kibiz0r

I, uh... think we got off on the wrong foot. I don't see spending or taxation as a bad thing.

I mean, peep the @midwest.social, for a hint. And I did specifically say that I wouldn't recommend any terms to replace "raise" and "revenue" that have a negative connotation, such as "deactivation" or "destruction".

I'm also aware of the multiplier effect. The benefits of government spending are actually why I'm so interested in reframing the conversation about spending and taxation.

I will quibble with this:

The spending of a tax dollar is the beginning, not the end, of the benefit.

The spending is the beginning, yes -- but not a tax dollar.

Governments don't need to tax first, in order to spend second. It's the opposite. That's why "raise" and "revenue" are such terrible terms. Because they prime you to think that taxes are how we pay for things. We pay for things by just paying for them. The government spends dollars into existence. Taxation is just there to incentivize economic activity to chase those new dollars and keep a stable value.

If you view taxation as necessary to gather the funds to do something, you can have a bunch of resources just sitting around doing nothing and never be able to utilize them because you can't gather the funds without destabilizing the economy. But if you can just spend the money into existence, you can go ahead and increase the utilization without taxing first and then adjust taxation as needed from there on out.

And it turns out, this is how money has always worked. Taxation has always been a cleanup step to keep the spending productive, not a prerequisite to enable the spending in the first place. The myth of tax as revenue is relatively new.

I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can't help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.

You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.

Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say "Well... it's complicated." And if it's complicated -- if it's not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil -- then it must not be genocide.

I'm not sure. I'm not a wordsmith or an economist. But I would expect it to be something that conveys a sense that the money is being decommissioned rather than mobilized, or annihilated rather than gathered.

But the sense of deactivation or destruction is usually a negative feeling, so I would want to find a word that puts a slight positive spin on it. This is a happy conclusion to the money's journey. Its task is done and the inflationary pressure associated with its work is now relieved.

After watching Finding The Money, terms like “raise” and “revenue” applied to taxes seem deliberately misleading.

Meanwhile…

So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.

Dude gave up his entire life to send a warning to as many people as possible. You think he’s gonna not post further warnings on Twitter?

It doesn’t seem like the ruling says copyright concerns justify overriding a right to anonymity under GDPR, but that the right to anonymity doesn’t exist in the first place.

I think that’s probably a better place to be, because it means they can legislate a right to anonymity.

“Stupid says ‘ban’?”

As a contractor, your client isn’t allowed to dictate your work methods. It’s one of the things the IRS looks at when identifying misclassified employees.

Article says it’s likely an OpenAI partnership.

Sabine

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