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Ted Cruz has released his report on 76 lawless actions by Obama, and yeah, they're as bullshit as you'd imagine http://www.scribd.com/doc/222704929/Ted-Cruz-Legal-Limit-Report-4
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May 7, 2014 21:28
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socialsecurity posted:This really seems like the kind of thing the Republican's should not be fighting Obama on, seems like a good way to piss of both minorities and the military A lot of the things on that list are things that Republicans would definitely support if it was their idea. A lot of them are just straight up fabrications too, like the very first one about work waivers for TANF
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May 7, 2014 21:45
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Munkeymon posted:Guess which citation is missing. It just got pushed to the next page http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2013/02/illegal-alien-who-killed-nun-was-on-obamas-supervised-release/ e: quote:A mainstream newspaper well known for its pro Obama reporting called the move a “highly unusual effort to save money.” Then, as if to defend the administration, the story goes on to say that the government hasn’t dropped the deportation cases against the immigrants, but rather the detainees have been freed on supervised release while their cases continue in court. lol (they're referring to the NY times) Good Citizen fucked around with this message at 21:54 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 21:52
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:What are they even going to do? Try to get someone to perjure themselves
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May 8, 2014 03:55
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hobbesmaster posted:They actually know what they're doing though. If it is indeed complete bullshit (it is) theres three options: Honestly I find the prospect that this goes to trial kind of terrifying. The GOPs assertion is that by declaring she was innocent Letner waived her right to invoke the 5th amendment. If that gets to the Supreme Court and the SC agrees then fuuuuuuuck that precedent.
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May 8, 2014 19:41
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tbp has been mostly reasonable in this thread and some of you are sounding kind of crazy right now
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May 9, 2014 19:24
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Evil Sagan posted:What's the most right-wing thing you've done? I voted for Bob Dole in a school-sponsored mock election in 1996. When I was 19 I refused to count the vote of a black person. gently caress you we're not getting olives on the pizza
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May 10, 2014 03:54
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Nonsense posted:If you are pretty wealthy, let's say making $500k+ a year, and you manage to own a home in the Bay Area, and this tech bubble pops, does the value of your impossibly expensive home suddenly drop, or does everything stay expensive, startups just disappear while Google headquarters in the Caymans? Google already is two Irish corporations with one located in the carribean and a pass through Dutch company. Google double Irish Dutch sandwich to see how they're avoiding most of their taxes
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May 10, 2014 22:07
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Axetrain posted:Nobody should get the impression that Bill Clinton is a good guy. He is definitely miles better then any Republican and I think he is very charming but he is still a Neo-Liberal shill that wants to gut social services and thinks the government's job should be to coddle corporate interests above all else (which he did plenty of both during his 8 years). I think it's a mistake to ascribe any ideology to Bill Clinton besides 'does whatever most benefits the Clintons'
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May 10, 2014 22:45
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:I was unaware of the specifics of how corporations like Google avoid their taxes, so thanks for this. Abusing each country's legal definition of nexus is like square one in tax efficient supply chain management. What Google has done with leasing their intellectual property to themselves through what are essentially shell companies that are nothing but accounting departments is comic book super villain levels of over-the-top hilarious. Caterpillar is another company that uses international accounting fuckery to minimize tax liability. And if this stuff is making you angry then don't even think about looking at what pharmaceutical companies or international charities are doing. The legal accounting tricks used by 'phony' international charities are so crazy right now that they'll make you physically ill Good Citizen fucked around with this message at 23:54 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 23:51
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Install Windows posted:It's way easier to make a list of companies that don't do this. Oh definitely. Any corporation that can afford to retain the services of tax consultants from one of the big 4 accounting firms has a tax structure nearly as complicated. Accounting is a great industry to be in right now if you can get into the upper end firms and don't mind long hours. (I'm a little biased)
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May 11, 2014 00:06
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Relentlessboredomm posted:So what are the Cayman's getting in return for being a tax shelter? Short answer is that this poo poo is really complicated. The US is one of the only countries in the world that has a worldwide taxation system instead of a territorial one. Also it has the highest statutory tax rate on corporations in the world and the largest amount of capital investment. This leads to all kind of fuckery. I could literally write pages and pages on this topic and my speciality isn't even tax, it's corporate audit.
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May 11, 2014 06:05
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Relentlessboredomm posted:Fair enough, just trying to come up with ideas outside of changing our tax code. I should probably just ask my family. They're all accountants of one type or another. The solutions are all within the tax code which means congress needs to act. In short were hosed. Instead of money being transferred to public services they're being transferred to a lessor extent to accounting firms like mine. Great for me, horrible for 90% of the country
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May 11, 2014 06:12
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moller posted:But one of the lowest effective rates, right? Or does the answer to that depend on who you ask? I don't know if we technically have the lowest effective rate. Probably not. If there was some way of weighing it against the access to capital then yeah, probably.
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May 11, 2014 07:00
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Spacedad posted:What do y'all make of this: I don't think democrats are screwed because of polling, but more because of which seats are up in this election and the nature of midterm elections. Yes, the GOP is likely to increase their lead in the house and maybe even grab the senate. And they will take interpret that as a mandate on their policies. If you aren't expecting that then you're being naive.
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May 11, 2014 07:58
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ReindeerF posted:Yeah, you're on to this. No, it hasn't. People can cherrypick a few examples, but the reality is that the money in places like China, Russia, India and so on flees to the US, not the other way around. Squeeze the financial sector and they'll squeal precisely because they know they can't run. They need the institutional structures available only in countries like the US, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Hong Kong, etc. In China there's no squealing, they just take their money and leave quietly. The people who leave developed countries for developing countries, in my experience, are by far middle class. Huh? I mean, there's a difference between picking up and moving to another country and moving the way money is generated to another country. Just in the last month or so Pfizer almost used a merger with Astrazenica to move to the UK specifically for tax purposes. Companies in the US are selling bonds in the US when they literally have billions of dollars sitting offshore because they think that paying interest is cheaper in the long run than paying taxes on money they've moved offshore. It's not something where you need to 'cherrypick' examples. The firms that aren't doing it in some way are the ones becoming uncommon. The only reason finance isn't doing it is because their whole gimmick lately has been using automated trading machines and locating as close to the NYSE as possible to shave hundredths of a second off trade times. Good Citizen fucked around with this message at 17:56 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 17:54
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Fried Chicken posted:No. Pfizer is going after Astrazenica to get Crestor because Lipitor is going generic. Cholesterol drugs are big money. They are looking at shifting their corporation to UK for tax purposes, but that is a distant second to bolstering their drug portfolio as their patents run out. You're right. It would be more correct to say that their intent in structuring the merger was to avoid US tax liability, not that tax was the sole reason for them wanting the merger in the first place.
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May 11, 2014 18:06
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ReindeerF posted:What firms have moved to other countries for tax purposes? Other than Pfizer, which almost did. There's no debate that this Irish-Dutch loophole has created a lot of foreign subsidiaries that are hoarding cash offshore and lobbying for a tax holiday, but aside from the occasional Halliburton (which isn't really headquartered in Dubai) or Eduardo Saverin (who wasn't American to begin with), who has moved? Any wealthy individuals? Any major companies? I don't follow which individual companies are doing what unless one makes the news or is part of a case study I worked with. My point was that moving to another country isn't a binary choice of pulling up stakes and abandoning the US market or staying here. People aren't fleeing the US but the money is so this 'lol go ahead and leave' stuff is kinda dumb. Even I'm not sure how to fix it. Lots of different countries are involved in a race to the bottom that the US isn't much participating in right now, mostly just because of partisan gridlock.
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May 11, 2014 18:35
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ReindeerF posted:You're way oversimplifying what happens. Let me put it back to you to add some context - if the world works how you assume, why are so many companies spending millions on lobbying trying to force a tax holiday to repatriate their earnings? If it works the way you assume, why haven't they simply moved overseas? I get that you think it works a certain way, my point is that it doesn't. They don't leave. Yes, in some cases money can be collected (not moved) offshore for holding purposes, but that's only in some cases - and in all cases those companies want the money to come home for the holidays because when the poo poo hits the fan, as it tends to do, they'd rather it not be stored somewhere they don't have political pull. They want it repatriated because they want to pay out massive dividends. And yeah, you're right that it's more correct to say that they're moving money generation offshore, not money they've already collected here. They haven't simply moved overseas because they want access to US markets and in most cases their executives live here and don't feel like moving.
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May 11, 2014 18:49
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Amergin posted:Exactly, I agree entirely (and I know I got lucky). The job market has changed and a four year degree is going to be required for pretty much everything from now on. And the problem is the lack of funding for higher education, not how much the universities are spending.
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May 13, 2014 18:39
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zoux posted:Erm, I don't think "education" is a quantifiable metric. Theoretically it should be possible. I think we can all agree that a communications major is the zero point, so then we just need to build the scale up from there.
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May 13, 2014 18:53
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The Warszawa posted:I'm curious to what extent "learn to code" will supplant trade school as the panacea of choice, what with the prominence of the Boy Kings of Silicon Valley. I mean, to some extent it has, but I mean in the David Brooks Yale School of Humility "too many [of other people's] kids are going to college" sense. In 10 years 'learn to code' will be on par with 'learn how to use excel'. It'll be a secondary skill that gets selected as part of a double major along with what you actually want to do
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May 13, 2014 20:08
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Caros posted:Except that Zimmerman is visibly Caucasian, with a 'white' name. Literally the only reason I know he has any Hispanic background is because I have been told. I think your memory might be a little cloudy. It's very easy to see that Zimmerman is part Hispanic at a glance Not that it matters, since the definition of white is ever changing. If this was the 1800s we could just as easily be having a conversation about whether the media is biased for calling someone white when he's actually half Irish.
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May 20, 2014 22:40
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I appreciate that they took the time to make this http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2011/03/ledger_live_animates_njs_pensi.html
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May 21, 2014 00:23
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SickZip posted:Not only describing him as white hispanic but then dropping the hispanic part in most descriptions and artificially whitening his picture is way outside of normal media behavior and only makes sense in forcing him into a narrative role better for sensationalism. It's unbelievably transparent. I agree, manipulating photos to fit your narrative is wrong and is way outside of normal media behavior (I can't find any sources saying that happened to Zimmerman outside of some literal crazy-person blogs)
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May 21, 2014 02:57
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Fried Chicken posted:I think just the former, but a tax goon explained it when they filed to appeal the damages and I'm just parroting them. Basically the report smaller profits and get a bigger subsidy now because we do that to try and keep the price of oil stable. Hopefully said goon will return and explain It's just classified as an ordinary business expense. You pay taxes on profits instead of revenues, and any legal settlements will decrease your profits so that you're paying less in taxes. It's not really 1-for-1 either. If you're in the 35% corporate tax bracket and pay a $1 million settlement then you are saving $1,000,000 x 0.35 in tax liability. And as I understand it a lot of BPs settlement is to affected businesses and not the government, so the government is getting screwed on both ends of the deal. Disclaimer: this is a huge oversimplification e: not sure about the subsidy stuff. A big part of oil accounting loopholes has to do with calculating resource depletion and its not something I've spent a lot of time with. Anyone who graduated from an accounting program in Texas could tell you all about it since it's a huge part of the focus there. Good Citizen fucked around with this message at 20:03 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 20:01
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nutranurse posted:So there's a strong likelihood that she'll just be her dad's stooge? That or she'll start filibustering his legislation until he changes his stance on curfew policy
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May 22, 2014 02:49
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absolem posted:I am arguing that it is not immoral to benefit from a situation in which someone other than yourself has violated someone's rights, as long as you yourself have not violated anyone's rights. I'd say it depends on your level of knowledge about how you benefitted from those acts. If you know you benefitted from the marginalization of others then not taking some measures to help correct the problem is immoral. The stolen goods mention from before works much the same way. If you happen to figure out they're stolen then you have some obligation to right things. I think how much an individual person or government should do to remedy the situation is debatable but the above is not.
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May 22, 2014 09:10
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Swan Oat posted:
This picture still sends me into hysterical fits of laughter every time. There isn't a lamer dude in the whole world.
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May 23, 2014 20:44
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Tempest_56 posted:Any of the roughly ten thousand attempts we've had to 'go in and bring democracy' in the last sixty years that seem to have inevitably left the nation behind 2-10 years later as a ruined shell that's little better than we arrived, if not worse off. Korea maybe?
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May 27, 2014 17:34
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:We left South Korea a militarized shithole for a longgg time after the Korean War. It wasn't really until the late 60's and 70's that the South Korean government (which at that point was a US supported dictatorship) shifted their economic focus to heavy industries, which created a huge influx of economic capital that allowed the country to modernize. They took that momentum, used it to build up and support a lot of state-owned conglomerates like Samsung, shifted industrial focus to electronics and that propelled them even further forward. Well it wasn't a perfect example but it was the closest thing to a success I could think of, considering the limitations. And as bad as it is or was, it would almost assuredly be part of North Korea without us. And that would be maybe a little worse.
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May 27, 2014 20:54
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JT Jag posted:The problem of course is that the response to these shooting is inevitably "you're exploiting this shooting for political gain, we need time as a nation to recover from this before we consider rash emotional political action." Then another mass shooting happens and that vague "grieving timer" restarts. It never ends. Lol the anniversary of a shooting happening before the next one. This must be an old cartoon
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May 27, 2014 23:27
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1stGear posted:Tea Party darling Dan Patrick has defeated Perry stooge David Dewhurst in the primary runoff for Lt. Governor. This is surely bad for Texas but I have a hard time not celebrating any misfortune to befall dewhurst so I guess I'll take my joy at others' pain where I can get it.
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May 28, 2014 05:22
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Crain posted:Personally I don't see the point of commencement speakers beyond "Someone you want to hear tell a story". The point of a commencement speech is to dick wave at lessor schools over which important person you were able to book.
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May 28, 2014 21:29
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Khisanth Magus posted:Wait, colleges really are having him to commencement speeches? Look up the history of Hillsdale
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May 28, 2014 21:42
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That is kind of terrifying, really, because you have to take someone seriously to invite them to that don't you? How are people still taking that nutcase seriously?
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beatlegs posted:My conservative friends are now touting a claim that the VA is actually overfunded. They cited this, from FOX's website: Don't look at it as a raw amount. Look at it as a decreasing cash surplus every year as they increase their service load. A $450 million surplus in a $60+ billion budget is really nothing especially if their cash reserves have actually decreased since the lat year
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May 29, 2014 02:34
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I find it pretty hard not to put a lot of the blame on Shinseki. Those offices should have been audited and he should have known what was going on. There was definitely some level of acknowledgment that this kind of thing was happening and nobody wanted to be the one to shine a light on it. If this was confined to just one office then I'd be more forgiving but it doesn't seem like that's the case. I don't think firing Shinseki will help veterans but he certainly should be fired for his inaction.
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May 30, 2014 17:07
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SedanChair posted:Military jobs are not the only tough jobs. However they are the only jobs where you might conceivably be killed as a part of your job. Noooope. Not even in the top ten jobs most likely to kill you
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May 31, 2014 18:17
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Joementum posted:Meanwhile at the Republican Leadership Conference Prayer Breakfast They're just a half step away from going to those things in warhammer space marine outfits.
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May 31, 2014 20:26
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PostNouveau posted:I don't know how much to read into this, but Ted Cruz just barely beat Ben Carson 30%-29% in the straw poll at the grassroots activist straw poll at the Republican Leadership Conference. Carson didn't even attend the event. I like pretty much everything about this. Cruz has been pulling everything out of his bag of tricks to appear presidential and just barely edged out the 'no really were not racist' prospect of the moment. Carson never had a chance at the presidency. He just doesn't have the speaking ability and presence when in an event that isn't completely precoordinated and scripted. He also has a need to be recognized as the smartest man in the room and seems to get shaken when people don't defer to him. He would implode spectacularly in the primaries.
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Jun 1, 2014 17:16
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