It's 2021 and we still haven't figured out how to stop robocall car warranty scams.
Like, SpaceX can land office-building-sized rockets on drone ships in the middle of the ocean, but the phone companies / FTC / Congress somehow can't figure out how to block / track down / put out of business these scammers?
I wonder if a 1-5 cents a call phone tax - replacing other per line phone taxes - would end this practice.
Or maybe a sort of Captcha, but for phone calls, where your phone automatically answers it and determines whether it's a robot or not ("Press 77 if you are a human") before forwarding the actual human to your phone.
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I've never seen so many party showers -- didn't even know the term, until I started looking at expensive mansions. They almost all above about $6M seem to have them these days. #FridayNightZillow
TONIGHT on #FridayNightZillow!
*Georgia party mansion w/massive Chinese garden, chapel, 100s of fountains, 3,000 square foot bedroom and an epic backstory
*Bonkers concrete cowboy house
*5 historic homes sold as combo
+Much, much more...
Hope they put a smile on your face!
FIRST on #FridayNightZillow: a BONKERS mansion known for holding some of Georgia's biggest and craziest parties.
16,900 sf, 15 acres, $2.5M
Includes "the largest private Chinese Garden and the largest residential fountain system in the United States" zillow.com/homedetails/13…
The garden has *350* fountain heads, per an article in The Palm Beach Post on the lavish party the owners held for 300 when it was done. A fun read at the link: newspapers.com/clip/23432297/…
That in turn would be enough to buy a Tesla for most of the households in Utah. He could have been Oprah-like, but for an entire state. "You get a car and you get a car..."
Fwiw, Romney drives a nice Cadillac SUV and likes to drive it himself, unlike a lot of other senators who often get driven around.
Tesla drivers in Congress that I'm aware of:
Massie
AOC
I think Schiff?
Heinrich
Kelly
Carper
Trump literally walked out of the meeting where Pelosi and Schumer were offering him a $2T infrastructure deal because he was upset about other things. That was the end of his infrastructure deal.
There was that time right before the election when Trump was pitching more money than Pelosi for stimulus and McConnell was far, far below...and nothing happened until December.
Some of the ways wealthy people shield their wealth are going untouched in the BBB bill so far: Never-realized gains, depreciation of appreciating real estate, 1031 provision that allows selling real estate without realizing gains, stepped-up basis at death, etc.
World's richest person is running a Twitter poll today on whether he should decide to realize some gains and therefore pay some taxes, or continue to not realize those gains and not pay taxes (which is perfectly legal under our system).
"Realize" is kind of a figurative term here, because billionaires can realize those gains in other ways by pledging a small portion of their wealth as collateral for low-interest loans for walking around money or for capital to start new companies.
Let's break down the cost of the $550B Biden infrastructure combo platter bill in a way most anyone can understand. 1/
The $550B almost entirely gets appropriated over 5 years, though it takes a little longer for some of the money to actually leave federal coffers. But we are talking roughly $110B a year extra for five years. What does that mean? 2/
$110B a year is about 2% of the federal budget.
Maybe think of a 49-deck cruise ship and you added another deck, maybe.
A lot of money? YES.
A big deal. YES.
Changing the arc of the budget universe? Not really. 3/