Did you folks not have Red Shoe Diaries?

I wonder if one of you is switching the words around from dead hang?

A dead hang is when you hold yourself from a chinup bar.

Tried it last night for a hockey game. I still think I’m not using it correctly but people were nice.

The world would also just be a happier and better place with another season.

Musk aside, it looks so goddamn stupid, I’d be embarrassed to drive around in it regardless. Like a cheap 80s movie version of what a futuristic car would look like.

And as Others have noted, why would you want a truck that looks like it can carry less stuff than a motorcycle can?

Ahhhh, gotchya, sorry missed that!

Though, I think tax cuts are fine to spur demand (especially targeted at lower income levels) though I’m a little hesitant about cutting spending. I’m in the camp that feels deficit spending is okay, maybe even desirable for things like recessions and wars. Spending cuts usually act as a drag on growth so if your goal is to heat up an economy, cutting taxes AND spending seems counter productive…

Oh, if the impetus is just to cut taxes, well I don’t think that’s particularly ideal.

If you’re cutting taxes in the hopes of Laffer striking again, fine but that’s supposed to be revenue generating.

If you’re cutting taxes for the sake of lower taxes, then you need to have some services in mind that are worth less than the value of the tax cuts, not just in terms of dollars but in terms of what they do. For example, you could cut SNAP benefits but yeah, most would be against that because feeding poor kids is pretty popular.

I don’t think these are unpopular because people don’t know economics so much as there aren’t many services they’d give up for marginally lower taxes.

Fair but I’m not sure what the point of spending cuts is beyond ,shrinking the state, cooling down an overheated economy or reducing a deficit. What am I missing?

A lot of government spending is super popular (think entitlements, healthcare, infrastructure etc.) I have an econ degree (admittedly, not particularly used as I’m now a dev) but I’m still not seeing a particular impetus…

Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve seen any of those in my lifetime. I’m Canadian and even Steven Harper, who would be almost a Democrat by American standards, wanted to go to war with the census for Reasons.

Broadly though, my understanding of Conservative values, peeling back the state, more self reliance etc is broadly unpopular to the many who think the state has a big role to play in social welfare from education to healthcare

If you could offer just rough ideas/goals, what would your sane, honest Conservative budget feature? Not looking to fight just genuinely curious. (No numbers obviously but like what would you want to cut. No vague “government waste” though please.)

Honestly, I’m just not sure deficit spending outside of wars/economic emergencies was a great strategy and instead, a time bomb Reaganomics left everyone else to deal with. I think that’s the ridiculously outsized part of spending that would’ve been the best to cut. If I remember correctly, servicing the debt is now on par with American military spending…

Cool to know about, thanks!

Oh interesting, I wasn’t aware there were actually examples of the Laffer curve working in reality! I alwats thought it was just a theoretical that conservatives had latched onto…

Oh absolutely, it’s just the VAT itself is regressive, not the overall tax system.

No, EU member states handle taxes individually.

But, that ease of travel is one inducement. (Consider, as billionaire Spaniard learns the government plans to tax an additional 100 million euros. With no border, is moving a few km next door to Portugal worth a 100 million?

More meaningful though is business taxes/regulations, which are a large part of why Europe has lost so many Unicorns to the NYSE and why within America, Texas is kind of killing it in terms of business relocations.

I personally think it’s a race to the bottom but those are the constraints that exist.

It’s obviously a tax on the biggest consumers.

Yes and no.

You’re absolutely correct in terms of total dollars contributed.

But the flip side is in terms of percentage of income. The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to have stocks, property and the like, which are usually exempt. So, as a total percentage of income, a VAT tends to hit the poor harder. (That being said, other taxes like capital gains are more progressive etc to make up the difference.)

They also tax the rich through progressive income taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes etc.

If you’re asking why not just tax the rich in place of a VAT, well, it’s sort of why not tax the rich to pay for absolutely everything we could want. The costs and difficulties in taxing the rich generally scale to the point where the marginal revenue raised by the tax becomes negative.

The delightful irony is that late last year, Chinese students started doing a big bicycle ride from Zhengzhou to Kaifeng for dumplings. Too many young folks together gets Chinese officials nervous so the authorities shut it down.

So, master of your own time if the party approves of how you spend said time.

How do you reward the work you encounter online?

Back in the day, before ad blockers general unobtrusive ads generated more revenue per site visit. As ad blockers become popular, the value of those same ads were worth less.

So, to answer your question, they were able to pay the bills with discreet ads which we decided were too annoying, leading to the current spiral of decline.