In other news
In the current news climate we see that some figures and events tend to dominate the front-pages heavily. Still, there are important, interesting or just plain weird things happening out there and a group of people can find these better than one.
I thought I would test with a thread for linking general news articles about "other news" and discussion. Perhaps it goes into the abyss that is page 2 and beyond, but it is worth a try.
Some guidelines:
- Try to find the "clean link", so that links to the news site directly and not a social media site. Avoid "amp-links" (google).
- Write some cliff notes on what it is about, especially if it is a video.
- It's not an excuse to make outlandish claims via proxy or link extremist content.
- If it's an editorial or opinion piece, it is polite to mark it as such.
- Note the language if it is not in English.
- There is no demand that such things be posted here, if you think a piece merits its own thread, then make one.
I was speaking more to wondering why Microbet hopes he gets impeached. All indications are Milei's economic reforms are turning the nation around from the economic catastrophe he inherited. Which in a vacuum one would think would be a good thing. But I guess Micro wants things to go back to the way they were before?
Maybe we don’t live in a vacuum? Duh?
Mexican senate greenlights american militaries interventions within mexican borders against cartels
Just in a training capacity though
Sounds like the cartels will be able to recruit well trained soldiers in the near future.
I think Los Zetas was originally started by ex commandos/special forces, who saw more profit on the other side.
Give it a little time.
It is trivially simple to scam money out of the entitlement programs.
If I were God Emperor for a week, I'd kick all sorts of people off SSI's disability program, for instance. I'm personally aware of a number of people lightly connected to my circle who are collecting bogus disability checks. I know of another guy who has his kids on Medicaid instead of paying for private insurance despite pulling in 6 figures, and you can walk over to the grocery store 2 blocks from my downtown office on any given day and have people offer to sell you EBT benefits for 50 cents on the dollar.
Milwaukee had a problem in years past with people scamming the state childcare system by setting up fake daycare businesses and collecting checks for "watching" each others' children, despite no kids actually changing hands on any given day. Mom A agrees to watch all 4 of Mom B's kids for $1000/week and vice versa. Do nothing, collect money. The prison sentences for the worst offenders after crackdowns started were laughably short.
Don't sit here and pretend like there's no fraud to be found.
Give it a little time.
It is trivially simple to scam money out of the entitlement programs.
If I were God Emperor for a week, I'd kick all sorts of people off SSI's disability program, for instance. I'm personally aware of a number of people lightly connected to my circle who are collecting bogus disability checks. I know of another guy who has his kids on Medicaid instead of paying for private insurance despite pulling in 6 figures, and you can walk over to the grocery store 2 blocks from my
This is an example of something I don't understand. Being so deathly afraid of some people getting something for free that they are not entitled to, that it is preferred to blow everything up instead eliminating individual fraud where they find it.
"This program helped 100,000 families feed their children last year who otherwise would have been at risk."
"But Bob down the street scammed $100 a month. This program has to go!"
The governor of New York State, Kathy Hochul, is mulling over whether to use the authority granted to her under the NY state constitution to remove Eric Adams as mayor of NYC. This has never been done in the history of the state.
As is often the case, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, Adams obviously is corrupt. This is not a debateable point. There is a reason why so many people at DOJ who were involved in building the case against Adams --including some arch conservatives -- are resigning in protest. (FWIW, before Adams took office, I was told by someone with a ton of knowledge about city politics that Adams was guaranteed to be corrupt.)
On the other hand, I don't love that the governor has this authority. If New York ever had a MAGA governor (which is not impossible), I'm certain that person would abuse this power.
On a related note, unless Adams pulls off a miracle, it seems likely that Andrew Cuomo will be the next mayor of NYC. Of all the name brand Democrats in the United States, Cuomo is on the short list for my least favorite. He is egotistical, a bully, not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and he treats the people around him terribly. In other words, he shares a lot of Trump's personality flaws, although he is less of an outright grifter than Trump.
For Hochul how would that play politically? Is Adams unpopular enough that she'd be fine?
I don't think I like the idea of the governor doing that. It's the kinda thing that started this.
For Hochul how would that play politically? Is Adams unpopular enough that she'd be fine?
The short answer is I don't know, and I'm not sure she does either. Her win in 2022 was relatively narrow. Now that Trump is supporting Adams, it's hard to imagine that canning Adams would generate much crossover support among Republicans. I suspect that most Democrats wouldn't hold it against her if she ousted Adams, but if it alienated even a relatively small percentage, it could be a problem.
My guess is that she is hoping that she can force Adams to resign by waiving the stick around, but I don't think that will work. Adams is stubborn.
Give it a little time.
It is trivially simple to scam money out of the entitlement programs.
If I were God Emperor for a week, I'd kick all sorts of people off SSI's disability program, for instance. I'm personally aware of a number of people lightly connected to my circle who are collecting bogus disability checks. I know of another guy who has his kids on Medicaid instead of paying for private insurance despite pulling in 6 figures, and you can walk over to the grocery store 2 blocks from my
But when billionaires /big corps are « smart enough » for not paying tax through fraud or dubious schemes like tax heaven , it’s fine and encourage by maga …
This is an example of something I don't understand. Being so deathly afraid of some people getting something for free that they are not entitled to, that it is preferred to blow everything up instead eliminating individual fraud where they find it.
"This program helped 100,000 families feed their children last year who otherwise would have been at risk."
"But Bob down the street scammed $100 a month. This program has to go!"
+1
Of course not, since 50% is hopefully an asinine number, but it's definitely more than $100 per 100,000 participant families.
You exaggerating in one extreme direction isn't any better than me going to the other extreme.
I haven't suggested "blowing up" the system anywhere, but I would be extremely aggressive in rooting out and prosecuting people scamming the system if I were in charge. That seems to be what DOGE is doing. They're catching some false positives, and then they're correcting those mistakes quickly when they get pointed out.
Even if the fraud rate is just 1%, that's many many billions of dollars and worth the trouble. I'd bet the number is higher than that, though.
Of course not, since 50% is hopefully an asinine number, but it's definitely more than $100 per 100,000 participant families.
You exaggerating in one extreme direction isn't any better than me going to the other extreme.
I haven't suggested "blowing up" the system anywhere, but I would be extremely aggressive in rooting out and prosecuting people scamming the system if I were in charge. That seems to be what DOGE is doing. They're catching some false positives, and then they're correcting those
Seem you are barking at the wrong tree ….
Most Americans don’t have offshore bank accounts; the superrich stash nearly $2 trillion in offshore tax havens. The top 0.01%, representing only about 13,000 households, hold more than a third of that, often held through tangled webs of shell companies.
The IRS estimates tax cheats cost the US at least $688 billion in 2021 alone. Trump’s IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Senate Finance Committee that the annual tax gap could be $1 trillion. One of our witnesses, Stephen Curtis, estimates that we could raise $600 billion from just a handful of scofflaw corporations for many years’ worth of unpaid taxes. We’ve seen in my lifetime a collapse in the share of United States revenues that corporations contribute — down to six percent. A lot of that collapse is through tax tricks like offshoring.
In 2010, Congress gave the IRS a new tool to root out offshore evasion by individuals. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, made foreign banks report offshore accounts held by Americans to the IRS. But Republicans hamstrung the IRS, and in 2018 the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that “the IRS had taken virtually no compliance actions to meaningfully enforce FATCA.” Most Americans had their incomes reported to the IRS by their employer; the superrich with offshore accounts were on the honor system. Guess how that worked out.
For large multinational corporations, compliance can turn on whether the IRS can investigate through the armies of lawyers, accountants, and even lobbyists that corporations employ to avoid taxes.
A huge amount of revenue can be hidden by a big corporation. The IRS has taken one pharma giant to court for $10 billion in unpaid taxes — more than the entire proposed FDA budget for next year. The Senate Finance Committee investigation showed this company reported 60% of its profits offshore despite making 74% of sales to U.S. patients.
Facebook owes $9 billion for its own offshore tax schemes, according to the IRS – enough to fund President Biden’s proposal to expand health coverage for kids.
Microsoft, according to the IRS, owes a whopping $29 billion for what one of its executives called “a pure tax play,” enough lost revenue to fund a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
For years, the outgunned IRS hampered by Republican budget cuts struggled against billionaires and corporations with virtually unlimited resources at their disposal.
In the Facebook case, with time ticking on the statute of limitations, the company sought to run out the clock on the IRS’ investigation. Republican budget cuts meant the IRS had to pause its audit because it didn’t have the money to hire an economist.
Been like that for decades and republicans will still play the same bs games .
Ps: nah let’s cut even more federal employees and social security that actually help people .
Pps: nah trickle down economy works , debt going « down » to 36 trillions , keep going on that same old republicans book of tax cut and cutting government jobs .
I get that. DOGE went after the lowest-hanging fruit first, which was shutting off the faucet to all the DEI activism.
If someone tasked me with shaving a trillion dollars off the federal budget, I'd probably use the keyword search approach to start, too.
Nobody has had their food stamps or disability checks turned off yet, so arguing about that right now seems pointless.
I get that. DOGE went after the lowest-hanging fruit first, which was shutting off the faucet to all the DEI activism.
If someone tasked me with shaving a trillion dollars off the federal budget, I'd probably use the keyword search approach to start, too.
Nobody has had their food stamps or disability checks turned off yet, so arguing about that right now seems pointless.
Where does the "again" part of Making America Great Again come from? I guess it has to be before all this woke "DEI activism" started in the early 60s. Has to be after the great depression...
We have like 10 years to work with here. Is the plan to start a third world war so we can go back to the WWII era greatness?
Have you ever thought this all the way through?
Where does the "again" part of Making America Great Again come from? I guess it has to be before all this woke "DEI activism" started in the early 60s. Has to be after the great depression...
We have like 10 years to work with here. Is the plan to start a third world war so we can go back to the WWII era greatness?
Have you ever thought this all the way through?
post-vietnam to 9/11 was a pretty good time. gulf war bit of a 6 month blip. mind you i was young during this period so hard to say how great it really was. i had a good time. /privileged white male of course.
don't remember much dei activism being shoved down our throats at all opportunities. there were no pronouns during that time.
post-vietnam to 9/11 was a pretty good time. gulf war bit of a 6 month blip. mind you i was young during this period so hard to say how great it really was. i had a good time. /privileged white male of course.
don't remember much dei activism being shoved down our throats at all opportunities. there were no pronouns during that time.
USAid started in 1961. Vietnam was all about spreading woke American degeneracy. 70s was the hippies era, 80s was cocaine and fraud. There isn’t much there that’s great that isn’t abject woke nonsense. So getting great again is about recreating the 90s? I could see that. The three most used words in the 90s were probably ******, ******, and Jewish.
Jncos are making a comeback too. It all lines up
had the start of many great american companies during that period: apple, microsoft, dell, google, amazon....i'm sure i'm missing a bunch. pretty good time for america.
