Another identity thief.
Despite doing a tiny bit of due diligence before giving the benefit of the doubt, it seems that an account I was hoping was real, isn't after all, and is just another scammer. It always saddens me a bit, because every time it happens, I get more untrusting and it means that it takes opportunity away from others, especially when the scammers are coming from the same nationalities over and over.
But look at the world we have created.
How much insider trading happened yesterday by Trump staff?
At a global level, the largest scammers are indeed the governments in collusion with the mega corporations, creating masses of wealth for a tiny, tiny minority of people, at the expense of everyone else. To reiterate again - this period is another in a long list of wealth transfer from the poor to the rich at an ever increasing rate, making the wealth gap wider and the problem evermore difficult to tackle.
But of course, people are blinded by things like talk of "no income tax" because the tariffs are going to fund it. Ah.... no. Sure, that might seem like a possibility now in the first few days of tariffs, but the rest of the world is going to adjust over time also, and other countries aren't going to keep funding the US tax system. If anything, they will look to reduce reliance further on the US, by generating their own changes to tax law - one of which would target the US services industry where billions can be made simply, by forcing the corporations to pay their tax where the money is earned. That makes billions for most countries every year.
Close corporate tax loopholes, and reduce income tax.
And when it comes to the conglomerate business tax practices, it is this that enables them to make oversized profits that get returned to investors, which means they become less attractive as investments too, because they get less profitable. And then, because of the tariffs, it makes more sense for the rest of the world to create their own versions of things, rather than buying from the US, which means that demand for US products also declines, even though demand in the US rises due to no income tax. But, when demand for US products declines and automation and AI really take hold, it doesn't matter if there is no income tax, because many people won't have incomes to tax.
I agree - no income tax should be the goal, but it is a little more complicated than some seem to be making out where the tariffs would pay for it - especially at this stage. Many seem to have already got accustomed to getting the extra 2B a day in government taxes, as if that is the way it is going to stay - like crypto people earning hundreds of percent in the first days of a DeFi project, calculating their gains over the next year.
An ecosystem constantly changes with every change, because one things affects another, and that thing affects five others, and so on and so forth. And while people are there trying to calculate what exactly is going to happen, there are also a lot of unintended consequences that will have influence in the system in unpredicted ways also.
Like always though, what the governments are doing is trying to solve complex problems with complicated solutions. They are looking for a single algorithm to solve a problem, as if it resides in a vacuum. But it doesn't, so that algorithm will become inappropriate as soon as implementation, even if it was "perfect" at the time of implementation - which it never is.
And because these complicated but "simple" solutions are being applied at scale into complex systems that have billions of interactions and interdependencies, with human nature being a big one of the influencing dynamics, when they ultimately fail, they fail big and impact on billions of people.
What people should remember is that governments aren't smart, even though there are some intelligent people working within the system. Ultimately though, they can only look at a few main aspects of society, and they tend to favour the monetary over the human. This means that even if they can change policy for more profit, the people still suffer.
As I have said many times before, the economy is backwards, because it assumes profit equates to future wellbeing, when it actually doesn't. Instead, profits should be made from creating wellbeing, so that growth of business and wellbeing of people are tied together, and advance together, rather than corporations making profits at the expense of wellbeing, and then people having to find ways to try and mitigate the damage.
But, scammers are scammers.
No government or corporation has you, your family, or your friends in mind when they are making policies. They don't care if you are doing well, or if corporations are doing you harm, as long as they are getting their cut of the take. They don't care if communities are falling apart, or if nations go to war - it is just more opportunity to make some money, to empower their business investments, and collect their kickbacks. Like all scammers, they don't care who they hurt, as long as they get what they want.
The more support they get, the more they will take.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]