If you want governments to listen without armed rebellion, the only thing one can do is refuse taxes.
They know that this is the inly othe tool you have - and thats why taxes are woven into the fabric of the economy such that its automatically taken without you having any control over them.
Its also why you can never truly own land. Dont pay taxes on land, and they will take it.
You can only pay for the privilege to rent land. Forever.
- Edward Abbey
Interestingly, the more independent contractors in a population, the easier it would be to stage a tax sit-in.
That's not a requirement, though. You can opt to have no taxes withheld and just pay what you owe in April. Of course, if you then don't pay your taxes, the IRS will find you.
> You can only pay for the privilege to rent land. Forever.
Yet, you benefit from the state recognizing your rights to exclusively use that land, and from foreign military invasion. Why should I subsidize the government protecting your assets?
If anything, land should be the primary source of taxable revenue. Mis-distribution of land (And the low cost of asserting ownership of it) is the cause of no end of social ills.
Since a common justification is to finance public schools, I suppose that complete privatization of education would be a necessary step in order to vastly reduce or generally abolish property taxes.
Property tax
Gas tax
Sales tax
---
Schools suck
Roads suck
Law enforcement sucks
Pollution sucks
---
But shiny new government buildings
All cops have new cars
Gas prices are out of control
The recycling fund was looted
Social security was looted
Trump just announced today to the NRA that he just gave a shit-ton of military weaponry to the police “you cant buy this stuff” he said.
Corporations pay no taxes
Flint has no water
This country is a joke.
Wait until big agra (monsanto) and inefficient governments take over legal marijuana.
Legal marijuana is a scam from a tax perspective.
Look at the lotto - that was supposed to pay for schools.
Look at “paid cable television” - that was supposed to eliminate commercials for a paid service.
Have you timed how many minutes a commercial break is on CNN?
Its all a joke.
EDIT:
And the thing that pisses me off, is they want to push all the costs down to the consumers. Are ANY of the water bottle companies held accountable for the mass plastic pollution in every thread of our environment? Obviously plastic isnt going anywhere - but the oil companies and chemical companies that produce all these materials and products pay nothing.
Look at this douchebag in the EPA right now. Are you following any of his antics? He had his lackeys being pay $40,000 PER MONTH just by Morrocco alone for lobbying access.
He had his "security" guy spending $100,000 on first class flights. He stole $65,000 from his campaign fund saying that he was reimbursing himself.
And then you have morons apologizing for them and defending these clowns.
> Property tax > Schools suck > Roads suck
I have no argument there.
> Sales tax
Have these been rising recently?
> Gas tax > Gas peices [prices] are out of control
Gas prices and whatever embedded taxes they have aren't that bad. They're much better than their peak around 2008 at over $4/gal.
> The recycling fund was looted
I'm not familiar with this.
> Social security was looted
Do you have a citation for that?
> Trump just announced today to the NRA that he just gave a shit-ton of military weaponry to the police “you cant buy this stuff” he said.
President Trump says a lot of things. Is there proof this actually happened?
> Corporations pay no taxes
You can argue whether they pay enough taxes, but I'd like a citation that they pay no taxes.
> Flint has no water
That's the city's own damn fault due to corruption.
> Legal marijuana is a scam from a tax perspective.
Personally, I'd rather we tax it heavily like cigarettes than to waste money incarcerating those drug users.
> Have you timed how many minutes a commercial break is on CNN?
They could use some more breaks.
Other localities in other states are worse than that.
http://services.corporate-ir.net/SEC.Enhanced/SecCapsule.asp...
Also, that refund is something that happened only in 2017; they paid over $1B in federal taxes in 2016, for example.
Can you elaborate on this? Why are the wealthy interested in empowering the NSA?
We can prove that wrong in November, of course.
EDIT: Its true that the democrats are just as bought, but I have faith that they would also appoint a supreme court that would rule the other way as well.
The Democrats are no better when it comes to these issues, look at their voting record.
Money has controlled politics in the US since the very beginning and without exception. In fact, money controlled politics in the distant US past to a far greater degree than it does today. In Rockefeller's time or before, you could do almost anything when it came to buying political favor, there were few limits on buying politicians.
The Chinese foreign funding scandals that followed the Clintons in both Bill and Hillary's campaigns - what was China buying? That was part of the deal that saw Bill spend vast amounts of time & effort lobbying to get China into the WTO during his Presidency, even going aggressively against his own party and voter interests.
"May 24, 2000, Bill Clinton clinched what many believed would be the last great legislative victory of his presidency. That afternoon, the House of Representatives voted to award China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing Beijing’s long-in-the-making bid to join the World Trade Organization. The historic deal had been Clinton’s top priority in the waning days of his last term—a move he hoped would improve relations with the world’s most populous nation, while cementing his own legacy of using free trade to advance America’s foreign policy interests. It had been opposed by labor unions wary of competition from poorly paid foreign workers and championed by corporations salivating over 1.3 billion potential Chinese customers (the business lobby had spent millions on TV ads supporting the pact). In the end, after much wrangling, 73 Democrats joined 164 Republicans to pass the agreement, which was expected to glide through the Senate."
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_next_20/2016/09/w...
[edit] Down-voting does not change the above facts.
"The conservative non-profit organization Citizens United wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts, which was a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act..." [1]
In other words, you are wrong about Citizens United, and unpleasant about it.
The 1% can pay whatever is required to protect their wealth - and its why the panama papers is the biggest scandal of all time.
So long as the 1% can live without consequence, they dont care how anything the government does affects the masses.
Of course, the complacency of us individuals reduces the security and privacy of us all. Realistically the NSA hasn’t been successful in reducing terrorist threats; in fact, the correlation is negative.
What are you basing this on?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
Try reading literally just the first paragraph.
Even if you accept and desire the NSA for the purposes of sigint, it makes no sense to pretend they can combat terrorism any better than any human can. They should stick to nation states. That we can’t easily discern whether or not they are spying on US citizens should be a red flag, even to lovers of spy games.
Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Let's only worry about what other nations are doing, until their agents and activities enter our country. Then we might as well stop bothering. Makes sense.
<Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?
What are you referring to? Do you have a security clearance? Do you think that other nations aren't constantly attacking our electronic infrastructure and security? What in the world makes you think that you would be aware of any success whatsoever of intelligence gathering in the Middle East? What makes you think that the situation couldn't have gotten much worse that it did?
To the extent that the expanded sigint is used for actual defense, it's trivial to expect more data to have helped (at least marginally) with the national defense aims of the agency. This is not controversial and somewhat trivial to point out.
The issue is that the NSA's behavior violated the 4th amendment rights of millions of people. You suggest that the ends justify the means. I respect that opinion and may even agree with it, but that doesn't matter.
What matters is that the law was broken in the creation of the domestic surveillance program and nobody is currently serving time in prison for breaking it.
The bill of rights exists because of very hard earned lessons about the appropriate relationship between the people and the government. We let a handful of officials ignore the 4th amendment and steal billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars to build the infrastructure to do so.
This is not just a major violation of rights but a major financial crime. The program should be cancelled, the officials responsible jailed, and the equipment auctioned off so that the proceeds can be returned to taxpayers.
Many of our rights as citizens give criminals and innocent people various protections against law enforcement. This is not a design flaw.
The estimates in this thread are that they received .3% or less of all call metadata in the US, which is probably a generous overestimate since the article says the full call records are "billions ... per day." Of that, they query less. I don't know how this can be considered "so much" domestic surveillance.
We as individuals never gave the NSA permission to track us, and most of us would never knowingly make the "unlimited tracking in exchange for nebulous collective utility" trade.