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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.

    Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.

    With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it’s really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.

    However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.





  • WiseThat@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzMythbusters
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    4 months ago

    This is what conspiracy theorists don’t get. The world’s scientists are not skeptical of your claims that water has secret spiritual memory because they hate you, they are skeptical because the claim you make, if it were true, would be so important and world-changing that they want to be absolutely sure of it before they endorse it.

    The difference is that, to a scientist, “this would be amazing if it were true” is not a good reason to believe it anyway



  • Cars are also REALLY not that convenient. I’m a dad to a four-month-old, and getting to appointments by bus/metro is SO much easier than using the car.

    Car:

    • Have to get the fucking car seat in the back seat
    • Pack stroller in as well
    • Drive with potentially screaming kid who feels isolated and lonely, feel like I’m gonna crash at any moment
    • Parking lots SUCK to walk around in with a stroller,have to push kid out into the open before I can see around these tall cars and just hope nobody is speeding

    Transit:

    • Push stroller right on to kneeling bus/level-boarding platform
    • can attend to my baby the whole time, no fussing.
    • don’t have to worry about parking AT ALL

  • Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

    Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

    The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)


  • Okay, so the problem is that because fossil fuels are cheap, most people don’t find it very worthwhile to explore new or more efficient ways to do things. This is especially true for the wealthy, for whom gas and heating costs are basically nothing, so they will do dumb shit like heat their homes while leaving windows open, or buy larger and less efficient luxury cars.

    The federal program fixes this. It adds a small cost to using fossil fuels, collects that money, and pays it back out to everyone. That means that people who use more carbon than average (which, again, is the willfully wasteful) will see a small penalty for their waste, while the people who are already trying their best to cut back will see a LARGE benefit, as they get a direct payment of cash for doing their part to conserve. If you are about average, there’s very little impact on you, but you NOW have an economic inventive to try and economize.



  • The problem is that’s literally just money laundering?

    They are using a shell corporation and bullshit liscencing fee to cover over the fact that this transaction is and should be illegal.

    Like, the idea here is that the church is not allowed to donate to a political figure, so they’ve set up a shell corp in the middle. The church pays $60 to the shell corp, who sends back 30 cents worth of paper, and then passes on 59.70 to Trump as a “licencing fee”, which is obviously just going to be spent on his campaign.





  • Galt’s Gulch was much more Socialist Commune than libertarian.

    Money had no use as Ragnar was running around distributing gold to everyone on a regular basis, John Galt had built a literal free energy machine and was giving the power away AND giving vanishingly cheap lectures on how to build one. Even the scarce resources (like the only car in the entire society) were being rented out for 50 cents a day.

    Plus all these fiercely competitive supercapitalists would just step aside and just allow competitors to operate with no challenge. The iron mine, and coal mine were all running at industrial scales to serve a town of a few hundred (they had robot labour and free energy) and when the copper miner just showed up they just let him stake a an exclusive claim and start digging with no issue.

    I highly recommend Adam Lee’s critical readthrough on patheos.com https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/