gusgalarnyk

Until I trust my government to not go hard right, until I can own my housing wherever I want to live in a given decade, until work goes/stays full remote and/or reduces total working hours, until I feel like I have too much money that I could lose the cost of a child and not risk being in the danger zone - until then kids aren't something I can guarantee a good life and that's not an acceptable starting place for me.

If housing is an investment vehicle for growing your money, then the people who can participate in that system will work to produce outcomes that fundamentally go against affordable housing. A society that believes in affordable housing as a right or a goal can't allow housing to be used as a place to park wealth so that it grows akin to a stock.

Whatever prices are, they are higher when a landlord is involved. We must get progressively outlaw multiple pieces of land. Owning more than two homes/flats should cost the owner something every year, not generate wealth - and that second one should be nearly neutral.

If housing is an investment ("a nest egg") then the people and policies that support it as an investment will stand directly opposed to people and policies that want housing to be affordable and a right.

Housing cannot be an investment vehicle akin to stocks in a society that meaningfully values housing for everyone as an objective to strive for.

Yes, of course. I wish you and everyone stuck there luck.

I am paying taxes and am able to vote, but because I make less than the required amount my taxes are essentially zero to the US because we have joint tax agreements between the two countries.

I don't know if I'll renounce after earning German citizenship or not but the exit tax is something I have to consider.

Ya, that's rough. That feels like a very immature take. The two parties are not the same, voting does matter, and I'd even argue that there are people so awful that assassination does make sense but I'm happy Trump survived because I think the Republican party would have been stronger without him.

I left the US, I'm between a millennial and gen z, and I left explicitly because I was worried about the future of the US and because moving abroad is akin to time traveling 20 years into the future. I have healthcare now, I live in a walkable city with great public transit, the crime rates are lower (although most places in the US aren't super violent, the probability of getting murdered goes way down when you leave), I have 6 weeks vacation, essentially unlimited sick time, and I'm not allowed to work overtime.

Both parties are not the same but if Democrats won in a landslide in every single election both state and federal in every chamber and every seat, how many years would it take to achieve all of those same things. I have no doubt these policies would happen with the right people in office, with radical change to the party they could even happen quickly and I believe it's what half the people want. But the two other outcomes are 50/50 with the parties and little gets done in a timely manner and worse the corrupt judges continue to error the system, or the Republicans win one big election just one more time and project 2025 starts getting a percent complete tracker and we slide back into the dark ages.

So I left. I believe if things go bad in the US historians will look at Trump's first victory as a period of brain drain from the country. But that's my two cents to go with this article.

That's my point, higher taxes does not mean less growth - you have a flawed understanding of taxes and economic growth. The government could take your tax money and convert the overwhelming majority of it towards meaningful services that a private company would have no incentive to be efficient about. That's what free market capitalism does, it finds services and then chokes out competition until the system is inefficient at using resources.

You can look at healthcare as a great example. The US spends more money on healthcare than most other countries and yet achieves worse results than the overwhelming majority of other countries. This is explicitly because healthcare is privatized in the US and prioritizes economic growth over providing a service. Other governments prioritize providing good healthcare and when government run provide better service and a cheaper price point. So if you live in the US you have worse living conditions because your government doesn't tax you more.

This same concept applies to transportation, Internet service (and often other utilities), elder care, housing, food. The government's "structural nature" doesn't mean much, every company is structured and just as inefficient. The difference is companies have an express intent to make more money, not provide better products or services unless that guarantees more money. What we see in an unregulated economy, which would require taxes to prevent, is companies find it easier to monopolize their market than provide better products/services. Governments on the other hand have the express intent to govern by the will of the people with power. In a good system this is the vast majority of constituents and not just the top 1% of wealth owners.

Your experiences with working for government or company or small town are not invalid but you have to understand that your experience is miniscule compared to the number of experiences out there. This is called anecdotal evidence. You can have all the anecdotal evidence and experience you'd like, but it's meaningless when compared with the whole world's experience which can only be measured using real world data - scientific conclusions or at least ones relying on some methodology. Because most governments implore 10s of thousands of people over hundreds of departments and locations, you simply couldn't experience a meaningful amount. So you have to build your opinions not based on your limited experiences but based on data.

Cable monster I think you're debating in good faith and for that I thank you. But you've got a lot of deprogramming to do - your opinions seem very implanted instead of individually formed. I

once believed less taxes and less government spending was an inherently good thing because I was told those things. With a bit of independent research, growing up and leaving the house that watched daily conservative programming, I learned that trickle down economics don't make any sense and that reducing taxes and government spending isn't simply good or bad - it's dependent on what services we feel we no longer need provided by the government.

So your statement of less taxes being better on every level is false from my understanding of the world. And just like you, I'll provide no sources, because I'm matching your effort here. The reason you're getting down votes and the reason I can confidently say you're simply wrong in some of these elements, is because these ideas are easily disproven with a bit of thinking, a bit of research in the real world, and it can upset people when someone holds such wrong opinions attempts to share them on the Internet without first supporting their statements.

Idk if this helps but I'll continue to respond as long as you continue to come off as not a bot or someone looking to simply stir the pot.

Well he and congress at the time permanently cut taxes for the rich and raised them for the middle class and poor so does that speed up or slow down the economy and does it fuel or resist inflation?

Cause it's pretty fuckin clear to me that taxing the rich less and the poor more isn't a good strategy for a healthy society.

Some of the "claims without a citation" are things that were done under the first Trump administration.

• taxes did go up for most Americans under the last tax bill. It's safe to say that if Republicans need to raise taxes it'll be through the lower and middle class.

• kids go hungry or into debt for school lunches today because of how little some families make. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a feature for the Republican party and not a bug.

• books are being banned in the US at an alarming rate, look at Florida as a prime example. Trump admin agnostic but definitely a party priority.

• trump suggested multiple times as president that people should just be shot, killed, or executed for things as benign as protesting outside the Whitehouse. He didn't do it, but it's a pretty short distance between "the president wants to kill you" and "the president is having you killed".

• the president did send in national guard and other militarily equipped groups to beat and pepper spray journalists and protestors while president.

• trump appointmented judges clearly lack the experience, qualifications, and apolitical-ness expected of a normal judge. You can see that in the supreme Court and you can see that at the federal judge level.

Insurance exists for a reason, loans exist for a reason, and the difficulty in selling a home is artificial because it's treated like an investment that appreciates instead of a commodity that depreciates like it actually is.

Landlords buy bad appliances all the time, they are incentivized to, the cheaper the better because they don't have to live with the consequences except for repairing it when it breaks.

In exchange for not owning anything in the place you live and having a fundamentally worse experience for it you get to pay someone else their mortgage AND their repair fund. You don't take that into account. Renters pay for everything, we just pay it every month instead of in lump sum hits like an appliance dying.

Landlords do not provide a service, at best they provide living mobility which could be improved drastically if housing wasn't treated like a private investment but instead a public service - so what little service they do provide is artificial.

Hydrogen is a stop-gap resource that is being pushed by oil companies to continue both producing destructive energy sources and slowing our transition by wasting money on less efficient projects.

"As at the end of 2021, almost 47% of the global hydrogen production is from natural gas, 27% from coal, 22% from oil (as a by-product) and only around 4% comes from electrolysis."

• source

Everytime someone hears or talks about or supports hydrogen we should cautiously assume oil companies are funding the project and it's worse than other already established solutions.

Will there be a place for hydrogen? Yes, probably in several niche or minority cases. But it won't be good for 90% of cars, trains, energy storage, etc because in each of those situations we have a clear path to full electrification or cheaper less harmful solutions that don't require an oil/gas byproduct.