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Armadillo: Thursday's six-pack
— Ottawa 5, Toronto 4 OT– Auston Matthews scored all of Leafs’ goals; if you have him in fantasy, you’re pretty bleepin’ happy today.
— Matthews is 5th player ever with a hat trick in his first game, first player ever with four goals in his debut.
— Former Baylor coach Art Briles is working with the Browns’ offense in Cleveland as a consultant. Browns have three former Baylor players.
— Cam Newton returned to practice in Carolina, good news for them.
— Best part of Cubs’ run is seeing 87-year old comedian Bob Newhart post pics of himself on Twitter “hoisting the W” after every Cubs win. Newhart’s great TV show in the 70’s was set in Chicago.
— Lot of recruiting sites that rate HS prospects are full of it; Denzel Valentine is in the NBA now, was a great player at Michigan State. As a high school senior, he was listed as the country’s #129 prospect. Oy.
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Armadillo: Thursday's List of 13: Excerpts from an article that I think is important…….
Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr put a Washington Post article up on Twitter last night which is very interesting; it deals with how (intentionally or not) Donald Trump has exposed a problem with our country’s tax codes. This article was written by Fareed Zakaria.
I’m posting the excerpts from this article because I learned a lot from it, about how basically corrupt our entire system is in this country and how our “leaders” damn sure better fix it pretty soon.
“Donald Trump has done America a great public service. No, really. By taking advantage of the country’s tax laws in such spectacular fashion, he has shone a spotlight on the corruption that is at the heart of American politics — the tax code……..
……….The problem with American taxes is something different: their complexity. The United States has the world’s longest tax code. The scholar Sean Ehrlich tabulated its word count at 3,866,392. Germany and France have codes that are less than 10 percent as long…….
………The complexity of the tax code exists by design, because it allows for the distinctive feature of the American political system: fundraising……..
America is unique among democracies in requiring, at all levels of politics, that vast amounts of cash be raised from the private sector. In order to get this money, senators and members of Congress need something to offer in return, and what they sell are amendments to the tax code. When you pay $5,000 to have a stale breakfast with a congressman, you are not paying for his insights or personality. You and others like you are buying a line of the code, which is why it is thousands of pages long. This is the world’s ultimate “pay for play” setup.
There are only two ways to fix this problem. One would be to stop people from paying politicians. But the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 that money is speech and thus constitutionally protected. (As far as I know, this is a view shared by no other Western democracy.) That leaves another path — take away what Congress sells. If the tax code were to be made short and simple, with a handful of deductions, politicians would have little to offer people as a quid pro quo. You could still pay them, for their ideas and personality, but I suspect that the flow of money would slow to a trickle. It is the simple, single solution to the cancer in American politics. And we could thank Donald Trump for highlighting it.”
— Ottawa 5, Toronto 4 OT– Auston Matthews scored all of Leafs’ goals; if you have him in fantasy, you’re pretty bleepin’ happy today.
— Matthews is 5th player ever with a hat trick in his first game, first player ever with four goals in his debut.
— Former Baylor coach Art Briles is working with the Browns’ offense in Cleveland as a consultant. Browns have three former Baylor players.
— Cam Newton returned to practice in Carolina, good news for them.
— Best part of Cubs’ run is seeing 87-year old comedian Bob Newhart post pics of himself on Twitter “hoisting the W” after every Cubs win. Newhart’s great TV show in the 70’s was set in Chicago.
— Lot of recruiting sites that rate HS prospects are full of it; Denzel Valentine is in the NBA now, was a great player at Michigan State. As a high school senior, he was listed as the country’s #129 prospect. Oy.
**********
Armadillo: Thursday's List of 13: Excerpts from an article that I think is important…….
Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr put a Washington Post article up on Twitter last night which is very interesting; it deals with how (intentionally or not) Donald Trump has exposed a problem with our country’s tax codes. This article was written by Fareed Zakaria.
I’m posting the excerpts from this article because I learned a lot from it, about how basically corrupt our entire system is in this country and how our “leaders” damn sure better fix it pretty soon.
“Donald Trump has done America a great public service. No, really. By taking advantage of the country’s tax laws in such spectacular fashion, he has shone a spotlight on the corruption that is at the heart of American politics — the tax code……..
……….The problem with American taxes is something different: their complexity. The United States has the world’s longest tax code. The scholar Sean Ehrlich tabulated its word count at 3,866,392. Germany and France have codes that are less than 10 percent as long…….
………The complexity of the tax code exists by design, because it allows for the distinctive feature of the American political system: fundraising……..
America is unique among democracies in requiring, at all levels of politics, that vast amounts of cash be raised from the private sector. In order to get this money, senators and members of Congress need something to offer in return, and what they sell are amendments to the tax code. When you pay $5,000 to have a stale breakfast with a congressman, you are not paying for his insights or personality. You and others like you are buying a line of the code, which is why it is thousands of pages long. This is the world’s ultimate “pay for play” setup.
There are only two ways to fix this problem. One would be to stop people from paying politicians. But the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 that money is speech and thus constitutionally protected. (As far as I know, this is a view shared by no other Western democracy.) That leaves another path — take away what Congress sells. If the tax code were to be made short and simple, with a handful of deductions, politicians would have little to offer people as a quid pro quo. You could still pay them, for their ideas and personality, but I suspect that the flow of money would slow to a trickle. It is the simple, single solution to the cancer in American politics. And we could thank Donald Trump for highlighting it.”
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