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What is the 90th percentile of U.S. farm operator household wealth? A long while ago I mistakenly cited https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/10/news/economy/farmers-estate-tax/index.html on Twitter by saying that 90% of farms are small because they're "worth" <$350k when actually it was that they bring in $350k annually in revenue. Someone pointed out that the article itself says that 50% of farm operator households had $827,300 in wealth in 2015, so what is the 90th percentile for farm operator household wealth? What percentage is affected by the current estate tax, and what percentage would be affected by various proposed estate tax changes (e.g. $3.5 million)? The article itself points out that those statistics would likely be inflated by assets unrelated to farming, muddling the value of that statistic anyway, though also https://www.cbpp.org/research/unlimited-estate-tax-exemption-for-farm-estates-is-unnecessary-and-likely-harmful makes a good point about exemptions encouraging speculation as tax shelters, maybe if the exemptions were only given to farmers who had their family line's way of life grandfathered in. Probably thinking this over more than it's worth because statistics that are both farming-only and exact aren't there galenanorth fucked around with this message at 03:22 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 03:13
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I hope Gil Garcetti has as much luck with this as he did in prosecuting OJ Simpson:quote:The parents of Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti have enlisted the help of prominent lobbyists to aid their son’s beleaguered nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to India. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/20/eric-garcettis-parents-register-to-lobby-for-their-sons-ambassador-bid-00034109
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May 21, 2022 03:22
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Embarrassingly, I don't recall offhand whether India ambassadorship is a worthless sinecure or one of the ambassador jobs that sometimes actually matters. I'd probably lean towards the latter just because that's the case for most developing country jobs, even in a really big developing country.
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May 21, 2022 03:29
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Xombie posted:By local police. Then they got fair trials with representation. Meanwhile you, I, and everyone gets to discuss it and talk about it without any fear of repurcussions. That's not authoritarianism.
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May 21, 2022 03:29
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The trap people seem to be falling into here is the assumption that the US allowing its citizens to complain represents a meaningful freedom rather than an innovation in velvet gloving. Complaining doesn't constitute meaningful opposition and nobody in power gives an ounce of a poo poo about talk with no action. This is actually a very smart concession for a police state to make, especially when one has a world-historic surveillance panopticon at its disposal to monitor it We're hardly two years from all seeing what happens when segments of the public stop talking and actually go outside to actually force change. Cops literally shot people's eyes out
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May 21, 2022 03:54
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How are we defining authoritarian here? Probably should get a shared understanding of what everyone is working off of
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May 21, 2022 04:03
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Putin's Russia has controlled opposition and obeys the letter of the law around term limits by him swapping President for Prime Minister every couple terms. Just because the laws are there doesn't mean they mean anything.
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May 21, 2022 04:09
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Xombie posted:The fact that only lovely people get elected doesn't constitute "authoritarianism". I am proposing, as are others, that the United States is a de facto authoritarian state, and the trappings of democracy it hides behind are just that--trappings. The way our government operates is effectively identical to that of a one-party system, offering only marginal differences of choice; the protections afforded by our laws exist only until the authorities decide they don't, which is consistently at the exact point they threaten the interests of the political class and the wealthy; our courts are patently unfair, functioning less as a justice system than as an exercise in punitive social engineering; and our law enforcement, instead of protecting us, exists almost exclusively to subdue and oppress the lower classes, with utter impunity and with powers that let them operate somewhere between "secret police" and "open political enforcers". (Fred Hampton, Gary Webb, countless other activists, brutalizing some political demonstrations and protecting others with a clear ideological agenda.) Slamming a dictionary on the table is not responding to any of the above. Our limited democracy is an apology for the authoritarian state we actually live under. E: Yeah, my bad. I'm sorry, I feel like I slipped into being an Argument rear end in a top hat here. POWELL CURES KIDS fucked around with this message at 04:24 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 04:19
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theCalamity posted:How are we defining authoritarian here? Probably should get a shared understanding of what everyone is working off of If you want to do that, make a new thread. Not here.
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May 21, 2022 04:19
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Uh then are we just going to keep talking past each other while operating on different definitions? Or just stop talking about authoritarianism in the US in this thread?
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May 21, 2022 04:24
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Flying-PCP posted:Uh then are we just going to keep talking past each other while operating on different definitions? Or just stop talking about authoritarianism in the US in this thread? Yeah, this is probably too broad to apply to current events. If we're gonna keep having the conversation it should be in another thread.
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May 21, 2022 04:26
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Xombie posted:You're moving the goalposts from "the US is authoritarian" to "it has authoritarian political parties". This is a small point, but in the interest of civility, it would be better to restate how this doesn't apply to your point rather than accusing another user of moving goalposts in thread. If you believe someone is doing a bait-and-switch of argumentation maliciously, you can also report them.
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May 21, 2022 04:39
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POWELL CURES KIDS posted:I am proposing, as are others, that the United States is a de facto authoritarian state, and the trappings of democracy it hides behind are just that--trappings. Fascists and liberals are different things tho. Currently it only serves the interests of fascists and authoritarians to conflate them.
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May 21, 2022 04:47
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Putin's Russia has controlled opposition and obeys the letter of the law around term limits by him swapping President for Prime Minister every couple terms.
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May 21, 2022 06:10
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Fascists and liberals are different things tho. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Liberals have had a bigger hand in creating the insane and awful conditions of the United States than fascist ever have. If we're going to paint the US as authoritarian for things like the carceral state, it was liberals that made that happen. Ciprian Maricon fucked around with this message at 06:16 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 06:14
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Liberals will always submit to fascism when push comes to shove. A good example of this? The fact that the Hindenburg is named the Hindenburg. That's the liberal response to fascism in a nutshell.
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May 21, 2022 06:15
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Y’all live in a liberal democracy. Don’t be eager for it become fascist authoritarianism. One is uh definitely worse than the other. This does not preclude pushing for better things and socialism.
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May 21, 2022 06:52
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Let's try to avoid clichés, gentlemen. Though that is an interesting fact about the Hindenburg.
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May 21, 2022 06:53
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Is it liberalism specifically that folds to fascism? Or just non-militarism in general....
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May 21, 2022 07:02
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It’s romanticism.
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May 21, 2022 07:07
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Bar Ran Dun posted:It’s romanticism. Could you explain?
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May 21, 2022 07:12
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Koos Group posted:Could you explain? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3901455&perpage=40&pagenumber=1&noseen=1
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May 21, 2022 07:15
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:A good example of this? The fact that the Hindenburg is named the Hindenburg. That's the liberal response to fascism in a nutshell. Care to explain? I had always heard that it had been named after Hindenburg by the anti-Nazi founder of the company that manufactured Zeppelins.
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May 21, 2022 07:23
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Ask the black men in supposedly progressive states like CA that get pulled over and harassed dozens of times by police if the US is an authoritarian nation. Ask the parents of Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Daniel Shaver etc etc etc. Ask the woman who had to be medivac'd to CO from TX because she had an ectopic pregnancy and doctors in TX didn't want to get sued or go to prison for saving her life. Stories like these are about to get way more common.
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May 21, 2022 15:34
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Y’all live in a liberal democracy. Don’t be eager for it become fascist authoritarianism. One is uh definitely worse than the other. This does not preclude pushing for better things and socialism. We will have fascist authoritarianism because of the utter weakness of liberal “democracy”.
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May 21, 2022 15:38
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Nucleic Acids posted:We will have fascist authoritarianism because of the utter weakness of liberal “democracy”. *already have
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May 21, 2022 15:39
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Ask the black men in supposedly progressive states like CA that get pulled over and harassed dozens of times by police if the US is an authoritarian nation. Ask the parents of Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Daniel Shaver etc etc etc. By your definition, literally every government is an authoritarian government. Yes, obviously a government has authority over its citizens  An authoritarian government is different, which is why that category exists as compared to other types/structures of governments
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May 21, 2022 15:42
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Kalit posted:By your definition, literally every government is an authoritarian government. Yes, obviously a government has authority over its citizens That category is more or less a deliberate creation to make our system look at all good.
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May 21, 2022 15:45
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Nucleic Acids posted:That category is more or less a deliberate creation to make our system look at all good. Only if you use it with a negative connotation, which is what Flipdelphia (along with multiple other people ITT who uses it in an obvious negative light) was doing.
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May 21, 2022 15:47
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Ghost Leviathan posted:*already have The democracy in the equation is basically just a bandaid over the gaping wounds caused by the liberalism in it.
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May 21, 2022 15:56
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Kalit posted:Yes, obviously a government has authority over its citizens If this absolutely idiotic excuse is a good enough reason why the US carceral state, a racist institution that consumes freedom for profit isn't "authoritarian" than the same logic can apply to China or Russia or any other country.
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May 21, 2022 16:22
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In the hopes of phrasing this in a way that didn't pop a sixer, if you don't think the US is currently authoritarian can you expand on that and explain why and how you define authoritarianism? It would be a lot more useful to me if you think I'm wrong since I can then educate myself on your understanding of it. Are we on a path to it? Were we at one point considering the US used to have a legalized caste system and slavery? Or honestly we can drop it. My original post was me thinking out loud and finding the desire for freedom to die from covid as "better" a very silly use of the word better. Sometimes two things are just both bad.
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May 21, 2022 16:27
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Y’all live in a liberal democracy. Don’t be eager for it become fascist authoritarianism. One is uh definitely worse than the other. This does not preclude pushing for better things and socialism. United States is not a democracy. It's a...I don't know what to call it, incremental apartheid anti-urbanization police state where the votes of cities, composed of multi-racial, multicultural constituencies, is diluted in favor of rural whites. Sometimes you get outcomes that the majority supports, sometimes not. With increasing amounts of not, these days. Couple that with bizarre poo poo like there being no campaign finance limits, political judicial appointments with redistricting/stalling/repealing power, and the party in power deciding where and how to vote, and it is to me a miracle anyone is still buying the "democracy" argument.
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May 21, 2022 16:37
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The usefulness of the word “authoritarian” is it can be applied to any place the west doesn’t like, but that also unfortunately means it can be applied to any nation in the west. Because it doesn’t mean anything except “the government did something some people don’t like.” If Evo morales is ‘authoritarian’ for changing term limits laws through the existing legal process and China is ‘authoritarian’ for covid lockdowns that kept millions alive, the US is definitely ‘authoritarian’ for its policing practices. Good luck finding a precise definition of authoritarianism that includes all the US enemies but doesn’t apply to the US - that’s the entire point of the word. It’s designed to be applicable to basically any government action anywhere. It’s a vibe, not a rigorous definition.
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May 21, 2022 17:33
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Kalit posted:Something like "you can't have a mask mandate" (or whatever examples you're thinking of) is different than "you can't pass laws". Of course the higher levels of government will sometime restrict what lower levels of government can do. But unless AZ has restricted Phoenix from doing nearly anything (which is subjective, I know), that is not what I meant. Sorry for a few pages back, but the state government has been doing much more than targeting mask mandates, etc. They have been going after other policies, such as the minimum wage, as much as they possibly can. For example, they tried passing a law that restricted minimum wages above the state level, as you said, but that was shot down by the courts. They then decided to go a different route, and pass a law that withheld a City's share of state revenue by the estimated amount the extra minimum wage earned workers. That effort is still to be determined in the courts. They've also targeted what civil right provisions that Phoenix and Tucson can enact on businesses, etc., and significant measures on what local school districts can implement beyond anything Covid-related. For example, they just passed a law that requires student's entire records to be accessible to parents, even those that should be covered by existing privacy laws, as well as allowing parents to veto what educational materials a school wants to use in classrooms. So don't hand wave away issues just because it doesn't fit your narrative. Canned Sunshine fucked around with this message at 17:44 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 17:42
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Best Friends posted:The usefulness of the word “authoritarian” is it can be applied to any place the west doesn’t like, but that also unfortunately means it can be applied to any nation in the west. Because it doesn’t mean anything except “the government did something some people don’t like.” If Evo morales is ‘authoritarian’ for changing term limits laws through the existing legal process and China is ‘authoritarian’ for covid lockdowns that kept millions alive, the US is definitely ‘authoritarian’ for its policing practices. It reminds me of the term "oligarch" which is never used to describe billionaires in america even though the definition absolutely encapsulates them too. It just only comes up when the billionaire is in a foreign country.
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May 21, 2022 17:52
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Best Friends posted:The usefulness of the word “authoritarian” is it can be applied to any place the west doesn’t like, but that also unfortunately means it can be applied to any nation in the west. Because it doesn’t mean anything except “the government did something some people don’t like.” If Evo morales is ‘authoritarian’ for changing term limits laws through the existing legal process and China is ‘authoritarian’ for covid lockdowns that kept millions alive, the US is definitely ‘authoritarian’ for its policing practices. Why wouldn't I want to be able to apply the word to America? It fits so well and has a fairly good predictive value for how nation will respond to things. It's authoritarian and ethnonationalist.
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May 21, 2022 18:01
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Kalit posted:By your definition, literally every government is an authoritarian government. Yes, obviously a government has authority over its citizens I didn't realize the governments of countries like Canada, Australia, the UK, or France routinely enable the blatant murder of citizens by police. I mean sure, we have rural county sheriff's departments with higher body counts than the police forces of these entire countries but no way that makes us authoritarian!
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May 21, 2022 18:34
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Srice posted:It reminds me of the term "oligarch" which is never used to describe billionaires in america even though the definition absolutely encapsulates them too. It just only comes up when the billionaire is in a foreign country. I have seen a handful of progressives start tossing this term around towards our mega billionaires, but generally this is exactly true.
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May 21, 2022 18:35
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:I didn't realize the governments of countries like Canada, Australia, the UK, or France routinely enable the blatant murder of citizens by police. I guess you...haven't been keeping up with UK news then?
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May 21, 2022 18:56
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