#will there be tax breaks credits

[artcalledtattoo]

Support Ukraine

Help stop Putin, Trump

[tomorrowusa]

Trump's most famous promise was to make Mexico pay for his squalid and corrupt border wall.

Amount collected from Mexico: 0 centavos.

Trump did give tax breaks to billionaires while giving COVID-19 to much of the rest of the country.

Trump's promises are as worthless as degrees from Trump University.

[cowardlycowboys]

paid some bills and now I can't kill myself like I want too

[tfincareer]

Unlock Financial Relief: Tax Benefits Every Family Should Know in 2024

Introduction In 2024, families have access to essential assessment benefits that offer assistance with spare cash. These incorporate the Child Assess Credit, Child Care Costs, and the Earned Pay Assess Credit. This direction will clarify how these credits work and illustrate how families can take advantage. Understanding these charge breaks can assist you with more cash in your stash, whether…

[inner-community]

also i cant even practice driving because our car is dead and our neighbor NEVER LEAVES THE HOUSE so we cant put my dads car next to it to jump it. i want to scream. i guess it helps complaining though so i can stop thinking about it so much and getting so stressed. i just feel like i need to be doing 10000000000 things.

really i just need to do 2 things rn - call the test people & send an email to the dmv guys. then when those are done i can study. and if i have to make a psych appt it would be fine because i should ask for my as needed klonopin back because i think i am still good for the most part it's just my anxiety randomly goes thru the roof and i need help w it. (weed has been making it worse. why would my best friend weed do this to me...)

i also should really remember every day to take my mushroom supplement because i cant overstate how much of a diff it makes taking it regularly.

also i need my wife to stop asking about tax stuff for A Minute because i know what we are doing i just need time to execute it all and i have to do all of the above bullshit first!!!!!!

[transmalewife]

I don't think americans realise what a nightmarish techno-dystopia they live in. Like I'm 23 and in NY last year i felt and behaved exactly like the elderly ppl she describes. Sometimes established, analogue solutions are better and involving technology makes them incomparably worse. Bus schedules being printed on paper and attached to bus stops is not a fucking problem to be fixed. it is a functioning system and even if it weren't REQUIRING PEOPLE TO HAVE A CHARGED SMARTPHONE AND SCAN A Q R CODE TO KNOW WHEN AND IF THE NEXT BUS WILL COME WOULD NOT BE THE WAY TO FIX IT HOLY SHIT. Even paying in cash requires you to interact with the credit card machine and dodge and fight off trick questions trying to steal your money or data

Its okay they could call me on a rotary faster than i could explain to them I’m old enough to know what a rotary phone is

[boreal-sea]

Biden’s 2025 would raise the child tax credits back to the levels they were at during the pandemic, an objectively good thing for literally everyone. Those benefits were slashed by Trump in 2017, and others trailed off after the pandemic “ended”. Biden is going to pay for it by undoing Trump’s tax cuts on wealthy corporations, aka by taxing them more.

You can bet your pants Trump won’t enact this budget if he wins the election.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[energynews247]

New US solar tax credit rules will do little to break China dependence, experts warn

Clean energy analysts have warned new US rules designed to speed up a reshoring of clean energy supply chains will do little in the short term to break their dependence on imports from China. The Treasury department on Friday issued new guidance that would only allow US-based solar developers to secure tax credits offered in the Inflation Reduction Act if they made their cells…

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #36

September 27-October 4 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris have lead the federal response to Hurricane Helene. President Biden's leadership earned praise from the Republican Governors of South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, as well as the Democratic Governor of North Carolina and local leaders. Thousands of federal workers are on the ground in effected communities having given out to date over 8 million meals, over 7 million letters of water. Both President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been on the ground in resent days meeting with effected families. During her trip to Georgia Vice-President Harris announced that the federal government will reimburse state and local government 100% of the costs from Hurricane Helene.

A strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association that briefly shut down ports on the East Cost and Gulf ended in a tentative deal. Both sides thanked Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for helping push the deal through. President Biden and Vice-President Harris had expressed solidarity with the works when the strike was announced and President Biden directed Secretary Buttigieg to take the lead in pressuring management to make a deal with the Longshoremen. The ILA got a 62% raise as part of the agreement.

Vice President Harris announced new actions to help those struggling with medical debt. This actions include new standards from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on debt collection. the CFPB plans on requiring debt collectors to confirm debts are valid and accurate before engaging in collection actions. As well as cracking down on debt collectors that collect on debt that is not owed by patients. Other actions included an announcement by the DoD that it was reducing pricing for civilians who get medical treatment at DoD hospitals and a track down on tax-exempt hospitals who are required by law to offer financial assistance but often do not. These steps come after Vice President Harris in June announced plans to remove medical debt from credit scores. Following the Vice President's call to action North Carolina moved forward a plan to eliminate medical debt for 2 million people in the state. President Biden's American Rescue Plan funds have been used by state and local Democrats to eliminate $7 billion dollars in medical debt.

The Department of Transportation announced $62 Billion in infrastructure funding for 2025. Thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by President Biden this will be $18 billion dollars more than was spent in 2021. The Biden-Harris Admin has helped support over 60,000 infrastructure projects across all 50 states, rebuilding roads and bridges, breaking ground on America's first high speed rail, updating ports and airports, and breaking high speed internet to rural communities.

The Department of Transportation announced $1 Billion dollars of investment in America's passenger rail future. This comes on top of $8.2 billion in investments announced in December 2023. The funds will help expand and modernize intercity passenger rail nationwide.

The Departments of Energy and Agriculture��announced a $2.8 billion joint project to bring 100% carbon pollution-free energy to the rural midwest. The DoE is investing $1.5 billion into helping bring the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan back on-line. Shut down in 2022 plans to refit and reopen it to allow the plant to keep generating clean energy till 2051. Once back online the Palisades Nuclear Plant will help stop an anticipated 4.47 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, or 111 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime. The USDA is investing $1.3 billion in two rural electric cooperatives, Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, which cover rural communities in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. This investment will help Wolverine and Hoosier connect to the Palisades Plant, reduce prices for customers, and reduce climate pollution, putting Wolverine Power on the path to be 100 percent carbon-free energy before 2030.

The Treasury and the IRS announced that 30 million Americans, across 24 states will qualify for free direct filing of their taxes in 2025. The IRS says that the average American spends $270 dollars and 13 hours filing their taxes. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by President Biden with Vice President Harris' tie breaking vote, Americans will be able to file their taxes quickly and for free directly with the IRS. Tax payers in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming will in 2025 be able to use direct file.

The USDA announced $7.7 billion in funding for Climate-Smart Practices on Agricultural Lands. This represents the single biggest investment in these programs in USDA history. Since implementation began in 2023 this conservation assistance has helped over 28,500 farmers and ranchers apply conservation to 361 million acres of land.

The Department of Energy announced $1.5 billion in investments in transmission infrastructure to help ensure our grid is reliable and resilient. This will help support nearly 1,000 miles of new transmission lines across Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. These lines will bring 7,100 MW of new capacity and create 9,000 good paying union jobs. Studies find to keep up with growth and meet our climate goals of carbon free energy the US will need to triple the 2020 transmission capacity by 2050. This is an important step to meeting that goal.

[jay-weller]

Popular Tax Breaks Not Being Extended

Popular Tax Breaks Not Being Extended - #jayweller #Clearwater, #Constitution, #CreditCounseling, #FilingForBankruptcy, #Law, #tax, #WellerLegalGroup - https://www.jayweller.com/?p=9030

[masigl4179]

It's time for the last #taxtipthursday of 2022 we're concluding our discussion about year end tax cutting ideas!

[gkmtax]

Best tax advisory services in USA

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[wilwheaton]

What the two different worldviews look like was on display earlier this month, when Republicans and a few Democrats in the Senate killed a bipartisan expansion of the child tax credit, a tax break for parents with dependent children. A hike in that credit during the pandemic cut child poverty dramatically, only for that rate to bounce back when the pandemic relief expired and dropped five million U.S. children back into poverty in 2022. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that the change “underscores the fact that the number of children living in poverty is a policy choice.” On January 31, 2024, the House passed an expansion of the child tax credit that was smaller than the one in place during the pandemic, and Republican vice presidential hopeful Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who has been criticized for comments about “childless cat ladies,” seemed to support the measure when he said, “If you’re raising children in this country, we should make it easier, not harder. And unfortunately it’s way too expensive and way too difficult.” He then falsely accused Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris of calling for ending the child tax credit (she has actually called for expanding it).   But Vance missed the vote, and before it, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told colleagues that passing the bill would “give Harris a win before the election.” According to Chabeli Carranzana of The 19th, Tillis “printed out fake checks made out to ‘millions of American voters’ with the memo: ‘Don’t forget to vote for Kamala!’”  ”

August 14, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson