But think of the children/sex trafficking victims/etc!

The conflation is deliberate, and I'm only surprised he didn't try to link in the underage angle to it as well. The average person is probably going to care a lot less, and be less supportive, of measures to crack down on a transaction between two consenting adults, whereas the average person is far more likely to support a crackdown on sex-trafficking.

And while it's not to say that legalized prostitution is a panacea for sex trafficking, it's a lot harder to regulate and monitor something when the entirety of it is illegal, and therefore pushed underground. As with illegal drugs, many of the bad aspects are due in large part to the fact that it's illegal, or at the very least are made much worse by the fact that those involved can't go to the police/courts/etc for redress of crimes against them, and instead have to rely on criminal protectors/enforcers, etc, who also aren't exactly inclined to care about laws on things like sex trafficking for instance.

What I'd want to know that the article doesn't state is whether that's a marginal tax, or a total tax.

When it comes to federal income tax at least, the rates are all marginal. The top tax rate is 39.6%, but that doesn't mean if you make $500k you're paying 39.6% of that. Rather, you only pay 39.6% of everything you make over the limit. You'd pay 10% on the first $9325, 15% on $9326 to $37,950, etc etc on up the scale. You only pay 39.6% of the last $81,599, since the 39.6% kicks in at $418401+ (as of 2017 at least).

So if it's 2.25% of everything over 250k, that's not going to kill anyone making that sort of money, because the guy making $251k owes exactly $22.50.

It also means different things to someone in Japan than it does in the USA. In the US, driving is freedom of movement, because public transportation tends to be poor to nonexistent. Even in major cities, NYC/SF/LA/DC, it's decidedly lacking compared to most other major cities worldwide. Take away someone's license, and they can't get anywhere unless someone else drives them.

It's an entirely different story in Japan. Public transportation is everywhere. Even if remote towns up in the mountains, there are clean/timely buses. There, a car isn't a necessity to the degree that it is in the US.

So if Trudeau is a Marxist, just what does that make the left-of-the-Liberals NDP?

I know it's the typical internet thing to go for whatever term is the absolute worst, but seriously, calling anyone who's even slightly left of center a Marxist means that by the time an actual f*cking Marxist comes along, you've got nothing better to throw at them. The left is guilty of it too - call everyone to the right of you a fascist, and by the time some actual fascists come along, nobody pays as much attention because they're used to ignoring it.

Only if you decide to set up a dichotomy between people who want to take that benefit away and give the money to the rich, and those who don't. It's entirely possible to have a right-wing party that also supports the status quo programs because they're popular, while not wanting to socialize the whole damn economy. Just look at Margaret Thatcher's Britain. She privatized all sorts of formerly government run corporations and interests, but she left the NHS alone - why? Because it worked and people liked it.

It's not like there's some sort of slippery slope to absolute statist control, and only total unmitigated freedom is a possible alternative. People/countries/societies can and do function with some measure of social programs, and as has been proven repeatedly in advanced countries, it works out just fine. The only thing that's proved to be a problem is corruption - in countries where that is widespread/endemic, and there's no or weak rule of law, it ends badly, but that's true of corrupt countries without lots of social programs, too.

That would be great, except our choices at the time were either Net Neutrality, or Cable Company F*ckery. Nobody was offering anything to encourage ACTUAL competition.

It would be great if the Republicans in Congress (and elsewhere) started actually supporting measures to break up the monopolistic BS, and arrange a system where companies would actually compete on merits and service and cost and such. If I had a lot of choices, then it wouldn't matter so much if Comcast or Verizon or whomever decided to engage in shenanigans with network traffic. But like the vast majority of Americans, I don't.

Net Neutrality is a band-aid on a deeper injury - but all the Republicans, along with Ajit Pai and friends, are doing for us is ripping off the band-aid and letting us bleed. They're getting rid of Net Neutrality, and telling us that "everything is fine now!" as if that was the problem. No, Net Neutrality was a solution, even if not a good/ideal one. They're not offering other solutions though, because they like the problem staying.

It's certainly a fair argument that the commerce clause has been a gigantic loophole for pretty much whatever the government has wanted to do.

But that doesn't change the fact that the Internet is, as part of its intrinsic and core nature, a medium for inter-state and international commerce. How many people do most or all of their shopping on the internet? How many businesses rely on the internet to function? If the internet shut down for a day, do you think any business is getting done, at all? I know the company I work for would probably tell everyone to just go home for the day if we didn't have internet. I'd argue that the internet is just as critical to commerce as transportation (roads/rails/shipping).

So sure, push back against the misuses elsewhere - but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

They've claimed that because the bans weren't allowed to take affect, that they couldn't take action to address those gaps.

This is of course unmitigated bullsh*t, because any paralysis in the government bureaucracy has nothing to do with whether or not a given individual is admitted to the country. They could certainly argue that the suspension of the ban might have allowed some people in that shouldn't have been admitted, but any failure to act in the 120 days is entirely on them.

Unless I'm mistaken, that's the most common instance - a private company offers to install the cameras and operate them for a cut of the money. It's disgusting and corrupt, and in my view, that sort of business model should be illegal.

That's cute - you think the automated camera cares about that?

It's easier to issue the ticket, because the majority of people will pay rather than spend the time and money to fight it, even if they're innocent of any actual violation. That's what the camera companies, and the municipalities, are betting on.

People need to realize that there are worse things than taxes. Taxes are at least nominally fair, in that they apply to everyone. You could argue that some people get taxed more thanks to the idea of progressive taxation, but the counter-argument to that is that those people get taxed more because they can afford more. So it's arguable at least.

That said, the use of traffic and other fines as revenue generation is essentially a tax in all but name - and worse, it's an unevenly applied "tax" that cares nothing about your ability to pay, and instead is predicated more on whether or not you drive an automobile (and how much/where). The fact that in cases like the shortened yellow lights, it's actively harming (rather than helping) safety, is just the icing on the cake. It's egregious, and needs to go.

The problem I see is that, when it comes to so many of these violations, whether it be H-1B abuses, or hiring undocumented workers, everyone focuses on the individuals themselves, and not the bigger culprit - the businesses hiring them. Do people seriously think those employers don't know? Do people think those foreigners wouldn't come here, or stay here, if someone wasn't hiring them? The employers know exactly what they're doing, and they don't care.

Why not? Because they're not going to get punished. Sure, their chicken processing plant might get raided and their workers deported, but the likelihood of enforcement actions that actually hit them are far, far lower. So instead they just hire the next batch of undocumented workers, and the cycle begins anew.

You want to cut down on these abuses? Target the a**holes who are truly profiting from it, here in the USA, that are fueling the cycle. That's not likely to happen under the current administration though, not when Trump's own businesses have distinct preference for imported workers (now at least in most cases those are legal ones, though there are allegations from the past of violations).

More importantly, this isn't the EB-5 investor visa that Jared Kushner's sister was busy hawking in China. That's the one which allows someone to essentially buy a visa for $500,000. Theoretically that was money to invest in a business, but in practice they can simply 'invest' in, let's say, someone's real estate development (such as the Kushner family's), which amounts mostly just to giving cash to whoever runs that development.

Instead, this startup visa (would have) required someone to have an idea for a business that's good enough to attract investors. Maybe some of them fail, but maybe some of them are the next (insert cool/successful tech startup), and we'd rather they be in the US than in the other countries trying to attract them.

Of course, the startup visa was drawn from the number of visas otherwise available for EB-5 buyers. Gee, I wonder why Trump and Kushner would want to cut startup visas, but keep the EB-5 around.

It also lets you filter by things such as:

-Likelihood of being outsourced
-Likelihood of replacement by H-1B
-Requirement of more years of experience with a system than the system has been released for
-Likelihood of the job getting you indicted
-Requirement of multiple years of experience for entry level positions

Of course I selected all those, and it came up with no results. I must be doing something wrong.

The big problem is that the bulk of those visas have been used by companies that were clearly violating the intent of the law, by essentially enabling other companies to play a shell game. It works sort of like this:

Acme Inc. can't just replace its IT staff with H-1Bs. What it can do is replace its internal IT department with a contracted IT services group. Enter Wile E. Coyote Services, a company that hires H-1B workers, who bids on the contract. When WEC Services wins because it can bid cheaply due to using lower-paid H-1B workers, it takes over the IT work formerly done by American employees of Acme Inc - whose jobs are now being done by WEC's H-1Bs.

A salary floor might go a good way towards fixing some of the problem, though part of the problem isn't because the program is bad as is, so much as it's not being enforced. WEC is already skirting the requirements and is likely making dubious justifications for hiring those lower-paid staff in the first place. We need a Justice Department (and an Administration) that is willing to hit them with a giant boulder, because if the rules change but no one enforces them, it won't really matter in the end.