Daily Archives: 18 February 2019

Fines and Negotiations

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The FTC and Facebook seem to agree that Facebook messed up with the way it handles user personal and private data; now they’re dickering over the fine to be assessed.

It [that fine, rumored to be in the multiple billions of dollars] would be the largest fine the FTC has ever imposed on a technology company, although the two have yet to settle on the exact number….

What is there to negotiate, though? Assess the fine, and if Facebook wants to negotiate argue the matter, let it do so in open court in an appeal of the fine.  That, unlike these kinds of “negotiations,” will occur in public, in front of customers and potential customers, with all that’s implied by the implications of pre-trial discovery results and public testimony.

Isn’t Zuckerberg all about transparency these days?

“Goosed” Paychecks

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Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR), Finance Committee Ranking Member, had this bit:

It looks like the Trump Treasury Department spent 2018, an election year, goosing people’s paychecks by under-withholding, and it should have been obvious that the bill would come due eventually[.]

Never mind that the IRS also warned taxpayers—and their employers—to carefully check their existing withholding arrangements, especially in this period of large changes to the tax code.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) was just as disingenuous:

Many Americans depend on their tax refund to pay bills and make ends meet….

Never mind that large tax refunds, far from being a savings account (that pays even less interest than a bank savings account), is an interest free loan to the government.  Leave it to a Progressive-Democrat, with his constant demands for OPM, to insist that this interest free loan to Government of a citizen’s money is entirely appropriate.

Keep in mind, too, that these are the same politicians who will work to prevent the tax reform’s current personal income tax cuts from becoming permanent.  Because the money in those paychecks isn’t the citizen’s; it belongs to Government.

Goosed paychecks?  Those could be permanently increased paychecks—because of the so far lowered income tax rates—but for those Progressive-Democrats.