Not his fault the tax rules are broken for the ultra-rich. They always have been throughout history...so I don't expect any changes.
If we tried, it would require regulation on how politicians can be compensated for the rest of their lives after taking office. Need to close the revolving door where politicians help out rich people/corporations while in office, then are compensated indirectly after leaving office.
> they want to persuade me to hold a set of opinions
Glad more people are realizing this. It's harder to spot/acknowledge for people on the left since the biased coverage feeds into their worldview...in my opinion it's artificially solidified their confidence on how "correct" they feel they are about political topics.
The next step in this realization is nothing to do with one-sided reporting, it's the massive scale of what selectively gets ignored or hidden.
Hindsight is 20/20. Being the guy on the sidelines saying "I knew this was gonna happen" after the fact never adds any value. It's you trying to make yourself feel special. If you were so confident in your predictions, show me where you shorted the stock and made a bunch of money off it going down. If not, please stfu with your grandmom truisms.
I think colleges do it for cachet, but finance companies do it for ROI.
Think about the business models...The college business model depends on maintaining prestige to continuously attract applicants willing to pay high admission rates. The finance business model uses money to make more money, and the risk to reward ration can be swayed depending on decisions made by certain individuals.
Have you never watched a drug smuggler movie? Half the headaches are trying to launder the money.
Speeches are the best way to bribe someone. Once they give the speech, it's "services rendered". There's no shady money transfers to explain, since it's all out in the open. There's no risk of fraud. There's no way to be caught in a lie, because the entire payment is pegged to physically speaking in front of a group, which they actually did do. The only questionable thing is the amount paid, which is subjective.
It's nothing to do with "prestige", it's about return on investment. It's usually a payment for friendly behavior in the past, or to increase the likelihood of friendly behavior in the future (or to essentially tap into their personal network at some point in the future).
Celebrities are bribed, they're called endorsements. Former presidents are worth less and less as they lose their connections. Their price tag depends on how much power they still wield....which is why Clinton and Obama still command high prices.
One benefit of all this is people coming together on a non-partisan basis. I hope this makes people realize that political ideologies (left or right) don't make a significant impact in our day-to-day lives, but that the tension is weaponized against us via divide & conquer...all so things like this get pushed under the rug.
I'm aware the term "swamp" may stir up some Trump era animosity, but this is the definition of a member of "the swamp". They're literally everywhere in positions of power.
I'd guess that Musk personally moved to TX because he's planning on moving SpaceX and (possibly) Tesla HQs to TX.
TX has lots of cheap land, low taxes, business-friendly politics, low cost of living (for employees)....CA is basically the opposite and getting worse.
I'm assuming there would be costs for the bank once you get into electronic transfers. (or did we just think of the next unicorn payment startup idea??) As a simpler solution, what if banks offered checks that didn't have any identifiable info on them and didn't require a signature, etc. And instead of account/routing number it have a hex value that is decrypted by the bank?
Yeah that's way more than what I thought you initially meant. I recently bought a car and the max I could pay with a given payment source was $7,500. So even if I wanted to pay cash for the whole thing they apparently wouldn't have allowed it. I guess they wanted to spread out their risk. A place that allows a $50k all cash payment might actually be somewhat hard to find.
My main point is that the finance companies don't provide enough value to warrant a % of every dollar I spend. Not to mention that the % is most likely already baked into the price of everything I buy, so that charge is actually being paid by me the consumer, rather than by the retailer. I don't think there's ever been a time throughout history where finance companies have been paid on so many separate occasions throughout a single product purchase lifecycle: e.g. finance charges trickled throughout the supply chain before it arrives at the retailer, finance charges paid to/from retailer vendors, the % collected being discussed here, the extra % charged if the purchaser doesn't pay their CC bill on time, etc. The best and easiest way to begin taking power away from these companies is to simply start paying cash at all times, especially for the more expensive items considering they charge a percentage. Then switch to paying with personal check once your cash-holding-amount discomfort exceeds your retailers-will-have-my-personal-info-and-might-use-facial-recognition discomfort.
Ok then how about if people went back to writing checks? Eliminates both of those issues without the additional finance charges. That would however provide personal information to the retailer, unless the check was somehow de-identified (like an on-demand money order or something). Also, in my opinion I'd think that businesses would prefer to make more money if the only downside is figuring out how to manage physical cash in the registers.
I've been telling myself to pay with cash more often, primarily because I think it's crazy that a finance company gets 3%-5% of every purchase using a CC. Obviously some of that covers overhead, but it's mostly a mafia style shake-down that society is blindly accepting as a matter of convenience. Stores linking facial recognition with CC details is just extra motivation for me.
If we tried, it would require regulation on how politicians can be compensated for the rest of their lives after taking office. Need to close the revolving door where politicians help out rich people/corporations while in office, then are compensated indirectly after leaving office.