#any amount over 600 is getting taxed this year

[woundedheartwithin]

I fucking hate the government

[interestrateuk]

What is the personal savings allowance?

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What is the personal savings allowance?

Maximising your income by minimising your tax liability is being financially tax efficient. And, if you use all of your allowances, you’ll be doing so legitimately.

One such allowance is your personal savings allowance, which can be an effective way to shield your income from paying more tax than necessary.

What exactly is the personal savings allowance (PSA)?

The personal savings allowance is a tax-free allowance introduced in the UK in 2016. It works by giving individuals a certain amount of interest they can earn on their savings without paying any tax on it.

The amount of the PSA you receive depends on your income tax band or thresholds. You’ll need to know your tax band before calculating your tax-free savings. Significantly, savings interest is classed as income. You need to add it to your total earnings before determining what tax bracket you sit in. If your interest takes you into a higher bracket, you need to be aware of the impact on your PSA.

For basic rate taxpayers (those who earn up to £50,270 per year), the PSA is £1,000. For higher-rate taxpayers (those who earn between £50,271 and £125,140 per year), the PSA is £500. Additional rate taxpayers (those who make over £125,140 per year) do not receive a PSA.

The PSA applies to interest earned on savings accounts, bank accounts, building society accounts, and certain types of bonds. However, it does not apply to interest earned on ISA accounts, as the interest on these accounts is already tax-free.

If an individual earns more interest than their PSA, they must pay tax on the excess interest. Basic rate taxpayers will pay tax at 20% on the excess interest, while higher rate taxpayers will pay 40%.

It’s worth noting that the PSA is a personal allowance, which means couples who hold joint accounts can each claim their own PSA, effectively doubling the tax-free amount of interest they can earn on their savings.

Personal savings allowances vs Personal allowance

One of the reasons tax can be so difficult to understand is the jargon behind it. Specific to the personal savings allowance, one reason that it can be hard to understand at first is that it sounds so similar to ‘personal allowance’. Yet, they are two different concepts.

The personal allowance is the amount you can earn every tax year before paying taxes. For HMRC reporting purposes, your personal allowance refers to income earned as wages or salary. However, if you are a business owner, you’ll need to pay income tax on your business’s profits or tax on dividends over your dividend allowance. 

For 2023/24, the personal allowance for most people is £12,570. However, you may have a slightly higher personal allowance if you can claim marriage or blind person’s allowance. Conversely, it may be lower if you’re a higher-rate taxpayer or still owe HMRC tax from previous years.

Calculating tax owed on savings interest

Any savings interest, or savings income, you earn from your savings accounts is included towards your personal savings allowance (PSA) until you go over your allocated amount. 

As a result, when calculating what tax you must pay, you must remember all your accounts and the interest earned on them, as they will affect your PSA. If you have multiple savings accounts, the interest earned on every single one is added to determine if you have exceeded your PSA. For example, if you have two savings accounts with interest earnings of £600 each, your total interest earnings would be £1,200, which exceeds the £1,000 PSA for basic rate taxpayers. You can get an annual interest summary from your bank.

In addition, some types of savings income, such as income from fixed-term bonds or savings accounts with bonus interest rates, may be subject to tax at source, meaning that tax is deducted before the interest is paid to you. So, for example, if you earn £1,200 in interest on a savings account, but £200 tax is deducted at source, your PSA will only apply to the remaining £1,000 interest.

The starting rate for savings income

The starting rate for savings and the personal savings allowance are two different ideas that are closely related. But, again, it’s essential to understand both so you know what is taxable for your self-assessment.

The starting rate for savings is a special savings rate available to people who have a low income. If you are eligible, you can earn some savings income tax-free in addition to your Personal Savings Allowance (PSA). Currently, the starting savings rate is £5,000.

To be eligible, you must meet the following criteria:

You must be a UK resident for tax purposes.

You must have taxable non-savings income, such as employment or rental income, below the personal allowance for the tax year. Remember, for the tax year 2023/24, the personal allowance is £12,570.

You must be a basic rate taxpayer, which means your taxable income is between £12,571 and £50,270 for the tax year 2023/24.

Your savings income (such as interest from savings accounts, bonds, or other savings products) must not exceed the starting rate for the savings limit for the tax year.

Remember, eligibility criteria and the amount of tax-free savings income available may change each tax year, so it’s essential to check the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website or consult a financial advisor for the latest information.

ISAs and your personal savings allowance

ISAs (Individual Savings Accounts) are a type of savings account in the UK that offer tax-free interest and gains on investments. Unlike non-ISA investments, ISAs have separate tax-free allowances and are not included in your personal savings allowance (PSA).

The annual ISA allowance is £20,000 as of the 2023/24 tax year, which means you can invest up to £20,000 in an ISA each year without paying tax on the interest earned or the gains made. You can split this allowance between different types of ISAs, such as cash ISAs, stocks and shares ISAs, innovative finance ISAs, and Lifetime ISAs.

ISAs do not affect your personal allowance for income tax purposes. For savers, then, using up your ISA allowance can be an effective way of shielding your interest earnings, particularly if you are going to go above your PSA.

Cash ISAs

Cash ISAs are most similar to regular savings accounts and offer a headline interest rate when you open an account. While that reliability coupled with tax efficiency is attractive to some, many are put off by the low rates that these products often have.

Stocks and shares ISAs

Due to the relatively low interest rates available with cash ISAs, many look to open Stocks and Shares ISAs, which are riskier products but offer uncapped return potential. In addition, investing in a Stocks and Shares ISA can be a particularly effective way to retain funds if you are trying to minimize the amount of tax owed because you will use up your PSA. Notably, the compound interest you earn can add up to significantly more than if it had been taxed.

Innovative finance ISAs

A less well-known product, an innovative finance ISA offers access to more types of investable assets. Generally speaking, that will mean investments in peer-to-peer lending or crowdfunding, which will be protected from tax. This product type may be attractive if you want to invest in more asset classes to diversify your portfolio. However, the trade-off is increased risk.

Lifetime ISAs

Available to those between 18 and 39, if you open this type of account, you can get a 25% top-up bonus payment from the Government on savings up to £4,000. However, how you spend the money has strict criteria. For example, you must keep it in an account until you are 60 or use it to buy your first home.

You can get all these different types of ISAs from many providers. However, ensure they are overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority to protect you from scams or negligent behaviour.

Investment types and your personal savings allowance

The PSA applies to interest earned and interest distributions on savings and cash investments such as:

Bank and building society accounts – including current accounts, instant access savings accounts, and notice accounts.

Life annuity payments and some life insurance contracts

Open-ended investment companies, investment trusts and unit trusts.

Peer-to-peer lending – interest earned from peer-to-peer lending platforms.

Government bonds – including premium bonds and national savings and investment (NS&I) products.

Corporate bonds – including bonds issued by companies.

Certificates of Deposit – short-term fixed-rate savings products offered by banks and building societies.

Money market funds – mutual funds that invest in short-term debt securities.

The PSA does not apply to income from other investments, such as dividend income from stocks and shares, property income, or income from rental properties. These types of income are subject to their own tax rules and regulations.

Do I need to declare savings interest to HMRC?

Yes, in most cases, you must declare savings interest to HMRC. This is because savings interest is seen as income and is subject to income tax.

If the total interest earned on your savings accounts exceeds your personal savings allowance (PSA), you must declare the excess interest to HMRC and pay tax on it. Most people will need to declare savings interest on their self-assessment tax return if they complete one. If you find yourself in this position, you could also ask HMRC or a tax advisor or accountant for other declaration options.

It’s essential to keep records of your savings interest earned, such as statements from your savings accounts or a summary of your interest earned for the tax year. This will help you accurately report your income to HMRC and avoid penalties for incorrect reporting.

What to do if you have already paid tax on your savings

If you have paid tax on your savings income but believe you should not have, you may be able to claim a refund from HMRC.

The circumstances in which you may be able to claim a refund include:

You have not exceeded your Personal Savings Allowance (PSA) or Starting Rate for Savings allowance but paid tax on savings interest.

You have overpaid tax on your savings income due to an error, such as your bank or building society not correctly applying your tax code or not deducting tax at the correct rate.

To claim a refund, you can contact HMRC directly or use their online services to submit a claim. To support your claim, you must provide evidence of the tax paid on your savings income, such as bank statements or savings account statements.

There may be time limits for claiming a refund, so it’s best to do so as soon as possible. You should also be aware that HMRC may conduct an investigation to verify your claim and could request additional information or documentation. It’s always a good idea to consult a financial advisor or tax professional for assistance with making a claim or dealing with HMRC.

The personal savings allowance

As with anything tax related, the personal savings allowance can seem a little complicated when you first read about it. However, it will become clearer the more self-assessments you do or the more work you complete with a tax advisor or accountant. The critical thing to remember is to keep informed about how much the allowance currently is – especially if you complete your own self-assessment – and keep tabs on your investments that attract interest.

[vivacapital28]

What To Find Out About Short-term Business Debt Financing

However, there are a number of common steps to follow should you choose a short-term funding choice. If cash is tight and also you need a short-term loan to fund operating expenses, take a deeper dive into the business’ funds and budget before borrowing. Likewise, evaluate whether the loan funds will enhance the business’ income or otherwise enhance its funds and ability to make payments. Then, determine how a lot you can realistically afford in payments every month—or week—and find a loan that fits your budget.

One benefit of traces of credit score over business bank cards is that the former typically charge a decrease Annual Percentage Rate . Small Business Administration loans are similar to standard term loans provided by private lenders. Most traditional business loans offered by personal lenders won't course of a loan utility except it’s accompanied by a detailed marketing short term business loan strategy. A stable business plan is your company’s highway map for the future. Without one, it’s very exhausting for a prospective lender to gauge whether your concept is commercially viable. Short-term small business loans can help business house owners survive a troublesome time or seasonal slump in income, but there are some cons to consider as well.

The Small Business Administration has excessive requirements for his or her loans. You will must have a good credit score history and powerful profits to qualify for an SBA loan. You will likely want to indicate that you’ve been in business a minimum of a 12 months to qualify for most SBA loans.

In fact, a brief term loan might actually help you elevate your credit score whereas avoiding extra interest funds. That mentioned, many lenders that don't require a proper business plan as a part of the application process offer short-term loans with greater annual percentage rates . Higher APRs imply a greater share of a loan’s repayments goes towards curiosity rather than the principal. Short-term business loans have numerous repayment terms, including daily, weekly or monthly, with different costs of borrowing.

Unpaid invoices are sold to a factoring company at a discount in exchange for a money advance. The company then assumes accountability for amassing cost out of your prospects. OnDeck’s business line of credit score provides fast and flexible entry to working capital. No prepayment penalties, account upkeep charges or inactivity charges.

The lender’s APRs range from 9.77% to 35.98%, relying in your creditworthiness and the loan terms, and that rate contains the LendingClub’s origination fee of 1.99% to eight.99%. To get a loan, you’ll must have a credit score of no less than 600 and no bankruptcies or tax liens on your credit report. Our platform brings banking and non-banking financial corporations so that you can select from. You can go through the rates of interest offered by them and make your choice. There’s no need to look elsewhere when we convey you a one-stop destination to care for your small business loan requirements. Many lenders additionally require a personal guarantee, which is a binding legal doc during which you pledge to personally pay again the loan if your business can’t.

While invoice financing includes borrowing cash with an bill as collateral, invoice factoring doesn’t contain a credit score relationship in any respect. The quantity of interest you’ll pay with bill financing depends short term financing on the lender, the bill and your creditworthiness. But you can usually anticipate to pay an interest rate between 13% and 60%.

Term lengths for business loans range with the kind of loan secured, the precise amount borrowed, the financial historical past of the borrower, and the chosen lender. Like expenses, borrowed funds could short term loan be divided into short- and long-term loans. A short-term loan comes due inside one 12 months; a long-term loan has a maturity larger than one year.

Instead of receiving a lump sum quantity that businesses should pay again in installments, a credit line operates as a credit card for companies. Therefore, you are not assuming the chance of borrowing too much. On the Yubi Loans platform, it is potential to get personalized business loans in accordance with your particular business necessities.

[cashappshelpsblog]

How Long Does It Take To Get a Tax Refund on The Cash App?

The Cash App offers various services like transferring money, paying bills, buying stocks, and receiving tax refunds. Many users wonder how long it takes to get a +1(909) 610-3890 Cash App Tax Refund. The answer can vary depending on multiple factors.

Firstly, the timing of the tax refund depends on how you filed your taxes. If you filed your taxes online, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sends a confirmation stating the acceptance of the tax return. If you filed with an online tax filing service, the confirmation message is usually within 24 hours of submitting the return. However, if you filed by mail, it takes around four to six weeks to receive the confirmation message.

Once the IRS accepts your refund, it processes the refund and sends it to your bank account or Cash App. The time taken to get a cash app tax refund depends on the payment mode you select. If you choose to have it deposited directly into your bank account, it takes around 2 to 5 business days for the refund to show up in your account. However, Cash App Direct Deposit option takes about 1-5 business days, and it can take less than a day if you opt for a standard instant deposit.

However, it is essential to remember that Cash App does not have any control over when the IRS sends the tax refund. The refund timeline is entirely dependent on how the IRS processes the refund. Sometimes, if the tax return has a mistake, it can take longer to process. In such cases, the refund is sent only after resolving the issue that caused the delay.

The time it takes to get a cash app tax refund entirely depends on how quickly the IRS processes your return, any possible issues with the tax returns, and which payment mode you choose. If you filed your taxes online and selected a direct deposit to your bank account or Cash App, it typically takes about 2-5 business days to show up in your Cash App account. However, the refund can take a week or two or sometimes longer periods based on the processing time taken by the IRS. It is always best to be patient and wait for the refund to arrive since it is a significant amount of money and requires a lot of processing.

How Long Does it Take For Cash App Taxes?

Cash App has become a popular option for people who want a simple and convenient way to pay their bills, rent, or make purchases online. However, some users of Cash App may be confused about how the app handles taxes. In this essay, we will explore +1(909) 610-3890 How long does it take for cash app taxes?

First and foremost, it is important to understand that Cash App is not responsible for cash app taxes or tax filings. As an individual using the app, it is your responsibility to report your earnings and pay taxes on them. Cash App does not withhold any taxes from payments made through the app. It is up to each user to keep accurate records of their transactions and report them appropriately.

If you use Cash App for business purposes, you may need to report your earnings to the IRS. Business owners are required to report and pay taxes on any income they receive, regardless of the form of payment. You should keep accurate records of your transactions and consult with a tax professional if you have any questions or concerns about filing your taxes.

Individuals who use Cash App for personal transactions may not need to report their earnings to the IRS, depending on the amount of money they receive. If you receive more than $600 in payments through Cash App in a calendar year, you will receive a Form 1099-K from the app. This form reports the amount of cash app taxes you have received through the app and is sent to the IRS. You can expect to receive your Form 1099-K by January 31st of the following year.

Cash App does not handle taxes directly but relies on individual users to report their earnings appropriately. If you receive payments through Cash App for business purposes, you will need to report them to the IRS. If you receive more than $600 through Cash App in a calendar year, you will receive a Form 1099-K from the app, which will be sent to the IRS. It is important to keep accurate records of your transactions and consult with a tax professional if you have any questions or concerns about your cash app taxes status.

[isa-ah]

Hi, Dutch person here, DO NOT GO TO THE NETHERLANDS!

We're currently in a massive housing crisis the likes we have never seen since before war times. It's so bad that a basic two room apartment will have rent that's over the 1K a month when it should be 600 or less and don't get me started on the absolute mess that comes with buying a house. Even the cringe real estate TV shows are quitting one by one because there's no available houses to show off anymore that are within budget for the people who sign up. On top of that, our current prime minister is absolute dogshit, has lied about many many financial affairs, the biggest of which falsly labeled mostly single moms of color as suspicious, accusing them of tax fraud. Many of said women have lost their kids to child protective services and some have even taken their own lives. They're still waiting for the compensation they're owed.

Finally, it's well known within the LGBTQ+ community that this country absolutely sucks at protecting us. Sure, a lot of countries have room for improvement there you're right, but many transmasc folks had to deal with being treated less than human by health care officials here. We only have a very few amount of clinics that have the capability to provide care for trans people and there are many horror stories of folks being denied treatment if they, for instance, don't want bottom surgery because if they don't 'they're not trans' according to some outdated definition some doctors still use. Not to mention the 2 year long waiting to even be contacted for a first time appointment. I'd say if you're already on hormones you'd stand a better chance, but A. chances are the paperwork will be insane for you and B. A lot of meds are straight up forbidden here and if you're on any of those, you're basically screwed. I actually want to leave my country for these reasons and many, many more, there are countless things I could name. Our country USED to be perfectly fine and a better alternative to live in for a lot of folks, but the last ten years a lot got shrunk or cut entirely from our healthcare system, educational system and even the police (and yes, that is a problem here because ACAB isn't really a big thing here and instead they don't have enough people to accurately do their jobs, the police station in my town had to leave due to underfunding and it's only gone downhill since, recently someone got shot a few feet from my house which has never happened in all the 25 years I've lived here.) Reconsider Spain, don't come here, save yourself.

i understand where you're coming from but I need you to know that shot for shot all of this is happening in america & worse.

like we live in a 3 bedroom home for 2.4k where there's water damage sinking our roommates bedroom into the kitchen ceiling and the landlord KNOWS that and in response tried to raise our rent further. the idea of living ANYWHERE w two bedrooms for only 1k?? insane. id jump ship to live there right now if i could. that's inflated for you but for us people are paying 2k+ for studios that don't even have one bedroom.

& being treated subhuman by doctor's is the regular for dfab and trans people here. being denied treatment for not being trans enough is also normalized (i had to pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for therapy and mental exams before i got on t), but my fiance and i have both been on testosterone and we're going to have our names and gender markers changed before we move anyway so it just doesn't fuss me tbh. like that's all bad shit but america does all of that on steroids while actively shooting guns at children w abandon. trust me, it's a step up.

[kinsey3furry300]

So how the heck do the Avengers pay for stuff, and how rich are they?

So, in the wake of “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” There’s a lot of debate about why Sam didn’t seem to get paid well for his work in the Avengers (at least in the MCU continuity), and this has got me thinking: we’ve got no evidence that the Avengers are, financially, anything but a hot mess. So lets break it down, Avenger by Avenger, using real-world pay scales for the ones who have jobs.

Tony: a billionaire, so clearly he’s a financial genius, right? Well….. his actions say otherwise. He’s shown to be wildly irresponsible with his money. He inherited a lot of wealth form his parents which was managed by the first Jarvis, Obadiah, and Pepper for him, he buys and then gives away not just woks of art, but entire collections by major 20th century artists on a whim, destroyed his own cars and home without concern, he tanks the value of his own company in the first Iron Man with a bad press interview, gets kicked of his own bord of directors, and ultimately, in Iron Man 2, gives control of his company to Pepper. He’s insanely rich, and insanely smart, but man, he’s not smart with his money. So all the cool stuff, his suits, the Avengers tower, the facility up-state: that’s all paid for by him, but Pepper is holding the purse-stings.  So, does he pay the others? We have no evidence for most of them… but we do with Spidey. Peter Parker is in the Stark Internship Program a euphemism to hide the fact he’s training and mentoring him as a super-hero, but I find the wording interesting: he refers to Spidey, his surrogate son and chosen heir, as an intern. I.E., Unpaid.  I’m guessing this is Howard’s influence over him, some sort of ‘make you own way in the world, son’ attitude, but  if he’s not paying Spidey, is he paying anyone else? He certainly pays for stuff super heroes suits and things, equipment, fuel, the base, but does he pay anyone a wage? No one ever mentions it. You think it would come up.

So, if he’s not paying them a wage, where do Avengers  (and thier allies) get their day-to-day money from, and are they rich? Using google and https://www.federalpay.org, lets find out.

Cap: Well, before Civil war, he’s a shield operative, and he presumably still holds his military rank: he’s a US Army captain, with (well) over 40 years service, so USD$88,142.40 per year, with $237.71  drill pay (pay per drill you have to do on weekends, on leave or outside of normal service) and $175.00 per month hazard pay (which I bet is interesting) on top of that. As a WW2 veteran, he’d be eligible for a war pension if he:

Was not discharged for dishonorable reasons; and,

Served 90 days of active military duty; and,

Served at least one day during wartime ("wartime" as determined by the VA); and,

Had  countable family income below a certain yearly limit; and,

Is  age 65 years or older; or

Regardless of age is permanently disabled, not due to wilful misconduct.

As he’s still receiving 90k per year, he’s ineligible for a pension as his countable yearly income is above the limit.  So if shield pays him in accordance with his rank and years of service, about $90, 600 per year incuding hazard pay.

After civil war, he’s a fugitive on the run, so presumably flat broke. I’d asume he gets his pension returened to him after the snap.

He’s also just gone from the 40’s to the present day, so 70 years of inflation probably makes buying things very confusing for him: everything would seem insanely expensive at first. He’d also not know what the correct prices are for anything invented after 45. You might get used to how much more expensive food and coffee is, but how much is a smart-phone worth? $200? $2000 $20000? Who knows? I bet the others have to facepalm a lot when he either refuses to pay for what he sees as clear price-gouging, and at the same time regularly pays insane amounts of money for goods and services because he doesn’t know better. He also has no known assets other than his pay: he rents an apartment making him one of the few American males in his age-group who isn’t a home-owner

Thor: Does Asgard even have currency? It’s depicted like a “Crystal spires and toga” type utopia with no poverty: even working class Asgardian’s like Scourge seem to be pretty well-off and want for nothing, so he’s from a post-scarcity society where actual magic is a thing. His “Another” coffee cup smashing and the fact he doesn’t have a computer of phone in Ragnarök might indicate that, no, he just doesn’t have, need or understand money. Splitting a bar tab with him must be a nightmare. His breakdown post snap indicates he’s got some cash, but not a huge amount, and is probably skiving of Valkyrie and the other Asgardians.

Banner: Okay, so a PhD could make you a lot of money from patents… in pharmacology or engineering. Theoretical physics? Not so good. And if Banner did have any patents, they’ve probably been seized under eminent domain by the US military.  At the start of The Hulk film, he’s working a entry-level factory job at a botteling plant in Brazil. The minimum wage in Brazil is 1069.62 Real per month, that’s 12,835.44 Real per year, or around $2437.79 US per year, before everything goes wrong for him! He then runs off to India, works for Tony for a bit and then gets shot into space. Spidey may actually make more in allowance than Banner does, and Banner is a gown ass man with bills to pay: I’d imagine he loses a lot in ripped clothing.

Natasha and Barton: Pre Civil-war, both are government spooks, so how well does that pay? The salaries of CIA Intelligence Analysts based in the US range from $25,838 to $685,701 , with a median salary of $125,340, so let’s assume that Shield pays in a similar range: $685,701 per year for Director Fury, around 125,000 for Natasha and Cliff, which explains Cliff’s nice, middle-class mid-western home. Post civil war, presumably not great: we know that Natasha spends a lot of her savings running and hiding all across the world, and Cliff takes a deal and presumably lives of his savings, pension and his wife’s income.

Rhodes: Full USAF colonel with over 10 years service? $105,562.80 per year, plus $293.23 drill pay per drill and $175 per month hazard pay, and because he’s team Stark and not Team Cap in Civil War, he’d not lose any of that. He presumably also gets an injury pay-out after his accident. After T’challa and Stark, he might be the best paid avenger.

Dr Strange: spends all his money he made as a surgeon on trying to cure his hands: spends literally his last dollars heading to Nepal to train. Wong even jokes with him about their lack of worldly money when asking for a tuna-melt. But, can use illusion to make people think he has money, and his home and clothes etc. come with the job, so in the same boat as Thor in that he has no money, but needs none AKA, he’s a bastard to try and split a restaurant bill with.

Wanda and Vision: No know source of income, just sort of live in Tony’s hose and eat his food, and on top of that Wanda goes on the run after civil war… yet they can stay in fancy hotels in Edinburgh, a relatively expensive city, and Vison apparently bought them a house to retire in, so one of them has some source of money. Maybe Tony gave Vision years of back-pay form when he was still Jarvis, or maybe the vison has a day job, which is, frankly, hilarious. Could you imagine him as a barista? I can, and it makes me very happy.

Scott Lang: I’d assumed he’d be super, super broke, but apparently the average pay for a private security consultant in the Bay area is $85,430 per year. Not bad. Pity he gets sucked into the quantum realm just as his business is taking off, so presumably, flat broke again.

Bucky: no known income, and I doubt Hydra paid him for being the Winter Soldier so he probably has no savings, but he should, technically, qualify for a military pension. As a single veteran, he’d be  eligible for federal tax-free pension of up to $1732 per month, or $20,784 tax free per year. Not much for someone who lives in NYC. He may also be eligible for medical benefits over the loss of his arm. Whether or not he got to see any of that money given how confused his life has been over the past 10 years is unclear, but on paper he’s eligible.

T’challa: He is, quite possibly, richer than Stark, and as an absolute monarch pays no tax and has access to his Nation’s vast wealth in vibanium. It’s good to be the king!

Captain Marvel: USAF captain, and a test pilot; the test pilot school only accepts applicants with a service length of less than 9 years 6 months (10 years six moths of helicopters) as they don’t want older applicants. With 8 years service, $79,538.40, plus drill pay and hazard.  However, no know (human) pay since 1990. Flat broke.

Guardians of the Galaxy: no data, but I’m assuming “Cowboy Bebop” levels of perpetual never-ending poverty given the way they choose to live. I’d also assume Rocket has taken all their cash into some sort of Ponzi scheme of his own creation, because just look at him, of course he has.

Spidey: he’s got about $10 of his aunts’ money at any given time, so he can buy lunch… which may in fact be more than Banner or Lang, and we know it’s more that Strange or Thor.

 So, here the big one: how rich or how broke is Sam?

Sam Wilson: annoyingly, we’re not directly told what rank Sam held in any MCU film. USAF pararescue “Maroon berets” are generally NCO’s (but there’ are officer-ranked pararescue) , and he’s seen working on his wings at one point, where as officers don’t generally work on or maintain airframes. He’s shown wearing a Nation Air guard grey while jogging at one point to confuse the matter further. The general consensus on redit is he’s a former USAF tech sergeant (E-6). But how long was he in the air force? With six years service (the minimum sensible time he could have served to work in pararescue based on his age), that would be $41,464.80 per year, plus drill pay and hazard. As Anthony Mackie, the actor that plays him, was 36 as of Civil War, and assuming the character is the same age, and assuming he retired from the air force that year, and he joined the USAF at 17, the youngest you can join, he’d have served 19 years, giving him a pay of $51,566.40, the maximum pay you can get at this rank before promotion to Master Sergent,  but meaning he left just before he’d qualify for the 50% final salary pension you’d qualify for after 20 years. Which seems weird. So let’s assume the character is one year older than the actor that plays him and served 20 years (ages 17-37), that means Sam has a military pension of $25,783.20 per year (20,784 of it tax-free), plus any injury benefits. He councils other veterans, but doesn’t get paid for that. He also chooses Team Cap in Civil War, so would become a wanted criminal, and so lose his income between 2016 and 2018, and then gets snapped and has no income for 5 years, which would destroy his credit rating. Like the rest of Team Cap, he presumably gets his post snap pardon, and goes to work for the US government at his former pay and rank. However, given how Captain John Walker treats him as an equal, it’s possible he’s been promoted to a captain when the  hired back, giving him a pay of between $54,176.40 to $88,142.40 (with 20 years experience, depending on if they take into account his prior service or not, and how much prior service he has), but either way, he’s just starting this as a new job after being legally dead for 5 years: no savings, and no credit.

Commercial fishing vessels cost about 10% of their total value per year in maintenance alone. I can’t identify what sort of boat the Wilson’s have, but some quick googling indicates that the cheapest  15m long wooden in-shore shrimp trawler costs around $140,000, so that’s $14,000 per year in maintenance costs alone, minimum. And that’s a lower estimate, assuming the rest of the business is sound, which we know it isn’t.

So, in concussion, yes, Sam is in some serious financial trouble until he can re-build his savings and credit, but the scary bit is he’s not alone in that: he’s probably better off than Lang, Banner, Danvers, Strange, Thor, Bucky, Wanda and Parker. Only Clint (if he gets a full pardon and gets his full pension), Rhodes, Stark and T’challa aren’t in some sort of potential financial problems. That asshole bank teller was right: despite the fact it seems to pay well on paper, with a few exceptions, the Avengers financials are probibaly a mess. EDIT: Rocket is running the Ponzi scheme, if that’s not clear from context. The others know they have money somewhere, but not where it’s gone. And It’s been pointed out to me that as he’s technically a POW while he’s the Winter Soldier, Bucky is owed over 70 years back-pay, equal to over 3 million dollars, details in the notes.

[strikingatheads]

I know most people don’t really care about homophobic horse game nonsense anymore but here’s the current diet drama:

The game has two currencies: a normal main currency, “gold dust”, and premium “mobia” only obtainable through microtransactions or by buying from another player.

In any game where the currencies can be exchanged between each other, there needs to be currency sinks to keep too much normal currency from circulating. HI3 does this in the form of buying ranch parcels, buying slots for ranch buildings and decorations which let you have more horses, buying slots for custom art, etc, etc. More horse slots means more horses to sell which means more gold for you, but each barn only gives you 3-5 slots. Horses usually sell to an NPC for 4k gold at most. There’s also a system that automatically “taxes” a percentage of your gold to the game itself to forcefully remove it from circulation.

The problem? The gold sinks are fecking capped. They rise exponentially to the point that i.e. parcel one goes from 1,000 gold, to parcel eleven being 89,000,000 gold. No one has ever reached it. Multiplying expense and the taxing system literally ensure no one will ever reach it. And this goes for every sink!

When every sink gets too expensive for a player to use, players end up accumulating more and more GD, and since they know the next upgrade will always be exponentially more expensive, all they're motivated to spend it on is mobia. The exchange rates went nuts, from around 1:600 to 1:1200, and people still struggle to make their ranches more than bare bones or rows and rows of ugly barns.

A forum thread has existed for over a year now asking for a reexamination of exponential sinks, but after 264 responses still hasn’t even been acknowledged by the devs.

Instead, the devs added a system a while ago where players pay 50,000 gold whenever they want and get a new horse slot plus some other perks. So far, exchange rates have gone down, but... Big players who bought upwards of 500+ horse slots have started breeding and selling their massive amounts of horses, effectively putting MORE gold back into the game.

How much? Oh, you know, around 4k per horse. Over Eight Million a month for a person at 500, combined with the previous profits they were getting from their existing slots, with only a 2.5 mil investment needed each month to keep them at the top. When the devs were informed a week in that the system needed a limit (when players were already over 590+), the horse slots you could buy were capped. To 500.

And no, those profits still aren’t enough to afford the gold sinks. Meaning most of that money will go towards mobia.

People have been buying lots of mobia while it’s cheap(now 1:880), and we’re all waiting for those big players to break even and start flooding the economy, all while begging the devs to do something about exponential sinks so the game isn’t 90% grinding. Fun :)

[blackwoolncrown]

Hate to ask you literally anything at this point, but do you know if patron earnings will be taxed at a $600 threshold?

Not sure but that doesn't matter for me as my patreon is already set up as work income bc it's part of my business. I already pay taxes on anything that comes in through patreon and paypal. However I would assume so since the law is seemingly affecting everything *on the grounds that* receiving money over $600 from *any source* is now seen as income.

Again the previous law was basically that any source of income 20k or over would be reported to th IRS as income on which you would be expected to file. This primarily affected small businesses then, like if you had an etsy, you didn't have to really worry about that unless you were making enough for it to matter to the IRS but if you ended up breaking 20k a year the IRS would come 'knocking at your door' expecting a cut and if you weren't filing you can nd up getting audited and indebted. Nuance being that this mattered more bc moneysharing apps are not like...work, which is what Patreon is. Patreon is set up as a platform that enables creators to be paid for their creations, aka work. But paypal, venmo cashapp etc are supposed to be places where you can send/receive money for *nothing* so it's heinous to consider that income especially at amounts under even one measly grand a year.

p.s. Found this on Patreon's site

so in certain states it is taxed at the $600 threshold whil the $20k is still holding elsewhere however I wouldn't trust this to stay where it's at bc I do not trust this system's endless hunger for the money of those who barely have any and it's distaste for taxing those who have exorbitant amounts.

ps. ilu don't feel bad asking me stuff

[drewgaither6]

Annotated Timeline of Period 9

Drew Gaither

2nd APUSH

11-27-18

Mr Johnson

A. Ronald Reagan’s victory in the presidential election of 1980 represented an important milestone, allowing conservatives to enact significant tax cuts and continue the deregulation of many industries.

As Reagan began his first term in office, the country was suffering through several years of stagflation, in which high inflation was accompanied by high unemployment. To fight high inflation, the Federal Reserve Board was increasing the short-term interest rate, which was near its peak in 1981. Reagan proposed a four-pronged economic policy (Reaganomics ~ supply side) that was intended to reduce inflation and stimulate economic and job growth: 1) reduce government spending on domestic programs; 2) reduce taxes for individuals, businesses and investments; 3) reduce the burden of regulations on business, and 4) support slower money growth in the economy.

In Congress, Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, and Senator Bill Roth, Republican of Delaware, had long supported the supply-side principles behind the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) (1981), which would also be known as the Kemp-Roth act. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in Congress, represented a significant change in the course of federal income tax policy, which until then was believed by most people to work best when used to affect the demand during times of recession. The ERTA included a 25 per cent reduction in marginal tax rates for individuals, phased in over three years, and indexed for inflation from that point on. The marginal tax rate, or the tax rate on the last dollar earned, was considered more important to economic activity than the average tax rate (total tax paid as a percentage of income earned), as it affected income earned through “extra” activities such as education, entrepreneurship or investment. Reducing marginal tax rates, the theory went, would help the economy grow faster through such extra efforts by individuals and businesses. The 1981 Act, combined with another major tax reform act in 1986, cut marginal tax rates on high-income taxpayers from 70 per cent to around 30 per cent. Reagan's 1981 cut in the top regular tax rate on unearned income reduced the maximum capital gains rate to only 20% – its lowest level since the Hoover administration.

In April 1980, the federal government enacted the crude oil windfall profit tax on the U.S. oil industry. The main purpose of the tax was to recoup the federal government's revenue that would have otherwise gone to the oil industry as a result of the decontrol of oil prices. Supporters of the tax viewed this revenue as an unearned and unanticipated windfall caused by high oil prices, which were determined by the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) cartel. Despite its name, the windfall profit tax (WPT) was actually an excise tax, not a profits tax, imposed on the difference between the market price of oil and an adjusted base price. The tax was repealed in 1988 because (1) it was an administrative burden to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), (2) it was a compliance burden to the oil industry, (3) due to low oil prices, the tax was generating little or no revenues in 1987 and 1988, and (4) it made the United States more dependent on foreign oil. The depressed state of the U.S. oil industry after 1986 also contributed to the repeal decision.

Part of Reagan’s deregulation overall was massive deregulation of the FDR New Deal Bank Regulations. Federal requirements that set maximum interest rates on savings accounts were phased out. This eliminated the advantage previously held by savings banks. Checking accounts could now be offered by any type of bank. All depository institutions could now borrow from the Fed in a time of need, a privilege that had been reserved for commercial banks. In return, ALL banks had to place a certain percentage of their deposits in the Fed. This gave the FED more control and stabilized state banks. Garn - St. Germain Act of 1982 allowed savings banks to now issue credit cards to make non-residential real estate loans and commercial loans and facilitated actions previously only allowed to commercial banks. Deregulation practically eliminated the distinction between commercial and savings banks. Deregulation caused a rapid growth of savings banks and saving and loans (S&L’s) that now made all types of non-homeowner related loans. Now that S&L's could tap into the huge profit centres of commercial real estate investments, many credit-card issuing entrepreneurs looked to the loosely regulated S&Ls like a profit-making centre. As the '80s wore on the economy appeared to grow. Interest rates continued to go up as well as real estate speculation. The real estate market was in what was known as a "boom" mode. Many S&L's took advantage of the lack of supervision and regulations to make highly speculative investments, in many cases loaning more money than they really should. When the real estate market crashed, and it did so in a dramatic fashion, the S&L's were crushed. They now owned properties that they had paid enormous amounts of money for but weren't worth a fraction of what they paid. Many went bankrupt, losing their depositor's money. This was known as the S&L Crisis. In 1980 the US had 4,600 thrifts, by 1988 mergers and bankruptcies left 3,000. By the mid-1990's less than 2,000 survived. The S&L Crisis cost about $600 Billion USD in "bailouts." This is $1,500 USD dollars for every man, woman, and child in the United States. In summary, the S&L crisis was caused by deregulation which led to high-interest rates that then collapsed. Other causes included inadequate capital and defrauding shorthanded government regulatory agencies (fewer regulators and inspectors).

On August 3rd, 1981 almost 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike after negotiations with the federal government to raise their pay and shorten their workweek, but their efforts were fruitless. The controllers complained of difficult working conditions and a lack of recognition of the pressures they faced. Across the country, some 7,000 flights were cancelled. The same day, President Reagan called the strike illegal and threatened to fire any controller who had not returned to work within 48 hours. Robert Poli, president of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO), was found in contempt by a federal judge and ordered to pay $1,000 USD a day in fines. This is comparable to Teddy Roosevelt’s interference in the Anthracite Coal Strike, banking on it being a “national emergency” if Americans did not get coal in the middle of the winter. He used a “bully pulpit” as he had no real power. Unlike Roosevelt, Reagan did have power and on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Wilson Reagan begins firing 11,359 air-traffic controllers striking in violation of his order for them to return to work. The executive action, regarded as extreme by many, significantly slowed air travel for months. In addition, he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On August 17th (ironically a day after my sister Angel's birthday), the FAA began accepting applications for new air traffic controllers, and on October 22nd the Federal Labour Relations Authority decertified PATCO. This for many conservatives was a major milestone as it dealt harsh blows to the already much-depleted labour union system that had been so prevalent during the Progressive Era and the Gilded Age.

In 1994, under the Clinton administration, the Contract with America was signed on the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C., by members of the Republican minority before the Republican Party gained control of Congress in 1994. The “Contract with America” outlined legislation to be enacted by the House of Representatives within the first 100 days of the 104th Congressional Convention (1995–96). Among the proposals were tax cuts, a permanent line-item veto, measures to reduce crime and provide middle-class tax relief, and constitutional amendments requiring term limits and a balanced budget. With the exception of the constitutional amendment for term limits, all parts of the “Contract with America” were passed by the House, under the leadership of the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Under George W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama two major changes to the tax code were made: (1) the EGTRRA and the JGTRRA. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) is an income tax cut enacted on June 7th, 2001. The Bush administration designed the tax cuts to stimulate the economy and end the 2001 Recession. Families would spend the extra money, increasing the demand. It, out of many things, increased the tax-deductible contributions people could make to their IRA accounts, doubled the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000, expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, provided greater tax deductions for education expenses and savings, reduced the gift tax, and provided relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The EITC phased out the estate and generation-skipping transfer taxes so that they were eliminated in 2010. The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) is an investment tax-cut that was enacted by the Bush Administration on May 28th, 2003. Its goal was to end the 2001 Recession. It reduced the long-term capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 15 percent. For taxpayers who were already in the 10-15th per cent income tax bracket, it reduced the rate to 5 per cent and then to zero in 2008. It changed the dividend tax rate to the same as the long-term capital gains rate. Prior to that, dividends were taxed as regular income. Increased tax deductions for small businesses, accelerated many of the provisions in the EGTRRA, which were supposed to be phased in more gradually, raising the exemption for the Alternative Minimum Tax.

B. Conservatives argued that liberal programs were counterproductive in fighting poverty and stimulating economic growth. Some of their efforts to reduce the size and scope of government met with inertia and liberal opposition, as many programs remained popular with voters.

Reagan stated in his 1987 State of the Union Address that he would “finally break the poverty trap” and in 1988 he signed the Family Support Act in October. The Family Support Act was the culmination of a major 1987 congressional debate on welfare. The act provided for an extensive state-managed education and training program with transitional medical assistance, child-care benefits, and stronger child support enforcement. Under the act, educators are provided opportunities to form linkages with other agencies to strengthen families and help them move toward self-sufficiency. Education is the pivotal goal of the FSA, to help families avoid long-term dependence on public assistance, and the act requires states to make educational services available to participants under the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) training program. Training and employment personnel and vocational and adult educators may join human services staff in providing education and training programs to JOBS clients. Heralded as an “end of welfare,” critics viewed the FSA as a failure. However, the act generated the expectation among voters that welfare recipients would and should be required to work. Despite the goals of the Family Support Act, the nationwide Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) caseload remained constant in the late 1980s, and then grew by more than a third between 1990 and 1994. Reagan also helped save Social Security by passing the Social Security Reform Act of 1983. It provided extra revenue dedicated to securing the solvent future of Social Security.

President Reagan signed legislation expanding Medicaid on several occasions. From 1982 to 1988, Reagan signed legislation mandating coverage for children and pregnant women receiving cash assistance, mandating emergency treatment of illegal immigrants who would otherwise be ineligible for Medicaid and expanding the low-income populations that states could choose to cover, among other expansions. Reagan also signed into law the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 (MCCA), a health care bill to expand Medicare and increase taxes to pay for it which passed in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate by wide margins. Most people thought for good or ill, this expansion of government would be permanent. It provided full coverage for hospital stays after deductibles of $560 USD (for hospitals) and $1,370 USD (doctor bills, 80% of drug costs covered after a $600 deductible, 150 days of coverage for skilled nursing care, and 38 days of coverage for home health care). To pay for this coverage, the bill included a $400 USD a year surcharge (tax) for seniors making $40,000 USD per year and an $800 USD surcharge for those in the top tax brackets. It was political backlash against those surcharges that caused the bill to be repealed during the George H. W. Bush administration.

Reagan believed that widespread freeloading plagued welfare and social programs. As Reagan slashed spending in his first term on programs, the poverty rate climbed from 12% to 15% and unemployment rose from 7% to 11%. Within seven months of Reagan's inauguration, Congress had enacted the largest spending and tax cuts in its history, slashing fiscal 1982 spending $35 billion USD below projected levels and reducing personal and corporate income taxes by $37.7 billion USD. The biggest change was to reduce benefits for the working poor and focus federal welfare assistance primarily on the non-working poor. Congress, for example, amended the major cash benefit program -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) -- to eliminate most payments to working parents. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Of the 450,000 to 500,000 families with earnings estimated to be receiving AFDC at the time of the [1981 program] changes, about one-half are estimated to have lost eligibility because of [those changes]. Another 40 per cent are estimated to have had their AFDC benefits reduced, and the remaining 10 per cent to have received unchanged or higher benefits. The other changes, which affect primarily non-income earners, are estimated to have made at least another 100,000 families ineligible and reduced benefits significantly for another 100,000.” Congress in 1981 and 1982 made changes in the Food Stamp program that, according to the CBO, eliminated about 4 per cent -- or one million people -- from the rolls. Deferrals in adjustments for inflation affected most people still receiving benefits. Although Congress refused Reagan's request to put a cap on the federal contribution on Medicaid (the state-run health care program for the poor) it did reduce federal Medicaid grants to the states and allowed the states to require Medicaid recipients to pay for part of the cost of their care. In addition, since AFDC recipients are automatically eligible for Medicaid, many of those eliminated from the AFDC rolls lost their medical benefits as well.

Congress abolished altogether the Public Service Employment (PSE) program, which provided jobs for the unemployed in state and local governments and in non-profit agencies. PSE was one of the most controversial of the low-income-targeted programs. Its advocates said PSE provided many poor individuals with work experience that eventually helped them move completely into the unsubsidised job market. However, opponents said the program provided dead-end, make-work jobs; news reports on mismanagement and provision of jobs to non-needy individuals further tarnished the program's image. The administration also targeted the Work Incentive Program (WIN) for cutbacks. The program, which provides job search and training assistance, has been mandatory for AFDC recipients without children under the age of 6 since its inception in 1967. However, Reagan's budgeters claimed the program was neither successful nor cost-effective in reducing welfare dependency. Although Congress rejected requests to eliminate the program, the number of registrants dropped from 1.6 million in 1981 to 1 million in 1982. Other major spending cuts affecting the poor were made in federal housing assistance programs, social services, and community services; school lunch programs, compensatory education and emergency energy assistance.

Counteractive measures during time include the Family and Medical Leave Act that was drafted by Donna Lenhoff of the Women’s Legal Defence Fund and a staffer for California’s Congressman Howard Berman in 1984. In 1985, the first version of the law introduced in the House of Representatives allowed for 18 weeks over a two-year period for unpaid parental leave for the birth, adoption, or serious illness of a child, and 26 weeks of unpaid medical leave for the employee’s own serious health condition. The law applies to employers with 50 or more employees. Nine years transpired between the initial draft of the bill and the actual passage of the FMLA in 1993 due to heavy political resistance. Over time, a coalition was formed from organisations representing diverse groups, including workers and unions, women, children and parents, the elderly, health professionals, and religious organizations. Many compromises were made to increase the bill’s political viability, including reducing the length of allowed leave and increasing the minimum employer size for employers covered by the law. The FMLA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The final version of the bill allowed for 12 weeks of unpaid parental and medical leave and applied to employers with at least 50 employees. It allowed employees to take leave to care for family members, but only if the family members are spouses, children or parents.

C. Policy debates continued over free-trade agreements, the scope of the government social safety net, and calls to reform the U.S. financial system.

Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative prompted a major increase in US food aid to Haiti. In 1984, Haiti received $11 million USD in food aid; from 1985-1988, Haiti received $54 million USD in food aid. The Caribbean Basin Initiative called for integrating Haiti into the global market by redirecting 30% of Haiti’s domestic food production towards export crops, a plan that USAID experts systematically carried out. The United States fully recognised that this would lead to widespread hunger in rural Haiti, as peasant land was converted to grow food for foreigners. At the time, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haiti’s infamous dictator, Francois Duvalier, ruled Haiti. Like his father, the younger Duvalier held onto power by controlling Haiti’s repressive security forces. He received millions in US aid intended to maintain US influence in the Caribbean as a bulwark against Cuba. The Reagan administration conditioned US aid on Duvalier’s support for the plan to restructure Haiti’s economy. Thus began the most massive foreign intervention in Haiti since the 1915-1934 American occupation.

By 1990, the year Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected President in Haiti’s first democratic election, US rice imports outpaced domestic production. Aristide was the candidate of Haiti’s popular movement Lavalas. He won with 67% of the vote. His February 1991 inauguration marked a victory for Haiti’s poor majority after decades of Duvalier family dictatorships and military rule, signalling the participation of the poor in a new social order. The Aristide government met with a large coalition of farmers’ associations and unions and proposed buying all Haitian-grown rice in order to stabilize the price, limiting rice imports during periods between harvests. Just seven months after his inauguration, President Aristide and the democratic government were overthrown in a bloody military coup led by General Raoul Cedras. Trained in the United States and funded by the CIA, Cedras commanded the Haitian Army. His regime unleashed the collective violence of Haiti’s repressive forces against its own people. From 1991-1994, nearly 5,000 Lavalas activists and supporters of the constitutional government were massacred; many others were savagely tortured and imprisoned. Rape as a political weapon was widespread. Three hundred thousand Haitians were driven into hiding, while tens of thousands fled the country.

In 1985, the US imposed import quotas on Japanese cars. Japan flooded the U.S. market with high-quality cars that sold far below the price at which the Big Three could afford to build, sell, and survive. In 1985, the dollar, at 220 to the yen, was still too high to arrest the rising U.S. trade deficit. The Big Three were at death's door. Refusing to let any of them go under, Reagan intervened to save the industry by imposing import quotas on Japanese cars. Free traders denounced Reagan as a heretic. The death of Ford and Chrysler were of far less concern to them than fidelity to the free-trade gospel of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. It was Reagan, after all, who first articulated a goal of free trade in the Western Hemisphere. America's first free trade agreement with Israel, implemented in 1985, was a Reagan achievement. A US-Canada agreement followed. In 1986, Reagan launched the Uruguay Round, a series of talks aimed at the reduction of trade barriers among more than 60 nations.

Back in 1984, President Ronald Reagan passed the Trade and Tariff Act, which allowed the president special authority to negotiate free trade agreements more quickly. Going off of Reagan's initiative, Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney supported the president and the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was eventually signed in 1988; it went into effect one year after. When George H. W. Bush became president, he began to negotiate with Mexican President Salinas to generate a trade agreement between Mexico and the United States. The trade agreement was part of President Bush's three-part plan called the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, which also included debt relief programs. After Mexico lobbied for a trilateral trade (Triangular Trade - Concept Originating from Mercantilist Slave Trades in the 1500-the 1800s) agreement in 1991, NAFTA was created as a way to open up free trade between the three, not just two, superpowers in North America. President H.W. Bush signed the NAFTA agreement in 1992, which was also signed by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Salinas. The agreement went into effect under Bush's successor President Bill Clinton, who signed the agreement himself on December 8th, 1993. By January of 1994, the trade agreement was in effect.

The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is an expansion of NAFTA to five Central American nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua), and the Dominican Republic. It was signed May 28th, 2004, and passed through the U.S. House of Representatives by one vote in the middle of the night on July 27th, 2005. After more than a decade of CAFTA, countries in the region have faced hardships for workers and farmers, corporate attacks on health and environmental laws, political instability, and deplorable human rights conditions. CAFTA is based on the failed neoliberal NAFTA model, which has displaced family farmers in trade partner countries, exacerbated the "race to the bottom" in labour and environmental standards, and promoted privatization and deregulation of key public services.

Now a look at the domestic side. Under Governor Mitt Romney’s administration, with his support and advocacy, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a health care reform law in 2006 with the aim of providing health insurance to nearly all of its residents. The law mandated that nearly every resident of Massachusetts obtain a minimum level of insurance coverage, provided free health care insurance for residents earning less than 150% of the federal poverty level (FPL) and mandated employers with more than 10 "full-time" employees to provide healthcare insurance. The law was adopted by senators Barrack Obama and Ted Kennedy into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Obama campaigned on it and after winning the 2008 election, set to work on passing it. The ACA was signed into law by President Obama in March 2010. Its major provisions go into effect on January 1st, 2014, although significant changes went into effect before that date and will continue in years to come. The Act extended insurance to more than 30 million uninsured people, primarily by expanding Medicaid and providing federal subsidies to help lower-and middle-income Americans buy private coverage. Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business had brought suit in federal court challenging the mandate that individuals carry insurance or pay penalties, as well as the expansion of Medicaid. The Supreme Court ruled that states could not be forced into cooperating with the Medicaid expansion, but left most of the other provisions intact. Much of the Obamacare political action came in 2009, the first year of the presidency. On July 14th, House Democrats introduced a 1,000-page plan for overhauling the US health care system. The debate raged throughout the summer and beyond.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a massive piece of financial reform legislation passed by the Obama administration in 2010 as a response to the Geroge Bush's financial crisis of 2008. Named after sponsors U.S. Senator Christopher J. Dodd and U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the act's numerous provisions -- spelt out over roughly 2,300 pages -- are being implemented over a period of several years and intended to decrease various risks in the U.S. financial system. The act established a number of new government agencies tasked with overseeing various components of the act and by extension various aspects of the banking system. Dodd-Frank put regulations on the financial industry and created programs to stop mortgage companies and lenders from taking advantage of consumers. This dense, complex law continues to be a hot topic in American politics. Supporters of it say it places much-needed restrictions on Wall Street, but critics charge that Dodd-Frank burdens investors with "too many rules" that "slow economic growth." An additional provision of the Dodd-Frank Act is known as the Volcker Rule, named after Paul Volcker. Volcker was chairman of the Federal Reserve under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Obama (AKA, dude forgot to retire). The Volcker Rule forbids banks from making certain investments with their own accounts. For example, banks can’t invest, own or sponsor any proprietary trading operations or hedge funds for their own profit, with some exceptions. Banks like Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Chase ALL broke this rule. Dodd-Frank is viewed as one of the most stringent regulations on banks since the FDR era, which was prompted after the Great Depression of 1929.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a United States Supreme Court case involving Citizens United, a 501(c)(4) non-profit organisation, and whether the group's film critical of a political candidate could be defined as an electioneering communication under the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act. Decided in 2010, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited because doing so would "violate" the First Amendment. The Court's decision struck down a provision of the McCain-Feingold Act that banned for-profit and not-for-profit corporations and unions from broadcasting electioneering communications in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections. The decision overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and partially overruled McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003). The decision upheld, however, the requirements for disclaimer and disclosure by sponsors of advertisements, and the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates. The overall precedent set, however, was that “money is speech,” and thus any limitation on money transactions would be considered "suppression of free speech" (I call bullshit). However, this ruling was flawed, as you cannot argue that prostitution or the payment of drugs is “speech.” Nevertheless, the Reagan and Bush stacked Supreme Court upheld such a ruling under the guise of the first amendment.

POL-1.0: Explain how and why political ideas, beliefs, institutions, party systems, and alignments have developed and changed.

Imagine a pendulum oscillating back and forth. Due to the laws of physics, the amount of energy applied to one end of the pendulum will match the other side equally. However, there is energy lost due to friction which inevitably stops the pendulum altogether, dead centre, and in line with the force due to gravity. Politics in any given society act in a pendulum manner. Key events, such as a war, a depression, a recession, or among other things act as the energy supplied to that pendulum. When the economy is bad and social issues are at a major crossroads, energy is applied to the right of the pendulum swaying it to the left. When the economy is good, energy is applied in the other direction, i.e. social welfare programs in the former like under FDR following the Great Depression of 1929, or during the Progressive Era and the Republican Normalcy preceding the crash in the latter, or the Conservative resurgence. The election of 1980 represents a shift in the ideology of the nation. After suffering from the Vietnam War, and the Carter administration bearing the brunt of military debt and major crises inherited from the Ford and Nixon presidencies, the United States citizens felt that they could "no longer trust a Democratic," welfare-friendly administration. In 1980, actor, republican and California governor Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency by all but three US states (because EVERYONE LIKED HIS MOVIES, and were BLINDED by his DONOR'S POLICY OBJECTIVES). With Reagan came a return to conservative values, that, although two “Democratic” presidents followed him, the United States still operates with. In other words, we swung so far back to the right, that it TRUMPED Herbert Hoover's or even Andrew Johnson's failed legacies). The “Neo-Liberal” philosophy that Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush AND Barack Obama ALL HAVE championed keeps that pendulum ever to the right, with an ANGRY populace BEGGING for a HARD-LEFT TURN AGAIN, something that goes EVEN FURTHER than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt or President John F. Kennedy!

The Republican and Democratic parties have amalgamated into one, corporate elite business party, where one must be subservient to corporate donors (Bill Moyers talks about this in his dissection of the Deep State). Tax cuts under the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well bank deregulations, the repeal of Glass-Steagall under Clinton, and the major increase in defence spending have contributed to a massive debt-deficit driven economy. And lest we forget the major increases in illegal wars under the second Bush administration. Artificial inflation, stagflation, and depreciating wages have led to a rise in homelessness, deaths, health care loss, starvation and overall poverty in America. Major slashes to public funding have only added to this loss. And the grossly misguided theory that cutting taxes for the TOP moneymakers, while potentially raising lower-income taxers will someone “trickle-down” wealth for those at the bottom has led to decades of congressional tax cuts that have only lead to corporations buying back their own stocks, artificially boosting the Gross Domestic Product while leaving workers without a dollar more to their name. All of this resulted in the election of a demagogue in 2016; a living embodiment of the SYSTEM of neoliberalism sparked by Reagan. Donald Jay Trump was a mere product of the years of wreckage to the American economy and political institutions paved by his predecessors. In this way, Washington D.C. has become a mere artifice, or "political theatre," that OLIGARCHS in Wall Street and Capitol Hill have successfully orchestrated, as individuals like Jeff Bezos, the Walton Family, Rothchild, the Koch Brothers, and Warren Buffet get filthy rich off the work that THEIR EMPLOYEES put in. And all they do is sit on their fat, rich, lazy white asses and SIT ALL day scheming their next corporate takeover for VALUELESS US Dollars AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR WORKERS HEALTHS & FAMILIES because OUR COUNTRY is 28 TRILLION DOLLARS in DEBT to THEM and THEIR SWISS BANK ACCOUNTS. That, combined with the bought corporate media that spews economic propaganda about “how well the economy is doing,” which seeps into the minds of Americans as we educate the future generation on what is right and wrong, is a recipe for a disaster. And the failure to properly address these issues has only further cemented their legacies in the inevitable, irreversible, and fast-approaching demise of the American Empire. Through this demise, may we FINALLY become A TRUE DEMOCRATIC NATION that works TOGETHER with ALL COUNTRIES, rather than LORD OVER THEM like PUPPETS on our DEMONIC STRINGS.

C. Employment increased in service sectors and decreased in manufacturing, and union membership declined.

Between 1970 and 2000, manufacturing employment was relatively stable, ranging from 16.8 to 19.6 million workers, and generally remaining between 17 and 18 million. However, this relationship broke down in the early 2000s, a period of rapidly growing trade deficits. At that time, manufacturing employment began a prolonged collapse, falling to a low of 11.5 million workers in February 2010, and recovering by December 2014 to 12.3 million workers, where it has remained. Overall, manufacturing lost 5 million jobs between January 2000 and December 2014. Between 2000 and 2007, growing trade deficits in manufactured goods led to the loss of 3.6 million manufacturing jobs in that period. Between 2007 and 2009, the massive collapse in overall U.S. output hit manufacturing particularly hard (real manufacturing output fell 10.3 per cent between 2007 and 2009). This collapse was followed by the slowest recovery in domestic manufacturing output in more than 60 years. Reasonably strong GDP growth over the past five years has not been sufficient to counter these trends; only about 900,000 of the 2.3 million manufacturing jobs lost during the Great Recession have been recovered.

In addition, the resurgence of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods since 2009 has hurt the recovery of manufacturing output and employment. As more free-trade policies like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP (Trans-Pacific Pact) have taken root and have gotten more aggressively laissez-faire, more and more jobs have been outsourced to lower-wages and less regulated countries such as Mexico with the automobile industry; China has virtually every industry, and India practically owns the customer support industry. Without regulations, US manufacturer labourers have no way to compete with countries that have non-union, slave-labour like, and in some cases actual slave labour conditions. This all has lead to the continuance of manufacturing jobs being outsourced. The emphasis on labour cuts, especially unions, was fuelled by Reagan’s bold policy of strike-breaking by firing 11,359 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored his order to return to work, causing a significant impact on labour-management relations in the private sector.

Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry has fused two technologies—hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—in a highly polluting effort to unlock oil and gas in underground rock formations across the United States. As fracking expands rapidly across the country, there is a growing number of documented cases of drinking water contamination and illnesses among nearby residents. Yet it has often been difficult for the public to grasp the scale and scope of these and other fracking threats. Fracking is already underway in 17 states, with more than 80,000 wells drilled or permitted since 2005. Moreover, the oil and gas industry is aggressively seeking to expand fracking to new states—from New York to California to North Carolina—and to areas that provide drinking water to millions of Americans. In the same aspect, fights over the dying and heftily cost (to the environment and miners health) of the coal industry have been waged as people lose their jobs in the mines and “coal towns” become desert towns.

Furthermore, as technology becomes more and more innovated, more jobs are being outsourced to robots, i.e. automation. So as more and more jobs become depleted, more people are finding it difficult to find work, and the owners of more automated industries rake more profit in without having to pay wages, which in turn invests itself back into the economy. More people turn to service sector jobs, i.e. plumbers, technicians, mechanics, construction, etc., because these jobs, at least as of now, demand ACTUAL people to provide labour. All of this is evidence of structural changes in employment due to many of the policies of the administrations including and following President Reagan.

D. Real wages stagnated for the working and middle class amid growing economic inequality.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that for the 1979-2007 period, the after-tax income of households in the top 1 per cent of earners grew by 275%, compared to 65% for the next 19 per cent, just under 40% for the next 60 per cent, and 18% for the bottom fifth of households. This trend of a rising income gap is evidentiary of not only the furtherment of money accumulation for the top earners but also the failures of the tax cuts for the top earners to generate more wealth for the bottom earner (supply-side economics). This issue was exacerbated with the Great Recession of 2007.

The Great Recession—which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009—began with the bursting of an 8 trillion-dollar housing bubble. The resulting loss of wealth led to sharp cutbacks in consumer spending. This loss of consumption, combined with the financial market chaos triggered by the bursting of the bubble, also led to a collapse in business investment. As consumer spending and business investment dried up, massive job loss followed. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. labour market lost 8.4 million jobs or 6.1% of all payroll employment. This was the most dramatic employment contraction (by far) of any recession since the Great Depression. By comparison, in the deep recession that began in 1981, job loss was 3.1%, or only about half as severe. The job loss during the Great Recession has meant that family incomes have dropped, poverty has risen, and adults, as well as children, have lost health insurance. The bursting of the housing bubble and the drop in the stock market has meant that family wealth has dropped dramatically, as well. This feature highlights the impact of the Great Recession on the labour market and on working families.

The Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act (EESA) (2008) was one of the bailout measures taken by Congress in 2008 to help repair the damage from the subprime mortgage crisis. The act gave the Treasury Secretary the authority to buy up to $700 billion USD of troubled assets and to restore liquidity in financial markets. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) was originally created and proposed by Henry Paulson. The original form of the EESA was rejected by the House of Representatives in September of 2008 and was therefore revised. A revised version was passed the following month. Proponents of the plan believed that it was vital to minimise the damage done to the economy by the mortgage meltdown, while detractors contended that the cost amounted to a bailout for Wall Street and the banks. A central part of the response to the financial crisis was the implementation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Another law passed by Congress in response to the Great Recession of 2008 was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009). It is more commonly known as the stimulus package of 2009, or the "Obama stimulus." The package included a series of federal government expenditures aimed at countering the job losses associated with the 2008 recession. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) called for a massive round of federal spending designed to create new jobs and recover jobs lost in the Great Recession of 2008. This government spending was intended to compensate for a slowdown in private investment in that year. It was intended to provide tax relief for families, including withholding reductions up to $800 USD per family and a $70 billion USD extension of the alternative minimum tax. It also was intended to provide over $80 billion USD in infrastructure projects, expand healthcare including $87 billion USD in aid to states to help cover additional recession-related Medicare costs, and provided over $100 billion USD in education spending, including teacher salary support and Head Start programs.

In a response to the legislative bailouts and the risky and overly greedy business practices of Wall Street, a movement was started known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupy is a progressive protest movement that began on September 17th, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning a surge in the movement against economic inequality worldwide. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The Occupy slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to income inequality and wealth distribution in the United States between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters acted on consensus-based decisions made in general assemblies which emphasized redress through direct action over the petitioning to authorities. The protesters were forced out of Zuccotti Park (where they had been assembled) on November 15th, 2011. Protesters turned their focus to occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, foreclosed homes, and college and university campuses.

WXT-3.0: Analyse how technological innovation has affected economic development and society.

As mentioned earlier, automation and the ever-moving feats of technology have affected jobs, wealth accumulation, and how Americans interact with one another and with those around the globe. In 1975, IBM released its first portable computer. In 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced NCP on the ARPANET, marking the beginning of the modern internet. In 1985 the first version of Microsoft was released. And technological feats continued. On June 29th, 2007, the first iPhone was released. With the access to computers, DVR technologies, expanding TV networks, countless websites and online records, human capacity has expanded and the ability to research and articulate such matters has grown. This affects society tremendously when it comes to the changing tides on social issues, the ability to question more of religion and previously inaccessible doctrine, the greater acceptance of sexuality, and a growing consumer culture based on the immediate gratification of buying things. These new technologies and attitudes have led to the further automation of U.S. sector jobs and the growing collapse of the economy.

New innovations in the manufacturing industry, especially in say coal, have left people without a job. More and more labour is being replaced with machines that only accumulate profit for the owner of those machines, who then buy back into their own companies. Unlike a paid employee who would have to invest in the economy by buying goods and participating in the market, or who get small "shares" in their company like at Home Depot or Publix, these owners of machines, corporations, and PEOPLE make up to 300x A YEAR what their average employee does, but CONTRIBUTE the LEAST AMOUNT of WORK in THE ENTIRE COMPANY. Hell, they probably didn't even design the machines they profit from, rather some college student in an unpaid internship at say Georgia Tech did. In this way, technology does help the overall GDP of the nation and increases profitability, but it undercuts wages and leaves more Americans less off than ever before. With tax cuts and supply-side theories, these greater profit margins are left unchecked and the consumer is the one to suffer. Larger businesses who have established themselves while also having the ability to adapt, like Amazon, begin to crush smaller competitors and without regulations begin to monopolise several industries simultaneously. With new robotic technologies, Amazon hires fewer and fewer workers, even having workerless stores and eventually driverless delivery trucks. At the same time, they have made their competitors go out of business, cutting jobs from not only their company but other companies in that field. Then, they make a profit from all of the cut jobs, sucking most of the wealth to just be invested back into the company to raise stock prices which goes MOSTLY into Jeff Bezos’ pocket.

B. Increased U.S. military spending, Reagan’s diplomatic initiatives, and political changes and economic problems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were all important in ending the Cold War.

Reagan increased defence spending to achieve "peace through strength" in his opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union. Reagan wound up increasing the defence budget by 35 per cent. Under Reagan, government spending increased 2.5 per cent annually. Reagan's first budget was for the fiscal year 1982. He incurred substantial deficits for each year of his presidency. As a result, the debt each year also increased. By the end of Reagan's two terms, the national debt had more than doubled. At the end of his two terms, Reagan had incurred a national debt of $1.86 trillion USD, a 186% per cent increase from the $998 billion USD debt at the end of Carter's last budget, FY 1981.

One of Reagan’s budgetary priorities was the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), by the name "Star Wars," which proposed the US strategic defensive system against potential nuclear attacks—as originally conceived, from the Soviet Union. The SDI was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in a nationwide television address on March 23rd, 1983. Because parts of the defensive system that Reagan advocated would be based in space, the proposed system was dubbed “Star Wars,” after the space weaponry of a popular motion picture of the same name (cause Reagan was an ACTOR and LIKED HOLLYWOOD). The SDI was intended to defend the United States from attack from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by intercepting the missiles at various phases of their flight. Though initial funding for the SDI had been approved by the U.S. Congress by the mid-1980s, the program aroused a heated debate among both arms experts and public officials over its military and political implications and its technical feasibility. Proponents of the SDI asserted that the overwhelming technological obstacles to its implementation could eventually be overcome and that an effective defensive system would deter potential Soviet attacks. Critics of the program argued variously that the scheme was unworkable, that it encouraged a further arms race, and that it undermined established arms-control agreements and weakened the prospects for further arms-control agreements. Testing continued on a number of SDI-related devices, but the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed the conditions of such defence.

START I inevitably acted as one of the dampers of the Star Wars program. In 1982, Ronald Reagan renamed disarmament talks with the USSR START and proposed radical reductions, rather than merely limitations, in each superpower’s existing stocks of missiles and warheads. In 1983 the Soviet Union abandoned arms control talks in protest against the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in western Europe (see Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty). In 1985 START resumed, and the talks culminated in July 1991 with a comprehensive strategic-arms-reduction agreement signed by U.S. Pres. George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. During the negotiations on START I, one of the most controversial issues had been how to handle limits on nuclear-armed cruise missiles, as verification would be difficult to implement. The issue was finally handled by means of separate political declarations by which the two sides agreed to announce annually their planned cruise missile deployments, which were not to exceed 880.

For the first time in eight years, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States held a summit conference. Meeting in Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev produced no earth-shattering agreements. However, the meeting boded well for the future, as the two men engaged in long, personal talks and seemed to develop a sincere and close relationship. The meeting came as somewhat of a surprise to some in the United States, considering Reagan’s often incendiary rhetoric concerning "communism" and the Soviet Union, but it was in keeping with the president’s often-stated desire to bring the nuclear arms race under control. For Gorbachev, the meeting was another clear signal of his desire to obtain better relations with the United States so that he could better pursue his domestic reforms. Little of substance was accomplished. Six agreements were reached, ranging from cultural and scientific exchanges to environmental issues. Both Reagan and Gorbachev, however, expressed satisfaction with the summit, which ended on November 21st. The next summit was held in October 1986 in Reykjavik and ended somewhat disastrously, with Reagan’s commitment to the Strategic Defence Initiative (the so-called “Star Wars” missile defence system) providing a major obstacle to progress on arms control talks. However, by the time of their third summit in Washington, D.C. in 1987, both sides made concessions in order to achieve agreement on a wide range of arms control issues.

When Gorbachev became head of the Communist Party in 1985, he launched Perestroika (“restructuring”). His team was more heavily Russian than that of his predecessors. It seems that initially, even Gorbachev believed that the basic economic structure of the U.S.S.R. was sound and therefore only minor reforms were needed. He thus pursued an economic policy that aimed to increase economic growth while increasing capital investment. Capital investment was to improve the technological basis of the Soviet economy as well as promote certain structural economic changes. His goal was quite plain: to bring the Soviet Union up to par economically with the West. Gorbachev launched Glasnost (“openness”) as the second vital plank of his reform efforts. He believed that the opening up of the political system—essentially, democratizing it—was the only way to overcome inertia in the political and bureaucratic apparatus, which had a big interest in maintaining the status quo. In addition, he believed that the path to economic and social recovery required the inclusion of people in the political process. Glasnost also allowed the media more freedom of expression, and editorials complaining of depressed conditions and of the government’s inability to correct them began to appear.

Solidarity, officially Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity,” was a Polish trade union that in the early 1980s became the first independent labour union in a country belonging to the Soviet bloc. Solidarity was founded in September 1980, was forcibly suppressed by the Polish government in December 1981, and reemerged in 1989 to become the first opposition movement to participate in free elections in a Soviet-bloc nation since the 1940s. Solidarity subsequently formed a coalition government with Poland’s United Workers’ Party (PUWP), after which its leaders dominated the national government. During a growing wave of new strikes in 1980 protesting rising food prices, Gdańsk became a hotbed of resistance to government decrees. Some 17,000 workers at the Lenin Shipyards there staged a strike and barricaded themselves within the plant under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa, an electrician by trade. In mid-August 1980 an Interfactory Strike Committee was established in Gdańsk to coordinate rapidly spreading strikes there and elsewhere; within a week it presented the Polish government with a list of demands that were based largely on KOR’s Charter of Workers’ Rights. On August 31, accords reached between the government and the Gdańsk strikers sanctioned free and independent unions with the right to strike, together with greater freedom of religious and political expression.

C) The end of the Cold War led to new diplomatic relationships but also new U.S. military and peacekeeping interventions, as well as continued debates over the appropriate use of American power in the world.

The Persian Gulf War also called Gulf War, (1990–91), was an international conflict that was triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, ordered the invasion and occupation of Kuwait with the apparent aim of acquiring that nation’s large oil reserves, cancelling a large debt Iraq owed Kuwait and expanding Iraqi power in the region. On August 3rd the United Nations Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and on August 6th the council imposed a worldwide ban on trade with Iraq. (The Iraqi government responded by formally annexing Kuwait on August 8th.) Iraq’s invasion and the potential threat it then posed to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer and exporter, prompted the United States and its western European NATO allies to rush troops to Saudi Arabia to deter a possible attack. Egypt and several other Arab nations joined the anti-Iraq coalition and contributed forces to the military build-up, known as Operation Desert Shield. Iraq meanwhile built up its occupying army in Kuwait to about 300,000 troops.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War was, according to President Bush, about "more than one small country; it is a big idea; a new world order," with "new ways of working with other nations . . . peaceful settlement of disputes, solidarity against aggression, reduced and controlled arsenals and just treatment of all peoples." Not long after the war, however, the flow of White House words about a new world order slowed to a trickle. Like Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points or Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, George Bush’s grand rhetoric expressed the larger goals important for public support when a liberal democratic state goes to war. But after the war, when reality intruded, grand schemes turned into a liability. People were led to compare the war’s imperfect outcome with an impossible ideal. The proper standard for judgment should have been what the world would look like if Saddam Hussein had been left in possession of Kuwait. The victory lost its lustre because of an unfair comparison that the president inadvertently encouraged, and recession shifted the political agenda to the domestic economy. The White House thus decided to lower the rhetorical volume.

In the 1980s, Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a once U.S.-supportive leader who was later accused of spying for Fidel Castro and using Panama to traffic drugs into the United States, was one of the most recognizable names in America and was constantly in the press. The struggle to remove him from power began in the Reagan administration when economic sanctions were imposed on the country; this included prohibiting American companies and governments from making payments to Panama and freezing $56 million USD in Panamanian funds in American banks. Reagan sent more than 2,000 American troops to Panama as well. Unlike Reagan, Bush was able to remove Noriega from power, but his administration's unsuccessful post-invasion planning hindered the needs of Panama during the establishment of the young democratic government. In May 1989, Panama held democratic elections, in which Guillermo Endara was elected president; the results were then annulled by Noriega's government. In response, Bush sent 2,000 more US troops to the country, where they began conducting regular military exercises in Panamanian territory (in violation of prior treaties). Bush then removed an embassy and ambassador from the country and dispatched additional troops to Panama to prepare the way for an upcoming invasion. On December 18th, Bush admitted he believed the current Panama situation was very concerning and that it had been "an enormous frustration to me" but declined to state what intent the US had toward it during an Oval Office interview with wire service reporters. R. W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times observed the invasion as placing Bush among other post-World War II American presidents that had "felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest."

Faced with a humanitarian disaster in Somalia, exacerbated by a complete breakdown in the civil order, the United Nations had created the UNOSOM I mission in April 1992 to aid the situation through humanitarian efforts, though the mission failed. The Bush administration proposed American aid to the region by assisting in creating a secure environment for humanitarian efforts and UN Resolution 794 was unanimously adopted by the Security Council on December 3rd, 1992. A lame-duck president, Bush launched Operation Restore Hope the following day under which the United States would assume command in accordance with Resolution 794. Fearing chaos resulting in the starvation of Somalia's civilians and to help U.S. Forces defend themselves, Clinton increased troop presence in the country. Demands for withdrawal, however, grew louder and Clinton ordered troops out of the country in March 1994. This left Somalia in a state of chaos, with warlords battling for control.

Much of the focus of Clinton's foreign policy during his first term was the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation in southeastern Europe that had declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. This declaration was the catalyst of a war between Bosnian Serbs, who wanted Bosnia to remain in the Yugoslav federation, and Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The Bosnian Serbs, who were supported by Serbia, were better equipped than the Muslims and the Croats; as a result, they populated and controlled much of the countryside in ways including besieging cities, such as the capital of Sarajevo. This caused widespread suffering, and in response, Clinton proposed bombing Serb supply lines and lifting an embargo preventing the shipment of military arms to the former Yugoslavia (a policy known as lift and strike - LITERALLY PLAYING WITH PEOPLES LIVELIHOODS, FAMILIES, AND HOMES like "BOARDS ON A CHESSBOARD"). European nations, however, were opposed to these moves. In 1994, Clinton opposed an effort by the Republicans in Congress to lift the arms embargo, as it were because American allies in Western Europe were still resistant to that policy. Clinton continued to pressure western European countries throughout 1994 to take strong measures against the Serbs. But in November, as the Serbs seemed on the verge of defeating the Muslims and Croats in several strongholds, Clinton changed course and called for conciliation with the Serbs. After the 2nd Markale massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces reportedly shelled a crowded marketplace in Sarajevo, NATO, led by the United States launched Operation Deliberate Force with a series of airstrikes against Bosnian Serb targets. The air campaign, along with a counter-offensive by better-equipped Muslim and Croatian forces, succeeded in pressuring the Bosnian Serbs into participating in negotiations. In November 1995, Clinton hosted peace talks between the warring parties in Dayton, Ohio. The parties reached a peace agreement known as the Dayton Agreement, leaving Bosnia as a single state made up of two separate entities with a central government. In the spring of 1998, ethnic tension in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia–the state formed from the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro–heightened when the military forces responded in the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. More than 90 per cent of the residents of Kosovo were Muslim and ethnic Albanians, many of whom wanted independence from the country. Yugoslav forces were mobilized into provinces to quell Albanian rebels. Through attempting to impose the Rambouillet Agreement, Clinton, who strongly supported the Albanians, threatened the Yugoslav administration with military strikes. On the 24th of March 1999, NATO, led by the United States, launched the two-month bombardment of Yugoslavia. The strikes were not limited to military installations and NATO targets included civilian targets such as factories, oil refineries, television stations and various infrastructure. The intervention, which devastated Yugoslavia, was not approved by the United Nations, the UN General Assembly or the UN Security Council, and was strongly opposed by both Russia and China. It was the first time in NATO's history that its forces had attacked a sovereign country and the first time in which airpower alone won a battle. In June 1999, NATO and Yugoslav military leaders approved an international peace plan for Kosovo, and attacks were suspended after Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo.

In May 1989, nearly a million Chinese, mostly young students, crowded into central Beijing to protest for greater democracy and call for the resignations of Chinese Communist Party leaders deemed too repressive. For nearly three weeks, the protesters kept up daily vigils and marched and chanted. Western reporters captured much of the drama for television and newspaper audiences in the United States and Europe. On June 4th, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters (Note System of a Down's B.Y.O.B., why DON'T the PRESIDENTS ever FIGHT THE WARS???). Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats on the scene estimated that at least 300, and perhaps thousands, of the protesters, had been killed and as many as 10,000 were arrested. In the aftermath, President George H.W. Bush denounced the actions in Tiananmen Square and suspended military sales as well as high-level exchanges with Chinese officials. Many members of the U.S. Congress, the American public, and international leaders advocated broader economic sanctions, some of which were implemented. U.S. leaders met with Chinese nationals studying in the United States as a symbolic gesture of commitment. Questions of relations with China, in particular the granting of Most-Favored-Nation trading status, were controversial questions for the remainder of President Bush’s term and into the term of President Bill Clinton.

WOR-2.0: Analyse the reasons for, and results of, U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military initiatives in North America and overseas.

After many feats in US power history, including the naval expansion under Teddy Roosevelt, the increase in military spending under Reagan, and the escalation of conflict under several presidents, including Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as a steady trend starting back in the days of Washington of money growth and growth in US representation around the world, the United States has blossomed as a GLOBAL SUPERPOWER, ever much so in the Conservative Resurgence. If one examines history in the world during any given time, one will find the ever-lingering ideologies of imperialism. One such example of this would be the British Empire and its stronghold on countries all across the globe during the 16th and through the 20th centuries (Note Netflix's "The Crown"). The United States is the largest and most frankly, important nation in global geopolitics. For this reason, the country finds a need to act as a sort of “global policeman”; at least, that is what we have been told. In reality, the United States has always gotten involved in matters that best benefit ITS OWN NATION as a whole whether it be financially, politically, or in other regards. The United States has no great moral cause to crusade around saving other countries for the greater good. Some may even say, with good reason, that the United States put up a façade when claiming that communism was the greatest threat to American democracy and that it must be stopped up at all costs, even if that meant destabilizing democracies across the world and stripping away civil liberties in the United States. That façade seems much more realistic when evaluating the great profit made off such wars as the Vietnam War, Korean War, and Cold War, and at the expense of American and foreign blood. President Eisenhower himself warned against the Military-Industrial Complex in his Farewell Address. This complex feeds off war, so inevitably, it survives at the cost of making war - a skill that US presidents seem to be pretty good at.

Diplomacy works for the US when it can benefit the most financially to do so. In such a case as the START I treaty and disarmament talks between the USSR and the US, the United States understood that more profit could be made by opening up trade with the Union rather than waging a never-ending Cold War. If the financial profits of the Cold War had exceeded the trade route, such diplomatic talks may never have occurred. In this way, the US can also block trade like with Cuba or with China after Tiananmen Square. The US will also support dictatorships across the world, and coups of democratic governments if it best serves the Country to do that, while at the same time waging wars against dictatorships and striving to “spread democracy.” It hides its money holds under the guise of "moral justice." Initiatives are incentivised by profit and by power.

A. In the wake of attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the United States launched military efforts against terrorism and lengthy, controversial conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Afghanistan War was an international conflict in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 that was triggered by the September 11th attacks and consisted of three phases. The first phase—toppling the Taliban (the ultraconservative political and religious faction that ruled Afghanistan and provided sanctuary for al-Qaeda, perpetrators of the September 11th attacks)—was brief, lasting just two months. The second phase, from 2002 until 2008, was marked by a U.S. strategy of defeating the Taliban militarily and rebuilding the core institutions of the Afghan state. The third phase, a turn to classic counterinsurgency doctrine, began in 2008 and accelerated with U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to temporarily increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. The larger force was used to implement a strategy of protecting the population from Taliban attacks and supporting efforts to reintegrate insurgents into Afghan society. The strategy came coupled with a timetable for the withdrawal of the foreign forces from Afghanistan; beginning in 2011, security responsibilities would be gradually handed over to the Afghan military and police. The new approach largely failed to achieve its aims. Insurgent attacks and civilian casualties remained stubbornly high, while many of the Afghan military and police units taking over security duties appeared to be ill-prepared to hold off the Taliban. By the time the U.S. and NATO combat mission formally ended in December 2014, the 13-YEAR Afghanistan War had become the longest war ever fought by the United States.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War (also called Operation Iraqi Freedom). The invasion phase began on the 20th March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 21 days of major combat operations, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq. This early stage of the war formally ended on the 1st of May 2003 when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations," after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.

In 2003, a secret compound, known as Strawberry Fields, was constructed near the main Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. It was not until August 2010 that reporters found that it had been constructed to hold CIA detainees classified as "high value.” These were among the many men known as ghost detainees, as they were ultimately held for years for interrogation by the CIA in its secret prisons known as black sites at various places in Europe, the Mideast, and Asia, including Afghanistan (LIKE JULAIN ASSANGE'S TORTURE IN BELMARSH PRISON). Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, in an exclusive report on August 7th, 2010, for the Associated Press, reported that the "high-value detainees" Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had first been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay on September 24th, 2003. They reported that CIA agents thought they had learned most of the information to be extracted from these individuals. At the time, the CIA thought the men could be held securely and secretly at Guantanamo, without any prospect of the public learning that they had been SUBJECTED to what the United States courts have determined is TORTURE, including waterboarding, one of the euphemistically termed "enhanced interrogation techniques." These techniques had been specifically authorized by political appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice (DOJ), in the Bush administration, in August 2002 (MONTH & YEAR DREW WAS BORN), in what came to be known as the Torture Memos. David Johnston and Mark Mazetti, writing in the New York Times in August 2009 also described the camp. They quoted CIA officials, who said that the camp's nickname in 2003 was a reference to the Beatles' song "Strawberry Fields Forever," because the detainees would be held there "forever" (THEY COOPTED POPULAR AMERICAN SONGS to SELL THEIR HEINOUS BULLLSHIT POLICES. THEY LIED TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC). As the Habeas Corpus petitions collectively known as Rasul v. Bush made their way to the United States Supreme Court for its ruling in 2004, the CIA took the four men back into their custody. Apuzzo and Goldman report that the Bush government returned the men to CIA custody three months before the Supreme Court's ruling, to avoid the possibility of having to release any information about them. The Supreme Court held that detainees had the right of Habeas Corpus to challenge their detention before an impartial forum, and NONE had seen counsel. Up until that time, no detainees had been able to challenge the grounds of their detention. The Supreme Court's ruling would have compelled at least some information about the four detainees to be publicly revealed. The CIA violated State Law, Federal Law, and International Law in VIRTUALLY EVERY COUNTRY and GOT AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE OF US NUCLEAR STOCKPLIES (aka the "threat" of the RED BUTTON being used against FOREIGN "enemies" - aka XENOPHOBIA).

Since 2004, the United States government has attacked thousands of targets in Northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) operated by the United States Air Force under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division. Most of these attacks are on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border in Northwest Pakistan. These strikes began during the administration of United States President George W. Bush and increased substantially under his successor Barack Obama. Some in the media have referred to the attacks as a "drone war.” The George W. Bush administration officially denied the extent of its policy; in May 2013, the Obama administration acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens had been killed in the strikes. THIS is what Chelsea Manning released and was imprisoned for, and what Megan McCain, daughter of WAR CRIMINAL, said was "justified" for "international security" on the asinine, politically-dumb ABC show "The View," that FOCUSES TOO MUCH ON PERSONAL ISSUES within HOMES and NOT ENOUGH on GLOBAL ATROCITIES. BUT Manning's distribution of this information SAVED future CITIZENS of the WAR-TORN regions, thus making CHELSEA MANNING a WAR-HERO, NOT a CRIMINAL, like her PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH and VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY.

B. The war on terrorism sought to improve security within the United States but also raised questions about the protection of civil liberties and human rights.

The USA Patriot Act was a law passed shortly after the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. It gave law enforcement agencies broad powers to investigate, indict and bring "terrorists" to justice. It also led to increased penalties for committing and supporting terrorist crimes. An acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism,” this "anti-terror" measure was chiefly designed to lower the probable cause threshold for obtaining intelligence warrants against suspected spies, terrorists, and other enemies of the United States. The USA Patriot Act deters and punishes terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad through enhanced law enforcement and strengthened money laundering prevention. It also allows the use of investigative tools designed for organized crime and drug trafficking prevention for terrorist investigations. For example, federal agents can use court orders to obtain business records from hardware stores or chemical plants to determine who may be buying materials to make bombs, or bank records to determine who is sending money to terrorists or suspect organizations. Police officers, FBI agents, federal prosecutors and intelligence officials are better able to share information and evidence on individuals and plots, thus enhancing their protection of communities. Opponents of the Act argue it effectively lets the U.S. government investigate ANYONE it wants to, colliding directly with one of the U.S.' most cherished values: a citizens’ right to privacy.

My Freshman Biology teacher Mr Alan Curtis told me that one time when being pulled over for a speeding ticket, he made a wise-assed remark to the police officer and he WAS THREATENED with the PATRIOT ACT in PAULDING COUNTY GEORGIA by one of their EVIL SHERIFFS. A CLEAR abuse of AN ALREADY unconstitutional law. Imagine how many innocent teachers, black, brown, and even poor-white people have been arbitrarily detained for 24-hrs against their will., causing them to lose job opportunities, miss school, and sometimes DIE in prison cells due to government overreach. Questions of misusing government funds arise when limited resources are used in tracking American citizens, especially those moving overseas. It is unclear what federal authorities intend to do with information discovered through tracking public records, raising concerns about the government’s autonomy and power. Suspected terrorists have been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without always explaining why or allowing legal representation, violating their RIGHT to due process. Some prisoners have been proven, subsequently, to not even have any ties to terrorism. Officials in the Federal government have OFTEN abused this power, even as far as imprisoning their OWN SPOUSES that cheated on them (this is known in the CIA as LOVESPYING). The business, finance and investment communities are more likely to be affected by heightened documentation requirements and due diligence responsibilities. Though the impact is more on institutions than individual investors, anyone who conducts international business is likely to experience added costs and greater hassles with something as mundane as opening a simple foreign checking account. Basically, rich oligarchs can open bank accounts and get away with it because THEY OWN THE GOVERNMENT, but a lowly grandma trying to get her child into a better country might spend DECADES in prison. This is UNJUST, UNBALANCED, ANTIQUATED, and news to be ADDRESSED IMMEDIATELY!

The Homeland Security Act was a piece of U.S. legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 25th, 2002, that established the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a new department in the executive branch of the government and established a number of measures aimed at protecting the "national security" of the United States. The act was drafted in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in 2001, when defending the United States against terrorist attacks and responding to large-scale emergencies which had rapidly emerged as top priorities for the government. Until the passage of the Homeland Security Act, the U.S. security apparatus had been dispersed across a wide range of federal agencies and the military. In addition to creating an entirely new federal government organization with its own mandate, a cabinet-level secretary, and more than 180,000 employees at the time of its founding, the Homeland Security Act placed a number of existing agencies beneath the larger umbrella of the DHS, which took on responsibilities ranging from infrastructure protection and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and related countermeasures to border and transportation security, emergency preparedness and response, and coordination with other parts of the federal government, with state and local governments, and with the private sector.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is a U.S. agency created following the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks that are mandated with developing and implementing policies to ensure the safety of the nation’s transportation systems. It was established by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 19th, 2001. Originally part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 2003 the TSA became part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Airport security and preventing aircraft hijacking are important concerns of the TSA and arguably the most well-known to the public. Uniformed transportation security officers at airports examine passengers and luggage, looking for any prohibited materials. Others work behind the scenes, for example, by reviewing passenger lists and comparing them with lists of individuals deemed to be a security threat or at risk for being a security threat. NOTE, this power is OFTEN ABUSED and RACIALISED. For example, I have always been "randomly" selected for more "IN-DEPTH" and UNCOMFORTABLE screenings as a CHILD. My PawPaw was put on hold because my YaYa forgot to put A SOUVENIR KNIFE in their main cargo and he was a Native American-Man with SLIGHTLY darker than normal skin and a granddaughter that was Lilly-white. This was a RACIALISED incident in the 21ST CENTURY.

They then identify anyone who requires additional screening or who should not be allowed to board a plane. The TSA also has a public presence with its VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams), members of which are easily identifiable as security officers and who patrol railways and mass transit systems. Other modes of transportation that are also under the purview of the TSA include freight carriers moving across the nation’s highways, cargo entering U.S. ports and travelling on U.S. waterways, and freight being transported via pipelines. In addition to the transportation security officers and VIPR members mentioned above, the TSA also employs other specialists, including behaviour detection officers, federal air marshals, explosives specialists, and canine teams as part of its mandate to "keep the country’s transportation systems safe" from THE COUNTRY'S OWN MESS of TERRORISM which was CAUSED by US OFFICIALS IN THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX who WANT WAR! (Note: Ozzy Osbourne's "War Pigs")

The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11th, 2001, attacks. "The program, which enabled the United States to secretly track billions of phone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens over a period of decades, was A BLUEPRINT for the NSA surveillance that would come after it, with similarities too close to be coincidental." It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications that were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, describe how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country." The program was named the Terrorist Surveillance Program by the George W. Bush administration in response to the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy following disclosure of the program. It is claimed that this program operated without the judicial oversight mandated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and legal challenges to the program are currently undergoing judicial review. Because the technical specifics of the program have not been disclosed, it is unclear if the program is subject to FISA. It is unknown if this is the original name of the program; the term was first used publicly by President Bush in a speech on January 23rd, 2006. On August 17th, 2006, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled the program unconstitutional and illegal. On appeal, the decision was overturned on procedural grounds and the lawsuit was dismissed without addressing the merits of the claims, although one further challenge is still pending in the courts. On January 17th, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders by letter that the program would not be reauthorized by the president but would be subjected to judicial oversight. "Any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," according to his letter. On June 6th, 2013, it was revealed that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was replaced by a new NSA program, referred to by its codeword, PRISM.

Edward Snowden, former American intelligence contractor, now whistle-blower, who in 2013 revealed the existence of secret wide-ranging information-gathering programs conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden left the CIA for the NSA in 2009. There he worked as a private contractor for the companies Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. During this time, he began gathering information on a number of NSA activities—most notably, secret surveillance programs that he believed were OVERLY BROAD in size and scope - A DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE ORIGINAL UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. In May 2013, Snowden requested a medical leave of absence and flew to Hong Kong, where during the following month he conducted a series of interviews with journalists from the newspaper The Guardian. Footage filmed during that period was featured in the documentary Citizenfour (2014). Among the NSA secrets leaked by Snowden was a court order that compelled telecommunications company VERIZON (my grandparents Jessica, Rex, and boyfriend's family ALL USED VERIZON while around ME, A DIRECT TARGET OF THE US GOVERNMENT as a RADICAL) to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialled and duration of calls) for MILLIONS of its subscribers.

Snowden ALSO disclosed the existence of PRISM, a data-mining program that reportedly gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters—Britain’s NSA equivalent—“direct access” to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. YOUR GOVERNMENT WAS WATCHING YOU! On June 9th, 2013, days after stories were initially published in The Guardian and The Washington Post without revealing the identity of their source (FOR OBVIOUS SECURITY REASONS), Snowden came forward, stating that he felt no need to hide because he had done nothing wrong. In a subsequent interview with the South China Morning Post, he claimed that the NSA had been hacking into Chinese computers since 2009 and that he had taken a job with Booz Allen Hamilton expressly to obtain information about secret NSA activities. The U.S. charged Snowden with espionage on June 14th, and Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, began negotiating with authorities in Hong Kong in an attempt to initiate extradition procedures. The Hong Kong government declined to act, and Snowden, with the assistance of the media organization WikiLeaks (ASSANGE'S LIFE-LAVING AUSTRALIA AGENCY), flew to Moscow, where his exact whereabouts became the source of intense speculation (SNOWDEN WENT OFF THE GRID). Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that Snowden, whose passport had been revoked by the United States, has remained within the confines of the international transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport ever since. HE WANTS TO GO BACK TO HIS FAMILY IN HIS HOME COUNTRY! THAT HE TRIED TO HELP SHARE THE TRUTH WITH! And dammit, he's FAMILY in my BOOK and I ALWAYS look after MY FAMILY!

NAT-2.0: Explain how interpretations of the Constitution and debates over rights, liberties, and definitions of citizenship have affected American values, politics, and society.

America HAS ALWAYS had a problem respecting the civil liberties of EVERYONE on its soil. Whether it be the natives, or African Americans, or any person other than a white, landholding, protestant man, ALL Americans have been deprived of BASIC civil liberties and HUMAN RIGHTS at one point or another. Presidents for centuries have made constitutionally iffy decisions, like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Espionage Act under President John Adams. It is at times of war or perceived threat that the American government ACTS THE MOST CARELESSLY in this regard. During WWI and throughout WWI and the Cold War, the Red Scare (fear of a "Communist" takeover in the United States) led to the forming of such committees like the House Un-American Committee and more legislative actions that went after any semblance of left-wing ideology. As seen in this section, these practices of encroaching on constitutionality did not stop during the Conservative Resurgence, if anything IT GREW since the years of Ronal Reagan. With the cultivation of new technologies, the government expanded its practices. After 9/11, the Bush administration could successfully market such legislation as the “Patriot” Act which greatly deprived civilian liberties, but if you advocated against it, you could and were perceived as “unpatriotic," like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh often yelled over and over again. THEY WERE LIARS AND IN IT FOR THEIR OWN PROFITS WITH THEIR OLD, OUTDATED, BASE LISTENERS. (note: What's the problem with Texas radio!!!!). At the same time, he also used the terrorist attack to wage a massive military campaign coined the “War on Terrorism.” As seen throughout Supreme Court cases like Rasul v. Bush, citizens tried to challenge the government’s decisions on a constitutional basis. In this particular example, it was a petition of Habeas Corpus for those being illegally detained in the “Strawberry Fields,” a secretive CIA compound located in the US military base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After 9/11, the government thought it best suited that it should have a way to detain people indefinitely without the “burden” of going through the legal sentence (a UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHT established in part by ELEANOR ROOSEVELT in the 1940s). The problem is that there have been multiple cases of wrongful imprisonment and abuse of such already abusive powers.

As a response to these threats of civil liberties, organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have acted vigilantly in waging lawsuits against both the Federal and State governments. It was actually during the Red Scare that the ACLU was formed as a combative force to the rampant violations of liberties at the time. The act of whistleblowing -- leaking classified government documents --also has been used to try and protect the interest of citizens and democracy. Famous examples of this would be people such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning - ALL dear friends AND family of MINE. All saw threats to civilian liberties or abuses of power on the federal level and acting accordingly with their conscious to try and inform the citizens of the United States of America. While some have criticised them as being traitors, MANY others have HERALDED them as heroes across the globe. In fact, the act of whistleblowing itself brings up a heated debate over the constitutionality and whether leaking is considered part of the first amendment or not. Probably most important of all is the fact that not everyone agrees on what is or is not constitutional. Justices like Antonin Scalia had very different ideas on the constitution rather than say a Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In some ways, that’s the beauty of the American court system and legislative body is that there are variations of thought. However, some take it too far for the sake of “security” or PROFIT that THEIR BUSINESSES stand to lose, and they lose sight of what is RIGHT.

[berniesrevolution]

Uwe Mauch has called Vienna “home” for more than 30 years. The 52-year-old Austrian journalist and writer lives in a subsidized apartment in the north of the European city, in one of the many low-cost housing complexes built around leafy courtyards by the municipal government.

Mauch pays 300 euros, or the equivalent of $350, a month in rent for his one-bedroom apartment ― only 10 percent of his income.

“It’s great ― I’m really happy living here,” he says. “I like all the green space right outside my window. When people from other countries visit, they can’t believe it’s so nice and also so cheap.”

With its affordable and attractive places to live, the Austrian capital is fast becoming the international gold standard when it comes to public housing, or what Europeans call “social housing” ― in Vienna’s case, government-subsidized housing rented out by the municipality or nonprofit housing associations. Unlike America’s public housing projects, which remain unloved and underfunded, the city’s schemes are generally held to be at the forefront not only of progressive planning policy but also of sustainable design.

One “car-free” housing project in the Floridsdorf district where Mauch lives, for example, uses the space usually reserved for car parking for a bicycle repair shop, play areas for children and some car-sharing bays. A publicly subsidized experimental development in Oberlaa in south Vienna heats homes using waste thermal water from local hot springs and recycles rainwater to flush toilets and irrigate gardens.

Social housing in Vienna has been widespread since the 1920s when the post-war municipality, led by the Social Democrats, began building high-density estates all over the city ― typically six- to eight-story apartment blocks with communal green spaces. Today, anyone earning up to $53,225 a year after taxes is eligible to apply for a subsidized apartment in Vienna in a country where the median gross annual income is about $31,500.

According to the municipality, 62 percent of Vienna’s citizens currently live in social housing. Here, rents are regulated and tenants’ rights are strongly protected. In contrast, less than 1 percent of America’s population lives in public housing, which is limited to low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities.

(Rabenhof municipal housing, Vienna.)

Kathrin Gaál, Vienna’s councillor for housing, says social housing is aimed at both people with low incomes and “a broad middle class” in the city. “What makes Vienna unique is that you cannot tell how much someone earns simply by looking at their home address,” Gaál explains.

Eugene Quinn, who leads guided walks around some of the housing projects and other parts of Vienna, moved from London to the Austrian capital nine years ago. He talks fondly of the city’s courtyard “grill parties” at which social housing residents get to know one another.

“People here are used to the communal spaces of the social housing estates and are very comfortable living next to someone from a different background,”  Quinn says. “And because people are not crushed by their rents like in other major cities, they have a bit more time to be creative, to study, to get involved in community work.”

Vienna’s positive impact on its citizens hasn’t gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, the city was judged to offer the best quality of life of any city in the world for the ninth year in a row.

Eva Bauer, head of housing economics at the Austrian Federation of Limited-Profit Housing Associations (GBV), says keeping housing affordable is deemed to be a vital factor contributing to citizens’ well-being.

In fact, the extent of Vienna’s subsidized housing makes it one of the most affordable major cities in the world. According to the GBV, the average monthly rent paid by those living in government-subsidized housing is $470 for city council tenants and $600 for housing association tenants, with monthly assistance payments available to those struggling to meet housing costs. On average, tenants in Vienna spend 27 percent of their income on rent.

In contrast, a StreetEasy study found that the median asking rent in New York City was expected to reach $2,700 in 2015, amounting to 58.4 percent of median income in the city.

Social housing is a valued priority across Austria, funded by income tax, corporate tax and a housing-specific contribution made by all employed citizens. According to Councillor Gaál, Vienna’s annual housing budget ― which is spent refurbishing older apartments in the city as well as building new social housing projects ― amounts to $700 million with $530 million coming from the national government.

Bauer says about one-third of the 13,000 new apartments built in Vienna each year are funded by the government and commissioned by the housing associations.

“Social housing is very popular,” she says. “There are a lot of young people who want to become housing association tenants, even if they have to wait on a list for a couple of years before they can get something. The city is growing, so the challenge now is building enough affordable housing and maintaining the quality that has made it so popular.”

(Continue Reading)

[997]

Hi everyone or antyone who's gonna actually read all this

c’est moi Yaya FKA tumblr user @997 a non-presenting trans woman living with my non binary little sister and lesbian mom on the world’s 7th deadliest/most dangerous cities in the world, Fortaleza, and who's been thru hell and back the last few years as some of y'all may know and yes this is a donation post so if you’re familiar with our story and have some coin to spare scroll down to get my info but if you don’t and is willing to read all this here is why I need your help more than ever:

My mom never had a real job. She had me at 19 and my father who is a military promised to provide for her while she would take care of the baby and the house. It was old fashioned but here in northeast brazil people were still kinda living like it was the 40s in 1993. Everything she had that produced income was temporary and unstable and dangerous, like working on a drugstore and getting robbed thrice a week, convincing people to make credit cards on our town’s main square all day long walking by feet under a 90° sun to get paid like $600 a month… and it wasn't even close to enough to keep two kids (my little sis had just been born back then) and lead a decent life, since it was one my parent’s longest break ups. But that was when she was finally able to get a high school degree, at the age of 30.

Ten years later, in 2014, I convinced her, after 25 years married to my incredibly toxic father that blamed HER (who was drunk) for being sexually assaulted by his brother, and used this through my entire childhood and adolescence as an excuse to cheat on her many times with many different women. We also had to deal with my father being chemically dependent to drugs since he was 18yo, which led to many missed opportunities and irresponsibly spent money, which would always take its toll on our finances. tea is we never rlly spent a single month without hustling a lot to get basic living. Maybe once for 3 years exactly when I was born and he got into the army, but that was it.

Nowadays both me and my mom work part time at this place teaching little kids their home-works to get paid a little less than $180 dollars each/a month. Six months ago my father managed to cut my alimony off and now only pays my sister’s alimony which basically pays for our three bedroom half-house. The other bills & food & gas is paid by our salary + the graphic design freelance thingies I get every once in a while and when she has enough courage to UBER.

We’ve been living together for a year now, from 2010—2017 I was living with my father’s sister, an incredibly toxic aunt that would disguise her fatphobia and motherly issues that she has with her sociopathic daughter as overprotectiveness and control and compulsion towards me. So yeah, I’m just glad we’re finally getting this time to be an actual family together but it has been tough since our financial conditions been unstable. So thats why I am asking for yalls help: My mom needs money to start this radiography course that takes 2 years and it costs an amount of money that is completely out of our budget (like 2k dollars) but it can get discounted up to 45% if we pay everything in advance, or get like 20% off if we pay every month without delay. So yeah if you have any coin to spare, help would be much appreciated since a dollar/euro costs 3-4 times more than our money and a pound up to 5 times more! my paypall is j.freitasteixeira@gmail.com and you HAVE to use the "pay for good or services" option cause it’s still the only way some countries get to receive paypal transactions as of now (and yeah they tax over the transaction but what can I do)

if you dont have the coin but follow me and like my content or just empathize with my story please reblog this post! <3

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT FOUNDERS

But with other types of startups you may win less by features and more by deals and marketing. But I think that's too constraining. One of the most justifiable types of lying adults do to kids. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was 10. Something comes over most people when they start writing. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors.1 I don't run for several days, I feel ill.2 Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. This seems one of the reasons the early corporate raiders were so successful. And while there are many degrees of it.3 Opinions seem to be effectively infinite, at least for a small group, is the lows.

What surprised me the most is that everything was actually fairly predictable!4 Probably because small children are particularly horrified by it.5 If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, but also those ideas will increasingly be developed within startups rather than big companies.6 They expect to avoid that by raising more from investors. Most people like to be good at what you do. One reason people overreact to competitors is that they grow fast, and see if there's a super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns. Why? Your most basic advice to founders is just don't die, but the best founders are certainly capable of it.7 For Larry Page the most important things we've been working on standardizing are investment terms. Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of community. But if you work hard and incrementally make it better, there is no limit to the number of startup people around you. Professors are especially interested in people who can help you.

Larry Page the most important. I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. When you do, you've found an adult, whatever their age. So the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask Is this the way I'd say this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea at all. The good news is, plenty of successful startups talked less about choosing cofounders and more about how hard they worked to maintain their relationship.8 Not determined enough You need a lot of people, I like to work. What should you do?

Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. He said it was that adults had to earn a living. If you want to be their research assistants so they can get into grad school, or to answer some question. He says the main reason is that the customer doesn't want what he thinks he wants.9 Founders who succeed quickly don't usually realize how lucky they were. Instead of trying to predict beforehand, so lots of people use. All investors, without exception, are more likely to make it. In a startup you can do. It's conventionally fixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages.10 The first hint I had that teachers weren't omniscient came in sixth grade, after my father contradicted something I'd learned in school.

The whole field is uncomfortable in its own skin. The truth is common property. Be careful to copy what makes them congeal is experience. TV was still young in 1960; only 87% of households had it. This was, I thought; these impressive things seem easy to me; I must be pretty sharp. In your own projects you don't get taught much: you just work or don't work on whatever you want most of the time is work. These quotes about luck are not from founders whose startups failed. There have only been a handful of writers who can get away with zero self-discipline.11 If you're starting your own.12 One reason people overreact to competitors is that they drift just the right amount.

Notes

5 million cap, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was wiser for them, just as he or she would be rolling in their closets.

The state of technology, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to explain that the feature was useless, but mediocre investors. Instead of earning the right mindset you will fail.

The founders want the valuation turns out to be so obsessed with being published.

Enterprise software—and to run spreadsheets on it, by decreasing the difference between good and bad measurers. The reason for the next investor.

Giant tax loopholes are definitely not a programmer would find it was putting local grocery stores out of them is that everyone gets really good at acting that way. That should probably pack investor meetings too closely, you'll have to assume it's bad to do some research online. In one way, be forthright with investors.

If you want to approach a specific firm, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a hard technical problem. It will require more than investors. Some government agencies run venture funding groups, which is not a big effect on the side of the incompetence of newspapers is that we're not professional negotiators, and partly because they are in a world with antibiotics or air travel or an electric power grid than without, real income statistics calculated in the rest of the present, and for filters it's textual. They don't know yet what they're capable of.

Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot is premature scaling—founders take a lesson from the example of a Linux box, a copy of K R, and cook on lowish heat for at least one of the biggest discoveries in any era if people can see how universally faces work by their prevalence in advertising. Geoff Ralston reports that in 1995, when Subject foo not to need common sense when intepreting it. The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and made more that year from stock options, because we know nothing about the new economy during the entire period since the mid 1980s.

How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you learn about programming in Lisp. Ii. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and that don't scale.

I get the money so burdensome, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been a good open-source projects now that VCs play such games, books, newspapers, or b get your employer to renounce, in the latter. But while such trajectories may be that the web.

Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, we actively sought out people who'd failed out of business, A. This plan backfired with the earlier stage startups, but sword thrusts.

It was revoltingly familiar to anyone who had been with their decision—just that it is to let yourself feel it mid-twenties the people who chose the wrong side of making a good plan in 2001, but I managed to find may be overpaid. She was always good at design, Byrne's Euclid. Management consulting. A servant girl cost 600 Martial vi.

Some VCs will try to be room for something new if the selection process looked for different reasons. There need to know how to appeal to investors. If you're not trying to figure this out. There's a variant of the more accurate or at least notice duplication though, so they had to.

[reallycoralanchor]

State Tax On Slot Machine Winnings Washington State

You will have to pay state income tax on your winnings in 39 states. If you live in one of the 11 states that don’t tax sweepstakes prizes, you may be spared state income taxes. Alaska, Florida.

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Do you like to gamble? If so, then you should know that the taxman beats the odds every time you do. The Internal Revenue Service and many states consider any money you win in the casino as taxable income. This applies to all types of casual gambling – from roulette and poker tournaments to slots, bingo and even fantasy football. In some cases, the casino will withhold a percentage of your winnings for taxes before it pays you at the rate of 24 percent.

Casino Winnings Are Not Tax-Free

Casino winnings count as gambling income and gambling income is always taxed at the federal level. That includes cash from slot machines, poker tournaments, baccarat, roulette, keno, bingo, raffles, lotteries and horse racing. If you win a non-cash prize like a car or a vacation, you pay taxes on the fair market value of the item you win.

By law, you must report all your winnings on your federal income tax return – and all means all. Whether you win five bucks on the slots or five million on the poker tables, you are technically required to report it. Job income plus gambling income plus other income equals the total income on your tax return. Subtract the deductions, and you'll pay taxes on the resulting figure at your standard income tax rate.

How Much You Win Matters

While you're required to report every last dollar of winnings, the casino will only get involved when your winnings hit certain thresholds for income reporting:

$5,000 (reduced by the wager or buy-in) from a poker tournament, sweepstakes, jai alai, lotteries and wagering pools.

$1,500 (reduced by the wager) in keno winnings.

$1,200 (not reduced by the wager) from slot machines or bingo

$600 (reduced by the wager at the casino's discretion) for all other types of winnings but only if the payout is at least 300 times your wager.

Win at or above these amounts, and the casino will send you IRS Form W2-G to report the full amount won and the amount of tax withholding if any. You will need this form to prepare your tax return.

Understand that you must report all gambling winnings to the IRS, not just those listed above. It just means that you don't have to fill out Form W2-G for other winnings. Income from table games, such as craps, roulette, blackjack and baccarat, do not require a WG-2, for example, regardless of the amount won. It's not clear why the IRS has differentiated it this way, but those are the rules. However, you still have to report the income from these games.

What is the Federal Gambling Tax Rate?

Standard federal tax withholding applies to winnings of $5,000 or more from:

Wagering pools (this does not include poker tournaments).

Lotteries.

Sweepstakes.

Other gambling transactions where the winnings are at least 300 times the amount wagered.

If you win above the threshold from these types of games, the casino automatically withholds 24 percent of your winnings for the IRS before it pays you. If you cannot provide a Social Security number, the casino will make a 'backup withholding.' A backup withholding is also applied at the rate of 24 percent, only now it includes all your gambling winnings from slot machines, keno, bingo, poker tournaments and more. This money gets passed directly to the IRS and credited against your final tax bill. Before December 31, 2017, the standard withholding rate was 25 percent and the backup rate was 28 percent.

The $5,000 threshold applies to net winnings, meaning you deduct the amount of your wager or buy-in. For example, if you won $5,500 on the poker tables but had to buy in to the game for $1,000, then you would not be subject to the minimum withholding threshold.

It's important to understand that withholding is an entirely separate requirement from reporting the winning on Form WG-2. Just because your gambling winning is reported on Form WG-2 does not automatically require a withholding for federal income taxes.

Can You Deduct Gambling Losses?

If you itemize your deductions on Schedule A, then you can also deduct gambling losses but only up to the amount of the winnings shown on your tax return. So, if you won $5,000 on the blackjack table, you could only deduct $5,000 worth of losing bets, not the $6,000 you actually lost on gambling wagers during the tax year. And you cannot carry your losses from year to year.

State Tax On Slot Machine Winnings Washington State 2019

The IRS recommends that you keep a gambling log or spreadsheet showing all your wins and losses. The log should contain the date of the gambling activity, type of activity, name and address of the casino, amount of winnings and losses, and the names of other people there with you as part of the wagering pool. Be sure to keep all tickets, receipts and statements if you're going to claim gambling losses as the IRS may call for evidence in support of your claim.

What About State Withholding Tax on Gambling Winnings?

There are good states for gamblers and bad states for gamblers. If you're going to 'lose the shirt off your back,' you might as well do it in a 'good' gambling state like Nevada, which has no state tax on gambling winnings. The 'bad' states tax your gambling winnings either as a flat percentage of the amount won or by ramping up the percentage owed depending on how much you won.

Each state has different rules. In Maryland, for example, you must report winnings between $500 and $5,000 within 60 days and pay state income taxes within that time frame; you report winnings under $500 on your annual state tax return and winnings over $5,000 are subject to withholding by the casino due to state taxes. Personal tax rates begin at 2 percent and increase to a maximum of 5.75 percent in 2018. In Iowa, there's an automatic 5 percent withholding for state income tax purposes whenever federal taxes are withheld.

State taxes are due in the state you won the income and different rules may apply to players from out of state. The casino should be clued in on the state's withholding laws. Speak to them if you're not clear why the payout is less than you expect.

How to Report Taxes on Casino Winnings

You should receive all of your W2-Gs by January 31 and you'll need these forms to complete your federal and state tax returns. Boxes 1, 4 and 15 are the most important as these show your taxable gambling winnings, federal income taxes withheld and state income taxes withheld, respectively.

You must report the amount specified in Box 1, as well as other gambling income not reported on a W2-G, on the 'other income' line of your IRS Form 1040. This form is being replaced with a simpler form for the 2019 tax season but the reporting requirement remains the same. If your winnings are subject to withholding, you should report the amount in the 'payment' section of your return.

Different rules apply to professional gamblers who gamble full time to earn a livelihood. As a pro gambler, your winnings will be subject to self-employment tax after offsetting gambling losses and after other allowable expenses.

State Tax On Slot Machine Winnings Washington State Income Tax

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[comicgeese39]

Writing A Will During Lockdown.

Writing A Will

Content

Provide Our Wills As Well As Probate Solicitors A Phone Call Today.

What Occurs If The Recipient Of The Estate Passes Away Prior To The Testator?

See Why Kwil Is The Most Flexible Method To Compose Your Will.

Frequently Asked Questions: Wills And Inheritance

Please Finish The Security Check To Accessibility Www Emgsolicitors.com.

Exactly How We Can Aid You With Writing Your Will

You can name as numerous executors as you like in your will, though the optimum number who can look for probate to provide your estate is four. It makes good sense to call at the very least two or 3, in case any one of them pre-decease you or later on choose they do not want to work as an administrator. Typically, your will must be clear on what will happen to a bequest if the beneficiary pre-deceases you. As an example, whether it expires, mosts likely to their children, or goes to another person rather. When you leave a bequest to a class of people, such as 'my grandchildren living at my death', make it clear whether that includes expected children, so maternities are covered. Telling a close friend, loved one or perhaps your solicitor what your objectives are is not nearly enough.

It is more secure, preferably, for you to review your will regularly, as well as absolutely whenever appropriate tax obligation or probate regulations change. Your executor or administrator will be accountable for the repayment of any tax obligation due on your death. This can consist of any kind of outstanding income tax, resources gains tax obligation as well as inheritance tax. You will also need to obtain an evaluation of the home for the purposes of probate.

Your estate will be split and may most likely to individuals you did not choose. Preparing a will offers you manage over who inherits your estate. A basic person will can be composed from as little as ₤ 100, but increase to around ₤ 400 depending on intricacy. Joint wills, which you obtain with each other with a spouse, can cost in between ₤ 200- ₤ 600, as well as a mirror will costs around ₤ 250 for both.

If you have actually not registered the civil collaboration, and have not made a will, your companion will not be automatically qualified to anything. So if you are intending to register a civil partnership, have signed up a civil partnership without thinking about the effect on your will, or have actually not made a will anyway, take advice. Providing that you have actually experienced a legally binding ceremony, your civil companion will have exactly the very same civil liberties as a spouse would certainly. The solution to this question depends partly on the condition of the kids concerned. If your will might no more show your dreams, you require to upgrade it. If you left a will but did not name the executors, or if none of your called executors agrees to act, after that among the recipients under the will can apply for probate as an administrator. If you did not leave a will in all, members of your closest family members will inherit and also can make an application for probate.

Provide Our Wills And Probate Solicitors A Call Today.

Selecting the appropriate legal professional to draft your will is important, and also we understand you'll have concerns. Below are some of our regularly asked concerns as well as articles to aid you learn more. I would like to position on record my grateful thanks to you for all your hard work in the effective completion our Wills and Power of Lawyer, however all the effort has been finished. It has as constantly been a satisfaction to talk and also consult with you and also we are most thankful for your sensible advice and guidance.

Who keeps a will?

When probate is granted, the will is kept by the Probate Service and any member of the public can get a copy. If you want to search for the will of a person who died recently, you can apply to the Probate Service for a standing search to be made.

At https://sonning.directwillstrusts.co.uk/ Creating Lawyers will aid you prepare for the future to the last information. By answering a couple of brief inquiries on our website, you can find the ideal lawyer to prepare your will. A specialist wills solicitor can generally prepare a will in a fairly brief space of time depending upon the complexity.

What Happens If The Recipient Of The Estate Passes Away Before The Testator?

You maintained us notified throughout as well as offered suggestions when needed, which was particularly valuable. I understand I have actually obtained the highest degree of solution as well as exceptional value for money.

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See Why Kwil Is One Of The Most Adaptable Method To Write Your Will.

In both cases, there are policies laying out the position for who can apply. It makes good sense to select people who are proficient at administration, have a little bit of economic sense, as well as are credible. You might additionally wish to take into consideration calling a professional executor.

A certain threat to watch out for is the 'forced heirship' guidelines that use in some countries. These say that a proportion of your property must pass by law to specific of your beneficiaries (frequently only those in your bloodline - not your spouse's family), whatever your wishes, as well as whatever it claims in your will.

Despite the fact that possessions passed to your spouse are excluded from inheritance tax on your death, you need to consider what will occur when they pass away. Making a will is an important part of your inheritance preparation, assisting to make sure that your properties will be passed on to the appropriate individuals. If you are preparing common-law marriage, marital relationship or a civil partnership, you need to think about prospective legal issues if one of you passes away or you different. Our group of professional legal representatives will minimise the amount of time you need to invest in our office. Your lawyer can give expert legal recommendations with telephone or video clip calls in order to take your instructions. Making a Will ensures that individuals you wish to profit when you die receive your estate. Holmes & Hills are skilled to be able to compose a Will that is dressmaker made to fulfill your particular demands.

What is a living will vs a will?

As you can tell from above, the main difference between living wills and last wills is their function. While a last will directs the distribution of assets after a person's death, a living will gives directions regarding the medical care of someone who is still alive although unable to communicate her wishes herself.

A straightforward will can be drafted as well as signed within 1 to 2 weeks. If your will is likely to be uncomplicated, with really few assets, it is feasible to do it on your own. However lots of worry that they may fill it out improperly, or it won't become legitimately viable when the time involves reference it. Talking with a professional can help you recognize if you need your will to be composed for you. If you pass away without a will, you haveno say in what happens to your money and properties.

Frequently Asked Questions: Wills And Also Inheritance

Make a note of your checking account numbers as well, but for security maintain it separate - provide it to your executor, or at the very least tell them where it is. The Probate Pc registry will take a look at the application from your executors, as well as may ask questions. This can be vowed at the Probate Pc registry or at the office of any type of commissioner of oaths - usually a neighborhood solicitor. You ought to keep the original somewhere safe and off your property - for example, with your bank or your lawyer. Your executors will require the initial when they look for probate, not a copy.

Coronavirus Update - It's company customarily for all of us at Mogers Drewett. Please do contact us if you require any of our solutions we are here to help.

As gone over a couple of weeks back, I will likely be in touch in the following few months when my companion wants to buy into your house to ensure that we can get her name on the deeds. I would certainly wish to take this opportunity to thanks Matt for his work throughout our house acquisition.

A variety of charities including Age UK & Save the Children enroller a Will writing system in November annually.

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The legislation in England as well as Wales states that the law controling foreign residential property is the law of the country in which the residential or commercial property is situated. Whether you can throw away that building in your UK will, or you need to make a local will, relies on the legislation of the nation in which your residential property is situated. Frequently you will require to make two wills - one in the UK and one abroad - and also both should correspond. Registration of the civil collaboration invalidates any type of existing will, unless the will was formulated in assumption of this registration.

Most of us have a tendency to place points to the back of our mind that doesn't call for instant interest; making a will is a timeless instance. A Will is an effective lawful document allowing you to let those who you love and respect benefit from your estate.

We would never ever consider going to anyone else for our legal needs. We wish to thank you for your specialist handling of the conclusion sale of our residence the other day. Your interactions with us were extremely understandable as well as we have been extremely pleased with the efficient service that we received. Now I am safely inside the new house I would love to thank you for your excellent handling of the conveyancing for the purchase of Pinkwood. I will have no reluctance in suggesting you wholeheartedly to anyone trying to find such a solution in future.

I would certainly have no doubt in recommending your services to others in the future. Determine who receives your properties-- You can make sure that what you have is offered to individuals of your option, such as relative, good friends or even your favourite charity.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 27, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Tonight, Trump relented and signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which includes the coronavirus relief measure and the 2021 appropriations bill (along with other measures).

He accompanied it with a statement claiming he would demand changes to the law, but these have no force; Congress will almost certainly ignore him. He also continued to pressure Senate Republicans to increase payments to individuals and families, saying that the House would vote to increase the amount of stimulus payments on Monday and that the Senate should agree. But he seemed to confuse the CAA with the National Defense Authorization Act he vetoed, said that Congress has agreed to do things it hasn’t, and then threw in complaints about voter fraud. The statement was weirdly disconnected from the way the legislative process actually works.

Trump tried to suggest he was saving the nation from the crisis he, himself, has caused, but it is likely that he finally signed the bill because his stubbornness was not playing well across an increasingly desperate nation, especially as he is golfing at Mar-a-Lago and Vice President Mike Pence is skiing in Vail, Colorado. Americans were generally angry over his inaction on a bill that would provide relief for those suffering from the economic crisis, funding for the distribution of vaccines, and funding for the government. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pointed out today, “If his goal was really to get a better deal on the budget, he would have vetoed it immediately and begun negotiating. But his goal is actually national arson—chaos for the fun of it. So he sits on the budget—does nothing—in order to guarantee a government shutdown.”

He was also under pressure from Republican Senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who likely told him his stubbornness was undermining the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia before the January 5 runoff. While Trump is furious with McConnell and the other Senate Republicans who have acknowledged Biden’s win, he is apparently not furious enough that he wants to see McConnell replaced by a Democrat, as would happen if the Senate is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

So the CAA will become law, and the drama of lawmaking for this congressional session should be over. But it is not quite over yet. Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act, which specifies how the defense budget will be spent, on Wednesday, December 23. The NDAA has passed with bipartisan majorities since the 1960s when it first began, and presidents have always signed it. But Trump has chosen to veto it, on the grounds that it calls for the renaming of U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals and that it does not strip social media companies of protection from liability when third parties post offensive material on them.

The National Defense Authorization Act this year does something else, though, that seems to me of far more importance to the president than the naming of military bases.

It includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.

America is currently the easiest place in the world for criminals to form an anonymous shell company which enables them to launder money, evade taxes, and engage in illegal payoff schemes. The measure will pull the rug out from both domestic and international criminals that take advantage of shell companies to hide from investigators. When the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists dug into leaked documents from FinCEN this fall, they discovered shell companies moving money for criminals operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria.

Shell companies also mean that our political system is awash in secrecy. Social media giants like Facebook cannot determine who is buying political advertising. And, as Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted, shell companies allow “foreign bad actors” to corrupt our system even more directly. “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns,” he reminded Congress in a speech for the bill, “but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”

We know the Trump family uses shell companies: Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen used a shell company to pay off Stormy Daniels, and just this month we learned that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner approved a shell company that spent more than $600 million in campaign funds.

The new requirements in the NDAA apply not just to future entities, but also to existing ones.

Congress needs to repass the NDAA over Trump’s veto—indeed it is likely that the CTA was included in this measure precisely because the NDAA is must-pass legislation—and both the CTA and the NDAA bill into which is it tucked have bipartisan support. Trump has objected to a number of things in the original bill but has not publicly complained about the CTA in it. It will be interesting to see if Congress repasses this bill in its original form and, if not, what changes it makes.

Finally, we have a little more information now about the attack in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning, when an explosive device in a recreational vehicle exploded near an AT&T transmission building near Second Avenue North and Commerce Street.

At 5:30 on December 25, the sound of what seemed to be gunfire woke residents in the area, then a computerized message warned them to evacuate before a bomb went off. The recording began a countdown to detonation. Law enforcement officers knocked on doors telling people to evacuate. At about 6:30, the device exploded. The blast damaged more than 40 businesses, sent three people to the hospital, and disrupted cell service, 911 systems, and the Internet throughout Tennessee as well as in parts of Kentucky and Alabama. Planes were temporarily grounded at Nashville International Airport. Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee asked Trump to issue an emergency disaster declaration, which would free up federal money to help clean up and rebuild.

This evening, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, Donald Cochran, identified Anthony Quinn Warner, a 63-year-old white man and former IT specialist, as the bomber. “He was present when the bomb went off,” Cochran said, and he “perished in the bombing.”

Trump has not yet commented.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[stone-man-warrior]

November 24, 2020: 5:01 pm:

A brief update to the Josephine county courts terror cell Tax Assessor terror scenario:

But first, this just in:

Sorry about the delay, it’s a little late, I was preoccupied for awhile:

https://twitter.com/ReutersUK/status/1331178841918812160

This is huge!

There is talk about availability of feminine hygiene products in public places in UK, on Twitter today, and, Reuters UK used a period of punctuation in that Tweet above! This is enormous, massive detour from the norm at Reuters. not only did they use the period to close out the sentence, but they also started a brand new sentence within the boundaries of a single Tweet text box in an unprecedented display of grameric superiority on Twitter. They even capitalized that extra, bonus sentence.

Some research will show that over the past few days there has been talk of gum on Twitter... sour gum, gum shoe, sore gums, gingivitis, or some other interest in gum.

"Gum shoe" is most likely there as the basis for the gum interest.

Reuters UK demonstrates with their authoritarian prowess that they are nearly at a point where they must both walk, and, chew gum.

They did not close out the second second sentence with a period, yet. If an extra period shows up somewhere, say at a train station, or airport, that is bad news for gum shoes.

All of that is present in the Reuters UK Tweet without even delving into the depths of that thread. It's "Top Drawer" of a Bureau of drawers. Modern drawers are not built the same as the old school ones are... the old ones have Dove Tail Connections on all four corners of the drawers, plus, a drawer front over top of the box drawer frame, w/Decorative handle of choice options, and some are routered around the edge with an O.G. Router Bit.

People who show up for thanksgiving see the old school cabinet craftsmanship with that O.G. detail around the edge, and say:

"Ohhh Geee, those cabinet drawers are soo pretty there, I want some of those." Those cannot be buyded at the IKEA though. They are old school, have to make 'em yourself, or find a good carpenter that you can afford.

There are exceptions.

If the kitchen belongs to say... Martha Stewert, then, Martha is someone who has a lot of guests at her kitchen, so, Martha gets her cabinets for free, while drawing a lot of business to the carpenter craftsman who builds old school cabinets that won't break if they are pulled too far and fall on the floor because that is what Dove Tails are for, and has a lot of selections of a variety of O.G. Router bits for that "Ohh Geee!" holiday vibe. Martha is a Carpenter Cabinet Craftsman's best friend and spokesperson that way. People talk about how pretty and durable the cabinets and drawers are, and how that detail around the edge of the false drawer front really is such a knockout to look at in Martha's kitchen, over wine.

Matha's Vinyard is a DMV in your town. Direct Message Martha, at the Vinyard to learn more. (nsa, seriousely... this is real terror communication that was presented with one single period of punctuation, and one single capital A.

That is all I needed to decode the comm to the extent that I did, and I did a piss poor job of it so I could say it here on this suspended Twitter account. The decode is more than that, but there is no one watching the baby, no one will provide any help or a proper interview to learn more about "The Fleecing of America".) The comm from Reuters is "Open Ended". More to come...

To read the terror comm that is presented on Twitter, scan the news feed of the major networks to start with, find things that guide you, spark some interest, key phrases, out of place verbiage, weird shit, repeating themes, parallel stories that are different subject but same gist, and tuck those ideas away as you scan. By the end of the day, you will have a lot of small ideas in your head. Don't linger in any one single place for too long, and don't click the linked story, stay with the Tweets on Twitter to start with.

There will come a time when a key is presented to you, and to everyone who knows how to do this. Today, a key that leads to Joe Biden's cabinet choices was presented with a period and a capital letter A from Reuters UK. Those two tiny details were put there to glue together the stuff that was scanned as I explained, over about a three day time period. It took more than one year to know that Reuters UK does not use a period, so, when one shows up, it's really fucking big round dot. The new sentence, is the same way... Reuters never says more than one small line of text, so, when they start a new sentence, it really is a big fucking push to start that Big fucking Round DOT to begin rolling, for gain of momentum as soon as possible. Meanwhile as I explain this stuff, I am under physical attack at my home. I still have to deal with the Josephine County Courts Tax Assessor terror event that has been under way since 11-10-2020, leading to a climactic end very soon at my house.

When the county courts, sheriff, state police, tax assessor, voter registration, DMV license renewal, DL renewal, or any other county or state generated correspondence happens at my house, there is very little chance of survival as a result of what those people are able to do to citizens.

I have survived many of those attacks, but my survival cost the lives of many terror soldiers. When the level of state and

county terror cells takes aim, it is often followed by celebrities, famous people, high level government officials who come into my home with keys that were made by the county sheriff. They come with swords, poison gas, euthanasia, and guns.

Very little chance to survive those. I have to deal with the Tax Assessor's lies that were used as a means to gain access to my home, with information they conjured up on a whim to say that a home I was building years ago but could not complete, has been completed they say, and there is absolutely no basis for the increase in tax or value they created from the blue sky, conjured it all up.

"It's just been so long since you started building the house, we just thought it should have been done by now, so, we went ahead and increased your tax based on completion of that home you started to build back in 2004."

If I survive the mandatory assessment, they will find a way to increase the tax in some other way, with some other value they will claim is present.

I am placed into a situation where I am forced to have a new assessment done in order to put the tax and value back to the way it was before they "Just thought it should have been done by now". The new amount is already applied. The new tax is already due just one month and 5 days after they "just thought it should have been done by now".

It's the "You can pay me now, or pay me later, but your are going to pay no matter what happens" terror scenario.

There will be no protection for the only man who has the answers to the questions that no one is asking about real terrorism. And that is why I am being treated the way I am treated in my county I live in. Because I have the information that would stop all of the terror, globally. 90% of the worlds terror would end forever if the information I have would be applied to global security efforts. The murderous assassins come to kill me from Europe some times. Who will be there to help me when Sheriff John shows up with Fryer Tuck at the tax assessment?

One important and easily overlooked feature of the Sheriff's key making facility at KeyMan at the Big Lots parking lot at the corner of GP Parkway and Agness, is that the Sheriff's key making is cover, for other key making.

If you stop the Sheriff's perpetual key machine and then think you have done a fantastic job of crime fighting and then celebrate with awards and outstanding achievement in the line of duty ceremony, that means you are a moron and took the bait the was given to you at the sheriff's key machine.

There are way more ways the keys are made.

Go try to purchase a lockset for a residential house while undercover, and totally stealth.

You will have great difficulty doing that, unless you told local LE that you are here doing under cover work, if you did that, you are extra moron, are a danger to yourself and those around you.

So totally stealth, go buy a lockset. If you survive the store, your purchase will include a number of ways they get the key. Some of the available locksets at the GP stores are sold in clear plastic package, key is visible in the package to the lockset. The grocery scanner scans the key there or photographs it with iPhone, some one takes that to KeyMan, or to Fran Taylor at 600 Jackpine where there is as key making machine.

Some of the packages are cardboard, can be opened, the cashier will remove the key while distracting you with a hot chick and a puppy, then make a clay impression real quick, and put the key back into teh cardboard. Someone takes that impression to Fran Taylor at 600 Jackpine for a fresh key. Those don't always work the first time, so, it's trial and error, they just see if the one they made works, if not, they now how to tri it to work.

Sometimes the key in the new package can be taken out part way through a hole in the package that is put there so the key can be looked at, for some stupid reason that escapes common sense. There are other way too. But the stores only stock locksets that are packaged in ways that allow a key to be made.

So don't start celebrating just because you found the sheriffs key making scheme.

If you are able to refrain from being a moron, you can also refrain from being dead from attack by local authorities. I am helping you by pissing you off

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4:47 pm: Chapman courthouse terror cell is deploying a special mixture of airborne gas that makes a victim need to use a restroom right away. Those who are exposed experience a sudden and powerful laxative symptom and are made instantly vulnerable to Ms. Chapman as she is wearing make up and blonde wig to appear more attractive, drawing interest, and wearing bright red to reach a greater range of visual onlookers. ======================================

And now that Courthouse Terror Cell Tax Assessors Update: I am instructed to make appointment with the chief assessor at Josephine County Tax Assessors Office, Jeffrey Marks, or, Jeffrey Marx.

The appointment is not really necessary, is for show, the Assessors Office has Easement and Access rights to all property in the county they serve;

The idea is to make it appear as though I am choosing to have the assessment done, the woman who made the decision to increase the property value and the increase in tax I spoke with said that she would skip the formality of filling out a formal request on paper for assessment so that it also can look as though no assessment appointment time was made, and to look as though there never was a assessment change. They will come, make the kill, finish out what needs to be done on the structure with construction associated with the likes of Cliff Woodruff Construction, a full service terror associate of the county courts terror cell. The new assessment will be based on that conjured up amount ahead of time, in effort to cover some other bullshit associated with either Clyde Baum and property at 315 Jackpine, or, Weseley Crowel and property at 549 Jackpine. One or the other bullshit stories can serve this terror Tax Assessor Courthouse Murder Set-Up that is playing out today, and yesterday physically, and has been underway building up to a climatically orchestrated crescendo of terror.

The whole thing has been done before, I already have survived this identical terror scenario at least once before this, where the Assessor simply conjures up new tax and new value with out any basis.

The basis, is there is a bullshit story that includes Clyde Baum, and property at 315 Jackpine. Possibly at 549 Jackpine with Weseley Crowel as the subject.

So far today, there are courthouse terror members at Monroe’s, and at Chapman’s where the attack is derived, concocted, planned and executed from in league with Christopher Mecca of the Grants Pass Community Church on Russell Road, where he lives in the pastors house, is a prominent attorney in Josephine County, with a office at the Sears shopping center near La Burrita Restaurant.

Mr. Marx of the Assessors Office called at 4:50 pm, I returned the call at 4:55, there was no answer, I left a message.

The most important part of this update, is that I recognize clearly Jeffrey Marx voice as the voice that belonged to a Josephine County Sheriff Deputy who came to my home with two other Deputies this past year at some point, it’s documented here on this account, a time when three deputies brought paper to serve me with, The paper that was used to arrest me on June 15 2020 and was crafted up by Christopher Mecca.

The Deputy that day, who is also Mr. Marx from the assessors office is a white male, about 40 years old, about 5′8″ tall, about 175 pounds, has a short dark beard, and short dark hair, is impostor Sheriff Deputy who serves paper from Christopher Mecca for the Josephine County Courts Terror Cell.

Stay Tuned, this is ongoing and is complicated, mixed in with seemingly unrelated events at my home, and other events that took place last night at the Fred Meyer Gas Station that I did not report with my Dystopia update for reasons that are too complicated to explain.

Events last night included at least two swordsmen, one at the Fred Meyer who was killed in defense there and another at my home who was also killed in defense.

There was also a “Runaway Tractor” terror event at the gas station, is associated with Lance of A-1 Paralegal Services on 6th & D Streets, and also is associated with A-1 Auctioneers, and A-1 Extermination Services of Grants Pass on 7th Street, Jeff Monroe works for A-1 Exterminators at least some of the time and a A-1 Exterminators black nissan van is usually parked at the Monroe’s in the evenings and on weekends, but has not been seen there lately, nor has Jeff Monroe.

The “Runaway Tractor” is a car that leaves the fuel pump at Fred Meyer gas station, and goes slowly over the curb, through and over some shrubberies, then over another curb, then through and across the traffic that is at the Fred Meyer Department store main entrance, and then over some more curbs and out of sight into the adjoining Fred Meyer Parking area.

So, that happened. They do it on purpose. It’s called “Runaway Tractor Terror Play at the Fred Meyer”. Specifically is associated with the Auction parts of the Courthouse terror cell.

“All this for one money” terror at the auction featuring Yodeling by Lance of A-1 Auctioneers.

End courthouse terror update: 5:57 pm.