State Tax And The Death of the Republic | SALT | Congress 3

One of the biggest problems with our impoverished media sector is the fact that nobody covers anything that matters anymore. We’ve got a lot of outrage, and a lot of time and effort spent on simple compelling stories. But if you’re truly interested in what’s going on in the world, or the direction that our government is going in, these stories are largely useless. What matters is almost always a lot more complex.

This channel’s first big hit dealt with one of those issues. We were the only folks looking at the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) who didn’t expect to make millions off of it. So we were able to show what the ramifications of the legislation were to a wide audience. I’m beginning to think that the elimination of the State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) is a similarly important issue. Sounds boring, but the implications are immense. This video attempts to lay out that story.

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How To Fix Congress | Congress 2

This week’s video lays out how easy it would be to fix Congress. This prompts a question though. If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it happened yet? I think the answer is pretty simple. Everybody hates Congress. It’s a vicious cycle we’re in. Congress has always been corrupt. Over the past half century or so, it hasn’t been very good at getting things done either. The general uselessness of Congress makes people angry. So they take funding away from it, and Congress gets even more useless. Nobody wants to stand up for Congress because it’s an unpopular position. Which makes it a perfect topic for this YouTube Channel.

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The US Congress Needs More Money

There are a lot of big dumb solutions out there. From a new constitutional convention, to reforming the electoral college, to doing “something” about “money in politics” there are many proposed solutions. I think these solutions make things way too complicated. We’re avoiding a much simpler fix. Give Congress More Money. The writers of the US Constitution thought the US Congress was the most important institution in government. There’s a reason they laid it out in Article 1. It’s the legislature, not the president or the courts that supposed to be doing the governing.

That’s not the way it works today. We are verging on worship of the office of the President, and we let the Judiciary make more and more of our laws. Over the past 22 years we’ve also systematically dismantled and starved the institutions that help our legislature compete. The results have been pretty straightforward. Congress is useless. If we give it some more money, and make it useful again, we may find ourselves with a functioning government again. This video lays out the case.

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Yemen Is Dying. We Can Save It | Yemen 6


Yesterday the US House of Representatives finally had a debate on The US War on Yemen. It’s about three years too late. But it is a good thing that it happened. It’s easy to look at this delay, and the toothless resolution that was voted on, and conclude that Congress is useless on this topic. As today’s video explains that would be a mistake.

This reaction video fortuitously leads into the upcoming vids. They deal with the US Congress, and they would have looked super non-related if it weren’t for all the Congressional Debate stuff in this video. There’s been a notion in the back of my head for quite some time. The US government is nowhere as screwed as we like to imagine. All the tools are there. We just choose not to use them. It may be worthwhile to do more in this vein. What do you think?

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Donald Trump Is Diocletian

Honestly, even I’m not so sure how I made it from John Kelly’s views of the US Civil War to Diocletian. But I did. It was nice to take a break from Saudi Arabia with a nice palate cleansing, and profoundly odd video. Comparing US history to Roman history is a profoundly silly thing to do. The systems are just too different. But sometimes the echos are so obvious I can’t help myself. I hope you enjoy this video as much as I enjoyed making it.

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