Where's the oil money going?

MI (re. your 2:36 p.m. post):

Um, didn't someone already say that? ;-P

Max Schadenfreude
Saying the tax system here is slightly broken is like saying Richard Simmons is slightly extroverted.

Granted, it is very broken, but it's not broken the way people pretend it's broken. It's not overly confusing to 90% of the people thanks to EZ forms. It could be simplified for small business owners, I admit, but most of that is an attempt to make things cheaper for them. I'm not opposed to any simplification effort, but that is not the actual problem with the tax code.

The actual problem is in that many of the rich do not actually end up paying anything, but that obviously won't be solved with Fair Tax. It would be solved with, oddly enough, expanding what counts as taxable, which would make the code more complicated, but only for people whose job benefit included a private jet and whatnot. If they can figure out who to have no 'income' now, they could easily figure out how to have no 'spending' under Fair Tax. (In fact, that's actually easier to figure out...it's called buying expensive stuff in Canada.)

Likewise, our monetary system of constant slow inflation might be a bad idea, but it's not a bad idea because fiat money is 'evil' and magically causes inflation. Inflation is done on purpose to attempt to match the money supply to the economy. Otherwise we'd have deflation as the economy grew, and deflation, paradoxically, would slow down spending and slow down the economy. Which would be a useful feedback loop if that was our goal, but it's actually the opposite of our goal.

The fact inflation been hurting us recently is not inherent, it's because we've stupidly ignored real economic growth and instead had pretend growth by loaning a lot of money to each other and raising the price of stuff, mainly houses, as we traded them around, which doesn't actually accomplish anything at all. Yet we pretended like that was real growth and that inflation should continue, instead of a) reducing the inflation, and b) restarting actual growth. No growth combined with the Fed ignoring truth in favor of Bush's magical economy delusion is the problem, not fiat money 'causing' inflation.

Yet we have a lot of lunatics who are sure that fiat money causes magical uncontrollable inflation and that we should have stayed on a gold standard, when hilariously our economy is thousands of times bigger than would actually have fit on our gold standard, so we would have been forced to devalue the currency repeatedly if we'd had a gold-based one...aka, 'massive inflation'. Whereas with fiat money we have exactly as much inflation as we want.

DavidTC wrote: "Granted, it is very broken, but it's not broken the way people pretend it's broken. It's not overly confusing to 90% of the people thanks to EZ forms..." blah blah blah...

David nice way to dodge the real issue dude. But I'm not letting you off that easy...

Again, just HOW MANY teams are there in Dubai? ;-)