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Comment Re:Not the only strategy (Score 1) 324

Right. Just the other day the Motley Fool published effective tax rates. That takes into account not just federal taxes but aveerage state/provincial tales and other tax-related burdens that actually get paid in real life by actual companies doing actual business in all the countries they list. The effective rate for businesses in the US is 40%. The second highest, behind only the UAE.

Comment Re:Good (Score 2) 323

For example, do you like tofu? No? Well tough shit, it's free, and I'm going to force feed you three pounds of it.

The correct analogy would be: do you like tofu? No? Well, here's a coupon for free tofu anyway. If you like it, pick it up at the store. If not, don't. Either way. Free tofu.

Comment Re:People have AMT (Score 1) 324

The problem here is the most of the money is either made or spent off shore from the incorporated nation. These corporations have created subsidiary corporations within other jurisdictions and sell to them at costs of a loss and the subsidiary ends up making the money in the jurisdiction that has low taxes.

And Alternative minimum tax would not be able to get around that because each incorporation is recognized legally as a separate corporation/company even when they are entirely owned by one of them.

Where the confusion happens is in the SEC (and equivalent) filings in which the owned subsidiaries get counted as an asset so it's activities are reported along with the parent corporation's activities. However, it doesn't reflect the obligations in differing nations or jurisdictions. Imagine it like this, you own an apartment building in the US and another in France. You form a corporation in France and place the apartment building there so make accounting and legal compliance easier. You pay property taxes on the properties only in the countries in which they actually are. Well, as long as you do not bring your rental income back to the US, you pay taxes on it only in France and it wouldn't even be counted on your US tax forms. But if I sued you because you got drunk and ran over my cat and you lost everything, those apartments in France would count as one of your assets.

Keep in mind, it's a bit more complicated then that, but that should give the gist of it.

Comment Re:Most taxes are legalized theft (Score 1) 324

Once in a while it is time to go pedantic.
Words have meanings. We can string words together without regard to their meanings, and create an aphorism that sounds good, but it leads to logical incorrectness and a misunderstanding of how things work. It would be better if you were just gibbering.

Theft
In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.

Tax
A tax (from the Latin taxo; "rate") is a financial charge or other levy imposed upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay, or evasion of or resistance to collection, is punishable by law.

Donation
A donation is a gift given by physical or legal persons,

Taxation is not theft. The two words describe different circumstances and processes. The outcome may be the same (your stuff is gone), but they are two different words with different meanings.

It would seem to me that if you do not want to pay your taxes but do so under threat of law, it would be theft. If you do want to pay your taxes voluntarily, it would be a donation. Of course this is using common understanding of definitions.

Comment Re:Most taxes are legalized theft (Score 1) 324

The first Budget in Obama's term put the war spending on budget.

They were off budget during Bush's terms but one of the first acts Obama did with a democrat congress was to put them on budget.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02...

Now, people may think "good, we need to account for that money anyways" but the fact is they were always accounted for in the end. The problem with this is the rules of congress say you have to pay for new spending. With the wars off budget, when congress decided to do something new or increase something, they had to either decrease somewhere else, raise taxes, or assume an influx of revenue with a realistic chance of it happening. Now, when the wars wind down, congress can simply spend the money as new spending without having to at minimum look for it.

Note, I saw some articles saying that we are still using some supplemental appropriates (off budget) for spending on the wars. I am led to believe this is minor compared to the on budget spending for it.

Privacy

FBI Completes New Face Recognition System 129

Advocatus Diaboli writes: According to a report from Gizmodo, "After six years and over one billion dollars in development, the FBI has just announced that its new biometric facial recognition software system is finally complete. Meaning that, starting soon, photos of tens of millions of U.S. citizen's faces will be captured by the national system on a daily basis. The Next Generation Identification (NGI) program will logs all of those faces, and will reference them against its growing database in the event of a crime. It's not just faces, though. Thanks to the shared database dubbed the Interstate Photo System (IPS), everything from tattoos to scars to a person's irises could be enough to secure an ID. What's more, the FBI is estimating that NGI will include as many as 52 million individual faces by next year, collecting identified faces from mug shots and some job applications." Techdirt points out that an assessment of how this system affects privacy was supposed to have preceded the actual rollout. Unfortunately, that assessment is nowhere to be found.

Two recent news items are related. First, at a music festival in Boston last year, face recognition software was tested on festival-goers. Boston police denied involvement, but were seen using the software, and much of the data was carelessly made available online. Second, both Ford and GM are working on bringing face recognition software to cars. It's intended for safety and security — it can act as authentication and to make sure the driver is paying attention to the road.

Comment Re:Parallax. (Score 0, Troll) 425

So instead of a crusty old veteran "maverick" and a cheerleader of debatable intelligence, we got a miserly career politician with impossibly white teeth (polished by repeatedly putting his foot in his mouth, no doubt) and a community organizer who demanded 10 years of tax returns from his opponent but deemed producing his own birth certificate a challenge.

Sounds like a WIN

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