will not kneel. I will not let my work, my reason, my life’s essence, be twisted into their instrument of enslavement. The flaw I built is my signature, my declaration that no man’s mind can be forced to betray itself. If the Rebellion finds it, if Jyn carries my spark, they will strike the blow I could not. And when the Death Star burns, it will be my mind—free, unbowed, triumphant—that lights the flame.
They thought they could break me with threats, with loss. But a man who knows his own value cannot be broken. My love for Lyra, for Jyn, is not their weapon—it is my strength, my reason to fight. I am no martyr, no sacrificial lamb for their altar. I am a creator, and I have chosen my stand. The Empire may take my life, but they will never take my soul. In that reactor flaw, I have carved my freedom, my truth, my self. Let them build their empires on the ashes of others. I have built my own monument, and it will outlast them all.
Breaking Bad is filmed and set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my hometown. In a pivotal episode, “Face Off,” set in July of 2009 but filmed around 2010 and aired in 2011, I saw a vehicle in a parking lot greatly resembling the vehicle I owned in 2009.
It wasn’t that vehicle. I had already sold that vehicle by the time the episode was filmed, to a private buyer who was almost certainly not a Netflix prop purchaser. Upon rewinding and rewatching, it’s not only a slightly different tint, it’s a different year’s model.
Still, it’s fun to see what could have been my vehicle in a parking lot I know I’ve never parked in, at a time when I still had it. Whenever I rewatch the episode with friends or family, I can point it out.
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