Not only the 17th but the 16th amendment. If you are going to make states directly responsible for collecting taxes, presumably on an apportioned basis, then you are going to need to give state legislatures direct power in the federal system. Which, as you have already said, means getting rid of the 17th amendment. Just as importantly you'd need to remove from congress the ability to levy direct taxes on people's income (16th amendment) or they'd just do an end run around the new system the moment they wanted more money. Ending up with high state taxes and then a federal tax on top of it would be horrible.

The problem is that the current system really benefits the people in power at the Federal level. They will fight to the bitter end to avoid changing that. Your only hope of changing that is a constitutional convention and even that only works if you can prevent them from stuffing the convention with their own people.

This is far worse than inheretence of debt. They are seizing these people's refunds based on debts that they claim their parents have incurred. Yet when the woman in the article demanded proof of the debt they were unable to produce any. She was supposed to get a due process review before they seized her money but all of the notices of that right just happened to go to a PO box she hadn't had in decades. Yet when it came time to collect they suddenly had her right address. From the article this pattern is not uncommon. So basically we have the IRS collecting a debt that they can't even prove is a debt and doing so, either through intent or incompetence, in a way that deprives the victims of their due process rights to challenge it. Even if you accept the premise of a child inhereting the parents debt, which I really fail to see any legimate basis for, this method of collecting those debts stinks on ice. I mean with they way they have this setup they could just declare anybody owed any amount that they desired to collect. After all they are not providing any proof and are simply siezing your money with no due process. I hope the lady in the article prevails in her court case. Because if she doesn't the rest of us will never know when some "old debt" will appear.

I noticed a couple of other disturbing things in this article. Ms Grice's father only owed, by their unsubstanitated claim, $2,996. Yet they seized her entire refund of $4,462 and only released the difference to her after the Washington Post started questioning it. So in addition to making her pay a debt that isn't hers, that they have no proof of and that they deprived her of her due process rights for, they also helped themselves to an additional $1,466 of her money that they only released under pressure from the press. Some of the other cases seem to be for fairly token amounts. Makes you wonder if what we are seeing here is the IRS adopting the tactic of demanding money from people that is just a bit less than what they can afford to fight for. Hopefully the courts will strike this whole thing down.

The complaint I have seen with "pure peanut butter" is that the oil rises to the top if it sits for awhile. I get comments like "the normal peanut butter doesn't do that" and "is this bad?". Then I end up explaining that this is what happens when you haven't added anything to artificially stabilize the oil in solution. As far as salt goes I don't think I have tried any brands that didn't have salt in them. I'll have to check next time I need to refill my peanut butter supply. Either way I do not put salt into the same category as "partially-hydrogenated or fully-hydrogenated oil" or various chemical preservatives.

The settlement, assuming this article is accurate, includes a broad ligation release that will basically shield the credit card companies from getting sued in the future. So essentially they are giving a token amount to this settlement and getting a huge litigation release that will allow them to continue to screw people essentially forever. I'd opt out of this class if it was me. Walmart, Target and Amazon have all opted out. Hopefully they will all sue individually and force a reasonable outcome this time. Depending upon how this goes Walmart may be doing us all a favor here by trying to force a better settlement.

This is just another example that reinforces my view that class action lawsuits are basically a scam. I have been involved in two where I actually joined the class and in both cases the company being sued and the lawyers came out just fine and the people in the class got pretty much nothing. I had two other instances where I qualified and I just opted out. Not surprisingly those cases also involved making lawyers rich while the people in the class got nothing. In this case the class members are getting next to nothing and giving up a hell of a lot to get it. Can't say I am surprised.

Congress appears to have declared it legal when they reauthorized the patriot act. Whether they want to admit it or not. All the statements to the contrary look to be members of congress trying to cover their asses now that the public knows and is upset. As far as I can tell nobody at the NSA is any kind of legal jeopardy over the current program. Presumably they might be subject to a challenge on fourth amendment grounds. This proposal might even be an attempt to head off that possibility.

From the article it appears that there are several changes in the proposal, that if they really do them, would benefit the public. One is that they will no longer have direct custody of the records. The second is that the retention period goes from 5 years to 18 months. The third is they are going to have to get warrants for individual searches instead of blanket warrants for "All of Verizon's customers" for example. It also limits the warrants to 2 hops where as they supposedly go out three hops now. As far as it goes this proposal would be a good thing. What they are talking about here is more along the lines of traditional wire tap rules compared to total surveillance we have today. I'll take that change if I can get it. That is the real trick will any of this really be done or is this a PR stunt?

The other issue brought up in this article is that they aren't changing anything about other forms of bulk data collection. With the example being given of the CIA collecting information on all money transfers. I am not at all sure that is reasonable either. Personally I am suspicious of anything that starts with the word "bulk collection of data". At the very least I'd like to see some sign of real oversight and a serious justification of anything like that.

That assumes that the other parts of the government are actually starting to digitize the processes that input into this. They are attempting to do so but as the article states only 5% of large scale government IT projects succeed and 41% completely fail completely. Some of those other projects are very likely ones that will provide the digitized inputs into this process. So while I think your over all analysis is correct that this problem will eventually self correct I suspect your time line of "another decade or so" is probably optimistic.

I remember the one with Robert Maxwell. Mostly because I had just interviewed for a position at one of his companies when it occurred. I was looking for a part time job in my field while I was in college. He was one of those guys who named everything Maxwell whatever. The company I had interviewed at pretty much vanished within a few months of his death. I always figured it was a suicide since he was in serious financial and legal trouble at the time. Though I guess he could have been drowning his sorrows and fell.

In general I agree with you on this. I don't like seeing situations where a company doesn't deal honestly with people and gets away with it. Unfortunately looking at the kickstarter FAQ it appears that their terms of service do allow them to get away with just refunding the money. For your typical kickstarter where people made a good faith effort to supply what was promised I can see that for something like this I am less sure that is appropriate.

I wonder if it has occurred to them how that could be exploited. Say I come up with a really good sounding idea and get people on kickstarter to give me a bunch of money for it. Some of these things have raised multiple millions on there. For the sake of example say I convince people to give me enough that I end up with $1 million after kickstarter and Amazon get their fees. I turn around and invest that in an aggressive stock fund and get 10% return. My guess is you could string people along for several years putting out bogus updates. So after say three years you have $1,331,000 less taxes etc. Then you come back give a sob story about how the project has fallen apart and you just can't complete it. Then following these terms you send all your backers an offer to refund their money and that they should just contact you if they want a refund. My guess is half the people won't even ask for their money back. So lets say 50% of the total amount pledged ends up being refunded. So you promptly pay out $500,000 while apologizing profusely for the problems etc. Since the amounts per individual are so small most people aren't going to really investigate what went on in any detail. In that example you refund everyone who asks and still walk away with $831,000 less taxes. Heck even if everyone demands a refund you'd end up with something around $300,000 less taxes.

I worked at a company that had a significant number of H1B visa holders. Most of them were sincere young engineers who wanted to move to America and become US citizens. What they got was basically indentured servitude at a US tech company. They don't have the freedom to easily change employers from the one that sponsored them here. The end result was they got paid substantially less than their US counter parts. Having this labor force without the freedom to easily quit pretty much allowed management to treat everybody poorly. After all management knew they could replace just about anybody with a H1B visa holder and pay them half. The one advantage that they got was when the company got into trouble they were not the ones who were laid off. As it is structured now I think the H1B program has nothing to do with their being a "shortage" of skilled scientific and technical labor. It has everything to do with companies wanting to suppress wages for US tech workers. At least that appeared to be the motivation at my former employer. They used those guys to allow them to cut wages and bring down benefits.

I don't blame the H1B visa holders at all. I knew a bunch of these people and they were hard working honest people. Frankly they are exactly the sort of immigrants we want in this country. I doubt if any of them have cost the US government one cent. In my view they are actually victims in this in that they have to put up with years of abuse until they can qualify for a green card on their own. That the visa program is designed to exploit them and screw the American tech worker at the same time isn't their fault.

Which is exactly the position we see being espoused in more and more of our governmental policies. The general attitude seems to be that people who achieve more have somehow victimized those who haven't achieved as much. I have an exceedingly low opinion of public schools in general. The ones in my area are bad enough that in my opinion that sending your kid to them comes dangerously close to child abuse. Then I find out that supposedly these crappy schools are in the top 10% of the country. If you have a particularly gifted child, or even slightly above average, and want to see them achieve things in life the public schools are a bad start.

The ability to manage inflation and prevent deflation is one of the primary advantages of fiat currencies vs. something like gold standard currencies. It is also true that in the hands of foolish or corrupt politicians fiat currencies can be greatly misused. Saying that deflation enriches the wealthy is an over simplification. The truth is that the wealthy are enriched by both deflation and inflation. Not because that is an inherent principal of either but because the wealthy are almost always in a better position to balance their assets based upon economic conditions. For example in a deflationary period the value of money goes up. The result is that debt becomes more expensive, commodities lose value, land looses value, stocks loose value and cash gains value. So the wealthy dump commodities, dump land, pay off debts and horde cash and they benefit. The average person can't just dump their mortgage, their car loan, their credit card payments or their house. During an inflationary period debt becomes cheaper, commodities gain value, things like stocks and land tend to revalue with the market. Cash and near cash assets tend to lose value. So the wealthy move out of cash positions into the asset classes that do well in an inflationary period. The average person can continue to repay their debts with devalued cash. They can take whatever spare cash they have and put into mutual funds vs. holding it in the bank etc. Their house will tend to gain in value as inflation occurs. The rich are able to benefit either way because they have the liquidity to reposition their assets and the knowledge on how to do it. The changes needed for an inflationary period are much more accessible to the general public. So it isn't so much that deflation enriches the wealthy so much as it impoverishes average person. Either way the rich are going to be richer at the end. The difference is how badly everyone else gets it.

It is pretty clear that many in the ruling elites redefine terms in ways that the general public doesn't understand. That to people like Feinstein "the country" in the line "for the good of the country" means the ruling elite not the general public. Which is a big part of why she can say having the NSA spy on everyone all the time is "for the good of the country" while at the same time going ape shit over the spying impacting herself and the other members of the elite is a catastrophe. The worst part about all of this is that in all likelihood she will be back wanting to spy on the rest of us again as soon as she isn't the target.

It might be interesting to compile a list of terms that politicians use that have radically different meaning to them than they do the public. The one that pops into my head right away is "middle class". Which seems to have different definitions to the general public, Republicans and Democrats.

My thinking was more along the lines of you enter your zip code and system gives you an all inclusive price including your local taxes. Rather than a large disclaimer.

AT&T got absorbed by Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC) in 2005. Which is pretty much the worst of the baby bells split off from the original Bell System. They adopted the AT&T name, in part because theirs has a rather bad reputation, but the underlying company is SBC along with the bits of AT&T that they kept. So it is really SBC that is buying up everything not the company formerly known as AT&T.

My recollection of the old Ma Bell isn't as rosy as yours. You used to have to rent the telephone from them. You were not allowed to work on the phone wiring in your own home. I can remember being charged a non-trivial amount to have a phone line in my parents home repaired. Because it wasn't allowed for me to do it and unless you bought their in home wiring insurance policy you had to pay Ma Bell to come do it. Before the break up I can remember it costing something like $2 a minute to call my grandmother in Illinois from Virginia. My dad used to stand there while we talked and time the call because he could only afford so much time per month. Before the break up my father wanted a new phone Ma Bell quoted him over $200. We didn't get it because it was so costly. A couple of years later after the break up that exact phone was sold under the AT&T brand name for $19.99.

The break up may have allowed many questionable practices but it also brought costs for the average person way down. The worst practices seem to be more related to the industry consolidating than to the initial breakup.

Generally the answer is that the fees in question are something being collected for a third party. Usually the Government. Taking a quick look at my mobile bill, this is in the US, for this month I see five fees. Communications Sales Tax, State & Local Sales Tax, Federal Universal Service Fund, Regulatory Surcharge and State 911 Fee. All of which are taxes. So in my view it is just like how you buy a bunch of stuff at the store and have to keep track of the sales tax that they are going to tack on at the counter. It would make life much easier if they forced the mobile providers to quote the prices inclusive of the taxes.