America - The Official Thread
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Scaff
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The channels been renamed to 'The Young Ottomans', damn I missed that.A war criminal gets told off by an "apologetic" anti-semite on a channel named after the people responsible for the Armenian Genocide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
McLaren
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Of course you would. Even the founder of the channel denied it once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Turks
https://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocidefaq.html
You're smarter than that Scaff, and you know TYT is the Breitbart on its side of the spectrum. They are not a reliable source of news, and got in trouble last month claiming a black shooter was actually a white supremacist motivated by Trump.
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Danoff
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Yea I agree that below a certain wage you're better off just being unemployed. For one, benefits from the government are better if you're "unemployed" vs. "underemployed". But also you have the extra time to save money. Not by scrounging dumpsters, but by going to soup kitchens, applying for better jobs, etc.
The minimum wage affects very few people in the US. Ironically, the number of people making less than minimum wage is greater than the number of people making minimum wage. I'm guessing those folks are food service where tips are expected to make up the difference and then some. The number of workers in the US that are actually using minimum wage, as in, it potentially is causing their salary to be higher, is 1.3M at most. I say at most, because it's almost certain that a fraction of those jobs would pay the minimum wage regardless of whether it was mandated.
Everyone else is not using it. For everyone else, their employer pays them according to what they earn, voluntarily, because they want that employee. Approximately 152M people.
I'm sure it is right, according to the law. They must have posted no profit, instead choosing to either pay their employees (which gets taxed) or buy things to grow (which is good).
Danoff
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That's tougher to do, because you have to account for regional revenue. Amazon is apparently headquartered in Seattle, so their US revenue has to be accounted for here. In fact, since they're incorporated here, they have to account for all revenue everywhere in the US. Because they get taxed on profits from Brazil here. So in the US, they'd need to show a worldwide lack of profit.
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That's where the larger companies are clever. In the UK if I buy a package from Amazon I buy it from an associated company called Amazon UK (or similar). The chances are that the product is fulfilled by a company in Jersey (also Amazon-something-something) and picked from a warehouse supplier there or on the UK mainland. By the time all the books are done the Amazon company that's made the most money is, by sheer coincidence, the one in the most lenient tax territory. The Amazon bits that are in tougher tax territories have normally paid so much for supplier services that their profits are literally zero. So zero tax.
Now that's what I call lucky!
Danoff
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That's where the larger companies are clever. In the UK if I buy a package from Amazon I buy it from an associated company called Amazon UK (or similar). The chances are that the product is fulfilled by a company in Jersey (also Amazon-something-something) and picked from a warehouse supplier there or on the UK mainland. By the time all the books are done the Amazon company that's made the most money is, by sheer coincidence, the one in the most lenient tax territory. The Amazon bits that are in tougher tax territories have normally paid so much for supplier services that their profits are literally zero. So zero tax.
Now that's what I call lucky!
Amazon UK is a subsidiary of Amazon. It's owned by the parent company. That doesn't allow them to skirt US taxes from UK revenue.
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The final European business (and possibly the US too) go through Amazon s.a.r.l., which is Luxembourgian. The US company takes advantage of state tax deals in the US, share (rather than balance) payments and loans to the SARL subsidiary to ensure it has the lowest tax burden in the US as legally possible. And it's legal, that's the main thing.
As a sort-of-aside: Trump's tax message is mixed. He wants big companies to pay more tax but has lowered the corporation tax requirement. I don't quite get that, but there you go.
Danoff
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Yea the European subsidiaries help Amazon keep a lower European exposure. They don't help with US tax exposure though, maybe if they're receiving investments of some sort, but that's how the US tax code is structured, corporate expenses are "deductible" so to speak.
The state tax thing doesn't help reduce its exposure to federal taxes as best I understand it. So the original concern was that Amazon is not paying US Federal income tax, and I don't think that any of the state or European subsidiaries actually reduce that tax exposure.
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The European businesses offer a way for the US parent to have significant expenditure that lowers their US profits.
They've been given various lets through tax breaks and deferments. Effectively the tax is being calculated and then relieved. In some ways this is a good idea - it keeps businesses "on-shore" and guarantees that the huge wage payout to employees is taxed at home. Amazon UK only paid £15m in tax to HMRC last year but their PAYE would be nearer £90m. Then there's the benefit to the economy from VAT on sales made to the employees spending that money in the UK.
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Is "the grapevine" the Mitch McConell statement?
Most leaders would try to avoid being in a position where they praise foreign dictators, attack the free press, remove all opposing government staff and declare unitarian states of national emergency because of the parallels that can be drawn to previous, well known regimes. Not Trump, it seems to be the order of business. Sadly his belief that he is the greatest president ever and that any contrary claims are enemy propaganda (also familiar hallmarks) seemingly prevent him from realising that.
Just how crazy can it still get?
Joey D
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Sounds like a fantastic use of tax dollars. And assuming Trump does this I can't wait until a president down the road uses this as precedent to declare a state of emergency for climate change.
Oh, and the national debt just went past the $22 trillion mark. Looks like Trump really is running the country like one of his businesses, you know to the point of hemorrhaging money.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/national-debt-effect-americans-223401667.html
Oh, and the national debt just went past the $22 trillion mark. Looks like Trump really is running the country like one of his businesses, you know to the point of hemorrhaging money.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/national-debt-effect-americans-223401667.html
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Danoff
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https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/politics/donald-trump-wall-funding-bill/index.html
National campaign promise emergency time.
National campaign promise emergency time.
Danoff
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To be fair it was something that looked like most of his supporters wanted the most from him campaign promise wise, the problem is it's not exactly constitutional the way the is trying to get the funds nor is it anywhere near enough money to actually finish the wall as claimed.
US debt is stupidly out of control it's ignorant of reality to blame it all on Trump as the intreast payments have been Soo high that basically any president who even tried to maintain status quo from the Obama administration would be growing the debt, but he certainly hasn't helped.
Unless someone like Ron Paul gets randomly elected to office in 2020 you have to accept that this problem is getting worse no matter who is in charge and will absorb most of government spending(just the intrest payments on the debt)in the years to come, I await the day US military equipment will be seized by crediters and mass government layoffs.
The only other option is to print the US dollar untill the debt is not a problem, but then many things will happen:
1. No creditor will loan to the US(why would you give money to someone that won't pay you back value at the same or higher then you lent)
2. The dollar will lose it's world reserve status
3. Hyperinflation will be a certainty thanks to the Above.
The Debt trap in a nutshell.
US debt is stupidly out of control it's ignorant of reality to blame it all on Trump as the intreast payments have been Soo high that basically any president who even tried to maintain status quo from the Obama administration would be growing the debt, but he certainly hasn't helped.
Unless someone like Ron Paul gets randomly elected to office in 2020 you have to accept that this problem is getting worse no matter who is in charge and will absorb most of government spending(just the intrest payments on the debt)in the years to come, I await the day US military equipment will be seized by crediters and mass government layoffs.
The only other option is to print the US dollar untill the debt is not a problem, but then many things will happen:
1. No creditor will loan to the US(why would you give money to someone that won't pay you back value at the same or higher then you lent)
2. The dollar will lose it's world reserve status
3. Hyperinflation will be a certainty thanks to the Above.
The Debt trap in a nutshell.
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