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steinrokkan posted:The devil is in details. You have probably never dealt with tax forms if you think it's possible to put together a simple algorithm for collating a report spanning decades and multiple countries. Even collecting and processing tax data for a single year is such a loving endeavor it takes hundreds of people just to sample the data from a single country. I don't think what Varoufakis said he did is remotely possible and/or realistic, and if it was done it was only through so massive simplifications and assumptions that it would be meaningless. But if we take him at his word and he really did do in a matter of months what other countries have yet to achieve, then his plan is still rubbish, which is the point I wanted to make. Plenty of countries have regular "past tax payment windows" or similar things that grant waivers from prosecution, but they don't wait to have finished compiling an impossible tax database to do these things. quote:Especially after being out of office, what would be the point? And since everybody in the Troika hated his guts, wouldn't they want to trumpet any deception by Varoufakis up to the high heavens? That's what gets me about it, the fact that there was absolutely no follow up from nobody. That's the thing that doesn't make any sense.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 00:32 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:08 |
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Shazback posted:I see now that I misconstrued your previous statement. Yeah, but I don't recall any other case of a state abolishing bank secrecy. If you have to individually request every single person's bank details to be released by court order, you can't really build such a database. Shazback posted:The point? Portray the Troika in a bad light, and him in a good one? It's likely that it's not an outright lie, that he was creating a database of past bank records. But all the practical problems we've mentioned above probably meant that the data in question was from only a couple banks, woefully incomplete, and his claims that they identified XX billion in tax evasion have a massive asterisk next to them. The Troika or anyone else doesn't follow up on it because it's a boring technical discussion and there's a limited amount of time and energy that people are prepared to spend to investigate Varoufakis' claims, especially when the result is so grey that it's almost certain he'll be able to say "you see, I didn't lie, all the things I said were factually correct" whilst saying all the caveats or problems in the analysis and the data would have been solved post haste were it not for the Troika. Well if you say so, it's nice to get some small concessions at least. Working pretty hard there to convince yourself though.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 00:41 |
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Friendly Humour posted:Yeah, but I don't recall any other case of a state abolishing bank secrecy. If you have to individually request every single person's bank details to be released by court order, you can't really build such a database.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 00:46 |
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Shazback posted:Yes, bank secrecy is so sacro-sanct that FATCA doesn't exist, and Switzerland, Luxemburg and the Cayman Islands are world renowned for the bank secrecy that exists everywhere else. Huh?
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 00:54 |
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GaussianCopula posted:Reminder: This is an idea from the genius who proposed to equip students and tourists with Google Glasses to fight VAT tax evasion. Again, this assumes that the CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY aren't all hilariously-corrupt morons. They're not very smart, and they have so much money that they don't have to be. It turns out that for a businessman being a terrible human being is a perfectly viable alternative to being actually good at business. (not defending that google glass thing though)
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 00:57 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6vV8_uQmxs&t=1348s Here's Mark Blyth talking about what actually happened with Greece and the rest of Southern Europe. Good lecture overall, highly recommend it.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 01:32 |
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Jesus after watching that talk and his predictions for the future of European politics I'm really glad the United States has a monopoly on force.
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Jul 2, 2016 |
# ? Jul 2, 2016 01:59 |
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Wow so he's saying the austerity campaign hosed main street so hard that investment had nowhere to go and therefore the central bank had no purchase for inflation to start and that's why we're in this secular stagnation scenario 6 years later? Thanks a lot European leaders.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 02:15 |
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The political implications of bringing to light massive disproportionate systemic tax evasion among the rich in an EU country seems pretty obvious. Much better to just have the Greeks remain a big undefined blob of cheats, rather than have people exactly like the ones celebrated in the rest of Europe stand out as leeches. well, they are just assembling a database. The banks have presumably already done the hard work of getting their data into useable form, since the banks themselves use the data. You don't need the data to work together on the fly or anything, you just need a one time import and collation that amounts to 'how much income did X person get in each year of concern?' Then you compare that to your spreadsheet of declared income and taxes paid. If you do not strap any bells and whistles on (like say the stuff youd actually need to determine if people were delinquent rather than running a query thru ur ramshackle database) then it would be p simple.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 02:51 |
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The political implications of bringing to light massive disproportionate systemic tax evasion among the rich in an EU country seems pretty obvious. Much better to just have the Greeks remain a big undefined blob of cheats, rather than have people exactly like the ones celebrated in the rest of Europe stand out as leeches. well, they are just assembling a database. The banks have presumably already done the hard work of getting their data into useable form, since the banks themselves use the data. You don't need the data to work together on the fly or anything, you just need a one time import and collation that amounts to 'how much income did X person get in each year of concern?' Then you compare that to your spreadsheet of declared income and taxes paid. If you do not strap any bells and whistles on (like say the stuff youd actually need to determine if people were delinquent rather than running a query thru ur ramshackle database) then it would be p simple.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 03:26 |
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steinrokkan posted:You are assuming that just because they are indifferent to the economic contributions of the lower classes, they are upholding some sort of symbiotic relationship of capitalist subjects in general, when in fact the hierarchy of class relations doesn't preclude the disintegrative effects of capitalist contradictions on relations within the capitalist class itself, which would be destructive without the moderating role of the capitalist state. Just because they pursue a predatory strategy in their relations to one class doesn't mean their predatory behaviour has been sated, and doesn't factor into their relationship with other classes. TheDeadlyShoe posted:well, they are just assembling a database. The banks have presumably already done the hard work of getting their data into useable form, since the banks themselves use the data. You don't need the data to work together on the fly or anything, you just need a one time import and collation that amounts to 'how much income did X person get in each year of concern?' Then you compare that to your spreadsheet of declared income and taxes paid. If you do not strap any bells and whistles on (like say the stuff youd actually need to determine if people were delinquent rather than running a query thru ur ramshackle database) then it would be p simple.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 08:16 |
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For those that think it's pretty far-fetched that tax evasion plays a huge role in the crisis in the southern countries: http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/opin...m_impostos.html TL:DR - The 1000 richest families in Portugal, in a regular economy, should pay 25% of the total IRS income. They pay 0,5%. Absolutely nothing is being done to fight this. There's no public discussion about this because all the media companies are owned by those same families. Also, virtually all of the companies in the PSI-20 pay their taxes in Amsterdam. If we keep robbing each other in Europe there's no austerity that can save us and you're simply stupid if you think it can. E: Also, in that article: quote:
quote:The situation is not necessarily a fatality, it can be solved "as long as there's political will", but the workgroup the IRS had working on this subject up until 2014 was disbanded. orange sky fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Jul 2, 2016 |
# ? Jul 2, 2016 09:28 |
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Arglebargle III posted:Wow so he's saying the austerity campaign hosed main street so hard that investment had nowhere to go and therefore the central bank had no purchase for inflation to start and that's why we're in this secular stagnation scenario 6 years later? Thanks a lot European leaders. Yup, and the best part? Completely unnecessary, completely pointless.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 09:45 |
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Friendly Humour posted:Yup, and the best part? Completely unnecessary, completely pointless. But what about ARE BALANCED BUDGET? Surely that must, by itself, count as a moral good (unless you're a degenerate Southerner).
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 11:57 |
The big deficiency in Blyth commentary on the Eurocrisis is that he doesn't understand moral hazards and the political process or his willful ignorance of those areas.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 12:52 |
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GaussianCopula posted:The big deficiency in Blyth commentary on the Eurocrisis is that he doesn't understand moral hazards and the political process or his willful ignorance of those areas. Thanks for this totally meaningless platitude.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 13:02 |
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Since for the time being the UK is still a European country, have a dumb joke.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 13:45 |
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Friendly Humour posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6vV8_uQmxs&t=1348s Thanks for posting this, I watched it all.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 13:45 |
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orange sky posted:Also, virtually all of the companies in the PSI-20 pay their taxes in Amsterdam. If we keep robbing each other in Europe there's no austerity that can save us and you're simply stupid if you think it can. And of course in this arrangement it's the Dutch who think they have it too hard and should leave the EU.
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# ? Jul 2, 2016 13:53 |
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GaussianCopula posted:The big deficiency in Blyth commentary on the Eurocrisis is that he doesn't understand moral hazards and the political process or his willful ignorance of those areas. What? The standard talk he gives has a section on moral hazard.
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# ? Jul 3, 2016 01:11 |
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His thesis on politics is that government has been defanged by organized capital after the 1970s jarred them into collective political action to raise their income share. It makes a lot of sense to me since you know... there's been a huge small government pro capital ideological movement since the late 1970s called neoliberalism built on new political alliances funded by the capital class. There's a clear inflection point in policy in the late 1970s that you can see in all sorts of data, from wages to c level management compensation to life expectancy in the American working class.
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# ? Jul 3, 2016 01:20 |
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the biggest holy poo poo thing in that video is the euro ratio of bank assets to GDP i didnt know it was that large.
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# ? Jul 3, 2016 01:52 |
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Indeed Bro.
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# ? Jul 3, 2016 01:53 |
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:the biggest holy poo poo thing in that video is the euro ratio of bank assets to GDP There's a reason why our politicians haven't talked about this. They prefer snappy twwets
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# ? Jul 3, 2016 01:54 |
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Arglebargle III posted:His thesis on politics is that government has been defanged by organized capital after the 1970s jarred them into collective political action to raise their income share. It makes a lot of sense to me since you know... there's been a huge small government pro capital ideological movement since the late 1970s called neoliberalism built on new political alliances funded by the capital class. There's a clear inflection point in policy in the late 1970s that you can see in all sorts of data, from wages to c level management compensation to life expectancy in the American working class. For anyone interested, David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism goes into how that sort of thing happened in the USA, the UK, and China.
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# ? Jul 3, 2016 08:44 |
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I'm a bit late to the party but you can absolutely write an algorithm to determine expected tax from a bunch of bank data. Designing software to automate audits were part of my previous job and we often had to do things like what was being discussed. At its simplest, one of the implementations went through company cash accounts vs declared p&ls, income statements, cash flows and statement of accounts (among whatever other data) and would flag an expected amount based on that. It was definitely a guesstimate and the flag was never shown to the companies but it was a pretty good way to find who should be looked into.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 01:39 |
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It's received comparatively little attention due to certain other events, but Italy's banking system is kind of on fire and Renzi's telling the Commission to go gently caress itself and its banking union: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e3b53640-4108-11e6-9b66-0712b3873ae1.html#axzz4DLBF39tgquote:Italy is prepared to defy the EU and unilaterally pump billions of euros into its troubled banking system if it comes under severe systemic distress, a last-resort move that would smash through the bloc’s nascent regime for handling ailing banks. http://www.wsj.com/articles/brexit-exposes-eurozones-weak-spot-italys-banks-1467567131 quote:Brexit has made what was already a serious Italian banking crisis worse. Italian banks are sitting on a combined €360 billion ($401 billion) of bad debts, equivalent to about a quarter of gross domestic product. This includes €200 billion of loans to borrowers now judged insolvent, which banks have on average written down to 45% of their nominal value but which the market appears to value at closer to 20% of their nominal value, which implies the system is short of around €40 billion of capital.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 07:57 |
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Italy's situation is very very similar to Argentina's in 2001. Usually, the value of Italy's currency would tank, banks would restrict movement of money for the masses, some would crash, some would move out, then the government would restructure debt aggressively, cue in vulture funds, etc. However, with the Euro and the EU, I have no idea what will happen. I don't think Germany will allow Italy to tank the value of the Euro. Anyway, it's bound to be a crisis, I have developed a biological sense for those.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 08:05 |
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Jesus just allow fiscal transfers already
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 08:57 |
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awesome-express posted:Jesus just allow fiscal transfers already Let me tell you a story about an ant a grasshopper, my son. It will blow your mind about all this fiscal transfer nonsense.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 08:59 |
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awesome-express posted:Jesus just allow fiscal transfers already If (benefitsGermany = False) { ECposition = gently caress NO; return ECposition; };
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:00 |
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Yeah we have solidarity up until that point in the curve where you can't make immediate money with that solidarity.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:00 |
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awesome-express posted:Jesus just allow fiscal transfers already LemonDrizzle fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jul 4, 2016 |
# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:04 |
Maybe if the Italian banks would not have spend all their earnings on dividends they would not need tax payer money. Or they could bail in their creditors, who are enjoying higher interest rates because of the risk, instead of using tax payer money. They are in the current situation because Renzi has no clue how to govern his country and needs to make sure no one gets angry before his referendum in October.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:07 |
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Requiring the owners of the bank to chip in for the bailout seems pretty sensible else they learn nothing but the state will take care of their reckless behaviour.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:07 |
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1. Nationalize the bank. 2. The state is now the creditor. 3. Bail-in 4. Bail-out.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:12 |
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"we'll loan you the money. At interest. Or say goodbye to your voter's savings."
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:13 |
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LemonDrizzle posted:As I understand it, fiscal transfers wouldn't actually help here - the Italian government could swing a bailout with its own resources if it needed to. The problem is that the rules of the European banking union dictate that failing banks cannot be propped up with taxpayers' money unless investors and depositors are bailed in first, which means that the banks' bondholders and retail investors (read: Joe Schmo and his current account) would be the first to lose out. That doesn't sound too bad considering that Joe Schmo's current account is covered by FITD while bondholders should always be at the end of the creditor line.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:16 |
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What's the least damaging way of getting rid of the euro? Can't there be a controlled non-murder way of going back to individual currencies here? Can there be some kind of project to split the euro into regional euros or national euros? Is there a way, at all?
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 09:39 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 14:08 |
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His Divine Shadow posted:What's the least damaging way of getting rid of the euro? Can't there be a controlled non-murder way of going back to individual currencies here? Can there be some kind of project to split the euro into regional euros or national euros? Is there a way, at all? A euro breakup would most likely result in a combination of the mother of all financial crises in the peripheral countries and the mother of all credit bubbles in the core. There's a reason that even after 7 years of crisis Greece still hasn't abandoned the euro, and it's that it would be far more stupid and suicidal than Brexit. The EU took seven years to prepare for the creation of the euro, and had a three-year transition period to fully adopt it for the first participating countries. I suppose it could be done a bit faster than that but the indirect economic costs would probably run into the trillions.
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# ? Jul 4, 2016 10:25 |