Comments on: Warfare?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:41:51 +0000

OT:Steve: You might warn her that if her current DVD player dies, she will need a new digital television to go with it. It just happened to my Mother.

Badtux, reality doesn’t enter into it with libeRandians. Cults don’t respond to facts.

Yes, Suzan, people have more interest in the ‘circuses’ as the supply of bread is falling. Some of the best comedies produced on film were during the 1930s.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:25:19 +0000

Our friend Catherine has no converter box on her old TV; broadcast TV does not interest her. She watches exclusively DVDs from Netflix. I haven’t talked to her yet about what she will do about the change.

Attention: movie-lovers in big cities (and probably a number of towns as well): the local branch PUBLIC LIBRARIES in Houston, for example, have a decent selection of DVDs, and at least our local branch has reasonably quick turnover as well. Of course, nothing could satiate Stella’s movie appetite, but she has been persuaded to make use of the ‘This’ broadcast channel, which shows lots of old, presumably out-of-copyright B&W movies.

By: Suzan

Suzan — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:41:59 +0000

And when you get down to it, people are more interested in movie availability than in tax law now. No matter the long-term consequences.

The history of civilizations on the decline and BT rocks!

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:26:01 +0000

Actually, you have to hold stocks for a year to count the capital gains as capital gains rather than ordinary income. So yes, the capital gains tax break does theoretically discourage holding stocks for a few seconds. Of course, now the system has been gamed to render that whole distinction between short-term gains and long-term gains meaningless. You don’t buy stock in a company for a few seconds. You buy stock in a FUND that buys stock in a company for a few seconds, then realize your capital gain at the end of a year by cashing in your fund stock. It’s crazy, but, apparently, legal — and inevitable if you treat long-term vs. short-term capital gains differently (i.e. as something other than income), people will simply find ways to create businesses that have no purpose other than to turn short-term capital gains into long-term capital gains for tax purposes.

As I’ve previously pointed out, the top 1% owns 49% of the assets of the nation yet generates only 25% of the income of the nation, thus is incredibly inefficient at actually generating income. The other 75% of the nation’s income gets generated by the bottom 99% using only 51% of the nation’s assets. So giving special treatment to “capital gains” for the top 1% not only is unfair, but it causes economic harm, because if those assets were transferred to the bottom 99% (via taxing the top 1% and spending the money in the economy) the result would be far more economic activity — more than twice as economic activity. That’s the numbers. That’s math. I know math is hard, but (shrug) 2+2=4, regardless of what right-wing ideology says.

– Badtux the Math Penguin