The TSLA Market / Economy

Do you though?

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I guess I could be an ass and not go.

I’m pretty much in agreement with your point. Was just complaining…

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It’s going to be interesting to see how this shakes out in various parts of the economy where things are indexed to inflation or other economic indicators that are all fucked up by the pandemic. One example in my industry - Canadian retirement savings limits and earnings covered by our national government pension plan are indexed to the growth in average wage. The average wage actually jumped by way more than is typical last year because it only counts the wages of people that are working (duh) and the pandemic wiped out a lot of low paying jobs.

I would be pretty comfortable telling someone that coming out of the pandemic I have to make difficult choices about managing my budget. If they have a meltdown about that I’m wouldn’t read that situation as you being the ass.

It depends on how ostensibly well off you are. Once you get to a certain level, you can’t really make that claim with a straight face.

It’s not really a budgeting thing as far as the airfare. And I do want to go anyway and would feel bad if I wasn’t at these weddings, especially after they all did the right thing and postponed during the worst of the pandemic.

The house and car thing is a budget issue though, as far as I planned to spend an already exorbitant number for both, and those numbers have now been inflated to the point where even though I could still probably afford both, it would violate my normal conservative budgeting. Just prior to the pandemic I had finally gotten the green light to move nearly full time to remote work, which had been one of the only things holding us back from building what we really wanted in the area we want. And also what was holding me back from splurging on a nice car. (Never made sense when I was putting between 35 and 45 thousand miles on my cars every year.) But I decided to wait until after the pandemic for both, and didn’t have the vision to see soon enough what it was going to do to home and car prices. So ya pretty much first world problems.

Holy shit that sounds miserable.

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Yes, my shortest commute since 2002 has been 60 miles (one way), and I put in a lot of miles on the weekends for climbing all around the northeast. The worst though was since 2016 driving 70 miles all the way into Boston (technically Cambridge). I got permission to work almost fully remote in late 2019, and then everybody else and their mother did soon after.

Everyone who receives 40% of the vote in any presidential, Congressional, or statewide election should automatically be audited, including during their term I’d they win and for a few years after they stop holding office.

Instead of “audit person x if they do y” the real effort should be towards completely rehauling the tax system. I mean what a fucking joke that “the best country in the world” requires you to, I don’t know, try to figure out what you owe them, and pay that, or get a refund, or something, every year, and if you don’t, you go to jail. If you’re not in the 1%.

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If I’m wrong on this, let me know, but I think that even non 1%ers almost never go to jail. I assume they get fined and have money taken from them.

This is mostly true. A quick Google search shows that fewer than 1,000 people per year are prosecuted by the IRS, and most of them probably get away with no penalty or a financial penalty. Several web sites quote 3-5 years as the average jail time for a person that goes to jail for tax fraud but it must be a very small number of people.

Interestingly there are a lot of websites that emphasize that the vast majority of people surveyed view paying taxes as a civic duty. I don’t know if that’s biased data (if some random person comes up to me and starts asking about if I think I’m obligated to pay my taxes then I might fudge my answer a bit).

In my business we see tons of rich people’s tax returns and it isn’t just Bezos types paying nothing. The only guys paying tons of tax are successful mid-size business people who are large enough to be generating real cash flow but not big enough to pay armies of tax lawyers.

I guess that this depends on your definition of “tons of tax” but salaried professionals have very limited tools to hide taxes. I am much more familiar with Canada, so I will defer to others on the US. But in Canada there are lots of favorable provisions in the tax law but if you collect employment income you can’t really “hide” it.

FWIW this was a big WSB ticker back before GME blew up. CRSR, GME, and PLTR were some of the most discussed tickers over the winter. It always seemed like one of the more solid companies but it may not have that newness factor that stocks like Wendy’s had.

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Yeah, maybe. Depends on mid-size definition too. I mean they’ll look like they’re paying a big rate similar to a high salary employee, but that’s after taking a bunch of easy lifestyle deductions; cars, travel, actual shenanigans. At 400k and up, it’s easy to shave a couple hundred a year off of income. Even at a couple million a year, it’s not rocket science to reduce the tax burden substantially.

Like no business owner actually ever personally bought that boat pulling f250 or their wife’s volvo suv.

Also July 16 OTM calls are pretty cheap tbh. So if you don’t want to gamble on weeklies and this popping this week you can get in with a slightly longer term chance to hit.

Yeah, I think this is true here too. W2 employees basically pay all the taxes.

Wow, 25% now. I’m a bit surprised because I thought it was already on WSB’s radar, but I guess bumps aren’t actually coming from WSB anymore, they’re coming from outsiders trying to predict WSB moves (so, us).

Edit: I’m with you. Back over the winter I successfully snagged some BB and NOK calls ahead of the WSB pumps (after watching but missing GME, that one hurt) but I haven’t been following as closely lately. I imagine this group could do a decent job of it if we collectively keep an eye out. CRSR seems to be evidence that WBS still holds some power, lol efficient markets.

I had a dream last night that CLVS ran up to $16, maybe we need to hop back on that one (it never got picked up by WSB, sadly, and I doubt it ever will).

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