Monday, October 29, 2018

Taxation and Democracy

The morning began with a bit of excitement in my inbox as Proust is now quoted in many contexts ;-)

Marcel Proust “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes"
It was also Marcel who observed 'Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.'"


“All the things that happened to you – there is no proof that they really did happen. Even memory does not always last. You turn your face up to the sky, inhale and exhale, close your eyes, and some little thing comes back to you for a quick second. But do not believe that moment will truly return.
Everything you do in life happens for the first time and the last time. There is nothing afterward, and there won’t be anything left. If you understand that, you will be able to genuinely enjoy the things you do.” –Aunt Gracia to Menashe.



 Almanac: Roger Scruton on pessimism
“I distinguish the right kind of pessimism, which means simply recognizing the deep incompetence of human nature, from the wrong kind, which tells us to stop hoping.” Roger Scruton, quoted in Madeline Kearns, Sir Roger... read more

For American Jews, their worst fears have come to pass


This is what they had long been fearing. On Saturday, the worst of those fears was made real as a gunman stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing at least 11.




AccessLex Institute, Legal Education Data Deck:

AccessLex Institute offers this Legal Education Data Deck for the use of the legal education community, policymakers, and others interested in viewing a snapshot of certain data and trends organized around the three driving principles of AccessLex Institute’s research agenda: access, affordability and value.


Morrison government to woo small business


The International Tax Competitiveness Index ( ITCI ) seeks to measure the extent to which a country’s tax system adheres to two important aspects of tax policy: competitiveness and neutrality. A competitive tax code is one that keeps marginal tax rates low. In today’s globalized world, capital is highly mobile. Businesses can choose to invest in any number of countries throughout the world to find the highest rate of return. This means that businesses will look for countries with lower tax rates on investment to maximize their after-tax rate of return. If a country’s tax rate is too high, it will drive investment elsewhere, leading to slower economic growth. In addition, high marginal tax rates can lead to tax avoidance. ... 

This is extraordinary: how some ex-crims got away with millions in govt funds which should have been going to the most desperate children in our society - Eddie Hayson


 

The Art Market’s Money-Laundering Problem (And Congress’s Inadequate Response To It)


"As the proposed extension of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to the arts and antiquities market awaits consideration on the United States House of Representatives floor, proponents of the art market are building consensus against the bill among both moderates and conservatives." … Read More

 One of the times in which Ellinor connected with Morten, one of the twins, was in their discussion of Manet's painting, and whether the left leg was correctly presented.

Wolfgang Schön (Max Planck), Taxation and Democracy, 72 Tax L. Rev. ___ (2019):
Political economy assumes that taxation and democracy interact beneficially when there exists “congruence” or “equivalence” among those who vote on the tax, those who pay the tax, and those who benefit from the tax. Yet this only holds true when we look at the community of taxpayers as an aggregate, not at the position of the individual taxpayer. Individuals might regard democratic decision-making as a tool for the majority to exploit the minority. They might also perceive powerful special interest groups to extract preferential tax treatment to the detriment of other constituencies. In the international situation, the notion of “congruence” or “equivalence” comes under additional strain. Why do most countries allow citizens abroad to vote without being subject to tax while resident aliens are subject to tax without the right to vote?

Gizmodod: 100 Websites That Shaped The Internet As We Know It – “The World Wide Web is officially old enough for us judge what it’s produced. That’s right, it’s time for the world to start building a canon of the most significant websites of all time, and the Gizmodo staff has opinions. What does a spot on this list mean? It certainly doesn’t mean “best.” A number of sites on this list are cesspools now and always have been. We’re not even sure the internet was a good idea — we’ll need another few decades before we come to any conclusions. In this case, we set out to rank the websites — not apps (like Instagram), not services (like PayPal) — that influenced the very nature of the internet, changed the world, stole ideas better than anyone, pioneered a genre, or were just really important to us. Some of these sites seemed perfectly arbitrary a decade ago and turned into monstrous destinations or world-destroying monopolies. Other sites have been net positives for humanity and gave us a glimpse of what can happen when the world works together. In many ways this list is an evaluation of power and who has seized it. In other ways, it’s an appreciation of the places that still make the web worth surfing. Next year will be the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s first proposal to CERN outlining what he originally called the “WorldWideWeb” (one word). Since then, Berners-Lee has had a few regrets about what’s become a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, and who knows what the future holds. Below you’ll find our somewhat arbitrary idea of the virtual destinations that mattered most, ranked and curated by the Gizmodo staff and illustrated with screenshots that exemplify their history, as we’ve played, shared, fought, and meme’d our way into the current millennium. 

One of the times in which Ellinor connected with Morten, one of the twins, was in their discussion of Manet’s painting, The Absinthe Drinker, and whether the subject’s left leg was correctly drawn.

“Irene Beckman is to be divorced…That’s all she knows. She’s no longer one with that life. How long has it been like that? She doesn’t know, doesn’t know any more. There’s no more knowing. There is her own life, but she doesn’t know it. Not yet. There is no ‘we.’ Her unknown self. That is what there is. And the way ahead. Unknown.”

cover altered lightA 56-year-old lawyer in Copenhagen, Irene Beckman discovers that after more than thirty years, she is being divorced. Her husband Martin has fallen in love with another woman, and the “light” by which she views her life has now been “altered.” Every aspect of her existence, which she has taken for granted, has changed, and she must now figure out who she really is.  In the hands of Grondahl, this age-old story takes on new life as Irene reminisces about the past and how she met Martin when she was a 17-year-old au pair in Paris, tells about her parents and their relationship, mourns for her unknown twin brother who died at birth, shares stories about her children, explores her present life, and tries to plan for the future. Her “journey to self-discovery” takes on added importance when her mother, facing surgery from which she thinks she may not recover, gives Irene a journal from her own early years. In it she tells of her meeting with a Jewish cellist during the war, his escape to Sweden, and her marriage to his best friend. The secrets that pervade people’s lives—her mother’s, her own, Martin’s—Irene learns, are as much a part of their relationships and later lives as the events they share with others. Ultimately, each person’s view of selfhood, personal origins, and ultimate destiny is viewed through a combination of events kept secret and events shared.


 ‘City of Surveillance’: Google-backed smart city sounds like a dystopian nightmare  “Creepy video.”

How to Clear Your Search History Off of Google’s Servers With the Company’s Latest Update LifeHacker (David L). If you think the NSA doesn’t retain this info, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.




Hierarchy and mystery job descriptions: what's eating public servants
FRUSTRATIONS REVEALED: What are public servants' biggest bugbears? Motivation-destroying hierarchy and performance management come in near the top, alongside confusing recruitment processes.

What Happens When Your Crime Library Goes Up In Smoke? Jeff Abbott on Losing His Library To A House Fire – “…I lost over 2,500 books in the fire. Lost to water, lost to fire (for weeks afterward, until the house was torn down, we would find partially burned pages of books that had fallen down from the attic or second story, like a kind of printed ash), lost to damage as smoke filled my office for hours and grit and stench settled into the pages.

I know that having a personal library of that size is a privilege. Many writers and readers don’t have that many books (and I have always been amazed when I meet writers and readers who have far more). We lost clothes, shoes, furniture (including items that had been in our families for generations), photos, art, toys, electronics, and far less replaceable items than books. But a library built from one’s childhood is a very singular collection. The library was a map of my life as a reader, and later a writer, from my first books to books I’d recently bought but not read yet. I realized, once it was gone, that my book collection was an annex to my imagination…”


In the September 2018 Tax Justice Network monthly podcast/radio show, the Taxcast:

  • we speak to Nicholas Shaxson about his new book The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer released alongside new research from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute on the true costs of the City of London’s oversized finance sector to the British economy – £4.5 trillion in lost economic output over a 20 year period – that’s equivalent to £67,500 for every person in the UK, not far off $90,000. This research has serious implications for oversized financial centres everywhere.
  • Also, we discuss the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the hypocrisy of the ‘west’ and corruption of democracy by dark money and national and international security threats not only from Russia, but also from China and, the most overlooked – the United States.

Featuring:


I looked at the Bank of England data and it was 3.5% of business lending went to manufacturing, a century or so ago that number would have been more like 80% and that’s a trend that has been going on for a long time. And you compare this 3.5% going to manufacturing with 75% going to either finance or real estate and you can see that something’s wrong, finance has become kind of unmoored and disconnected from the real economy.”
~ Nick Shaxson
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