>This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.
And yet.
>If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.
Without even getting into the subject of kids who are brought here.. I just have to say, why? Immigrants are net contributors in the US. Many of these people who are here "illegally" are in a bureaucratic maze and are attempting to follow the rules. Some aren't, sure, but we live in a society where we don't draconianly punish people for a certain level of breaking the rules in cases where there is no real harm done. And I say deportation, particularly to 3rd country like the USA is doing now sometimes, qualifies as very draconian.
If you add the eligible voters who chose not to vote (indicating they were fine with whoever wins), then it's a clear majority. If you don't vote, your vote is effectively for the winner.
not being motivated enough to vote against != support in terms of claiming a popular mandate. If I just don't care who wins, you can't say I support either candidate.
At most you could say my inaction prevented the winner from losing I guess.
It’s a first past the post election system, meaning you vote for the lesser evil. And this was Trump’s 2nd go around, where he campaigned on pardoning traitors. Anyone that didn’t vote for Harris gets lumped in with the supporters of the current administration, for all intents and purposes.
Eh. You can’t claim the non voters all implicitly support him though since they didn’t know the outcome ahead of time. I’ll agree they didn’t sufficiently oppose him ahead of the 2nd time to bother voting. But that’s far from support.
On the other hand while yes it's still running, twitter is mostly not releasing new features, and has completely devolved into the worst place on the internet. Not to mention most accounts now actually are bots like Elon claimed they were 3 years ago.
I dont know; they may well have been on the ads and moderation side. And they did add the hangouts/voice calls stuff, but that may have been an acquisition, I'm not sure.
Actually Trump repeatedly said he didn't know about project 2025. He's so scattered in his campaigning that it's possible to pretty much justify any action as "what he said he would do." But saying executing project 2025 is exactly what he SAID he would do defies all reality. It may be what intelligent observers expected him to do but it is not what he said.
Edit: good lord people I’m not defending Trump I’m saying he lies about everything including that he lied and said he wasn’t going to do project 2025. Read the post I’m responding to!
People have got to learn how to read between the lines with Trump and those around him. When the things he says he is going to do and the things he’s actually doing are exactly the things laid out in project 2025, the connection to the project is immediately clear and establishes that he was lying about knowing nothing about it.
> Actually Trump repeatedly said he didn't know about project 2025
* He said he'd end the war in a day.
* He said he had a better health care plan.
* He said he'd drop the price of eggs.
* ...
* He said lots of things that were not true.
> Actually Trump repeatedly said he didn't know about project 2025.
His exact quote is: "I have nothing to do with Project 2025." Meaning sure - he did not write it. I doubt he read it - it is 900+ pages long document :-)
Anyway, he might fooled some people but I doubt - my understanding was that he is going to follow Project 2025. It is good time to rewatch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYwqpx6lp_s
I am certain you can find more than one quote of his relating to Project 2025. In any event this also doesn't disagree with what I said more broadly, which is, he was not forthright about his plan to do exactly what Project 2025 said, so you can't say he's doing exactly what he said. But anyone with a hint of insight could understand that was his plan.
I'm responding to someone who said Trump is doing what he SAID he would do, and that is all I intended to correct.
They are because they have an interest in keeping tax filing difficult and unapproachable, to keep public animus against taxes at its maximum. Coincidentally this is 100% in alignment with the tax prep industry whose entire existence is based on products which solve and handle the complicated tax situation.
Simplifying the tax code is about tax prep. The simpler the tax code, the simpler to file. Though what you say about him wanting to lower taxes is possibly true, none of those posts are about that.
How so? You don't pay TurboTax per regulation. You pay them a flat fee to file your taxes.
I might buy that line of thinking for a corporation but the direct file program was about individuals. Elon gleefully tweeted about how that had been deleted. That's a direct give away to TurboTax and H&R Block.
The 1040 is already really easy to fill out for most people. But you can't just go on the IRS website e-file using the W2 that the IRS already received.
Thought experiment: taxes for everyone are $1 but you have to climb to the top of an icy glacier to place a single dollar bill in a collection box. Is it easy to file these taxes?
Not relevant because you exclude Elon Musk from the "they" who "have interest in keeping tax filing difficult and unapproachable"? Because he is clearly not one of them: "Simplifying the tax code will increase productivity", "Crazy idea: let’s simplify the tax code", "The tax code needs drastic simplification!", etc. And he seems to have quite a bit of influence in the Trump administration.
The people with complicated taxes are rich. Most people have dead simple taxes tax-code wise. W2, standard deduction, dependents, maybe some interest deductions. You’re just being obtuse now. Removing random capital loss carryover loopholes or what have you has nothing to do with mainstream tax prep.
That people don’t know how to do it and thus many pay companies to do it for them. Most of these people’s taxes are extremely simple from a tax code perspective.
Intuition. If the majority of bitcoin usage was for transactions involving services and goods instead of speculative investment, there's a pretty strong case for a wager that the impact of speculative investment on its price would decrease.
I don't personally believe this will ever happen. BTC has too much legacy cruft. The "digital gold" narrative won out. Day-to-day transactions will happen in a newer, perhaps not invented yet crypto.
I agree but that’s like saying if my grandma had wheels she’d be a wheelbarrow innit? BTC is not set up to ever be a reasonable currency. Agree digital dollars is where we’re headed.
You should not sell your shares in the S&P 500 to buy pizza unless your financial situation changes drastically for the worse or I guess maybe you are near death. As I said in the other thread, the problem is that btc is too desirable in the market to be a functioning currency and using it for pizza or impulsive daily purchases is a nonstarter in reality.
But you’re wrong. People sell S&P and BTC everyday even if they aren’t dying.
This is time value of money. If I wait 20 years instead of buying a house, I can have more money. But that’s 20 years of my life I didn’t live in the house I wanted.
I could invest more in S&P and not go on vacation, but then I won’t have as much time to go on vacations.
Goods and services now can be more valuable than money later, and that’s why people sell. And that’s why deflationary currency is fine.
I notice you mentioned big ticket purchases which I specifically did not mention. Your argument looks a bit different if you replace houses and vacation with lattes and sneakers. We live in a consumer economy where a marginal drag on purchasing activity due to currency deflation would probably be pretty disruptive to put it mildly.
If you’re arguing that people would think harder about their purchases and frivolous spending would decline. I agree. And I think that’s a benefits
If you’re asking if people would not use their deflating currency to buy lattes and sneakers, I disagree. People like sneakers and lattes more than money. They prove this everyday by buying them instead of s&p.
There is an issue of the cost of a transaction - which nis bad for btc and s&p. Nobody wants a tax form for buying a pizza. But the regulatory environment creating high selling costs is orthogonal to the deflationary property.
The argument simply is that exchange should be frictionless and deflationary currency will slow the velocity of money. I guess you agree this will lead to reduced prosperity and economic activity, though you call it frivolous purchases. Your comment about preferences doesn’t play into it; this is about mechanics of exchange, and a precious asset is an inefficient medium for commerce which would lead to reduced economic activity because not only do you have to factor in the opportunity cost of buying a good or buying some other good (sneakers or s&p), now you also have hodling, zero economic activity, as a 3rd option with its own expected return and opportunity cost to forgo. When I buy sneakers, the s&p 500, or btc, my dollars don’t disappear. A counterparty receives them and they stay in the economy. If you pay me in btc and I just hold it, then that money effectively does disappear from the economy.
And I’m not even mentioning all the macro issues of not being able to provide liquidity in the form of new capital in times of crisis.
I agree that it will reduce the velocity of money and maybe “GDP”. But not prosperity, individuals being able to save wealth into the future is a better life outcome than more goods changing hands.
> and a precious asset is an inefficient medium for commerce
You are conflating liquidity with deflation. To be a currency it has to be liquid, we agree. We also agree btc is not as liquid as cash. But deflation or stability is orthogonal from liquidity.
> now you also have hodling, zero economic activity,
Already addressed. People want money to buy goods.
> my dollars don’t disappear.
The value isn’t lost in the exchange but it’s lost everyday due to inflation.
And by “lost” I mean transferred to government projects.
> that money effectively does disappear from the economy.
No it merely is saved for a future consumption date. If we average consumption needs of participants in the economy there is no reason to expect a monotonic hoarding effect. That would mean consumers are not satisfying their desires for goods.
Here is one last framing. The economy is not money, it’s goods and services. Money is just a tool for claiming them. So what does an inflationary currency do to help the economy? Does it cause more people to get out of bed and create new goods and services? No. It just transfers claims to resources to someone else.
> You are conflating liquidity with deflation. To be a currency it has to be liquid, we agree. We also agree btc is not as liquid as cash. But deflation or stability is orthogonal from liquidity.
I’m not; you have a limited view of what inefficiency means. The currency can be liquid and still inefficient for exchange due to other kinds of overhead such as opportunity cost of spending the currency itself.
The economy is not money but a frictionless (opportunity cost wise NOT liquidity wise as you keep trying to divert to) currency is better for facilitating exchange and access to goods and services.
I think a perfectly stable currency could be OK too but that would require incredible management on the monetary side to maintain that equilibrium. And absent being able to hit that bullseye it’s been proven, as much as things like this can be, that a stable little bit of inflation with a fiat currency is much stabler and leads to more prosperity than a currency bound by finite resources external to the economy.
Isn’t it enough that you can buy gold or whatever or bitcoin with your depreciating dollars? Why the fixation on it being a currency?
Maybe it's improved but when i played with btc and made 3x and freaked out and bought a secondhand pixel with my $800 stake in milliBTC the friction was huge. I paid unpredictable vig getting $ and I had very indirect access to sell price which was being constantly fucked over by whales playing.
A true economy of low friction btc transactions for pizza has never existed at the scale banks do pay wave. Its hypothetical frictionless, not actual. I'm willing to bet even legalised state coins will be tracked, frictive and taxed.
Totally. The practicalities of BTC or any crypto as currency today are also a big problem. On top of the fundamental whyyyy of it all. If you can easily convert to/from USD to crypto or other desired store of value doesn’t that provide the required buffer against inflation? Why imbue the currency itself with value? I know societies used to do it that way but that’s not really an argument for doing so in the present day on its own…
You could and should ask the same question about stock shares - and indeed there’s an entire profession with centuries of history around that – but it’s a fundamental error to ignore magnitude. The stock market is based on real value and that avoids wild swings when nothing has fundamentally changed - even through the mortgage bubble my portfolio made made gains because people still needed to buy food, cars, phones, clothing, etc. and if did even a little research it had been easy to spot companies whose fundamentals didn’t support their valuation. In contrast, a pure fiat currency like bitcoin has value only from social consensus and has far more volatility.
The problem is a currency which is also considered a precious good. It’s like using diamonds as the medium of exchange. Gold is far from the most valuable commodity, and silver even less so. So I think it means we should use some other crypto than BTC if we want to have it be a currency.
Isn’t it nearly entirely the commercial banks “printing” money by fractional-reserve lending? Low interest rates mean more, bigger loans from banks, ergo more money out there.
What do you mean "necessary?" It's a function of demand, they only write the loans for borrowers who want and qualify for them.
It's not pedantry. It's understanding the model of attribution which blames the "fed" for this when it clearly seems like a function of the systemic design of our economy and financial system. Put another way - abolish the fed, and I'm not sure how this would change. And in fact it might get worse as you've removed an oversight and controlling body.
When people talk about ending the fed they don't just mean the actual Federal Reserve. They mean the Federal Reserve along with everything they control such as fractional reserve banking, quantitative easing, etc. Perhaps there is somebody out there who wants to end the fed, but keep fractional reserve banking, but I haven't seen them.
Fixing that will, potentially fix the issue ... Or completely crash everything.
Ahh, “end the fed” doesn’t mean end the fed, OK. Because if you did end the fed, you’d have unregulated banking and maybe a return to wildcat banking which um, would probably not be better for your long term finances.
A quick perusal of Wikipedia’s article on the history of banking would reveal that banks figured out they could lend out more than the amount they had in deposit well before the concept of a central bank came into being, and the central banks’ role has historically been to keep things at least somewhat under control. So again, to put it simply, blaming the fed seems totally misguided here.
I don't think you understand how catchy phrases work. You don't make your phrase 50 words long to accurately convey your thoughts or it will never catch on. The majority of those advocating for ending the fed are Austrian economics supporters who consider the Fed, and the things they are involved with, to be things that need to end and use the phrase end the fed to encompass all of that.
Heh. I think it’s more likely most people saying that don’t really know what it’d entail.
For instance without our current banking and financial system you’d have to pay banks to look after your money, if all they were allowed to do with it was hold on to it. This would have a similar drag on your principal as inflation does on buying power.
And yet.
>If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.
Without even getting into the subject of kids who are brought here.. I just have to say, why? Immigrants are net contributors in the US. Many of these people who are here "illegally" are in a bureaucratic maze and are attempting to follow the rules. Some aren't, sure, but we live in a society where we don't draconianly punish people for a certain level of breaking the rules in cases where there is no real harm done. And I say deportation, particularly to 3rd country like the USA is doing now sometimes, qualifies as very draconian.
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