I really liked that people voted with their wallets. I funded $10/month to a couple of people and pulled everything out. I'm glad they reversed the fee. Will start funding again.
I wish we could all do the same with our taxes to make a point to GOP.
You could organize a taxpayer's strike. Obviously not paying your taxes is illegal, so it's a risky move. If you get enough people to join your strike, you'll probably have a lot of leverage. But good luck getting enough strikers.
Companies do that all the time, that's why Apple is "striking a deal with Ireland" rather than having execs and accountants go to jail.
How does the proverb go again? If you owe the bank fifty thousand dollars you have a problem, if you owe the bank fifty million dollars the bank has a problem?
Ireland would much rather keep its word with Apple and not make them pay anything more than previously agreed to, but the EU is forcing its hand.
The only deal being struck is between the EU and Ireland to make Apple pay additional tax that Ireland says Apple doesn’t owe, and it’s more of a threat from the EU than an actual deal.
Tax evasion is not paying taxes on income you know you should pay taxes on and is unambiguously illegal. Tax avoidance is structuring your income so as to pay as little tax as is legally possible. The first is legal, and done in secret. The second is legal and done quite openly.
A tax strike is illegal and done openly in an effort to get other people to do the same illegal thing openly. Neither tax evasion nor tax avoidance.
Apple is not striking a deal with Ireland nor does it want to. The European Court of Justice has ruled that Ireland’s tax policy constitutes state aid and Apple should pay more tax. Ireland and Apple both disagree and are appealing the ruling. Until such time as the appeal is ruled on the money is being held in escrow.
Also in Finland: a new additional tax on motorcycles was canceled after citizens removed so many motorcycles from the registry that the new tax with fewer motorcycles was going to bring in less revenue than the status quo before the law proposal.
In a mostly unrelated sidenote, I'd love to experiment with this in a simulation of my hometown. The city is pathetically dependent on cars in it's culture and urban planning. I'd find it interesting to apply crazy taxation to automobiles with all of the revenue being funneled into public transport.
I had cancelled my pledges and re-added them all today (and added one even). I know unfortunately a lot of creators will never get back a good chunk of their pledges, but I feel it's important for us to both revoke our money when a company makes a bad decision... and resume it when they make a good one.
Companies recognizing that good decisions make them money is the key. If they figure they're going to lose money no matter what they do, they're less likely to take our feedback into account.
If I didn't vote for them, and they vote diametrically to my views, they do NOT represent me.
Just because mob mentality vote says X candidate wins means little. Especially if we were to hold to the initial representation in the constitution of 30k people per representative. But that number has ossified at 535 for how long now?
That's not what representation means. They may not represent your viewpoint, but they do very much represent you and all the other constituents within their region.
I'm never quite sure what people who make these kinds of arguments as you did are attempting or hoping to achieve. It's trivially impossible to represent every single viewpoint within a constituency with anything other than direct voting. So that's fine if you want to advocate for direct voting, but just come out and say it. Otherwise, any other system involves intermediate representation, which will then have this exact problem.
> I'm never quite sure what people who make these kinds of arguments as you did are attempting or hoping to achieve. It's trivially impossible to represent every single viewpoint within a constituency with anything other than direct voting.
You can approximate it much better than FPTP does by any system which produces more proprotional results, which is just about any system of democratic representation you don't deliberately try to make worse; FPTP for legislative seats is pretty much the bubble sort of election methods.
Well if it were just FPTP, it would be bad. But still not as bad as what we have now. We have known, admitted gerrymandering that disenfranchises and de-represents voters intentionally to split them up and make their decisions not valid.
I'm sitting with a -3 on my main post, and I still believe my points are still valid. I live in a liberal city in Indiana, and the republicans have gerrymandered us down the middle to split our votes to 2 different republican districts. Prior to 2010, we had better representation and would get more moderate republicans or democrats. No longer.
Because the US is not a strict Democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic that uses an electoral college as a layer of separation.
Further, even if Trump had won the popular vote, your floated premise would remain: the popular vote only represented a modest minority fraction of all adults in the US. So how can that possibly represent the actual full will of The People?
Regardless, history has proven on countless occasions that the will of the people is not always the ideal thing to follow. The Bill of Rights exists precisely to protect the minority from the all-too-often irrational will of the people. (you'll note that I specifically didn't justify the current state of affairs in US politics as being somehow good or positive, I'll pre-empt that conflation)
> Especially if we were to hold to the initial representation in the constitution of 30k people per representative. But that number has ossified at 535 for how long now?
That 30,000 number was decided before many advancements allowing for much higher population densities. London had a population of around one million in its first census in 1801. That's 33 representatives. New York City alone now has around 8.5 million people, or 285 representatives. The entire US would be 10820...
Yep, I was aware it was going to be around 11k legislators. Makes it a hell of a lot harder to buy them out, and use the money->influence pipeline.
And with newer tech, like the Internet (which was an academic curiosity when the 535 rule was enacted) can now easily network 11k representatives. There's now very little reason to meet physically in a room. Especially if we value transparency.
I'd like to see that there is an effective communication going on between citizens and their representatives.
Right now, with the current system, I see a few ways to communicate.
Physical letter: form letter or nothing
Phone: automated system recording
Email: form letter or auto-subscribed to email list
Facebook: Ignored, form statement, or banned
Twitter: Ignored, form statement, or banned
What I do see that works is what lobbyists do: they have face-time with their legislators. The current contention rates of up to 500k people per representative makes that avenue nearly impossible currently. Unless you happen to get a glimpse at a talk, you have close to 0% chance of talking with your rep.
With a contention ratio of 30k to 50k/rep, would make meeting your representative much more likely. It would also reduce money effects, since now elections are a local thing instead of a moneyball contest.
As I said, that was definitely a devil's advocate position, and on this I very much agree with you in principle but not on approach. The approach I would rather see is to devolve power the federal government has managed to aggregate back down to the states, and hopefully even more local levels.
I've commented on this before; I'll just link those instead of repeating myself:
They're doubling the standard deduction, which will cut taxes for the majority of all middle-class tax payers. Most of the middle class pays no or little in the way of net income taxes as it is, with 85%-90% of all income taxes being paid by the top 20% income bracket. The tax cuts the middle class will receive, will drive their net income taxes that much closer to zero.
85% of all the value of the SALT / local income tax deduction goes to people making over $100,000 per year.
97% of all home owners own homes worth less than the new proposed cap on mortgage interest deduction.
Both of those tax increases will almost exclusively hit well-off people.
Do think about whether lower taxes is even a good thing in the long-run. Accruing $1 trillion national debt just kicks the burden to the next generation, as does gutting public services to fill the gap. I also live in Washington, and honestly it's rather disgusting that we don't pay any income tax... our overreliance on property taxes is inefficient and leads to systemic funding problems for some programs.
why should the Federal government finance the tax methods the states impose on their citizens. this change is good because it will bring the methods of taxation, the value of taxes taken in, and their usage, to light.
far too often high taxation states have lived with the idea that the rich won't complaint too much since they can deduct a large portion from their federal taxes. yet all those not rich enough to itemize got stuffed.
people need to understand that deductions of state, real estate, and similar taxes, only serves the wealthy. Yet oddly the very same people who complain about the wealthy and taxes instantly pivot when they learn how its all done and that they will be affected.
We are the rich, the vast majority posting here make far more than the average if not in multiples. people think it takes millions to be rich, but its not true when you look at the numbers.
Why should states like California finance the federal government's handouts to other states that refuse to actually tax their own population, do you mean? And why are you ok with the federal government financing states that use property taxes, but not other types?
> why should the Federal government finance the tax methods the states impose on their citizens
The underlying assumption to your question is that the money belonged to the government in the first place.
By that logic, you go to work, produce economic value, various levels of government take what they want, and you receive whatever is left at their pleasure. That's your income: whatever part they decide to let you have after they're done dividing up the money that your employer desired to pay to you.
Thus by not "allowing you to deduct" taxes paid, one level of government is literally trying to tax you for money that has been taken by another before you got any of it.
> why should the Federal government finance the tax methods the states impose on their citizens.
It should be neutral to them, which is why State/local taxes should be deductible; non-deductibility creates an artificial incentive to avoid tax-funded programs that are a net economic benefit before considering the distortion produced by federal taxation.
I wish we could all do the same with our taxes to make a point to GOP.