How did Citizens United “make bribery legal”?
224 karma · joined August 2, 2018
The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay roughly 37 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent pay roughly 30 percent. Do you consider that an equitable “membership fee”?
Why don’t you just write a bigger cheque to your tax collector, then?
What possible reason could one have for making it “hard” to stay wealthy, other than pure spite and jealousy? How does it benefit society in any way?
That Beyonce is the most talented and hardworking person? That no one should have a higher net worth than her? You have some very strange views.
You can't choose not to eat food either.
> So why does our literature usually assume that both are the same?
What literature assumes they're the same?
What did you mean by this nonsense?
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Exercising editorial control does not make them liable for all content [1]:
Courts have consistently held that exercising traditional editorial functions over user-submitted content, such as deciding whether to publish, remove, or edit material, is immunized under Section 230.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act grants interactive online services of all types, including blogs, forums, and listservs, broad immunity from tort liability so long as the information at issue is provided by a third party.
See [2] for some examples of online activities that are covered.
[0] https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
[1] http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/immunity-online-publishers-u...
[2] http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/online-activities-covered-se...
I don’t think this is clear to the average person at all.
Nope. It is about prohibiting corporations and unions from using their funds to make independent expenditures for speech [1].
> In fact, some companies having a tendency to curb free speech through contracts denying people the right to talk about certain things.
Your example is strange. Such contracts are not imposed by the government.
> corporations get used to dodge personal liability by their owners and employees
You should clarify what you mean by this and how it is relevant to the issue at hand.
But that’s just going back to my comment 4 levels up this thread. If it’s an issue of tax amount visibility and not tax filing pain, the latter is not needed for the former.
Nowhere does the author say that. Your whole comment is a strawman.
You don’t know that the author painted your generation with an overly broad and negative brush. And even if he had done so, it wouldn’t render the article “pointless”.
To make this more explicit, presumably the chain of reasoning is as follows:
1. Make tax filing more painful.
2. As a general rule, people will set out to do that which reduces their pain.
3. Therefore, people will set out to do that which makes tax filing less painful.
4. People determine that lobbying for lower taxes will make tax filing less painful.
5. Therefore, people will set out to lobby for lower taxes.
Step 4 doesn't make sense to me because reducing total tax rate and reducing tax code complexity are orthogonal issues, and advocating for lower taxes will not in and of itself lead to a simpler tax code.
How is the amount on a check or bill, if made clearly visible, somehow “not visible”?
What's your evidence for this claim?
> this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently
What are you talking about?
No. It's not always wrong.
Well, under your proposal they can’t know how far they’ll get.
> Yes, developers had to think through design decisions, stick to well defined HIG's and use controlled test groups
Well, did they? To a greater extent than today?
This is so comical I actually laughed out loud. How did you arrive at this conclusion based on their comment? Walk us through your reasoning.
What agenda would that be?
Edit: It’s a sad state of affairs for HN when a question like this immediately gets downvoted twice without explanation. HN is indeed changing, and not for the better.
Historical experience suggests the opposite.