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      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY9BHwyZ9Mo\n\nOne thing that really irks me about this marching the people involved, along with the mainstream media, is the selective outrage.  Dana Loesch gets up and says a very true statement that crying white mothers is ratings gold, and everyone lost their damn mind – as if Dana wished the death of every black baby in America. Hell, when I said no one cares about dead black kids, I had white anti-gunners coming at me like, “how dare you!”  As if they were blacker than I was. \n\nBut then Malcolm in the Middle’s David Hogg says, “there’s a lot of racial disparity in the way that this is covered.  If this happened in a place of a lower socioeconomic status or a place where like a black community, no matter how well those people spoke I don’t think the media would cover it the same.  And I think it’s important that we point that out as Americans and realize that.  Because we have to use our white privilege now to make sure that all of the voices that have – all the people that have died as a result of this and haven’t been covered the same can now be heard.  It’s sad, but it’s true.” \n\nWow. \n\nThe arrogance of this statement knows no bounds.  Who the hell gave David Hogg the authority to put on his white-man’s-burden costume to save me from myself by marching to restrict my right to own a gun that at one point I wasn’t considered human enough to own?  This is the shit we’re co-signing?  No one said a word about that ridiculous statement.  No “how dare you?” or “I can’t believe you would say that!”  But let my black ass get up here and fight for a right that would have been denied to me over a hundred years ago, and all I get is “token this” and “coon that.”  And I’m fighting for the same rights Malcolm X, MLK, and the Black Panthers fought for; but because he’s a white boy talking about white privilege, it’s okay for him to march on Washington to restrict your freedom. Think about that. \n\nThey’d only want to hear from black people who agree with gun control; the same gun control that would disproportionately affect the black communities. Do you think they’re going to go to David Hogg’s neighborhood to enforce these laws?  Come on, people.  Think!",
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      "permlink": "the-true-meaning-of-the-second-amendment",
      "title": "The True Meaning of the Second Amendment",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gqDH_3nWvg\n\nWell, it may be the most controversial and the most contentious right that we have as Americans – the right to keep and bear arms.  Now, the root of that contention is in the often misunderstood intention of the Founders and Framers. \n\nSo, what is the Second Amendment really about? \n\nWell, there are so many questions being debated in the media these days about what rights we have under the Second Amendment.  One of those questions that has come up, is the Second Amendment outdated?  If the Founding Fathers of this country had been aware of the kind of weapons we would have today, would they have kept the Second amendment in the Bill of Rights?  And is the Second Amendment really about protecting yourself, or is it more about hunting and sportsmanship? \n\nWell, let’s start with the actual language of the amendment.  It reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, and the right of the people to keep and to bear Arms shall not be infringed.”  Well, over the years Politico, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other media outlets have reported about the National Rifle Association’s efforts in the 1980′s, that they say, caused the well-regulated militia part of the Second Amendment to become ignored.  And thanks to what all-out push by the NRA, the meaning of the Second Amendment was expanded from the militia to the individual.  Jeffrey Toobin – a senior legal analyst for CNN, a staff writer for The New Yorker – he wrote an article for the magazine on this very topic. He writes this: “The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun rights enthusiast to the White House…”  “…At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find clear and long-lost proof that the Second Amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and to carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.”  \n\nWell, now Toobin’s analysis may be historically correct in his observation of the change in the public’s understanding of the Second Amendment today, but when he gets it wrong is when he indicates that the Second Amendment did not originally grant the right of private ownership of a gun for individuals.  Let’s read that Second Amendment one more time just for clarity:  “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, and the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”  So, what about those well-regulated militias?  What are we talking about?  What were the Framers talking about? \n\nSee, the answer lies in the history of our country.  Of all the fears held by our Founding Fathers, none was stronger than the fear of standing armies.  As constitutional scholar David E. Young has observed, “The necessity of an armed populace, protection against disarming of the citizenry, and the need to guard against a select militia and assure a real militia which could defend liberty against any standing forces the government might raise were topics interspersed throughout the ratification period.” \n\nNow, this is likely a very foreign concept to many Americans.  But understand this, the very first battle over the Second Amendment was not about whether or not the people should be armed.  It was he given at the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights  – everybody was armed.  No, the battle was over whether or not we would have a standing army.  A battle between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.  The Anti-Federalists – among them George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams  – were staunch advocates of the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution because they did not trust the power of the federal government to be self-restrained.  \n\nDon Kates, a constitutional and Second Amendment scholar, explains it like this: “During the ratification debate, the Federalists vehemently denied that the federal government would have the power to infringe freedom of expression, religion, and other basic rights – expressly including the right to arms.  In this context, Madison secured ratification by his commitment to support and to safeguard the fundamental rights that all agreed should never be infringed.”  \n\nNow, on the other side of the debate were the Federalists.  That included John Jay, James Madison, and George Washington.  These men supported a Second Amendment because they believed that a central federal government would be capable of controlling a standing army.  Instead of a standing army, Anti-Federalists wanted every able-bodied man in America to be armed in the event that a federal government, or even America’s own standing army, turned against its own people. \n\nSo what you need to know is that for many Americans this is a very difficult and uncomfortable truth – the Second Amendment is not about hunting, it’s not about defense of your property.  The Second Amendment was written by men who ultimately believed that governments and armies would turn on their own people.  And it was written as a way to guarantee that that would never happen.",
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      "body": "Hey @redbloodedguy, great post! I enjoyed your content. Keep up the good work! It's always nice to see good content here on Steemit! Cheers :)",
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      "title": "Gun Control Marchers Have No Idea About Guns",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0xhiDeLUPs\n\nThere are a lot people who unfairly criticize Charlie Kirk, but he deserves a lot of credit for going out and exposing how utterly clueless these nitwits are.",
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      "author": "redbloodedguy",
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      "title": "What is Gerrymandering?",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joq4CawabwE\n\nIn 1787, our Founding Fathers came to an agreement known as “The Great Compromise”.  The deal called for two chambers of Congress to be created to form the legislative branch of the federal government.  The lower chamber to be named the House of Representatives and the upper chamber to be called the Senate.  The goal was to bring equal representation for each American to the decision-making process of our infant government.\n\nThe Senate was to name two members per state, regardless of size, to serve six-year terms each.  Meanwhile, the House of Representatives was designed to reflect each state’s population distribution, with these members serving two-year terms.\n\nBut has the current government system remained true to the spirit of equal representation that was coveted by our Founders?\n\nTechnically, yes.\n\nStates with larger population like Florida or California are apportioned more congressional seats than less populated states like Montana or North Dakota.  However, while more representation may be equal based on population markers, accurate ideological representation of constituents is hardly accounted for in many of those congressional districts.\n\nEnter gerrymandering, a funny sounding word used to describe how congressional district boundaries are drawn to give one political party an advantage over the other.  Something the Founders didn’t see coming.\n\nImagine a geographical grid of 100 voters with the political ideologies represented by the color blue and red.  The region is made up of 40% blue voters and 60% red voters.  Now, if the district’s lines are drawn in a consistent manner, the number of elected red and blue candidates should match up the political makeup of the region perfectly – four candidates for blue, six for red.\n\nHowever, after every national census, states are required to redraw congressional districts to address population movement.  That’s when shenanigans happen.\n\nIf the political party in power is able to control the redistricting process, they can draw the district boundaries in odd, irrational shapes in order to gain an advantage over the other party in the next election.  The end result: an unrepresentative governmental body where one party has gained the system to get more votes than the other in Congress.\n\nSo, if you ever see congressional districts that look like a blindfolded pre-schooler drew them, you now know that gerrymandering was involved.",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttps://www.mruniversity.com/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/arguments-against-trade",
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      "title": "Arguments Against International Trade",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZye4zFzk3o\n\nInternational trade is a controversial subject. There’s a lot of arguments surrounding it. We’re not going to go through all of them by any means. But here are some of the most common: \n\n* That trade reduces the number of jobs in the United States. \n* That it’s wrong to trade with countries that use child labor. \n* That we need to keep certain jobs at home for national security. \n* We need to keep certain key industries at home because of beneficial spillovers onto other sectors of the economy.  \n* And we can increase U.S. well-being, the argument goes, with strategic trade protectionism.  \n\n**Let’s consider trade and jobs.** \n\nWhat happens when a tariff is lowered?  Well, imports will increase, and there will be fewer jobs in the import competing industry.  For example, if we have a tariff on shoes and we reduce the tariff, we’ll have imports of more shoes from China and from Vietnam, and that will mean fewer jobs in the American shoe-producing industry. That’s what people see when they think about reducing a tariff.  They’re worried about losing those jobs in the American industry.  \n\nHowever, we want to see the issue in a deeper way, in a more fundamental way, and a key question to ask is, “Why do people send us goods? Why would workers in China and Vietnam work long hours to send us shoes?\"  It’s certainly not from the kindness of their heart.  \n\nUltimately, they want goods in return, goods or services.  They are working – they are producing in order to consume.  They are sending us goods because they want goods in return.  They are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of self-interest as Adam Smith said.  \n\nAnd that leads to a fundamental insight about international trade.  Namely, we pay for our imports with exports.  When we import more, we will ultimately export more because we pay for our imports through our exports.  What this means is that trade doesn’t destroy jobs overall.  Trade moves jobs from import-competing industries to export industries, and overall, wages increase on average because of comparative advantage.  Because we pay for our imports with exports, when we import more, we will export more.  Jobs will reduce in the import competing industries and increase in the export industries.  \n\nNow, this process is not always easy.  Problems can occur when we lose jobs in low-skill import-competing sectors and gain jobs in high-skill export sectors.  Overall, when the United States imports goods, we typically import goods produced by low-skill, because America on average is a high-skill economy, it has high-skilled workers on a world level, but we do have some low-skill workers, and imports tend to compete with the products produced by low-skilled workers.  Everything will be fine if our education system is working well, and if those low-skill workers can increase their skills and move to high-tech – or high-skill, not necessarily high-tech – high-skill sectors.  Of course, that’s a big \"if,” and the transition can be difficult.  \n\nWe have to put this in context, however.  In a growing economy, jobs are appearing and disappearing all the time, not just or even fundamentally because of international trade, but because of changes in preferences and changes in technology.  Let’s take a look at that.  \n\nIt’s important when thinking about trade and jobs and jobs in general that the American economy succeeds precisely because jobs are being created and destroyed all the time.  Job destruction is often a sign of progress and growth.  Think about Thomas Edison.  He destroyed the whaling industry with his invention of the light bulb. CDs – some of you may not even remember compact discs – they destroyed jobs in the record industry.  MP3s destroyed jobs in the CD industry.  This is the way progress often occurs.  Employment and the standard of living overall keep rising over time, and the reason they’re rising is precisely that old jobs are being destroyed, new jobs are being created.  Overall, in the churn, there’s a trend towards richer jobs, higher-paying jobs, higher wages.  Overall technology, trade, these benefit the U.S. economy.  \n\n**Regarding Child Labor**\n\nChild labor is something which no one wants, but it’s important to understand that child labor is something which happens when people are poor.  Child labor was common in 19th century Great Britain and the United States.  Child labor declined in the developed world as people got richer.  \n\nForces that reduced child labor in the developed world are also at work in the developing countries.  As countries become richer, child labor declines.  As real GDP per capita increases, the percent of children ages 10 to 14 in the labor force decreases.  So, increases in real GDP reduce the percent of children in the labor force.  So in China, for example, there are about 12 percent of kids in the labor force, but because there are so many Chinese children, that’s a large number of children in absolute numbers.  \n\nAgain the key here is really that economic growth reduces child labor.  So if you want to reduce child labor you want a country to become rich.  The question is, “Can one accelerate this process by banning child labor or by refusing to trade with countries that use child labor?\"  That’s really refusing to trade with the poorest of countries.  Do we really want to do that?  Do we really want to say to poor countries, \"We’re not going to trade with you.\"  There are many opportunities here for unintended consequences of laws which may have been trying to do a good thing but backfire.  So, for example, when India banned child labor, one of the effects of that was to reduce the wages of children because now you have to hire them under the table.  Because their wages were lower, the families were poorer, and because the families were poorer, they had to rely even more on child labor.  So it is very easy to create a policy which backfires.  \n\nIt is not, in my view, a good idea to use international trade as a weapon or as a tool against child labor.  A much better idea would be to help poor countries, would be to offer free schooling in poor countries, to offer lunches for schools in poor countries.  This increases the incentive to send the children to school because then they are fed.  So there are lots of things we can do to reduce child labor in poorer countries, but to say to those countries, \"We’re not going to trade with you because you’re poor and you’re using child labor just exactly the same way we did in the 19th century.\"  That is really not in my view a productive policy.  \n\n**Trade and national security**\n\nYeah, some industries probably should be protected to protect national security. The problem is this argument is subject to great abuse.  Almost every industry can and does make the claim that they’re essential for national security.  \n\nSo let’s give some examples. Vaccine production?  Yes, probably a good idea for us to have some domestic capability.  We don’t always want to buy our vaccines from abroad, just in case.  Angora goat fleece? Am I serious?  Yes. Believe it or not, we have protected Angora goats with the argument that their fleece is necessary to produce military uniforms.  Yep, some people think goats are vital to national security.  I’m not kidding.  \n\nThe key industries argument is very popular among the high-tech crowd.  The argument is, is that there are some industries, which for a variety of reasons, are especially important for a nation to have a foothold in.  \"Biology, microbiology is going to be the future, therefore we need to have this type of industry.\"  Or, \"Computers are the future, therefore we need to have this type of industry.\"  The argument is that these industries create spillovers for other industries.  They create learning, they create research, they create workers, high-tech workers, which spread out to other areas of the economy and benefit the economy in ways which go beyond the GDP produced by those particular industries.  Ross Perot famously made this argument when he said, \"Producing computer chips is better than potato chips.\"  \n\nIn some ways this may be true, but it’s overall not a compelling argument.  For example, today most computer chips are cheap, mass-produced products.  They’re not something we really want to be producing at all.  They’re not even produced with a lot of labor.  They’re mostly produced in big factories which don’t actually make lot of money.  Much better to design the product the way Apple does, making lots of profit, than to buy the chips which Apple uses in its iPhones, which don’t make a lot of money at all.  In 1990, Walmart contributed more to the boom in productivity than Silicon Valley. So it’s always difficult to say exactly which are the most important industries.  You wouldn’t think that Walmart retail is a hugely important industry, and yet, Walmart is the world’s largest firm, and it has done a huge amount to make the American economy more productive.  \n\nSo no one really knows which industries are the ones with the really important spillovers, and when we add in political economy, the tendency for politics to often choose based upon the wrong reasons – this argument is really not very compelling.  \n\nHere’s an argument which again works in theory, but is less likely to work in practice.  It’s possible for a country to use tariffs and quotas to get a larger share of the gains from trade.  The argument here is that if you can limit or tax exports, not tax imports, but tax exports, then you can let domestic firms act as a cartel, so it’s a way of helping domestic firms to be more like a monopoly, to act like a cartel.  So the government plus the domestic firms put – creates a tax, or limits exports, in order to raise the price of those exports on world markets and in order to grab up more of the gains from trade.  It can work, especially if there are few substitutes for U.S.-produced goods.  On the other hand, if there are substitutes for U.S.-produced goods, or if we push the price of our goods up too high, and that creates the substitutes, we may in the long run really reduce our market.  \n\nMoreover, these arguments for strategic trade protectionism are not such a great idea if other countries can retaliate.  If every country tries to do this, then world trade as a whole will shrink and no country will be better off.  So in trying to grab up a larger slice of the pie, we have to always be worried about making the pie smaller.  Again, the argument works in theory. A very clever government might be able to do it, but in practice, this is really not a very good reason for limiting trade.  \n\nSo to sum up, restrictions on trade waste resources by transferring production from low-cost foreign producers to high-cost domestic producers.  Restrictions on trade also prevent domestic consumers from exploiting all of the gains from trade.  There are some good arguments for restricting trade.  Some arguments are valid, but they’re usually of limited applicability.  Overall, I think free trade is a robust policy in the sense of it’s a policy which works well in most circumstances, and protectionism will work well only in a limited number of circumstances.",
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      "title": "Backwards, Nationalist, Progressive Neomercantilism",
      "body": "@anders216 said: \n\n>You are seeing this from the consumer point of view they’re talking about the gross domestic product having a deficit means we are importing more goods and we are exporting meanwhile we make more money if the goods are made in the United States cuz we have the initial production distribution transportation \n\n>Transportation of finished goods transportation of the raw Goods meanwhile that’s all money earned by American workers and then spent in the United States putting roofs over children’s heads and food on their tables. I’m sure your career does not produce anything you provide a service but we cannot be a leader in the world with a service oriented economy we have to be a production economy and Export are labor overseas and get paid \n\nThis is a common misconception of what a “trade deficit” actually is and how trade actually works.  Spoiler alert: trade deficits are really quite meaningless.\n\nEverything should boil down from a consumer point of view, because ultimately that’s what determines a healthy domestic economy.  GDP, after all, includes all domestic consumption.  Consumption, investment, and production comes from an incredibly complex series of transactions at home and around the world.\n\nAnd if you understand that we pay for all our imports with our exports in trade, in one way or another, then you will see that as long as domestic production in the economy is going well it really does not matter what the trade deficit is.  We are going to benefit either way.  When we pay for cheap imports, our dollars must be used domestically at some point.  Foreign governments are not going to just sit on US dollars.  They are going to spend them on our exports, or invest in our market in a number of different ways. So trade ultimately benefits our country. Meanwhile, while tariffs may generate some revenue to the general government, they ultimately harm not only foreign importers but also domestic consumers.  It’s a lose/lose.  Sure, you may protect a few domestic production jobs, but at the cost everyone else.\n\nA national economy cannot be successful if the country is an autarky – an economically independent, “self-sufficient”, closed economy.  Hell, most individuals could not survive very well all on their own, think about it – and that’s coming from someone who enjoys bouts in the wilderness on my own.  There are so many things people in the modern world take for granted today that is provided by readily available affordable goods and services produced in places you probably have never heard of before.\n\nOur global trade system is so robust and diverse in both natural and labor resources that it would be quite foolish to try to close it off in order to “bring manufacturing jobs back to America.”  Most of these jobs have dried up domestically because we have moved on to much better things, while poorer nations are producing these things because they are trying to catch up to us.  Just imagine if our independent states decided to become autonomous in trade. They would not last long at all today.  The states need each other.  And the same can be said by the global economy.\n\nDo yourself a favor and watch this short video explaining how even the most mundane of products are manufactured from commodities provided by an intricate network of producers from around the world in order to deliver cheap, convenient goods to your local market which benefit your life, even in the most insignificant of ways.\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws\n\nWhy some conservatives have adopted this awful, backwards, nationalist, progressive, neomercantilist belief system is very odd to me.  Trade protectionism does not “put America first,” it puts only a handful of special interest industries first.  Even the most tribal of nativists should realize it ultimately is not in their best interest.",
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      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "justification-for-gun-ownership",
      "title": "Justification for Gun Ownership",
      "body": "![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRqzY4v4k98Ki1gaYBbeM3X8xDyRXaBBkZMZpVLLLF7bk/image.png)\n\nYesterday’s incident at Great Mills High School in Maryland highlighted the principle that only good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns.[1] Because of an armed good guy, the casualty was limited to 1, that of the malicious shooter. Whenever we use facts and logic to defend private ownership of firearms, the gun control faction would pass off the countless examples of good guys with guns as “anecdotal.”  So when does anecdotal become fact?\n\nThe most comprehensive firearm study was commissioned via Executive Order by President Obama, “directing federal agencies to improve knowledge of the causes of firearm violence, the interventions that might prevent it, and strategies to minimize its public health burden.” Sponsored by the anti-gun Centers for Disease Control and Prevention[2], among others, the 2013 study “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence” by the National Academy of Sciences [3] show overwhelming and undeniable evidence that far greater good came as the result of gun ownership. Of the documented cases alone, guns were used to protect the innocent at least 10 times as often as used to kill the innocent. [3a, pg 15] This doesn’t even include the undocumented, non-reported cases of deterrence.\n\n“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies” [3a, pg 16]\n\nIt’s simply logical.  During a home invasion or assault, if neither criminal nor homeowner were armed, the odds are in the former’s favor, especially if it’s a hardened, career criminal versus the elderly and/or housewife.  Who would you bet on in a fist fight between a 210 pound gang member versus a 140 pound middle age woman?  Firearms would greatly even the odds.  But by how much?\n\nDuring robberies, not resisting has the greatest odds of losing property, at 83.6%.  Fighting back would reduce the odds of losing property by 37%, but also increases the risk of injury by 44%.  Fighting back, while armed, reduces the odds of losing property to 1/5 compared to not resisting, while ALSO reducing the chance of getting injured by half.  Similar with victims of assault.  Fighting back slightly increases the chances of being injured compared to not resisting, but fighting back while armed reduces chance of injury by half, from 55.2% probability to 27.9% probability. [4b]\n\nBut the anti-gun biased media often downplay this, while publishing misleading information, such as the New York Times: “It is true that guns are occasionally used to stop violence. But contrary to what the National Rifle Association suggests, this is rare. One study by the Violence Policy Center found that in 2012 there were 259 justifiable homicides by a private citizen using a firearm.”[5]\n\nReferencing their source, it checks out [6].  So for every bad guy killed by a potential victim, there are 32 murdered victims. This kill-ratio seems dismal, but remember that the primary objective of a good-guy-with-a-gun isn’t to kill the bad guy, but to stop the bad guy from doing bad things (using lethal force if necessary). So it’s actually a GOOD sign for humanity that out of the 100,000+ defensive gun use per year, only a few hundred cases result in death.  For example, refer to our prior post on mass shootings being stopped by good-guys-with-guns, many of which didn’t involve lethal force [7]. Thus even without killing the bad guy, being armed plays a big part protecting victims.\nOn the other hand, criminals can also commit crimes aided by guns without killing, and actually most illegal gun use does NOT involve someone getting killed:\n“Approximately 3 percent of firearm-related assaults known to the police (which represent a portion of total firearm-related assaults) are fatal (computed from FBI, 2011c)” [3b, page 30]\n“Guns also can be used to intimidate and coerce through threats of violence. In 2010, firearms were involved in less than 6 percent of the total 3,148,250 reported aggravated or simple assaults (Truman, 2011). Similarly, less than 7 percent of all rapes or sexual assaults in 2010 involved a firearm (Truman, 2011).” [3b, page 32]\n\nRead that again: Less than 7% of assailants or rapists had used a gun to impose their will on the victim. That means the vast majority of violent crimes were committed with weapons other than guns.\n\nTherefore, even if nobody had guns, both good guys and bad guys, criminals would still be committing violent crimes, just with an alternative weapon. There’s no data on what-ifs (unless we develop Minority Report tech), but logically I would surmise that the number of criminals deterred by not having access to firearms would be fewer than the number of criminals emboldened by the prospect that none of their potential victims would be armed. As if criminals followed the law anyway!\n\n[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/20/us/maryland-school-shooting-resource-officer-response-trnd/index.html\n\n[2] “Dr. Timothy Wheeler of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership has noted that CDC has a track record of anti-gun bias. In the 1990s, one CDC official even stated that his goal was to create a public perception of gun ownership as something “dirty, deadly — and banned.””\nhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/03/20/any-study-of-gun-violence-should-include-how-guns-save-lives/#394a1ec05edc\n\n[3] “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” Institute of Medicine and . 2013. Committee on Priorities for a Public Health Research Agenda to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18319.\n\n[3a] https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3\n\n[3b] https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3\n\n[4] “Firearms and Violence, A Critical Review.” National Research Council. 2005. Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10881.\n\n[4b] https://www.nap.edu/read/10881/chapter/7\n\n[5] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/06/opinion/how-to-reduce-shootings.html\n\n[6] “In 2012, across the nation there were only 259 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm reported to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program as detailed in its Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That same year, there were 8,342 criminal gun homicides tallied in the SHR… For the five-year period 2008 through 2012, there were only 1,108 justifiable homicides involving a gun.”\nhttp://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf\n\n[7] https://www.facebook.com/WeAreCapitalists/photos/a.157549024416648.1073741826.157541337750750/458679690970245",
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      "title": "The Political Value of Crisis",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIQUSb4r1UQ\n\nThere’s one pattern in which you generate political support by creating a “crisis”.  Now, since all human situations have some negative features to them, nothing is easier than to find something to complain about and to call it “a crisis”.  \n\nA crisis does not mean that what you’re talking about is any worse than anything else that human beings do.  It does not even mean that it’s getting worse than it was in the past.  In a remarkable number of cases as I’ve looked at, the thing that is called a crisis has, in fact, been getting better for the years prior to the policy. \n\nNow, after you’ve convinced people there’s a crisis, you have your solution.  This is sort of a four-stage thing.  First comes the crisis, then comes a solution.  Typically, the people who advocate the solution will say, “this will lead to ‘Beneficial Results A’.”  The critics say, “this will lead to ‘Detrimental Result Z’.”  In the third stage, they put the policy in and the result is that at least a ‘Detrimental Results Z’.  \n\nThe interesting part is the fourth step, where the people who attribute this detrimental result of the policy are accused of being simplistic for ignoring the complexities of the many factors involved.  Moreover, the only cure for this new bad situation is more of the same policy.  \n\nLet me give a couple of examples.  \n\nFirst, the War on Poverty.  Now, the purpose of the War on Poverty was not to prove that if you took money from here and then you put it there, it would be more money there than there was before.  The purpose of the War on Poverty was to end dependency on government handouts.  That is you would have “an increase in spending and investment,” as they say, “in these programs which will then pay off down the road as all the problems that have been forestalled by this wonderful program now begin to subside.”  You can quote either from Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton, depending on who you prefer to quote – large literature from both sources.  And so, ‘retraining’ is one of the great magic words in both administrations.  You will ‘retrain’ people, including people who had never trained in the first place, in order to reduce long-term dependency.  So, the predictions were made that if you had these programs after some period of years dependency on the government would decline, and of course the opposite prediction that dependence on the government would increase.  And so, the War on Poverty was initiated.\n\nFirst of all, the situation at the beginning of the crisis.  Poverty had been declining in the United States for at least a decade.  Dependency on the government to stay out of poverty had been declining for at least a decade prior to the War on Poverty.  Dependency on government began to increase almost immediately.  As of today, there are more people in poverty than there were in 1964 despite literally trillions of dollars spent.  And the only cure is more of the same. \n\nExample two: sex education.  Now, the goal of sex education was to prevent teenage pregnancy and venereal disease.  This, of course, was a “crisis”.  Now for those of us who tend towards skepticism, if we look back at the actual data we find that teenage pregnancy was declining for more than a decade prior to the introduction of sex education into the public school system.  By 1968, half of all the public schools in the United States had sex education.  During the 1970′s, the other half kicked in.  Teenage pregnancy during the decade of the 1970′s rose by approximately 50%.  Teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1978.  And both those trends are still continuing.",
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      "parent_permlink": "lobbying",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
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      "title": "Leftwing Lobbyists and Donors",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKDj4SK1GA\n\nYou’ve probably heard a lot of claims that the Koch brothers are trying to control American politics with their giant checkbook.  They’ve been called “homegrown oligarchs” who have “cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House.”\n\nThat’s an interesting claim, given that their agenda is to decrease the power government has to give favors to special interests like them.\n\nBut if you think the spending by the ultra-wealthy to forward their interests only exists in the Republican Party, think again.  The truth is: Spending by the ultra-wealthy to change the American political landscape is not a phenomenon limited to the Right.  The Left’s spending is potentially much worse.\n\nYou may know George Soros, the prolific political donor on the Left, who has spent billions on politics.  He’s funded the Institute for Policy Studies, which as had multiple fellows call openly for “violent tactics to destroy the US government.”  But do you know about billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, whose $74 million in left-wing political spending in the 2014 cycle made him the country’s top political giver; and his spending seems to have been successful, because he’s receiving government subsidies for his green energy investments.\n\nThen there’s the Democracy Alliance, a network of so-called progressive donors who have helped distribute approximately $500 million to liberal organizations since its founding in 2005.  They’ve helped fund the Center for Media and Democracy, which paid for a conspiratorial book alleging that the Bush administration sought to turn the country into a right-wing, one-party state.\n\nOr the American Federation of Teachers, which since 1990 has spent over $92 million on federal elections, with $91 million going to Democrats and liberal, left-of-center groups.  They’ve defended New York’s rubber rooms, where teachers go to do nothing and can still be paid for years on end, because the union has made them so difficult to fire.\n\nThe truth is, if you want to know about subversive political spending, you need to hear about what’s going on on both sides of the aisle.  The Capital Research Center’s new website InfluenceWatch.org aims to bring balance back to this discussion.",
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      "title": "The Four Legitimate Functions of Government",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYb-dzFN3n8\n\nI’m not an anarchist.  I believe in a government, but a limited government.  And the government should be limited, in my opinion, to very simple functions. \n\nNumber one: to defending the country against foreign enemies.  I have tried for a long time to see how to make national defense a private enterprise and I’ve never succeeded.  It’s easy to see how to privatize schooling, but I don’t know how to privatize national defense.  So I’m reconciled to the fact that we’re going to have to pay twice as much as we should have to pay in order to get an effective national defense.  Because anything government does on the average – there’s some things that are more, some that are less – on the average, anything government does cost twice as much as if it were being done by private enterprise.  So, one function of government is to protect the country against foreign enemies, national defense. \n\nA second function of government, and one which it performs very very badly, is to protect the individual citizen against abuse and coercion by other citizens.  To keep you from being hit over the head, mugged on the streets, your house being broken into, and so on.  And I believe that the government performs that function very ineffectively, because it’s try do so many things that it has no business doing. \n\nA third function of government, a very important function, is to define the rules of the game we play.  What’s private property?  If an airplane flies 10,000 feet over your house is he violating your private property?  If he flies 10 feet over your house is he violating your private property?  There’s nothing natural about where the line should be drawn.  So we have to have some mechanism for making the rules about that.  And that is an appropriate government function. \n\nAnd fourth, it’s appropriate for government to provide a mechanism for adjudicating disputes about the meaning of those rules – a judicial system. \n\nThose are the four essential functions of government, in my opinion.  And those are the only functions that are essential.  There may be some other areas in which if you started with nothing more than that, government might conceivably do more good than harm; but from where you are now, if you could only move back in that direction it’d be marvelous.  There’s no way you’re going to do it.  \n\nThe best you can hope for is that you can hold down government, keep it where it is, and let the private economy expand so that government becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of it.  And even that is a very optimistic expectation, though it’s possible.",
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      "permlink": "debunking-fake-history-about-ronald-reagan",
      "title": "Debunking Fake History About Ronald Reagan",
      "body": "![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmVq7oy6VFKNLBuiRg9GQAeUD1x73FXkNr4LEftP4Wy7h2/image.png)\n\nThis meme from Snarky Pundit (recently shared by Occupy Democrats) pretends things used to be better before Reagan came along. This forgets the 1970s was a time of economic malaise, with stagflation and a lower standard of living. In fact, the data shows things are much better today.\n\n-The median household income in 1980 was $49,406 in 2016 dollars. The median household income in 2016 was $57,617. This is more than a 16% increase.[1][2]\n\n-If we break it down by quintiles, the increase is even more impressive. If we think of middle class, “breadwinner” working households, those would be the 2nd, 3rd and 4th quintiles (omitting the poorest and richest fifth of earners). In 1980, the 2nd quintile of households averaged $38,905 in inflation adjusted dollars, compared to $45,600 in 2016 (a 17% increase). The 3rd quintile went from $59,645 to $74,869 (a 25% increase) and the 4th quintile improved from $87,332 to $121,018 (a 39% increase).[3]\n\n-This increase in income comes even as hours worked declined. In 1980, the average employee worked 34.9 hours a week, today it’s 34.5 hours. So, more money for less work.[4][5]\n\n-The increase in median income also comes as labor force participation declined slightly, from about 64% in 1980 to 63% today. This belies the assertion that everyone, or more people in the household are now forced to work to earn what they used to.[6]\n\n-The cost of most consumer goods has fallen dramatically since the 70s. Between 1979 and 2015, the inflation-adjusted prices of bicycles, blenders, coffeemakers, ovens, dishwashers, food processors, refrigerators, grills, stoves, microwaves, slow cookers, toasters, treadmills, TVs and vacuum cleaners fell by an average of 76%. For example, it took 33 hours of labor to buy a dishwasher in 1979 vs just 13 in 2015. For a vacuum cleaner the difference is 15 hours vs. 2.3, for a color TV it’s 70 hours vs. 4.3. Not to mention all the new inventions that were unavailable in the 70s.[7]\n\n-While overall standard of living is up, some costs have risen faster than inflation, particularly housing, education and healthcare. Coincidentally, these are the areas of the economy government has been most involved in, and these costs have risen with every president since Reagan. It seems the bogeyman is not what this meme purports.[8]\n\n[1]https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/acs/acsbr16-02.pdf\n[2]https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf\n[3]https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-income-households/h01ar.xls\n[4]https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=CE_cesbref2\n[5]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEP\n[6] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000\n[7]http://humanprogress.org/blog/us-cost-of-living-and-wage-stagnation-1979-2015 \n[8]https://www.cato.org/projects/humanprogress/cost-of-living",
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      "parent_permlink": "trade",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "trade-war-what-is-it-good-for",
      "title": "Trade War: What is it Good For?",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tyKjiSTew\n\n“Trade wars are good and easy to win.  When we’re down $100 billion with a certain country, we just don’t trade anymore with them…we win big. It’s easy!”\n\nOh, boy, that’s dead wrong.\n\nWhen you spend $100 at your local store, you don’t lose $100.  You gain goods and services that are more value to you than the $100 that you just spent.  If the government intervenes and stops you, you have to go to a worse alternative.  That’s the loss.\n\nDon’t believe this nonsense about the trade balance.  A trade deficit is nothing but millions of customers spending money at their best option.  It is not a loss; it’s millions of gains.\n\nBut if the government intervenes and stops them, consumers lose their best goods and services; businesses lose their best and cheapest inputs, like steel, and become less competitive.\n\nSo, a “trade war” is nothing but two governments fighting over who can inflict the most damage on their own citizens.  And just like in real wars, they quarrel about who started it.  But the question is not who began to punch himself in the face first, it’s who stops doing it.  Or, as Joan Robinson puts it in a metaphor, “Just because your trading partner throws rocks into his harbor, it’s not a reason for you to throw rocks into your own.”",
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      "author": "keyball",
      "permlink": "re-redbloodedguy-2018321t15933392z",
      "title": "",
      "body": "Bank of China owning the banknote building in the Bronx ?",
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      "parent_permlink": "politics",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "he-survived-a-school-shooting-now-he-s-fighting-to-allow-guns-in-schools",
      "title": "He Survived a School Shooting. Now He’s Fighting to Allow Guns in Schools.",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQXSmUsxdZQ\n\nSo, I was 15 years old when Columbine happened.  My friends and I were outside the school when the shooting broke out.  Immediately after the shooting, we all actually gathered in my elementary school.  I will never forget seeing a father that I had known since I was a young child running around looking for his son, asking me, “Have you seen my son?”  He never did.  He never got to see his son alive again. \n\nFrom that point on, I kind of wanted to make a difference.  And that’s why I joined the Army.  It’s a big reason why I do what I do now.  It’s because that that moment really seared into me that life’s important, and we only have one chance to do this right.  \n\nSo, I remember being a college student myself and actually going through and getting the training and obtaining a concealed carry permit myself.  And at the time in Colorado it was illegal to conceal and carry on a college campus.  So if there was one place that I felt like I really needed to protect myself, it was on a college campus.  And I couldn’t do that back then.  \n\nAnd so, that was really my first time of realizing that these gun-free zones just don’t work.  They don’t work.  And then after I got out of the military and I got into office, the day I decided to run for office I knew I was going to run this bill.  This is my fourth year, this year, running it.  And each year I run it because as we’ve seen, Columbine was 19 years ago, and things haven’t gotten any better. \n\nWe keep doing the same policies over and over.  When I was in Columbine, it was in the middle of an assault weapons ban, and they obtained their guns illegally.  All the different gun control measures that are being talked about wouldn’t have stopped it.  They don’t work.  The only thing that actually works is repealing the gun-free zones, and letting good people defend our kids. \n\nSo, my bill does exactly what we’re talking about ,which ends the policy of the gun-free zones.  It says that we’re no longer going to just try to protect kids with some flashy sign on the door – that I think, frankly, invites criminals intent on doing harm.  Instead, it says that if you have a concealed carry permit – and in Colorado that requires some training, a background check,  and fingerprints – then you are legally allowed to carry on school grounds.  \n\nI’ve had a lot of Columbine students reach out and say, “I would speak out with you, but thanks for doing for us.  I just can’t can’t be public because I worry they’re going to say the same nasty stuff about me that they’re saying about you.”  Most people see this is a commonsense measure, that’s a must-do measure to protect our students.  We just don’t get all the attention that the anti-gun crowd gets, because we’re not quite as nasty about it as they are. \n\nI was lucky enough to marry my high school sweetheart.  I met her when I was 16, so it was after Columbine; and she actually didn’t go to Columbine, but we worked together.  And now we have three beautiful daughters ourselves.  And two of them are in public schools right now, and it just freaks me out as a father.  I think about school shootings all the time.  I thought about it a lot after Columbine and going through college.  And the day after the Parkland shooting happened, dropping my kids off at their own school just absolutely scared me as a father.  I was practically in tears all the way up here in the Capitol, because I just didn’t feel like they’re protected.  They’re sitting ducks inside their school. \n\nAnd what makes me even more angry is I know for a fact that there are teachers in my own kids school willing to protect them, willing to do that; and by state law we prohibit them.  And I think that’s just outrageous, and we actually have to act.",
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      "parent_author": "",
      "parent_permlink": "politics",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "china-s-freedom-crushing-social-credit-score",
      "title": "China’s Freedom-Crushing ‘Social Credit Score’",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N80zgzxUIE\n\nIs your privacy under threat? \n\nIf you think your privacy’s threatened, be glad you don’t live in China. Facebook and Twitter are banned in China, so people use WeChat – one of the world’s most popular mobile apps.  So, the government spies on that round-the-clock. The state also monitors the Chinese version of Amazon called Alibaba.\n\nWhy should we care what the communists do?  We’re not in China. \n\nLi Schoolland came to America thirty years ago.  “After I came to the United States I thought, ‘oh no more politics. I’m in the land of free.  I’m not worried.’ And after I saw these things happen I said, ‘no no no!’  I said, ‘I have to tell the American people.  Don’t let this happen!’”  Li survived the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution.  Her parents were doctors, so they and she were re-educated.  “Mao said we shouldn’t learn from books; we should learn from the military, from the farmers, and from the workers.  The poorer you were, the better you were.  If you’re illiterate, you’re the best.  The repression is not over.  The control of people’s mind, people’s mouths, people’s pen never stopped.” \n\nToday in China if you tell friends about certain books your message will be blocked.  Even innocent sounding phrases are censored.  So, I understand the titles of novels like “Animal Farm”, “Brave New World”, but \"Long Live the Emperor”? \n\n“Because \"long live” means forever.  Xi Jinping, now adjust the constitution, but nobody can talk about it.”  They can’t even talk about Winnie the Pooh.  “Oh, because somebody says he looks like Winnie the Pooh, so it’s banned.” \n\nAnd now, another step more subtle than just banning things.  The state will monitor what you say in social media and assign you a social credit score that will tell them how trustworthy you are.  The government says this will allow the “trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”  \n\nSome American governments already do something similar.  Los Angeles Police now practice predictive policing.  They pay a company called Palantir to analyze social media, trace people’s ties to gang members, and predict the likelihood that someone may commit a crime.   People like that.  They think it makes them safer.  \"I think they’re giving government too much power.  They didn’t realize this is going to lead to more and more and more.  There’s no end.”  \n\nI would like to know that there’s a trust score so I can know who’s trustworthy and who’s not.  Sounds sort of appealing. \n\n“Yes, we do want to know who we can trust when we do business, but those are market behaviors.  We don’t need the government to get involved.”  When government does get involved, bad things can happen.  \n\nWhat happens if you have a low score? \n\n“First, you lose your job, or you never get promoted…your children cannot get to good schools.  For Chinese people, if their kids cannot go to a good school that’s the whole world.”  If they really don’t like what you say, they lock you up, and torture you.  \n\nBut that’s China.  Why should we be afraid?  In America, every week on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, I challenge people in power.  I say these things and no one punishes me…so far.",
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      "parent_permlink": "politics",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "understanding-the-amazon-paid-no-taxes-claim",
      "title": "Understanding the \"Amazon Paid No Taxes\" Claim",
      "body": "![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmTmYSPVmXJJ1SgbbaQHuJ17jQZBaaKR3cmuwuBwSoY6r2/image.png)\n\nYou’ve likely seen the numerous memes and headlines circulating claiming that Amazon paid no income taxes in 2017. Below, we’ll walk through exactly what happened and how.\n \nFor starters, understand that Amazon DOES pay income taxes. Per their SEC filings, they paid $562 million in Federal/State income taxes in 2012 [a], $144 million in 2013 [a], $279 million in 2014 [a], $452 million in 2015 [b], and an incredible $1.344 BILLION in 2016. And this is just Federal and State income tax, it doesn’t even count the millions of income taxes owed to foreign jurisdictions.\n \nSo what happened in 2017? Essentially, they paid millions of income taxes to state governments and to foreign governments, but zeroed out their federal taxes largely through one-time benefits that aren’t likely to reoccur en masse. Here are the taxes broken down:\n \n• Income tax owed at federal statutory rate:\n+ $1,332,000,000\n\n• Income tax owed at state’ statutory rate:\n+ $114,000,000\n\n• Impact of Foreign Tax Differential:\n+ $1,178,000,000\n\n• Other unspecified income taxes:\n+ $71,000,000\n___________________________________________\nTOTAL OWED BEFORE REDUCTIONS:\n$2,695,000,000\n \nThis is what Amazon would have owed in Federal, State, and Foreign income taxes if there were zero deductions, credits, or deferred tax benefits allowed. Below, we will show you how they reduced this.\n \n• Subtract Tax Credits:\n- $220,000,000\n\n• Subtract Impact of 2017 Tax Act:\n- $789,000,000\n\n• Subtract Effect of Stock-based Compensation:\n- $917,000,000\n___________________________________________\nTOTAL OWED AFTER REDUCTIONS:\n$769,000,000\n \nAs you can see, after subtracting all of the above, they still ended up paying $769 million in income taxes. This money went either to foreign countries that Amazon does business in or to State governments, but it’s true that they successfully offset the amount owed to our Federal government. As demonstrated above, they accomplished this through 3 avenues: generic deductions/credits, the 2017 Tax Act, and benefits from stock-based compensation. Let’s explain how…\n \nGENERAL DEDUCTIONS/CREDITS:\nContrary to widespread assumption, this was actually the smallest of the three ways Amazon reduced its tax liability. Had they ONLY used these reductions, they would have still paid millions in federal taxes. Nevertheless, let’s review them. Per their SEC filing, as of December 31, 2017, Amazon had a federal net operating loss carryforward of approximately $226 million, since they had losses from prior years.[b] When a business reports a net operating loss, it can be used in later tax reporting periods to offset taxable income. [c] Furthermore, Amazon had amassed approximately $855 million of federal tax credits potentially available to offset future tax liabilities. [b]  This was primarily related to the U.S. federal research and development tax credit. [b]  This is noteworthy since R&D costs incurred in years when a company has no income can be carried forward to offset tax on future profit. [d] In most cases, these tax credits can carry forward for up to 20 years. [d] There were also “deferred tax benefits,” which arise when a business overpays taxes in the past (usually when using estimates to pay taxes in advance). These overpaid taxes are eventually returned to the business in the form of tax relief. In 2017, for instance, Amazon had $202 million in deferred federal tax BENEFITS and $26 million in deferred state BENEFITS. [b] Companies aren’t required to apply all benefits/credits at once, but this year, they used $220 million of them. This is standard practice and is largely justified given that investments made in the past take years to finally pay off, and R&D credits are often awarded when a firm creates something innovative for the production line or consumer, so companies willing to invest in innovations will often record losses for years - and therefore earn tax credits they can’t cash in until their investments turn profitable. \n \n \nIMPACT OF 2017 TAX CUTS:\nThere was a onetime $789 million tax benefit Amazon received from Trump’s 2017 tax cut.  While the tax cuts generally took effect on January 1st of 2018, “the law includes a grandfather clause for companies that (like Amazon) have managed to defer or postpone tax liability from prior years.” [e] Because the tax rate dropped from 35% to 21%, Amazon was able to claim the difference as a benefit. In addition to that, the Tax Act enhanced the option to “claim accelerated depreciation deductions on qualified property.” [b]  “This is the [major] source of Amazon’s $789 million benefit.” [e] Since many are citing Amazon as “proof” that corporations get away with highway robbery, it’s relevant to note that this benefit is strictly a one-time deal and does not reoccur every year. \n \n \nSTOCK BASED COMPENSATION:\nIt’s common for firms to offer stock options as some form of compensation. Under standard accounting rules, companies calculate the fair market value of these stock options on the date they are granted and report that value as an expense. However, “the Internal Revenue Service allows companies to claim a tax deduction for any increase in value when those options are exercised, usually years later at a much higher price. The tax savings are listed in regulatory filings as excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation. [f] In other words, if a company’s stock increases in value from the time it was given to an employee to the time it was exercised (bought or sold by the employee), the tax deduction will be greater than the initial deduction on the accounting books. This results in lower taxes, and thus an excess tax benefit that can show up later. Note, this only happens en masse if a company’s stock is sky-rocketing due to widespread success over that specific period of time. It could also just hover around the same value and therefore likely not result in any change to taxes (since people aren’t likely to exercise a stock option if they see no value in buying or selling it). \n \n\"For example, in the dark days of June 2009, Mel Karmazin, chief executive of Sirius XM Radio, was granted options to buy the company stock at 43 cents a share. At today’s price of about $1.80 a share, the value of those options has risen to $165 million from the $35 million reported by the company as a compensation expense on its financial books when they were issued. [f] …If he exercises and sells at that price, Mr. Karmazin would of course owe taxes on the $165 million as ordinary income. The company, meanwhile, would be entitled to deduct the full $165 million as compensation on its tax return, as if it had paid that amount in cash.” [f] This is justified “because they are deducting the cost of paying an employee, just as they would if they paid a salary in cash.” [f] Amazon’s SEC filing specifically shows this, saying “For 2017, our tax provision includes $1.3 billion of excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation.” To be clear, this field was not a tax benefit in prior years, but instead was a tax liability (meaning they paid the government). It only worked out in 2017 because of the company’s skyrocketing stock value. As of 12/30/16, Amazon’s stocks closed at 766.47.  A year later, however, on 12/29/2017, they closed at 1182.35.  That’s an increase of 54.26%. [g] The exorbitant growth of Amazon in recent months (it’s doubled its stock value in the last 18 months for instance) resulted in this form of compensation yielding a net tax deduction as opposed to a net tax owed. This is natural, if you think about it, since people would understandably wait to cash in stock options until the price was on an upward trend. Again, since people are referencing Amazon as an example of what’s “wrong” with the system, it’s relevant to point out that this is largely a one-time deal. Amazon hovered around the same stock price for years before it finally spiked. Companies do not continue to spike forever. They will likely experience one era of incredible growth and then plateau. The point is, this benefit will not be there year after year, so citing it as though it were is a form of cherry picking. \n \nCONCLUSION:\nAmazon certainly did avoid paying federal income taxes - one year. But it did so in a way that’s largely irreplicable in future years, and therefore isn’t a sign of some long term systemic problem. Amazon also paid millions of income taxes to other jurisdictions in 2017 and has paid millions in federal income taxes in prior years. Let’s be honest about this, it’s a one-time thing. \n————————-\nSources:\n[a]\nhttps://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872415000006/amzn-20141231x10k.htm\n \n[b]\nhttps://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872418000005/amzn-20171231x10k.htm#sADDB770721BC5C5DA09BD58B71D94D7E\n \n[c]\nhttps://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/15/the-net-operating-loss-carryback-and-carryforward\n \n[d]\nhttps://www.mossadams.com/getmedia/3fd15bb1-e9ef-452e-8efe-3bb9bf022f62/Moss-Adams_RnD-White-Paper_rev111516\n \n[e]\nhttps://itep.org/amazon-inc-paid-zero-in-federal-taxes-in-2017-gets-789-million-windfall-from-new-tax-law/\n \n[f]\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/business/tax-breaks-from-options-a-windfall-for-businesses.html\n \n[g]\nhttps://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/historical",
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      "parent_permlink": "marchforourlives",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "colion-noir-blasts-marchforourlives",
      "title": "Colion Noir Blasts #MarchForOurLives",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9nu72um6-o\n\nWhat if we didn’t exploit the trauma of kids to push a political agenda? \n\nWhat if the media actually covered the kids who completely disagreed with students like David Hogg? \n\nWhat if we had put armed guards in every school in America five years ago when the NRA first called for it? \n\nWhat the FBI had done its job and stopped the killer? \n\nWhat if the Sheriff’s Department had done its job and stopped the killer? \n\nWhat if the football coach who heroically sacrificed his life had an AR-15, instead of empty hands? \n\nWhat if the politicians you cheer for actually cared about the violence in the inner cities? \n\nWhat if the celebrities who donated millions to your march, used that money instead to help high-schoolers like you in the inner city? \n\nWhat if you respected your freedom that millions of people across the world would risk their lives just to have the chance to receive? \n\nWhat if your march wasn’t backed by an anti-semite who said, “Hitler was a very great man”? \n\nWhat if I told you that calling someone a “bitch” because they disagree with you is an American, it’s just childish? \n\nYou people want a culture war but the culture isn’t on your side, and I’m gonna expose that on my show. So stay tuned. \n\nOh, and by the way, if you’re gonna pander to the #me2 movement, you should probably start by not perpetuating the use of misogynistic language. \n\nOh, and one more question – Conor Lamb ran as an AR-shooting pro-gun Democrat.  So does that make him a bitch, a liar, or freedom-loving American? You pick.",
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      "parent_permlink": "climate-change",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "the-paris-climate-fraud",
      "title": "The Paris Climate Fraud",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVkAsPizAbU\n\nAnother hot year.  Global warming!  What will we do about that?\n\nPoliticians for most every country promised to deal with it by signing something called the Paris Climate Agreement.  But when President Trump took office he said, “the United States will withdraw.” \n\nWhat?  We will withdraw?  We, alone? \n\n“President Trump isolated the United States with his reckless and indefensible decision,” said Al Gore.   My neighbors in New York agree with that, and so do most of the media. \n\nReally?  I bet they don’t even know what was in the agreement.  I didn’t.  “The Paris Accord was somewhere between a farce and a fraud.”  Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is one of the few people who’ve actually read the Paris Agreement, and also the commitment set in by every country.  “You don’t even have to mention greenhouse gases in your commitment if you don’t want to.  You send in any piece of paper you want, we’re gonna staple them all together, and we’re gonna call that the Paris Accord.  Everyone’s sent in a piece of paper and they stapled it together and held it up and said this is amazing.”\n\nSo what’s in the commitments that every country made?\n\n“What you find is they either pledged to do exactly what they were already going to do anyway or pledged even less than that,” says Kass.  “China for instance said we pledged to reach peak emissions by about 2030.  Well, the United States government had already done a study to guess when Chinese emissions would peak, and their guess was about 2030.“  Peak doesn’t mean stop. It just means stop increasing.  “That’s right.  So in fact China promised they will continue increasing their emissions for for some time to come.  China was actually one of the better pledges.  India made no pledge to limit their emissions at all.  They pledged only to become more efficient.  But they proposed to become efficient less quickly than they’re already becoming more efficient.  So, their pledge was to slow down.  My favorite was Pakistan whose pledge was to reach a peak at some point after which to begin reducing emissions.  And so you can staple those together and you can say we now have a global agreement, but what you have is an agreement to do nothing.  And if anything you’ve gone backwards, because whereas in the past you could have criticized countries and said hey why aren’t you doing anything, now we have an agreement that says in fact we will applaud you for doing nothing.”\n\n\"Obviously President Obama got a lot of political mileage out of that but the climate didn’t get much at all.  The one country that showed up in Paris with a very costly ambitious target was the United States.  So, President Obama took all the zero commitments from everybody else but threw in a really expensive one for us.”  \n\nSuper expensive!  Obama pledged to reduce American emissions by a quarter.  Of course it’s true that the United States produces twice as much greenhouse gas per person as China and India, so isn’t it on us to do more? \n\n“Even if we zeroed out our emissions tomorrow and the future of climate change is still a question of what happens in China and India,” says Orrin Kass.\n\nWhen Trump said he was leaving the Paris Accord, he was trashed by politicians across the world.  President Obama said, \"This administration joins a handful of nations that reject the future.”  \n\n“If the future is worthless climate agreements that everyone goes to Paris to talk about then first of all that’s a very sad future and it’s one that we should be proud to reject.” \n\nThe earth is warming.  Man may well be increasing that.  But the solution isn’t to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing while pretending to make cuts.  Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty. Most of us didn’t even know how phony it was, but now we do.",
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      "permlink": "re-redbloodedguy-let-kids-be-kids-20180320t201328812z",
      "title": "",
      "body": "@@ -318,17 +318,18 @@\n  have ea\n-t\n+ch\n  had the\n",
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      "title": "",
      "body": "I somewhat agree with your points in this article. I think parents need to use common sense and pick and choose what advice to heed when raising their kids. It can be harmful to be in the sun at the hottest part of the day, but wearing sunscreen will help prevent any adverse effects. Hose water, though, well my boys have eat had their fill of that! :)",
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      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttp://www.freerangekids.com/digging-in-wet-sand-is-dangerous/",
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      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "let-kids-be-kids",
      "title": "Let Kids Be Kids",
      "body": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmj03URx1NA\n\nSummer—glorious summer!\n\nTime to dig in the sand, gulp from the hose, play at the park, and leap with joy! Unless you’re a kid—in which case, find yourself a comfy sofa in a dark, quiet room and settle in.\n\nThis is the season your parents are bombarded with the kind of warnings previously associated with incoming torpedoes.\n\nThe basic message: Don’t have fun—it’s too dangerous.\n\n“Remember when digging in the sand at the beach was a fun activity for young children?” asks the website KidsTravelDoc. “Sorry. No more. Based on recent findings, only with lots of do’s and don’ts is frolicking in the sand a healthy activity.”\n\nThe blog’s author, Karl Neumann of the American Academy of Pediatrics, lays out his own don’ts: “Studies show that children playing in the sand are more likely to become ill than children merely walking on it. And the risk of illness increases with digging in the sand, being ‘buried’ in it, and digging in wet sand.”\n\nGot it. Keep your kids on dry sand. No, wait—“Dry sand presents problems, too.” So, Dr. Neumann warns: “Discourage children from lying directly on the sand.”\n\nWhile you’re at it, “Walking barefooted is another ‘don’t.’ Have children wear lightweight, ventilated, hard-soled footwear that covers the toes. This helps prevent stubbed toes, lacerations, puncture wounds, and burns from hot sand. Ideally, footwear should be worn for wading in the water.”\n\nIn fact, why take your kids to the beach at all? Better to keep them at home on a hard, nonporous surface, free of dirt and obstacles, checking frequently for venomous spiders, disease-bearing insects, and sewage. Children should also be in steel-toed work boots. Come to think of it, chain-mail wouldn’t be a bad idea.\n\nBut even that isn’t enough. Simply keeping the kids at home doesn’t ensure they’re safe either, especially if they make it into the backyard. Parents Magazine warns that “bees are attracted to flowers, so don’t put fragrances or floral-patterned clothing on kids.” Surely, you’ve seen swarms of bees chasing children in floral prints.\n\nThe American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that if your moppets still insist on playing outside, the little daredevils at least should “limit sun exposure during peak intensity hours—between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.” That shouldn’t put a crimp in anyone’s day, should it?\n\nThe Academy is afraid that kids will get too much sun. It’s also afraid they’ll get too little sun and end up with rickets. A related fear is that kids won’t get enough water because…everyone is obsessed with “hydration” these days.\n\nIt’s always seemed to me that drinking when thirsty does the trick. Apparently, I was wrong. Now there’s a product on the market—a water bottle with a wi-fi connection. The app allows parents to monitor how much water their child is drinking. The obsessive little gadget even knows if the kids are secretly not drinking—pouring out water to stop their parents from texting them to drink more. And an animated character on the bottle’s built-in screen grows healthier and happier the more the child drinks. Let’s hear it for more screen time!\n\nThe wi-fi water bottle has yet another great advantage: it keeps the little ones from drinking the wrong sort of water. Google “hose water” and you will be drowning in stories linking the stuff to just about every illness except gout. Some study, endlessly reported, found that hose water contained “PVC plastic additives, which can cause birth defects, liver toxicity, and cancer.” Naturally, in these stories there is no mention of how many gallons of water a child would have to guzzle for any of these issues to ever develop.\n\nBeing a kid these days is no walk in the park. But that’s just as well. Yet another Parents Magazine piece warns that to keep children safe at the playground, you should “walk away if you see cement, asphalt, dirt, or grass: these surfaces are linked to head injuries.” So are walls, if you bang your head against them.\n\nMy advice to parents is therefore short and sweet: Tell your kids they can’t swim alone or get into a stranger’s car. And then stop reading other safety tips and, maybe—just, maybe—kids can have a real childhood.",
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      "author": "whtchpl",
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      "body": "Good to see more people spreading a healthy message about this topic. We need more posts like this , less fear more fact. Keep it up homie !",
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      "title": "",
      "body": "Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:\nhttps://www.facebook.com/WeAreCapitalists/posts/841213152716895",
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      "parent_permlink": "politics",
      "author": "redbloodedguy",
      "permlink": "gun-control-does-not-deter-crime",
      "title": "Gun Control Does Not Deter Crime",
      "body": "![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmSr8eopR5RBq8rqugDjA7N57cNF199DsWKfr7Furv2Fyd/image.png)\n\nGun control is often an emotionally debated issue, particularly after tragic events such as the Parkland, FL shooting this week. Many who are understandably outraged want to do practically anything possible to prevent such tragedies from occurring again. However, it’s important to realize that most of the proposals suggested in the heat of the moment would not serve to do anything meaningful, if anything at all, to reduce gun violence.\n\nExpanding background checks, one of the most touted proposals, would not have helped to catch the Parkland shooter. Per USA Today, the shooter bought the gun legally, meaning he did not have a criminal record. [a]\n\nBanning so-called “assault weapons,” another widely touted policy, would not be a meaningful measure either. It’s also important to note that so-called “assault weapons” are not really assault weapons but are semi-automatic rifles. As such rifles comprise a miniscule amount of gun homicides, it’s no surprise that a 2004 study commissioned by the Dept. of Justice found no evidence that the previous Federal Assault Weapons Ban passed in 1994 (expired in 2004) had had any effect on gun violence and concluded that “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” [b]\n\nWith that in mind, let’s examine a few other facts about gun control.\n\n#1 - Gun homicides in the United States have decreased by half between 1993 and 2013. At the same time, the rate of gun ownership has substantially increased. [c]\n\nNOTE: I disagree with the headline and inference of source C. AEI infers that the correlation of increasing firearm ownership to the decreasing rate of gun homicide is proof that more guns equal less crime. However, it should be noted, the research on this point is far from settled, and at the moment is more of an instance of committing the false cause fallacy. In other words, correlation != causation.\n\nHowever, what these charts from AEI DO show is that the data DOES refute the common assertion from gun control advocates that more guns means increased crime. That should be the takeaway here.\n\n#2 - Britain, commonly cited by gun control advocates in the US as an example to emulate, is in reality a poor case for gun control. Homicides actually increased in the United Kingdom since the passage of the 1996 laws severely tightening gun restrictions, reaching a peak of 18 per 100,000 in 2003 before starting to decline. [d]\n\nAs also noted by statisticians Leah Libresco and Carl Bialik from FiveThirtyEight, “In parts of Great Britain, there isn’t strong evidence the ban and buyback saved lives. After the new gun law was implemented in 1996, the number of crimes involving guns in England and Wales kept rising through the 1990s, peaking in 2003 and 2004 before subsiding. The post-2004 drop is hard to credit to the buyback and possibly occurred because of an increase in the number of police officers. It’s possible that any effect of the ban, positive or negative, was swamped by other factors affecting gun violence. There has been one notable mass shooting in Great Britain since the law was passed, making it hard to judge whether the law has been a success in that respect.” [e]\n\nEven more recently, gun crime increased in Wales and England by 27% in 2016, according to the BBC. [f] Clearly, Britain is not the gun control paradise Americans are so often told.\n\n#3- Australia, another commonly cited example of successful gun control, looks promising on the surface but careful analysis shows otherwise.\n\nAs Libresco and Bialik state: [e]\n\n“In Australia, homicides declined after the ban and buyback, but homicides had already been falling, according to a 2003 analysis by criminologists Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos. The share of robberies and suicides committed with a gun declined, but the researchers found that the overall data was “consistent with a story of substitution” — meaning people used other weapons for homicide and suicide. Through 1998, the number of suicides (normalized by age) remained nearly constant, and the share of suicides using a firearm fell by the same rate it had been falling before the ban. Armed robberies increased through 2000, though fewer were conducted with a gun. Causing criminals and potential suicide victims to reach for a different weapon could be a partial victory for a buyback program. Most alternative weapons are less lethal than a firearm. But if that happened, it didn’t appear to change the overall trend for violent deaths.\n\nReuter and Mouzos only had a few years of post-ban data to judge, but last month, a more recent study of Australia’s gun buyback program published in the Journal of the American Medical Association still found only muted results. After the ban, firearm deaths (which were already declining) fell faster than they had before the ban. However, non-firearm suicides and homicides also fell, and even more sharply, in the aftermath of the ban than firearm deaths did, making it hard to tell if the trend in firearm deaths was the result of the ban or if all suicides and homicides were falling for a different reason. Because non-firearm suicides and homicides fell after the ban, the researchers found it unlikely that Australians who tended toward suicide or homicide simply switched methods after the ban. If they had, the number of deaths by suicide and homicide without guns should have risen.”\n\n#4 - Many charts we see surrounding gun deaths in the United States include suicides. This is significant because the vast majority, 60 plus percent of gun deaths in the US are SUICIDES, not homicides. [g] Therefore, out of the approximately 33,000 deaths by firearm a year, only around 10,000 are attributable to homicide.\n\nThis is important because another aspect of the gun debate is the issue of self-defense. Estimates on the amount of defensive gun usage vary widely, but even the most conservative estimate, courtesy of the NCVS, a nationally representative crime victimization survey issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, estimates anywhere between 60-120,000 individuals use a gun to defend themselves from harm every year. [h]\n\nThe rate of defensive gun use is likely higher than what the NCVS reports, as most other estimates have found, but I thought it best to utilize the most conservative estimate for this particular post.\n\nIn conclusion, there are three reasons I remain opposed to further gun control measures: 1) - gun control is not necessarily an effective crime deterrent. 2) - going strictly by the numbers, more people use a gun in self-defense than use them to commit a murder. 3) - As most gun control advocates often tout nations that banned large classes of weapons from public use, I oppose further gun control in those regards because I believe the 2nd Amendment acknowledges an individual right to bear arms, as also recognized by the Supreme Court in DC vs. Heller.\n\nSOURCES:\n[a]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/15/florida-shooting-suspect-bought-gun-legally-authorities-say/340606002/\n\n[b]: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf\n\n[c]: http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-more-guns-less-gun-violence-between-1993-and-2013/\n\n[d]: https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-facts-that-neither-side-wants-to-admit-about-gun-control/207152/\n\n[e]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths-mass-shootings/\n\n[f]: https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/10155270539592217/\n\n[g]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/10/05/obamas-claim-that-states-with-the-most-gun-laws-tend-to-have-the-fewest-gun-deaths/?utm_term=.2691231c0508\n\n[h]: https://www.nap.edu/download/18319",
      "json_metadata": "{\"tags\":[\"politics\",\"guncontrol\",\"gunviolence\",\"masshooting\",\"gunban\"],\"image\":[\"https://steemitimages.com/DQmSr8eopR5RBq8rqugDjA7N57cNF199DsWKfr7Furv2Fyd/image.png\"],\"links\":[\"https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf\",\"http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-more-guns-less-gun-violence-between-1993-and-2013/\",\"https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-facts-that-neither-side-wants-to-admit-about-gun-control/207152/\",\"https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths-mass-shootings/\",\"https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/10155270539592217/\",\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/10/05/obamas-claim-that-states-with-the-most-gun-laws-tend-to-have-the-fewest-gun-deaths/?utm_term=.2691231c0508\",\"https://www.nap.edu/download/18319\",\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/15/florida-shooting-suspect-bought-gun-legally-authorities-say/340606002/\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}"
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