Only if you make below $85k/year. People making $400k aren’t able to deduct the payments on their $300k loans. Also, the limit is $2500/year in interest. People with $300k in loans pay that much every other month in interest.

Because capital gains taxes are only taken when a gain is realized. Me selling my 2 shares of Boeing will get taxed capital gains, but the person holding 200,000 shares and using them as collateral for untaxed loans will get no capital gains taxes assessed.

Also because making gains in the market is one of the few ways a working class person can set themselves up for retirement (as fucked up as that is), so raising the tax would hurt them more unless you have a tiered structure like we do for income tax brackets.

This tax doesn’t affect anyone that actually works for a living

The average general surgeon in France makes around 230,000 euros before bonuses and all, so there are surgeons out there making 400k euros. I’m pretty sure they work for a living. You also underestimate how hard highly paid corporate executives work. You might not VALUE their work, but most of them work their asses off (even if what they are doing is counterproductive or stupid or worthless).

This tax doesn’t affect very many people who work for a living, but the people who are wealthy enough to actually not work for a living at all will not be affected either, since this isn’t a tax on wealth.

Seriously, that’s how much a doctor makes while carrying $300k in student loans. Yes, these are US numbers, and I’m sure France has both lower salaries and much lower or no student loans. But the point stands that $400k is a really high salary but not necessarily wildly wealthy if you are paying more in student loans than you do for your house.

What this will accomplish is force newly rich people to stay in their class while the wealthy class people get no change at all since they don’t have a high salary. The wealthy stay wealthy while the poor have no chance to become wealthy, only merely rich.

I didn’t understand at all what this story is about. I read the story, though, and here is my best guess: Greek law says nobody can work more than 5 days/week and 40 hours/week. I am guessing that is to ensure companies hire enough people to do the work instead of relying on overtime (e.g. a company has 1640 hours of work in a week, so they can either hire 40 people who work 41 hours, 1 of which is paid, or 41 people who work 40 hours, which requires benefits/overhead for 1 more person on top of just hourly wage). That spreads out the hiring and gets more people employed. The issue they are seeing is unpaid overtime at places that are open 24 hours and 7 days a week when there are surges. This law allows exceptions in certain circumstances and requires that overtime work to be paid. The concern is that companies will always say there are exceptional circumstances and rely on overtime, meaning fewer jobs will be created.

I fucking guarantee every single one of the locals out there spraying people and yelling at tourists has been a tourist at some point in their life. Even if it was for a day trip to Madrid or Valencia or Bilbao, they were tourists who didn’t deserve to be attacked just for seeing some place new. They are just hateful hypocrites who like annoying people for fun.

They have a legitimate concern with housing prices and how the government has allowed (until recently) Airbnb to drive up their housing costs. But the tourists aren’t the problem. And if they want to get rid of all tourists, let them A) find out how much their economy relies on tourism, and B) never be allowed to leave their city again.

While I understand the argument, I think it comes down to encouragement of more trophy hunting. I’m not anti-hunting, since some animals need to be culled for their own health and survival (see deer overpopulation) and some people legitimately hunt for food to eat. But allowing people to shoot lions and elephants, even if it costs a shitload of money, only encourages more people to shoot lions and elephants.

Holy shit, what a depressing story. Those poor people are finding out in a very painful way that bureaucracy has nothing to do with rational reasoning.

The person said Cuba being under US sanctions is what caused the Pacific side of WWII. What they were TRYING to say is that Cuba has been under sanctions, and that OTHER, unrelated sanctions were the cause of the Pacific side of WWII; but they used indefinite pronouns and therefor had a confusing sentence.

The joke is about the unintended interpretation of the sentence.

He was president when he falsified records, which is the crime he was convicted of, not paying off a porn star.

No, the crime isn’t the hush money, it’s the falsifying records. And THAT happened while he was president.

They aren’t banning Airbnb. They are banning short term rentals. Huge difference. You can do long term rentals on Airbnb, and you can do 2 day rentals on other websites like VRBO. Those other sites have been around for a very long time.

Thank you to SCOTUS for creating the world’s largest and most ambiguous loophole.

You’re right, I misread the number of people in the West Bank.

Israel has 10 million people, 7.3 million of which are Jewish. West Bank has 2.7 million, 670,000 of which are Jewish. Gaza has 2.3 million, roughly zero of which are Jewish. So 8 million vs 7 million.

But calling me cowardly because I’m trying to figure out a much more difficult situation than “just do it” is terrible. You have to realize it is much more difficult than just saying, “create a new government.” You are trying to do what George W Bush did in Iraq. Just get rid of the old government and start a new one. It’s that easy! Just do it! If you half-ass the implementation of the solution, you’re going to get a horrible outcome. These details need to be discussed if you want to get to your desired solution.

I never said I was against that. I’m just trying to figure out the much harder act of implementing that very simple view of the world. If you just say, “here’s a new country that’s fully democratic with equal rights for all… but it now includes both Gaza and West Bank and is 73% Jewish,” you have effectively given Israel an even larger country. Hell, in the US we have universal suffrage and equal rights for everyone from the ocean to the ocean… but only theoretically. Ask a black man how equal he feels in the US, even though he has all the rights and suffrage of a white man. That’s how Palestinians would be treated except probably way worse.

The details beyond that are what is actually difficult and why peace hasn’t been achieved. It’s all fine and good to say, “we should all be happy brothers” but it ignores how hard that is to do when the two brothers want each other dead. I’m in favor of a two state solution along with reparations, but that will also be very difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the many times it has been attempted over the decades.

Who is the government? Is it an elected body? Who elects them?

Because either you appoint a government that is made from basically Hamas (that’ll be peaceful!), or you open elections for a new country where Jewish people are 73% of the population… so basically Israel again but now with officially more territory.

So what is your solution to all of the people living in Israel (not in the occupied West Bank)? Where do they go?

Because Germany has a history that they want to put behind them. The already have way too many citizens who are white power, neo-nazi assholes who still call for death to Jews, so it’s somewhat logical that they decided they don’t want any more of that mindset as citizens who can vote.

Then that’s your own issue. Germany is a sovereign country who can choose who it wants as citizens. They have chosen to not allow in their country the kind of people who actively work against the right of a certain type of person to exist. Maybe you aren’t that kind of person and are just opposed to the creation of Israel in the middle of someone else’s country without their consent (which I agree was very wrong to do, but at some point we as civilized people need to move forward and figure out how to live in peace instead of constant fighting), but the vast majority of people who say Israel doesn’t have a right to exist are the kind of people who deny the holocaust and think Jewish people don’t have the right to exist. Germany doesn’t want any MORE of that kind of person in their country.

Now, the inverse SHOULD also be true where they require people to say that Palestine has the right to exist as a country, but that excludes most of the world right now.

But people are conflating recognizing Israel as a sovereign state with approving and condoning their actions. If all countries were held to that standard, there wouldn’t be any countries around. The shit my own country does would exclude us from being recognized as a country under that standard.

You don’t see the difference in supporting a country defending itself from being invaded versus aiding a country that is invading?