House Republicans to vote on bill abolishing IRS, eliminating income tax
foxnews.com
foxnews.com
Since they oppose this by trying to pull funding from them.
There's also plenty of room for improvement of course (including learning from other industrial social democracies as well as recent internal issues), so that's relative, but the most reasonable perspective to start from is that we're all ridiculously lucky. Without substantial appreciation for that fact we're quite likely to wreck institutions that have gotten us here.
And I agree, it is astoundingly well-functioning at it.
It also doesn't pass muster with my own lived experience. I've loved all of the 15 years I've spent in both Northern and Southern metro California, and I'd do it again.
At one point last year the median household income was $75k/year. The median house price was $525k or so. Basically this created the situation if you couldn't afford a house before the housing crisis, the $1500 to $2000 rent payments were going to eat into your income and make it harder to buy a house.
The NIMBY politics surrounding housing has got to go in California. We're beginning to get that here.
How interesting. Presumably as enlightened examples of the opposite of California governance, they wouldn't have any such thing as a housing crisis caused by popularity.
Or... it could be they've had the luxury of not having popular-place problems thus far, and like everyone else are suddenly discovering that actual governance is hard.
My property taxes have more than doubled over the last decade.
A popular HN perspective would describe SF's problem as NIMBY and that we should allow developers to build without regulations like mandatory parking, but the transportation situation in SF is really bad. I feel that a city cannot just scale linearly once you pass a certain population / density threshold.
When I go to SF I expect to burn 20 minutes solely on parking or to pay very expensive parking fees for private lots. If you use any major highways in California during rush hour then expect a 30-45 min tax on your time. If people want SF to pass 1M then there needs to be a deliberate public works project to revamp the infrastructure in a massive way.
Also, do people think that building more lots would make things cheaper? London's population is ~9M, NYC is ~8.4M, Tokyo is ~14M. If London gets to 10M, is housing going to be finally affordable to UK citizens? When will Tokyo be affordable? SF is approximately 3-4x the population density of London and 3x of Tokyo. The vibe I get when driving around SF residentials is one of claustrophobic density, like the city can't afford any interstitial gaps between lots for things like trees.
In short, public golf courses -- moreover -- the protection of public golf courses. That's pure NIMBYism right there. California chose golf courses over housing. Think about that.
Now this is "homes" I'm talking about, not other dense living situations like apartment buildings and hotels.
This is partially due to people buying up available housing stock to AirBNB resulting in a skewing of prices.
Many houses that would be back on the market now sit empty with no tenants for significant portions of every month thanks to that business model.
And I'm not sure that AirBnB avoids any particular segment of the market; it can as easily cannibalize 1bd condos as it can 4bd homes.
I'm gradually approaching retirement age and looking for a place with better climate to retire to, but everywhere I've visited - including California - has a lot of negatives that outweigh the positives of where I currently live, which (by a lot of metrics) has some of the worst climate in the nation. Despite all of that, I might still put up with additional crap elsewhere to live in a more moderate climate. Don't underestimate climate as a powerful decider for where people live.
And "batshit policy" shouldn't be taken seriously as a charge without serious specific policy criticisms.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
> I have a hard time combining this sentiment with my lived experience in California.
I have no problem at all reconciling it with my 45 years of lived experience in California. About the only good thing California Republicans did for government in that time is provide such a flagrant display of how a minority dedicated to scoring political points with no concern for the general warfare could abuse supermajority requirements as to motivate California voters to change the Constitution to make the state somewhat practically governable despite the existence of the California Republican Party by removing the legislative supermajority requirement for the annual budget.
And California's progressive lock arguably isn't even really old enough to drive.
Yet, that's exactly what the "government doesn't work" crowd seems to be pushing for. It's great if you're a billionaire neo-feudalist and terrible if you're literally anyone else.
I'm not sure what this tax issue has to do with the right to vote?
Don't follow the fact that only billionaire feudalists are allowed to think their government isn't working well? Why can't ordinary citizens be unhappy?
> Don't follow the fact that only billionaire feudalists are allowed to think their government isn't working well? Why can't ordinary citizens be unhappy?
You can think a government isn't working well, but the solution is not "dismantle the government" (which would lead to corporate rule and kind of already has), it's "elect a better government".
A charitable interpretation of Republican "fundamental ideology", as it were, would be that they prefer more well-functioning social institutions at lower levels of government, closer to the people those institutions are meant to serve. It would make sense than beyond just a publicity stunt to lower federal taxes and have states and localities tax more.
I can't take you seriously if you're claiming that one of the two major parties in this country isn't interested in the well-being of the country.
But at this point, no, I don't believe that's actually what's animating it. Selective election denialism is as nihilistic about local institutions as it is about national ones, while theories about state legislatures overridding citizen ballots sure isn't moving things closer to the people.
Whether you can take me seriously isn't any particular concern of mine, whether you can take the actual underlying topics seriously is the primary matter of concern.
The J6 response from the Republicans is the hallmark about power and politics in the party these days. Law and Order is fine long as it's only applied Biden's son or Hillary Clinton.
This.
This was the problem with Democrats for a long time. They weren't for anything, they were just against Republicans. Republicans in government used to be well-educated and their main ideological thrust was based on a set of principles of limited government, free-market capitalism, and maximum agency of the governed. They fell short of this ideal, but the ideal was there.
Not any more. They're doing stupid symbolic things like this resolution to "get them Democrats" not to actually fix anything, and not as a matter of principle. Part of the problem is any conservative leaning person of any intelligence or reasonable level of education doesn't go into government, they go into business. We end up stuck with bozos like we have now.
This move to abolish the IRS is as much theater as the move to "abolish" daylight savings time in the U.S. which never goes beyond submission of a bill.
If they'd backed this with something like a flat tax, that would have been a bold move, even semi-realistic. But this is circus fare.
Edit: When they controlled all three during the beginning of the previous President's time in office. Still waiting for infrastructure [week] to end and I'm still waiting to see what the Republicans ACA replacement will be... SMH
People are getting savaged by inflation while the Democrats want the IRS to hire more agents that have a habit of targeting the middle income and poor because they are low hanging fruit.
That's what the additional funds is trying to rectify.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-20/super-ric...
>They currently target middle income people because the lack the funds to go after the affluent and the wealthy and the obscenely rich.
Low-hanging fruit: The obvious or easy things that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/low-hanging%20fru...
It's not nonsense, it's the reality.
Additionally, do you really believe US corruption is minor enough that politicians will target the major donor class for tax violations en mass?
> do you really believe US corruption is minor enough that politicians will target the major donor class for tax violations en mass?
Not giving the enforcement agencies the means to do the enforcement is not going to help either. If you are worried about corruption in the US, support efforts that get money out of politics, reversing Citizens United, etc. Not by virtually absolving rich people from paying taxes "because they already bought the politicians".
But that's not what this does. This doesn't do anything to transition power away from the federal government. It just makes it impossible for the federal government to do its job.
That doesn't prove that they're not interested in the well-being of the country, but only because they know this won't succeed. If they thought it could pass, it would be wildly irresponsible. Instead, all we know is that at this moment they've chosen to make a grand and pointless gesture instead of actually governing.
And what do you suppose should be the priorities for the federal government? What needs actually governing that can't be better done at state and local levels at the moment?
We could have a decent argument about which jobs are better handled by a federal government and which aren't. The notion that the federal government isn't actually doing anything and could just vanish tomorrow is absurd and not worth discussing.
Even so, I'd be willing to say, "Sure, fine, the government is doing more than it should". That's pretty vacuously true, and also irrelevant. Getting people to agree on which parts are important, and finding a better way to implement them, seems a more germane question.
Where do I sign up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia
I'd refer you to their web site, but they don't appear to have one.
They know it won't become law. The point is to rile up the media, get hits on cable news, fund raise, and generally be useless as a governing body. This is what both parties do when they are out of power, and I would say is what they _prefer_ to do. It's easier than governing, makes them money, gets them media attention, etc.
Both parties here in the US _want_ to be minority parties so that they can behave this way and assume no actual responsibility for anything.
*I'd argue that most people in either party do _want_ to govern. But each one is being hijacked by loud minorities who would rather perform.
Didn't Brexit start as a "there's no way this will actually happen" signaling gesture by establishment Conservatives?
To your point though, a good example of that kind of thing is the idiocy of Republican states who passed years of anti-abortion "trigger laws" in case Roe/Casey were ever overturned. They all assumed those precedence would never be overturned, and so they could be as extreme as they wanted.
Now they are reckoning with their posturing.
The problem with taxing money before it's spent is that you have no way of separating out "good" consumption (e.g. health care) from "bad" consumption (e.g. yachts, 2nd homes). That kind of system leads to convoluted tax codes and things like HSA's and using health insurance as a form of compensation.
that's depends if reinvesting is counted as spend.
Bezos very likely sold much more stocks value wise than spent on boats and cars.
I guess they mean a (federal) sales tax because taxing at time of consumption is fairly hard to implement.
Yet very amusing to imagine.[1]
[1]: In a Monty Python or Douglas Adams way, natch.
Imagine John Cleese working in an office, tallying how much toilet paper every employee uses at work, so that they (the consumers) can be taxed for it, and not their employer (who merely bought it)
The proposal “gets rid of the national personal and corporate income taxes and abolishes the IRS…as well as implements a national sales tax. Additionally, the bill gets rid of the death, gift, and payroll taxes.”
I'm not sure 23% would be enough to offset the loss of the federal income tax.
Same with money that you already took out of a regular 401k and paid taxes on it.
Same with money that was already taxed for the past 5 years.
Etc.
Senate wouldn’t back it and President wouldn’t sign it.
Telling how ignorant audiences are of civics that this stunt would merit an article. (Indeed, a good number of these same reps literally voted to fund the IRS at unprecedented levels just a few weeks ago.)
[0] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2018/11...