Personal Shopper, SALT and Sovereignty
Feb. 16th, 2019 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinuePersonal Shopper
Ciro and I watched Oliver Assayas's Personal Shopper, a ghost story with a famously ambiguous scene that has led to a plethora of stupid theories (almost all variants of "everybody is dead," the least interesting intepretation of any movie that isn't Defending Your Life). However, we got hung up on a different scene later in the film, during the course of which somebody pours coffee out of a Bialetti moka pot. It occurs in a kitchen in daytime with ample sunlight, and it's obvious that the coffee is watery in a way it should not be.
Could it be an exposure problem, I said.
No, said Ciro, look at the blacks in the cast iron pans.
We have concluded that either the moka pot was majorly overfilled with water (which seems out of character), or - and hear me out - the coffee is a ghost.
SALT deductions
I have not filed my taxes yet this year, but as a consequence of the 2017 Republican tax bill (it's a Paul Ryan baby, not a Trump baby) I know I will not be able to deduct my state income tax. This is the thing the news has talked about as a way to "punish" coastal elites, which come from states that are very likely to have a higher local tax burden (but which are nevertheless more likely to be net contributers to the federal coffers rather than net recipients of federal largess, so it's an interesting situation when you start talking about "fairness," and I could talk about taxes all day but I'm trying to get to a point).
It seems to me as a futurist that this might be something that history books point to in 100 years as one of the early signs that the Senate would become an archaic/ceremonial body like the House of Lords.
The reason I say this is that, well, look at the UN or the EU. They ask for contributions from member nations, but they don't directly levy taxes on individual citizens of those nations - each country decides how to meet its financial contribution. If the UN sent a tax bill to each person in the world, I think it's safe to say people would freak out.
That's the way income taxes were in the US until 1913, basically. States could do them. The federal government didn't, except briefly during the U.S. Civil War, which was considered unusual and temporary (like the draft). There was a real debate over whether the U.S. government was pre-empting powers reserved to the states, to such an extent that there had to be a constitutional amendment (the 16th) to say a federal income tax was ok in peacetime.
The fact that people in the U.S. at large can even have discussions about what's fair taxation on the basis of individuals rather than on the basis of states - and that this would be championed by Republicans from low-population states - shows the degree to which we increasingly agree that political power at the federal level derives from individuals and not from agreements between states.
I think we're moving to a unitary system. I don't think we seriously recognize a philsophical basis for dividing power equally between "states" anymore. They're getting to be more like teams we root for in a sports league, and the debate is whether we'd rather do revenue sharing like the NFL or luxury taxes like MLB. The Senate's obsolete in its current form. We can already see restructuring going on, and a backlash to that restructuring (not to mention the electoral college) but it seems random. It will look less random in retrospect, I suspect.
Ciro and I watched Oliver Assayas's Personal Shopper, a ghost story with a famously ambiguous scene that has led to a plethora of stupid theories (almost all variants of "everybody is dead," the least interesting intepretation of any movie that isn't Defending Your Life). However, we got hung up on a different scene later in the film, during the course of which somebody pours coffee out of a Bialetti moka pot. It occurs in a kitchen in daytime with ample sunlight, and it's obvious that the coffee is watery in a way it should not be.
Could it be an exposure problem, I said.
No, said Ciro, look at the blacks in the cast iron pans.
We have concluded that either the moka pot was majorly overfilled with water (which seems out of character), or - and hear me out - the coffee is a ghost.
SALT deductions
I have not filed my taxes yet this year, but as a consequence of the 2017 Republican tax bill (it's a Paul Ryan baby, not a Trump baby) I know I will not be able to deduct my state income tax. This is the thing the news has talked about as a way to "punish" coastal elites, which come from states that are very likely to have a higher local tax burden (but which are nevertheless more likely to be net contributers to the federal coffers rather than net recipients of federal largess, so it's an interesting situation when you start talking about "fairness," and I could talk about taxes all day but I'm trying to get to a point).
It seems to me as a futurist that this might be something that history books point to in 100 years as one of the early signs that the Senate would become an archaic/ceremonial body like the House of Lords.
The reason I say this is that, well, look at the UN or the EU. They ask for contributions from member nations, but they don't directly levy taxes on individual citizens of those nations - each country decides how to meet its financial contribution. If the UN sent a tax bill to each person in the world, I think it's safe to say people would freak out.
That's the way income taxes were in the US until 1913, basically. States could do them. The federal government didn't, except briefly during the U.S. Civil War, which was considered unusual and temporary (like the draft). There was a real debate over whether the U.S. government was pre-empting powers reserved to the states, to such an extent that there had to be a constitutional amendment (the 16th) to say a federal income tax was ok in peacetime.
The fact that people in the U.S. at large can even have discussions about what's fair taxation on the basis of individuals rather than on the basis of states - and that this would be championed by Republicans from low-population states - shows the degree to which we increasingly agree that political power at the federal level derives from individuals and not from agreements between states.
I think we're moving to a unitary system. I don't think we seriously recognize a philsophical basis for dividing power equally between "states" anymore. They're getting to be more like teams we root for in a sports league, and the debate is whether we'd rather do revenue sharing like the NFL or luxury taxes like MLB. The Senate's obsolete in its current form. We can already see restructuring going on, and a backlash to that restructuring (not to mention the electoral college) but it seems random. It will look less random in retrospect, I suspect.
