Sort of. Campaigning on vague slogans about something doesn't mean you have democratic legitimacy to avoid the whole process by which that something is supposed to get turned into law.
Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
> Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.
I agree with this statement and have commented as much elsewhere, but Congress could rein in Trump's tariff-setting ability any time they wanted to, and they have very explicitly chosen not to.
I agree with the parent comment - people in the US very clearly voted for this, buyer's remorse be damned.
Part of that is Congresspeople receiving retaliation and death threats from MAGA, which is not really how democracies are supposed to work, and generally not a valid mandate the voting public is able to produce.
The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.
However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.
Volpe and Chisholm have honed and fine-tuned their swings over 20 years to produce results good enough to vault them into the top few hundred in the world at that particular craft.
They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.
Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.
Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.
Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey the sentiment with as little as "Breakfast?" or "Hungry?" when talking with family. In the child's second language, would the maitre'd at the restaurant of a fine hotel ask a two word question, or rather bury those in respectful filler?
"Ow" and friends, by the way, are interjections to express sudden pain, functioning analogously to an adult's swearing. They're not full sentences about the pain and its source.
> Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey
It's kind of hilarious that you assume I'm not a native English speaker because I speak more languages... I'm a native English speaker who just happens to have grown up with 2 other languages and have a wife that speaks 4+ languages. On top of that I've taken a bunch of university level English courses.
Yes, I'm aware that people shorten sentences into statements when speaking to those they're familiar with. I do it as well.
Here's a thought experiment:
- If a toddler speaks in short statements it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant speaks in short statements it's "broken English"
- If a native speaker speaks in short statements it's vernacular or slang
Or:
- If a toddler makes up words it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant makes up words they're uneducated
- If a native speaker makes up words it's a dialect
Most of those incorrectly use the linguistic terminology (in particular, "dialect", "baby talk", "slang") but, yes, congratulations on discovering that context plays a role in communication.
Which really shouldn't be surprising: if a business is not adding value, it's not a viable business. But if a business is adding value on net, it should indeed owe tax charged on net value added.
You're right, it's not surprising at all. It's a tax meant to make revenue for the government. But all my life I've heard from people (who have never had a business), that businesses get back all their VAT. It doesn't help showing them the accounting, which very clearly shows VAT paid and VAT deducted.
It's a misconception that is on the level of people believing that their progressive tax rates are applied back towards previous salaries or business owners who think you should increase prices for the customers you have to make up for the customers you lost.
It’s not really a tax on their profits. Consumers have to pay it on top of the net sales price, and they know that it won’t add to the company‘s bottom line. The money goes to the state every month (or quarter sometimes), deducted by the VAT the business itself already paid for services/products.
For accounting purposes, VAT is a totally separate cycle of money, and for every important financial metric, VAT is ignored. [Removed] If you happen to spend more VAT than you collect, you’ll get the negative back from the state. Also, the net price is always known because it must be shown on every invoice.
On a product of 120€ with 70€ wages, they pay 20€ VAT on the 100€-before-tax, and they pay 25% IS (corporate tax) on the 30€ margin, so 7.5€ (this example is for France). If they distribute the remaining 22.5€ as dividends, the recipients pay up to 30% IR, so 7€.
VAT is most of the tax revenue by far. France’s budget is made of 50% VAT, 15% from corporate tax (IS), 10% from income tax (IR) and then the rest from various state revenue (like renting the palaces for movies).
I don't know the initial incentives, but VAT is much harder to evade (businesses have to keep track/declare things if they want to reclaim the VAT they paid).
Also it's a consumption tax, in the end the end consumer is the one paying it (through higher price). The businesses in the middle are mainly collecting the tax on behalf of the state.
I mean, what's the rationale in the US for a business being taxed on their profits, and also having to pass along the sales tax they've collected?
It's just two forms of taxation. Sales tax/VAT is a fixed proportion of sales, and then you also pay tax on profit that's left.
You might as well ask why people pay income tax when they make money and then have to pay sales tax/VAT again when they spend it!
Of course, answering that is complicated, and there are a lot of factors. But the main one is basically that governments like to tax "everything", so that people/goods/services that might wind up evading one tax wind up paying another. Sales tax makes sure governments get revenue even when businesses make no profit, taxing profits makes sure governments get more revenue when businesses make more money.
1. They need to tax every economic transaction possible to maintain demand for the Euro currency and keep it from loosing its value. This is the most important reason.
2. To get more money in taxes for the government. There's people who argue that lower tax rates increases economic activity and in the end would increase tax revenue also for the government. The government doesn't see things that way. "You pay me now, pay more!"
3. Taxes on profits are an incentive for business owners to reinvest any surplus into growing their business, meaning more jobs etc.
The candidate “solution” to that problem is to remove any representation requirements in medical trials, so adverse effects that manifest just in specific subgroups aren’t found. I wish I were joking.
I want an actual-full-screen, with menu-bar and Dock invisible, with no window chrome - not merely “fill the maximum allowable space by the OS, as if dragging the windows corner with mouse”.
BUT I don’t want to use the native affordance for that, since that makes it its own “Desktop”, and I can no longer switch to it using my Snow Leopard-era muscle memory of using ^-<number> to switch between them.
I am fully aware that this is incredibly niche requirement, but it is a dealbreaker for me :)
I saw that Ghostty kinda supports this; but then disables tab support if this is enabled, which, also an obvious dealbreaker.
It’s growing into a similar problem as faced by nations with an inverted population pyramid and no immigration: an increasingly smaller share of workers whose productivity supports an increasingly large proportion of the economically idle.
But it happens much faster because rather than being economically idle due to having worked and contributed to society for 40-some years like those nations’ retiree seniors, Haredim move smoothly from being children drawing on societal resources to being adults drawing on societal resources with no period of usefulness in the middle. By analogy, they’re the peacock feathers of Israeli society, and how things get resolved with that will get … interesting.
Ramanujan himself survived childhood smallpox and died at just 32 from what's thought to be complications from an earlier bout with dysentery. But he had lucked out in that he was born male in an urban setting in a high caste, with access to education, textbooks, and the language of the imperial core, and managed to make it to adulthood at all.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the right (genius) person in the right place at the right time in history of science to marry together things other people figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.
It's not that individual makeup is so irrelevant, it's that if we assume (potential) Einsteins and Ramanujans follow a normal distribution (or really any random distribution), then the fact that so many people in the world live in situations where any genius will simply never be noticed means we are necessarily missing out on the vast majority of them.
Congress has previously delegated tariff authority for emergencies to allow the president to do stuff like impose (temporary) sanctions in fast moving foreign policy negotiations. The mechanism by which all the current tariff stuff is getting done is by Trump having declared that trade deficits (in goods only), by virtue of existing, constitute such an emergency, despite having been observed for 80 years and being both an inevitable consequence of the US being an advanced country. Like, the whole thing rests on a total perversion of the law's intent, economics, and the English language itself.