am I the only one who thinks that IF its really the case, its kinda ... unfair. cmn, MA is good writer and he 100% deserves his money but he made it writing about SV! I think CA certainly deserve its 10,3% back, hey?
People have been arguing about it forever, but I think there's at least a relationship. The UC and Cal State systems have been feeders to many tech companies, and during the Valley's formative period, even the private universities were heavily state-subsidized (California used to have an extremely generous CalGrants scholarship that would pay for any CA high-school student with good grades to go to any CA university, public or private).
There are rules in place to determine what's 'fair' and what's not 'fair.' I'm assuming Mike has played by all the rules, so it's most certainly 'fair.'
If the state of California didn't think what Arrington did was right, there'd be a law. We've built up a system of rules, we all have to follow them, Mike did, so he's in the clear.
"Law" is [theoretically] a consensus on "fairness". If we all went around killing each other based on our personal views, well that just wouldn't be very fair, now would it?
Agreed, but it's your job as a citizen to try and pay exactly what you owe by law. If what Arrington did was legal, it wasn't wrong of him. No one should be paying more taxes than what's legally required. If there are any loopholes (so to speak), it's the role of the citizens to "exploit" them and the role of law makers to close them if necessary.
If there are any loopholes (so to speak), it's the role of the citizens to "exploit" them and the role of law makers to close them if necessary.
That's a pretty bad attitude to have, that citizens should be trying to exploit as many loopholes as possible. That sets up citizenry vs. govt. as a competitive game, which is a great recipe for making something that's supposed to be cooperative become dysfunctional and complex.
It's an impossibly complex task to make a perfect airtight literal codex of laws in a system, and it's not reasonable to assume that humans can create such without introducing a huge number of contradictions, etc. We need to keep in mind the spirit of the law in order to keep our system from devolving into a morass.
I'd argue that complexity is what causes loopholes, rather than the other way around.
Things like tax credits aren't 'loopholes' - they're specifically codified in the law for people to utilize, in an attempt to encourage certain behaviors.
It's not gamesmanship, although there is some competitiveness between state tax laws (such as this WA vs CA capital gains thing).
That's WA's incentive to get people with lots of money to come live (and hopefully spend) it in WA. CA has enough people with lots of money that it can afford to take a different stance.
"Conformity with rules or standards" is an established meaning of "fairness"; to make any other judgement, as the poster a few levels above did, requires one to take a position on Arrington.
There are two places where one might take a position: "are the laws being fairly applied in this case?" and "are the laws themselves fair?".
Clearly it would be unfair to treat Arrington differently than the law requires. I think the charitable interpretation of the above poster is that he thinks the laws themselves are unfair. You may disagree, but arguing that what Arrington did is legal is beside the point.
I've already pointed out that if Arrington's complied with the tax rules and standards, his action have met one definition of fairness, which is not at all beside the point. To argue fairness or unfairness by other definitions, you have to take a position on those laws. Otherwise, you rule out such judgments, which leads us back to the question "did he play by the rules?"
