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Megillah Gorilla posted:Let's see what he has to say about that onTwitter:  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 8, 2019 19:58
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Randler posted:As a tax nerd that independent article's description of Trump's depreciation argument is very bad and actually seems to be somewhat supportive of Trump's bullshit argument. As a tax nerd, it'd be fantastic if you could fill us in on some of the details. I only sort of follow depreciation and don't know how it would apply in Trump's context. Could you help us fill in the gaps?
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May 8, 2019 20:05
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Megillah Gorilla posted:
r/politics has seemed fairly sane to me since at least about a year ago. I think at some point post-2016 they purged the bots and the forum did some course correction. I'm sure there are still plenty of hellholes on reddit overall but r/politics has been about as left-wing as USPOL at least lately.
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May 8, 2019 20:13
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Anora posted:https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1125891810595954688 Surely there will be no economic consequences if consumers pare back consumption!
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May 8, 2019 20:15
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Eating anything except rice, beans, and cabbage purchased and prepared in bulk is nonessential.
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May 8, 2019 20:17
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Anora posted:https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1125891810595954688 Wait wait wait what the gently caress is this? Is this implying that the average person shouldn't be able to buy things that may or may not make them happy and contribute to the economy? I mean, god forbid someone make an "impulse" purchase on a new shirt or something. I'd like to see a breakdown of how many "nonessential" purchases someone with a $500k+ income makes. edit: To be clear, I know plenty of people who contribute nothing to a savings, 529, IRA, 401k, or other long-term savings plan that spend a bunch of money on poo poo they don't need and probably should spend "smarter". But to shame people for going out to dinner once in a while? Or for buying a new shirt? Lord Wexia fucked around with this message at 20:21 on May 8, 2019 |
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May 8, 2019 20:18
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Ridesharing, a thing people do because of how luxurious a splurge it is versus driving your own car
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May 8, 2019 20:22
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Those numbers are as fake as Donald's tax returns. There is no way in hell the "average American" spends $100 in rideshares each month, much less $750 in eating out.
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May 8, 2019 20:28
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I could even buy the $750 a month eating out, but the ones I really don't buy are the subscription boxes being that high while impulse spending is simultaneously that low. Their methodology for this (if it's not "completely make poo poo up") would probably give Nate Silver an aneurysm.
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May 8, 2019 20:31
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I've not got full methods, but here's the root press release that US News repackaged as a story: https://www.swnsdigital.com/2019/05/americans-spend-at-least-18000-a-year-on-these-non-essential-costs/ Note that n = 2000, a nice (intensely suspicious) round number, collected across two days. Note it was also commissioned by a startup life insurance firm as part of some sort of justification about the relative cost of life insurance premiums.
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May 8, 2019 20:48
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Discendo Vox posted:Note it was also commissioned by a startup life insurance firm as part of some sort of justification about the relative cost of life insurance premiums. And done by OnePoll, which is one of the “fill out surveys for money” companies.
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May 8, 2019 21:00
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I don't know what you're talking about. I get all my dietary fiber by consuming subscription boxes.
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May 8, 2019 21:00
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Discendo Vox posted:Note it was also commissioned by a startup life insurance firm as part of some sort of justification about the relative cost of life insurance premiums. Lol I missed the link and spent a few minutes of very fruitless digging, because it turns out the word "ladder" is used rather a lot in proximity to economic data. Also, the polling outfit isn't an actual polling outfit. They're one of those market research companies like Pinecone that pays people to complete surveys. They literally sell push-poll data for marketing: quote:Our surveys are transformed into national news stories and are brought to life in various forms of multimedia content, including video and animation, infographics, reports, quizzes, vox pops, social media and radio campaigns.
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May 8, 2019 21:04
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That USA Today thing is as bad as the Henry Offenses from...I think the WSJ? Also Vox has a great write up as always about the NYT Trump Tax reporting but I liked this bit best https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/8/18536708/trump-lost-1-billion-taxes-nyt quote:While Trump was losing tens of millions of dollars in 1990 and 1991, his father, Fred Trump, made money. But his only loss was an investment in an endeavor of his son’s. lol
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May 8, 2019 21:05
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Kaal posted:Those numbers are as fake as Donald's tax returns. There is no way in hell the "average American" spends $100 in rideshares each month, much less $750 in eating out. You don't spend 25 bucks a day eating out every month? 
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May 8, 2019 21:53
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HootTheOwl posted:You don't spend 25 bucks a day eating out every month? I don't have a spare $25, not with all these subscription boxes.
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May 8, 2019 21:54
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pfft 84$ on online shopping, if you arent buying opened packets of sauce on ebay you arent living with maximum efficiency.
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May 8, 2019 22:16
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BlueBlazer posted:pfft 84$ on online shopping, if you arent buying opened packets of sauce on ebay you arent living with maximum efficiency. Make sure you separate your online purchases from your impulse buys.
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May 8, 2019 22:17
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I mean, if you're worried about non-essential purchases, you could just stop buying USAToday.
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May 8, 2019 22:42
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I think you'll find that that is HIGHLY essential.
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May 8, 2019 23:05
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saintonan posted:I mean, if you're worried about non-essential purchases, you could just stop buying USAToday. I get it free from the hotel I live in at nightly room rates. My Continental Breakfast budget is $0 / month 
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May 8, 2019 23:06
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Discendo Vox posted:As a tax nerd, it'd be fantastic if you could fill us in on some of the details. I only sort of follow depreciation and don't know how it would apply in Trump's context. Could you help us fill in the gaps? I'm not an American tax nerd (  ), so this'll be more general than specific to US GAAP and US tax law of the time.~ A very simplified intro to accounting principles as they relate to income taxes ~ What is income? On a very basic level, business accounting is based on you taking a look at what you got (assets) and what you owe (liabilities) on a given day, e.g. 31 December 2017. The difference between your assets and your liabilities is your equity. So let's say you have €500,000 in cash. €100,000 of those are money you always had while €400,000 were loaned to you by a bank and needs to be repaid eventually. Oh, and you also need to pay 5% interest to the bank annually. code:Let's say you're a business that manufactures license plates because manufacturing makes for better examples than real estate/construction. In order to make license plates, you need metal and a machine that cuts and stamps the metal into the license plates. Now, let's assume that on 31 December 2018 you bought such a machine for €150,000. Now, let's see what stuff you have and what stuff you owe on 31 December 2018. code:On the other hand, your debt has already increased by €20,000. So despite you not having handed over any money to the bank yet, you're already poorer. Overall, the stuff that happened to your business in between 1 January 2018 and 31 December 2018 resulted in you becoming €20,000 poorer, which is your income for this fiscal year. How does depreciation figure into this? Because the purchase of the machine didn't actually make us poorer, we have listed in under "Stuff we have". But eventually, we're going to use the machine to make license plates. Eventually, the machine will break down from being used constantly at which point it will become worthless. So eventually, the purchase (and use) of the machine will have made us poorer and we have to consider this when calculating our income via the "Stuff you own" minus "Stuff you owe" method. We already established that one day the machine will break down. We could theoretically just delete the machine from the "Stuff you own" list in the year the machine gets destroyed. Then the initial purchase price of €150,000 would be lower the income of the year the machine gets destroyed in (because during that year, we lose €150,000 worth of stuff we own). This method has drawbacks. It doesn't really make sense to use an old machine until it dies, it's kinda random when exactly it will break down and inflation will lessen the impact of the loss incurred by removing the machine. Alternatively, we could just not consider the machine "Stuff we own" in the first place. After all, it will eventually break down, so why don't we consider it gone the very moment we exchange the eternally useful cash for this temporarily useful machine that is doomed to someday be destroyed? Then the purchase of the machine would lower the income in the year we purchased it. This method would have a major drawback from the taxman's point of view. Because income determinates taxes. So in a progressive tax system, there would be a huge incentive to just buy a bunch of stuff in good years in order to create expenses that lower income and therefore taxation. Also, neither method really "fits" with what is economically happening. Because you use the machinery for like 15 years, so considering its purchase as an expense in 2018 (when it was purchased) or 2033 (when it will be destroyed) with nothing happening in between seems kinda weird. That's why under most accounting standards nowadays, the machine gets depreciated from the time of its purchase until it leaves the "Stuff you own". One way to do this would be to assume the machine loses 1/15th of its value for each of the 15 years it will be used. So each year the "Stuff you own" loses €10,000 in value due to the machine being linearily depreciated (until the machine reaches €0). Get to the part where Trump is bad at business already! And why did the newspaper say depreciation is a tax benefit? Depreciation only distributes the expense generated by you buying a thing over the period you use the thing you bought with that money. If you built the machine yourself, you'd replace "expense generated by buying" with "expense generated by building (i.e. buying material, paying labour". The latter is how it's working for buildings. It's an accounting principle used to distribute expenses. It's not a magic trick with which you can make your revenue disappear into the ether. When you blame your losses (i.e. negative income) on depreciation, that doesn't fundamentally change the fact that you do not make enough money (i.e. get more stuff) to offset the stuff you lose and/or new debts you take on. And spending more money than you're making for many years on end is kinda the opposite of what a business is supposed to do. Remember the thing I said about inflation? €150,000 in 2018 are worth more than €150,000 in 2033 despite being nominally the same amount of money (cf. boomers talking about wages). If you pay 50% income taxes, the accumulated depreciation for the machine (€150,000) will nominally reduce your tax burdens by €75,000 when taking all the years of depreciation into consideration. (I also assumes you're not Donald Trump and actually have a revenue stream that puts you into positive income so actually have a tax burden you can reduce.) Due to inflation, it would be preferable to see this nominal reduction of taxes closer to 2018 than 2033, because the value of the €75,000 would be higher. So if the government wants to subsidize an industry, they can just change how that industry is allowed to depreciate its stuff. E.g. in our example, if the government wants to support the license plate manufacturing industry, it could allow them to depreciate their machines entirely within the first five years despite the machines being used for 15 years. So the instead of depreciating 1/15 from 2018 to 2033, we would depreciate 1/5 from 2018 to 2023, which gives us the nominal tax reduction earlier and therefore gives us more value (and also liquidity, but that's more of a financing nerd topic). While this is beneficial to our industry, it does gently caress all to the underlying principle that depreciation is just the way we recognize business spending in our accounting. And as long as tax rates are below 100% and we don't get money from the state for having negative income, it also does gently caress all to save our failing business that doesn't make money. It merely makes us hold on a bit longer, because it eases our financing situation. So Trump still bad at business. And what about land? Land (different stuff from buildings) does not lose value, so you don't depreciate it. In your list of "Stuff you owe", you - at least in this context - never go above the value you originally paid for the stuff you have. So while the land becomes more valuable, you do not generate income from it until you realize that change in value by selling it to somebody else and changing "Stuff you owe: Land €1" to "Stuff you owe: Bunch of money this guy paid for the land". Because you do not recognize this increase in land value until you sell it, your business still makes losses, so you're still bad at business. I guess you could use the valuable land as a collateral to take out more loans, but that only results in you having to pay even more interests, so you'd be still bad at business. 
Randler fucked around with this message at 23:15 on May 8, 2019 |
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May 8, 2019 23:08
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Randler - thanks for the effort post. Tax law might as well be gibberish to me past a (very simple) point. That really helped put things in context.
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May 9, 2019 00:12
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Anora posted:https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1125891810595954688 https://twitter.com/lib_crusher/status/1125917470190133248?s=21
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May 9, 2019 00:30
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Great post Randler, I was like 80% of the way there but missed the fundamental "this still means losses" part. Thank you!
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May 9, 2019 00:39
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JHU students led a 36 day long sit in to protest militarization of campus security and contracts with ICE. https://twitter.com/baltimoresun/status/1126101290952556545?s=21
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May 9, 2019 00:52
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HootTheOwl posted:You don't spend 25 bucks a day eating out every month? Who has time when they're busy getting their four haircuts a month in?
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May 9, 2019 02:25
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I have some really important local news https://twitter.com/kfor/status/1126314721211297793?s=21
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May 9, 2019 03:41
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Solaris 2.0 posted:That USA Today thing is as bad as the Henry Offenses from...I think the WSJ? It's astonishing how everything he touches - everything - turns to poo poo.
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May 9, 2019 05:02
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Silver Nitrate posted:I have some really important local news 
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May 9, 2019 09:14
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haveblue posted:I don't have a spare $25, not with all these subscription boxes. OK. What in hell is the thing US News is calling "subscription boxes"?
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May 9, 2019 09:47
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geegee posted:OK. What in hell is the thing US News is calling "subscription boxes"? Without meaning to be snarky: exactly what they sound like - they're boxes you subscribe to that have things in them; you might also know them as loot crates.
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May 9, 2019 09:52
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Niton posted:Without meaning to be snarky: exactly what they sound like - they're boxes you subscribe to that have things in them; you might also know them as loot crates. I think it's more along the lines of Blue Apron or Stitchfit than the random garbage bins of loot boxes.
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May 9, 2019 09:57
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geegee posted:OK. What in hell is the thing US News is calling "subscription boxes"? Overpriced souvenir-type stuff you get in a fancy box, because of how capitalism has monetized nerd culture the same as everything else.
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May 9, 2019 10:15
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Lightning Knight posted:Overpriced souvenir-type stuff you get in a fancy box, because of how capitalism has monetized nerd culture the same as everything else. I’d argue that there are some good ones that give you decent value. As a lazy goon who hates going clothes shopping, a menlo club monthly package has treated me well. It’s not always nerd culture stuff.
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May 9, 2019 11:55
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Frabba posted:I’d argue that there are some good ones that give you decent value. As a lazy goon who hates going clothes shopping, a menlo club monthly package has treated me well. It’s not always nerd culture stuff. I mean, the ones that tend to be the most heavily advertised and pushed on social media are mostly nerd paraphernalia rather than anything you might actually want. It's basically marketed as if you were somewhere going to an overpriced giftshop, except instead they mail it to you.
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May 9, 2019 12:04
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How is it a widespread enough phenomenon that it shows up as a major thing the “average consumer” spends money on along with food and transportation, like an expense you have to list when the bank tries to refinance your loan Am I so out of touch? No, the loot crate subscribers are wrong
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May 9, 2019 12:36
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Data Graham posted:How is it a widespread enough phenomenon that it shows up as a major thing the “average consumer” spends money on along with food and transportation, like an expense you have to list when the bank tries to refinance your loan I think the razor subscription boxes are pretty popular. Most of my friends who shave use one.
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May 9, 2019 13:19
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Food ones are big too. There's a lot of we send you a box of ingredients and a recipe every month/week. Alcohol too, most wineries will send you periodic shipments of wine if you subscribe to their club. The stupid has gone well past nerds
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May 9, 2019 13:35
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Data Graham posted:How is it a widespread enough phenomenon that it shows up as a major thing the “average consumer” spends money on along with food and transportation, like an expense you have to list when the bank tries to refinance your loan This was put together by a “marketing research” firm for a life insurance startup that wants to show you can afford life insurance. So no, it’s not that widespread.
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May 9, 2019 13:39
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