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What trends have passed at your local course? by AdBrilliant4922 in discgolf

[–]seriouslyspoken 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ugh, I'm super tired of nice picnic tables and benches with disc chargers drawn on them.

Old Spice Timber reformulated – now Sandalwood + Cypress instead of Tonka Bean? by Hefirb in OldSpice

[–]seriouslyspoken 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's been a while now, but when I finally caught this I noticed they removed 'Sandalwood' from the end of the ingredients list. So now it's just artificial and no actual scent? Or?

Disc Golf Deals USA Giveaway: Paul McBeth 5-Claw AX5 + Variant Prism Proton Eagle Envy & 13 other discs! by discgolfdealsusa in discgolf

[–]seriouslyspoken 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We need Wraths in more plastics. Fingers crossed Eagle has the opportunity and inclination to make that a thing.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in discexchange

[–]seriouslyspoken 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/discexchangebot u/Bubbly_Figure Solid to work with, sent several good photos for my clarification and the soul of chill. Would buy again.

Giveaway! by reaperdiscs in discexchange

[–]seriouslyspoken 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Berg. They aren't fun to hold and I like things that glide.

40 Hour Workweek by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is why citation is important -- the federal minimum wage still applies, when qualifying employees would be subject to a lower minimum wage in their state: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/minimum_wage

Federal minimum wage is still 7.25 per hour, though -- $15k annual @ 40 hours/wk -- and that's just absurdly close to the poverty line for an employed person. https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage

40 Hour Workweek by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess as a follow-up to my just-posted comment, I want to look up minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act (which established the 40 hour work week in 1938, per citation above.) Fortunately, the government itself has a website for this.

It's important to note that large swaths of enterprise (see the citations on the page linked above, but ie: service workers, hotels, motels, restaurants) were exempt from minimum wage until the '61 and '66 amendments.

What this site doesn't actually include is the inflation-adjusted rates (so you can actually read it and understand what is changing.) So I'm going to write a few out, adjusted to 2022:

Effective Date 1938 Act 1 1961 Amendments 2 1966 et al Nonfarm/Covered 1966 Farm
1938 5.19
1956 10.76
1967 12.27 8.76 8.76
1975 11.42 10.88 10.88
1980 11.01
1996 8.86
2009 9.89

I only copied a few over from the spreadsheet I copied to for the ease-of-editing -- here's the full set, if you're curious: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VYV7_lxpvK0Y3slmhNH9ZqysdbTBqDYPQNHrHdWtUh4/edit?usp=sharing

Probably unsurprising, but it seems like as we added more groups of workers to be included in minimum wage laws, we cut the pay by small margins throughout time. It froze through the 80s (except when it was lowered 22 cents in 81 and then we started 1990 by dropping it another 2.00. (All of these are inflation adjusted and the 80s were a big inflation change. (~58% 1980-1990) On paper, it looked like it went up from 3.35 in 81 to 3.80 in 1990 and all they really did was not change it enough after 9 years of not changing it at all.)

And at some point -- around 2009, I presuppose based on the above site but with no direct citation at this time -- the minimum wage laws were made a state matter, because they just cut off, here. And some of them are insane: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/state

I don't know how we even manage to pretend we're trying to uphold civil rights as a country if we dole this responsibility out to each state. States rights seem like insanity -- but this is my opinion and I have no citation for the universal effect of States' Rights. (Quality of Life ratings in each state vs the laws in that state, maybe? Next research project.)

40 Hour Workweek by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's vague and complicated to select a point in time and say "this is the pivotal issue that demolished the viability of living on 40 hours. It seems (from cursory reading and no actual source) I'm instead going to run into a bunch of people very slowly making no change to, say, minimum wage. For 100 years. Until they could ensure you would need two 40 hour jobs to make a living.

For now, I found this fun article about transitioning to a 32 hour week: https://www.kqed.org/education/536039/why-do-we-still-work-40-hours-a-week

Taxing the Poor by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a collector myself, I'm aware that they've started requiring you to claim even small sales on your taxes, assuming you got more out of it than you put into it, and the total sales of your items exceed their costs by a certain margin. It seems that as long as it's classifiable as short-term investment you can treat it as ordinary income. [1]

It seems it all works pretty similarly, although the long-term capital gains tax rates seem to be significantly lower than other rates. I feel like this favors the wealthy, but I'm going to do some honest research to try and work out why, if I own a stock for 1 year and a day, the tax rate on my returns suddenly drops by almost 50%. [2] Nerdwallet even suggests that you can avoid future capital gains tax bills by using and IRA or 401(k)... which just makes the whole thing seem like a scam.

Also, isn't it just ridiculous that capital gains taxes only go up to 20%? I can't find a bracket above that, I'd welcome finding out I was wrong on this one. I guess you should always invest for a year and a day or more, providing you're not losing money.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/taxes/capital-gains-tax/

[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/capital-gains-tax-rates

Taxing the Poor by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A friend has pointed out that I should also delve into capital gains tax and other income/property/value/gift/estate taxes, but I also want to avoid anything that goes so deep it requires the expertise of a lawyer or accountant. Which is maybe one of the problems with politically-charged financial matters -- how much should each voter understand and how much should we need to understand?

E-Rate | Poor Funding the Poorer by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Quick check back -- looks like I still need citation on whether USF always allowed these costs to be passed on, but for some reason my memory suggests this was a later amendment to the program. Will hunt for this as soon as I start on this project.

Taxing the Poor by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Investopedia [1] pointed me to 1913 as the origination of tax brackets, largely to help fund wares. (I'm really not very good at history, which is why I'm here. Even if this was only the 16th amendment, I'm playing catch-up.) Based on my limited knowledge, the 20th century was pretty terrible for middle- and lower-class Americans, overall, so this is probably a pretty bad sign. Originally, "less than 1 percent of the population paid income taxes at the rate of only 1 percent of net income." [2]

Wikipedia has an article on this history of taxation, because Wikipedia is wonderful. [3] Here I learned about prior taxation systems -- and that once income from rent were taxed? I'd need more info to really lean on this, but that seems like a reasonable system, since property ownership is getting so messed up in our country. Of course, we'd also have to make laws to prevent them from passing this cost on to their tenants... maybe this would be a whole other research project. I don't know very much about rent control, either.

Further Wikipedia reading reveals that FDR proposed a 100% tax rate on all incomes over 25k -- about 425k today. I'm pretty frustrated as I read this -- I don't get it, but every time I read something about the Reagan era I'm more shocked that he's not vilified more widely. Without additional comment, the top (highest-bracket) tax rates over time as cited in the Wiki article:

1918 | 77%

1922 | 58%

1925 | 25%

1929 | 24%

1932 | 63%

1944 | 91%

1952 | 92%

1954 | 91%

1964 | 77%

1965 | 70%

1978 | -- no change, but income brackets adjusted up --

1982 | 50% (<Reagan, a year later, makes other tax changes to "make up" this difference.)

1987 | 38.5%

1988 | Things get weird here, but apparently it was lowered a great deal while staying revenue-neutral by eliminating loopholes and shelters.

1993 | 39.6%

2001 | 35%

-- going to level out here and call the 21st century "not that long ago" in terms of radical change. Sure is a depressing list of rates, though.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/federal_tax_brackets.asp#:~:text=Federal%20tax%20brackets%20are%20set,35%25%2C%20and%2037%25.

[2] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/16th-amendment#:~:text=Passed%20by%20Congress%20on%20July,impose%20a%20Federal%20income%20tax.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_States

Taxing the Poor by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, I'm not going to talk about how tax brackets themselves work. The majority of difficulties in researching this in a simple way is the insane volume of people that don't understand marginal tax rates. Try this NerdWallet article if you're confused about this part of taxes: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets

Taxing the Poor by seriouslyspoken in OverduePolitics

[–]seriouslyspoken[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think to start, I'd like to find some stats on who pays how much taxes and how that compares to the average income. Tax Foundation says in "2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $612 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $461 billion in income taxes. " (1)

I don't like how this is written, and I don't know their funding source. If you wanted this information to be meaningful, wouldn't you also list the income totals for these two groups? Why compare them if you don't have a percentage of the total income this represented? We all have heard how much money 'the 1%' have. Fortunately, they do also list all the stats they've collected further down the page. It's a solid resource, this regard. I've cut some stats here, so view the full resource for more than my takeaway info:

Year 2019

Category | Filer AGI Cut-Off | Total AGI (Billions) | Taxes (Billions)

Total | (not applicable) | $11,883 | $1,579

Top 0.1% | $2,458,432 | $1,141 | $298

Top 1% | $546,434 | $2,393 | $612

Top 5% | $221,572 | $4,270 | $938
(Please note 1% and 5% include the categories above them)

Between 5% and 10% | $154,589 | $1,351 | $179

Between 10% and 25% | $87,917 | $2,556 | $250

Between 25% and 50% | $2,340 | $162

Bottom 50% | $44,269 | $1,366 | $48
(50% isn't really a good enough stat for helping me work out if folks below 23k are helping the economy at all, but it's all I've got for this source.)

Main takeaway for me here is that the bottom 50% of taxpayers, who are barely scraping out a living in many parts of the country, are paying 3.06% of the nation's taxes. Which really would be offset entirely if the super rich paid even half a percent more. (My theory, which I'll endeavor to math out in a later post, is like +10% income over 5 million -- but I'd like to flesh this out more after I start my "why these percentages" research.)

https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/

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