Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
@VegasFrank said:
I would, Steve, but I Just don't care what cartoon picture is on my tub of butter.
You are, of course, too smart to not know that you've skirted the point, however, you're ultimately correct.
Sorry guys, 9 days without a cigar or alcohol and my tolerance for the slow surrender of our way of life to the Cancel Culture movement has dropped from low to nil. Getting a little stir-crazy here, brings out my inner JD.
@peter4jc , can I expect this to continue? Or, get worse?
Y'all pray for Faye, a friend of ours who's been through this recently told her "He may get a little testy." To which she replied "How will I know?"
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
@VegasFrank said:
I would, Steve, but I Just don't care what cartoon picture is on my tub of butter.
You are, of course, too smart to not know that you've skirted the point, however, you're ultimately correct.
True, I did. But I've given up on idealism and I really actually don't care. Paint a **** gremlin or a picture of a post-sonic drive thru diarrhea for all I care. Butter is butter.
We lost our culture when we took down statues of the anonymous confederate soldier and stonewall Jackson, who was as pious as a pope and never owned a slave. Bring those things back and maybe I'll give two Fuchs about a tub of butter. But probably still not...
The land o lakes indian is gone because of more racist images like aunt Jemima and the Washington redskins. Just like with everything else in the world, we will force you to do something right with our oversight if you continue to do that thing wrong without us.
End of the day, BFD.
Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
Sorry guys, 9 days without a cigar or alcohol and my tolerance for the slow surrender of our way of life to the Cancel Culture movement has dropped from low to nil. Getting a little stir-crazy here, brings out my inner JD.
@peter4jc , can I expect this to continue? Or, get worse?
Wait a minute... I thought it was cigars and alcohol that made me a curmudgeon; you're saying they're what keeps you closer to normal?
Sorry guys, 9 days without a cigar or alcohol and my tolerance for the slow surrender of our way of life to the Cancel Culture movement has dropped from low to nil. Getting a little stir-crazy here, brings out my inner JD.
@peter4jc , can I expect this to continue? Or, get worse?
Wait a minute... I thought it was cigars and alcohol that made me a curmudgeon; you're saying they're what keeps you closer to normal?
Well, "normal" might be a stretch. Definitely mellower though. Now Faye's out there running my weedeater, she already mowed the lawn. It's driving me nuts. I should be counting my blessings! Heavy, heavy sigh..........
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
Above we see two labels, from items in my refrigerator.
One of the labels is indicative of a company that recognizes the negative impact of cultural stereotypes and the ultimate beauty and strength of diversity in our nation.
On the other label, racist forces have compelled the manufacturer to remove the image of the beautiful Native American woman.
Food for thought. The brainwashed will disagree. Post up those WTF's.
In Fumo Pax Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy cigars and that's close enough.
Above we see two labels, from items in my refrigerator.
One of the labels is indicative of a company that recognizes the negative impact of cultural stereotypes and the ultimate beauty and strength of diversity in our nation.
On the other label, racist forces have compelled the manufacturer to remove the image of the beautiful Native American woman.
Food for thought. The brainwashed will disagree. Post up those WTF's.
I was about to look through my photos to see if I still had this saved
Noticed on LinkedIn this morning how commercialized pride month has become as many companies have add the rainbow flag into their logos. Then my daughter sends me this.
So my buddy says that it's about 10 chicken fingers....can't wait to party with Bitcoin Ricky and Deep Pockets Patrick!
Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
Disclaimer: All trolling is provided for the sole entertainment purposes of the author only. Readers may find entertainment and hard core truths, but none are intended. Any resulting damaged feelings or arse chapping of the reader are the sole responsibility of the reader, to include, but not limited to: crying, anger, revenge pørn, and abandonment or deletion of ccom accounts. Offer void in Utah because Utah is terrible.
So my church moved to a new location a few months back, and now it's a 20min. drive each way. Today when I got home I saw a moth inside my car, probably because I had the windows cracked while at church because it's so mother-mary-and-joseph hot around here. It made me sad to think this cute little guy was going to either die or escape into my garage if I parked w/ my windows open again, which of course would mean that he'd be away from his friends, family, and familiar surroundings. So I drove back to church and shooshed him out there; "Bye little friend... live long, be well..." And now I'm eating lunch 40min. late, but it's OK because I have that warm fuzzy feeling from doing my good deed for the day. >! and if you believe any of this, I would of course refer you to the title of this thread. For those who want their two minutes back, please fill out Form ID10T and mail it in.
@peter4jc said:
So my church moved to a new location a few months back, and now it's a 20min. drive each way. Today when I got home I saw a moth inside my car, probably because I had the windows cracked while at church because it's so mother-mary-and-joseph hot around here. It made me sad to think this cute little guy was going to either die or escape into my garage if I parked w/ my windows open again, which of course would mean that he'd be away from his friends, family, and familiar surroundings. So I drove back to church and shooshed him out there; "Bye little friend... live long, be well..." And now I'm eating lunch 40min. late, but it's OK because I have that warm fuzzy feeling from doing my good deed for the day. >! and if you believe any of this, I would of course refer you to the title of this thread. For those who want their two minutes back, please fill out Form ID10T and mail it in.
In the first sentence, my mind went, "Wait. What?"
And I had to look at who posted 3 times.
In Fumo Pax Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy cigars and that's close enough.
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
In colonial times, parts of the North taxed the rich more than Europe did, with Massachusetts going so far as to enact a wealth tax that covered financial holdings, land, jewelry and more. Southern colonies, by contrast, kept rates low and collection ineffectual, to prevent taxes from undermining slavery by eroding the wealth of slaveholders.
After the country’s founding, the low-tax advocates generally won out — until the 20th century, when soaring inequality, two wars and the Great Depression led Washington to create the world’s most progressive tax system. Then the situation flipped again, and top tax rates have plummeted over the last few decades.
Yesterday, the news organization ProPublica published a scoop, based on the tax returns of thousands of wealthy Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. An anonymous source sent ProPublica the material after the organization had published articles about the I.R.S.’s lax enforcement of taxes on the wealthy. (Here’s ProPublica’s explanation of why it decided to publish the new story, despite privacy concerns.)
The tax returns offer details on a story that has long been clear: The wealthy now pay strikingly low tax rates.
To take one example, Bezos’s wealth soared by $120 billion from 2006 to 2018, and his federal taxes during that time amounted to only 1.09 percent of the wealth gain. The situation for the average household was radically different: Its taxes amounted to more than 100 percent of its wealth increase.
‘Buy, borrow, die’
A central reason that very wealthy people can avoid taxes is that the U.S. system taxes only so-called realized gains — like wages or stock sales. But the wealthy often live off unrealized gains — in the form of stocks and other assets that grow more valuable over time. The wealthy borrow against these assets to pay for houses, islands and private planes and then use a variety of strategies to avoid paying taxes on the debt repayment.
One such strategy is waiting until after death to repay the loan — or what Edward McCaffery, a tax expert at the University of Southern California, calls “buy, borrow, die.” Robert McClelland of the Tax Policy Center called it the main revelation of the ProPublica story.
All the while, the wealthy are often able to keep their taxable income low. In 2011, Bezos reported so little income that he qualified for — and claimed — a $4,000 child tax credit. In both 2016 and 2017, Carl Icahn, who’s a billionaire, paid no federal income taxes.
Legal tax avoidance by the wealthy has become more widespread over the past half-century for several reasons. For one, inequality has soared, meaning that the rich have more wealth to protect. And tax rates have fallen significantly.
“It’s amazing how much we’ve cut taxes even since 1997 — on dividends, the estate tax threshold, capital gains and the top rate,” Owen Zidar, a Princeton University economist, told me. “All of those things have become more favorable to the top of the distribution.” The decline in the corporate tax rate — effectively a tax reduction for shareholders — has also been important.
You sometimes hear the cynical view that raising taxes on the wealthy is pointless, because they have the resources to evade any taxes the government tries to impose. But history suggests otherwise.
While some tax avoidance is inevitable, the federal government has largely succeeded in raising taxes when it has tried. The very richest Americans paid more than 50 percent of their income in federal taxes during the 1950s and ’60s (and were less successful at shielding their wealth from taxation). Today, that percentage has fallen below 30 percent.
There are three main ways to reverse the decline in tax payments by the wealthy, Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, said. One is a direct tax on wealth, like those proposed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Two is a tax on unrealized gains — assets that have become more valuable — as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed. Three is an increase in corporate taxes, as President Biden favors. There are also more modest ideas, like a larger estate tax.
Societies can choose how much they do or don’t tax their wealthiest people, Zucman said. “For billionaires,” he added, “the federal income tax — the pillar of the U.S. tax system — has become a voluntary tax.”
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
Warren and Sanders proposal sounds pretty much like what they did in France, which I believe turns out to add up to unmitigated disaster. Slow robbery, as it were. Is anyone considering something more fair? The Flat Tax, perhaps? Maybe the very wealthy could pony-up the same percentages of their true income as the working man?*
*Man is used here in the older sense of the word, meaning all human beings, as it takes far too much time and taxes my memory to recall all of the newly discovered genders by their particular chosen nomenclature.
WARNING: The above post may contain thoughts or ideas known to the State of Caliphornia to cause seething rage, confusion, distemper, nausea, perspiration, sphincter release, or cranial implosion to persons who implicitly trust only one news source, or find themselves at either the left or right political extreme. Proceed at your own risk.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
And the proposal for a tax on unrealized gain has a problem, too, since many middle class folk have retirement accounts (which are taxed when drawn as regular income. As usual it will be, regardless of what they choose, the middle class who will be shouldering the heaviest burden.
@silvermouse said:
And the proposal for a tax on unrealized gain has a problem, too, since many middle class folk have retirement accounts (which are taxed when drawn as regular income. As usual it will be, regardless of what they choose, the middle class who will be shouldering the heaviest burden.
At one time or another in their lives, 58% of taxpayers get assessed as one of the 10% top earners. This usually occurs when they sell a house and/or retire.
At one time or another in their lives, a similar proportion of the top 10% wind up in the top 1%.
Oddball factoids. I think it was Thomas Sowell who adduced them.
“It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)
It's a good idea to have a fair tax structure. I don't like the wealthy being able to 'cheat legally' but I also don't like making them into the villains either. I remember a video a while back that explained how if you took all the income of all the top incomes and put that against the federal budget, all their money would be gone in a month... and that's not just a taxed percentage, that was all of their income. So while we want to think taxing the rich is a panacea it isn't.
What makes as much sense (to me) as finding a fair tax structure is finding a way to trim federal spending. Kinda like how you and I have to do it; can't spend more than we earn... what's the best way if you want to deal w/ less income? Spend less.
It doesn’t matter how much they take in, it’s never enough. I’m also super sick of money not going where it’s supposed to go, and no one is ever held accountable.
"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give". Winston Churchill. MOW badge received.
Comments
@Patrickbrick @Rhamlin are you guys ready to party at the pool at the encore?
You are, of course, too smart to not know that you've skirted the point, however, you're ultimately correct.
Sorry guys, 9 days without a cigar or alcohol and my tolerance for the slow surrender of our way of life to the Cancel Culture movement has dropped from low to nil. Getting a little stir-crazy here, brings out my inner JD.
@peter4jc , can I expect this to continue? Or, get worse?
Y'all pray for Faye, a friend of ours who's been through this recently told her "He may get a little testy." To which she replied "How will I know?"
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
True, I did. But I've given up on idealism and I really actually don't care. Paint a **** gremlin or a picture of a post-sonic drive thru diarrhea for all I care. Butter is butter.
We lost our culture when we took down statues of the anonymous confederate soldier and stonewall Jackson, who was as pious as a pope and never owned a slave. Bring those things back and maybe I'll give two Fuchs about a tub of butter. But probably still not...
The land o lakes indian is gone because of more racist images like aunt Jemima and the Washington redskins. Just like with everything else in the world, we will force you to do something right with our oversight if you continue to do that thing wrong without us.
End of the day, BFD.
Wait a minute... I thought it was cigars and alcohol that made me a curmudgeon; you're saying they're what keeps you closer to normal?
Hang in there, Steve.
Well, "normal" might be a stretch. Definitely mellower though. Now Faye's out there running my weedeater, she already mowed the lawn. It's driving me nuts. I should be counting my blessings! Heavy, heavy sigh..........
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
I'm with you on the heavy sigh, Rachel has picked up most of what I did before I got sick and arthritic. I don't like it.
Wtf! 75$ for chicken fingers? I hope it serves 20 people.
MOW badge received.
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy cigars and that's close enough.
I was about to look through my photos to see if I still had this saved
Noticed on LinkedIn this morning how commercialized pride month has become as many companies have add the rainbow flag into their logos. Then my daughter sends me this.
Me: Thinking 18 new posts means some drama goin' down in the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" thread.
Also me: When there ain't that much drama in the 18 new posts after all.
😳
So my buddy says that it's about 10 chicken fingers....can't wait to party with Bitcoin Ricky and Deep Pockets Patrick!
Good thing I don't do pools.
MOW badge received.
$75 for chicken fingers? Better come with free hookers.
Trapped in the People's Communist Republic of Massachusetts.
A bottle of Tito's is $825.00
talk about price gouging. Thats like $30 a bottle normally.
They're just printing money down there
So my church moved to a new location a few months back, and now it's a 20min. drive each way. Today when I got home I saw a moth inside my car, probably because I had the windows cracked while at church because it's so mother-mary-and-joseph hot around here. It made me sad to think this cute little guy was going to either die or escape into my garage if I parked w/ my windows open again, which of course would mean that he'd be away from his friends, family, and familiar surroundings. So I drove back to church and shooshed him out there; "Bye little friend... live long, be well..." And now I'm eating lunch 40min. late, but it's OK because I have that warm fuzzy feeling from doing my good deed for the day. >! and if you believe any of this, I would of course refer you to the title of this thread. For those who want their two minutes back, please fill out Form ID10T and mail it in.
In the first sentence, my mind went, "Wait. What?"
And I had to look at who posted 3 times.
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy cigars and that's close enough.
BREAKING NEWS!
edit: from the NYT:
In colonial times, parts of the North taxed the rich more than Europe did, with Massachusetts going so far as to enact a wealth tax that covered financial holdings, land, jewelry and more. Southern colonies, by contrast, kept rates low and collection ineffectual, to prevent taxes from undermining slavery by eroding the wealth of slaveholders.
After the country’s founding, the low-tax advocates generally won out — until the 20th century, when soaring inequality, two wars and the Great Depression led Washington to create the world’s most progressive tax system. Then the situation flipped again, and top tax rates have plummeted over the last few decades.
Yesterday, the news organization ProPublica published a scoop, based on the tax returns of thousands of wealthy Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. An anonymous source sent ProPublica the material after the organization had published articles about the I.R.S.’s lax enforcement of taxes on the wealthy. (Here’s ProPublica’s explanation of why it decided to publish the new story, despite privacy concerns.)
The tax returns offer details on a story that has long been clear: The wealthy now pay strikingly low tax rates.
To take one example, Bezos’s wealth soared by $120 billion from 2006 to 2018, and his federal taxes during that time amounted to only 1.09 percent of the wealth gain. The situation for the average household was radically different: Its taxes amounted to more than 100 percent of its wealth increase.
‘Buy, borrow, die’
A central reason that very wealthy people can avoid taxes is that the U.S. system taxes only so-called realized gains — like wages or stock sales. But the wealthy often live off unrealized gains — in the form of stocks and other assets that grow more valuable over time. The wealthy borrow against these assets to pay for houses, islands and private planes and then use a variety of strategies to avoid paying taxes on the debt repayment.
One such strategy is waiting until after death to repay the loan — or what Edward McCaffery, a tax expert at the University of Southern California, calls “buy, borrow, die.” Robert McClelland of the Tax Policy Center called it the main revelation of the ProPublica story.
All the while, the wealthy are often able to keep their taxable income low. In 2011, Bezos reported so little income that he qualified for — and claimed — a $4,000 child tax credit. In both 2016 and 2017, Carl Icahn, who’s a billionaire, paid no federal income taxes.
Legal tax avoidance by the wealthy has become more widespread over the past half-century for several reasons. For one, inequality has soared, meaning that the rich have more wealth to protect. And tax rates have fallen significantly.
“It’s amazing how much we’ve cut taxes even since 1997 — on dividends, the estate tax threshold, capital gains and the top rate,” Owen Zidar, a Princeton University economist, told me. “All of those things have become more favorable to the top of the distribution.” The decline in the corporate tax rate — effectively a tax reduction for shareholders — has also been important.
You sometimes hear the cynical view that raising taxes on the wealthy is pointless, because they have the resources to evade any taxes the government tries to impose. But history suggests otherwise.
While some tax avoidance is inevitable, the federal government has largely succeeded in raising taxes when it has tried. The very richest Americans paid more than 50 percent of their income in federal taxes during the 1950s and ’60s (and were less successful at shielding their wealth from taxation). Today, that percentage has fallen below 30 percent.
There are three main ways to reverse the decline in tax payments by the wealthy, Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, said. One is a direct tax on wealth, like those proposed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Two is a tax on unrealized gains — assets that have become more valuable — as Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed. Three is an increase in corporate taxes, as President Biden favors. There are also more modest ideas, like a larger estate tax.
Societies can choose how much they do or don’t tax their wealthiest people, Zucman said. “For billionaires,” he added, “the federal income tax — the pillar of the U.S. tax system — has become a voluntary tax.”
It's cheaper to buy another senator.
Warren and Sanders proposal sounds pretty much like what they did in France, which I believe turns out to add up to unmitigated disaster. Slow robbery, as it were. Is anyone considering something more fair? The Flat Tax, perhaps? Maybe the very wealthy could pony-up the same percentages of their true income as the working man?*
*Man is used here in the older sense of the word, meaning all human beings, as it takes far too much time and taxes my memory to recall all of the newly discovered genders by their particular chosen nomenclature.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
And the proposal for a tax on unrealized gain has a problem, too, since many middle class folk have retirement accounts (which are taxed when drawn as regular income. As usual it will be, regardless of what they choose, the middle class who will be shouldering the heaviest burden.
The estate tax proposal will **** everyone.
MOW badge received.
At one time or another in their lives, 58% of taxpayers get assessed as one of the 10% top earners. This usually occurs when they sell a house and/or retire.
At one time or another in their lives, a similar proportion of the top 10% wind up in the top 1%.
Oddball factoids. I think it was Thomas Sowell who adduced them.
It's a good idea to have a fair tax structure. I don't like the wealthy being able to 'cheat legally' but I also don't like making them into the villains either. I remember a video a while back that explained how if you took all the income of all the top incomes and put that against the federal budget, all their money would be gone in a month... and that's not just a taxed percentage, that was all of their income. So while we want to think taxing the rich is a panacea it isn't.
What makes as much sense (to me) as finding a fair tax structure is finding a way to trim federal spending. Kinda like how you and I have to do it; can't spend more than we earn... what's the best way if you want to deal w/ less income? Spend less.
It doesn’t matter how much they take in, it’s never enough. I’m also super sick of money not going where it’s supposed to go, and no one is ever held accountable.
MOW badge received.
I think of this tweet often. Now's as good of an example as any.
