You think South Park is PRO-NAZI?? Seriously? I have to ask…have you ever actually watched the show? If so, could you point to how they are pro-Nazi? Because, you know, I’ve never gotten that out of it.
ETA: Seriously man…you sound like a lot of conservatives who bitch about the show constantly. Here is a sample of their ‘pro-Nazi’ stance.
-XT
Al Gore put his profits from his books and movies into Green Energy projects. He put his money down to initiate new Green Technology. He has been at it for a long time. He is a believer in Green Energy and had invested heavily in it. I have no problems with Gore.
Then that would run afoul of the First, in that it is discriminatory against religiously-based non-profits.
Plus the idea is to simplify the tax code. Trying to separate out the religious from the secular non-profits and their activities would either retain or increase the complexities of the code.
Regards,
Shodan
Not really. Secular groups are forever calling themselves “churches” in order to put forward spurious arguments about how they should be able to smoke dope or whatever because it’s part of their faith.
Much less likely that a religious group will disaffirm their faith for favorable tax treatment.
That doesn’t address the First Amendment issue. If government gives preferential treatment to secular charities, that is an infringement of the free exercise of religion, a clause just as important as SOCAS, or more so.
Regards,
Shodan
A church is not a charity. The primary mission of a church is to spread the word of god. The primary mission of a secular charity is not.
Both the Al Gore debate and the question of taxing churches might be better dealt with in separate threads, please. This thread is about structural reform of the U.S. Government.
See what I said earlier about the difficulties of disentangling religious charitable work from secular.
My church has a subsidized day care, food shelf, AA meetings. provides space for the Boy Scouts and a domestic violence support group, and supports a school in Tanzania. My pastor does counseling, grief support, as well as premarital counseling. Why should we be penalized, when another non-profit which does the same things is not?
Regards,
Shodan
Almost a year later, Obama gets the ball rolling: http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/13/politics/obama-federal-government/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
[shrug] Gore never got the chance to do it, now it’s time. As for “Algore,” see here, and please don’t do that again.
I’ll post as I please.
Regards,
Shodan
And people will still point out the nonsense.
No and hell no. Too many states want to teach creationism (Sorry: “Intelligent Design”) as science. We need to have kids understand how the world actually works, rather than Bronze Age fairy tales.
Sorry, but this is a deal-breaker.
A national government’s departments should be reorganized every few decades, anyway. Agencies are created ad-hoc for specific purposes and sometimes that leads to several different ones doing similar things without coordination.
Of course, the point of the Department of Homeland Security was mainly simply to hive off several security-related agencies from their parent departments and group them under a new one. I dunno if that has really made any of them more efficient, alone or together.
But, is that really the sort of thing with which the DoEd concerns itself?
Really? All deductions? Let’s say I have a company that makes furniture, you want me to pay taxes on what I sell the finished goods for but I can’t deduct the cost of wood or labor? OK, of course not, that’s not what people mean when they say no deductions, they mean all that complicated stuff.
So now my company is deducting the cost of raw materials and labor, so it looks like I have $100,000 in income. But wait, how about that $150,000 in equipment I bought? Can I deduct that. OK, sure. We’ll deduct that and now I show a $50,000 loss for the year and don’t pay any taxes. Now next year I make $100,000 after labor and raw materials. I’m still using that same equipment. Shouldn’t I be able to offset some of that with the cost of the equipment I bought last year? OK, how do we do that? Well maybe we make a rule about how we deduct the cost of capital equipment and amortize it across several years. This is why taxes are complicated; it’s hard to calculate what income is. Even without “loopholes” and special tax breaks, it’s difficult and there are lots of things to consider when writing the regulations. This idea of just “eliminating deductions” is moronic. It’s a good way to stir up the yahoos, but it’s meaningless.
I read that this restructuring proposal will save 3 billion over ten years. Fine, sounds good to me.
Just as I was thinking wow Obama might finally be doing something I can agree with, the next story reported is he’s going to ask for another trillion dollars.
Sigh.
Tell me they’ve been working on the idea for the last 12 months.
One think I learned in tax law: “Deductions” are, generally speaking, simply a way of calculating real income.