business incentives

BTW, Tennessee is a geographical area it's just land, you can't "bad mouth" it. One can certainly bad-mouth elected officials who enact extremely regressive tax policies designed to make sure the poor _never_ get a break in defense of the affluence of millionaires and billionaires, and the non-millionaires and billionaires whom for whatever mysterious reason seem to like things that way.

California exempts food from sales tax. Well, it's complex. One sandwich shop here sells a WARM corned beef sandwich because a hot corned beef sandwich would be taxed.

It's easy to exempt the stuff that poor people need. Kids clothes, food, medical care, rent, anything used.

Billionaires don't eat much more food than poor people. Probably less. There aren't a lot of obese billionaires.

There is no reason to be jealous of wealth; it's mostly bits spinning on a hard drive somewhere. If you're the jealous type, be jealous of a billionaire's consumption.

I can, sometimes do, eat at the same restaurants that billionaires partonize. So can my plumber. Maybe not as often, but that's OK too.

Hardly anyone in the USA is starving. There is tons of free or very cheap food. It's the ultra-poor in other countries that need help, including our help. What is inequality to us would be paradise to them.

The you're-just-jealous defense is an easy cop-out, I don't personally believe I am but there is no satisfactory way to prove that to be the truth.

I saw lots of people buying many Powerball tickets when the jackpot rose above a billion dollars, it made me wonder if they knew what they were truly asking for.

Doctors and lawyers and engineers tend to be very wealthy people by comparison with the rest of the population, my impression is that doctors and lawyers and engineers are on average not intrinsically any more happy day-to-day than most other kinds of people. I know that most young medical students and doctors I know (which isn't a huge sample) often work an enormous number of hours a week and often even when they have "down time" they're still working at home. It would seem to leave little time to enjoy things like Sunday drives in fast cars, beers with friends, meeting "friendly" women, or "hanging out" with a variety of friendly women.

I'm fortunate to be able to earn a modest income doing a job I enjoy and that I'd probably spend time working at even if I weren't getting paid for it. I work fewer hours by comparison but have more of the latter things above - a fine trade off in my estimation.

You can always find someone in a worse off position than you are, doesn't change the fact that while you don't see Ethiopia-like starvation on the streets that many people in the US often do lack for nutritious food and often do go hungry. Those other countries also don't usually market themselves as the "greatest nation in the world." A country which has many of its citizens lacking for quality, healthful food and proper nutrition on the regular is not, in my estimation, the greatest.

"The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, tweeted Tuesday, 'I never thought I'd see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.'"

The elected officials of the fine state of TN do seem to get things right from time to time. Hey why not just let 'em knock down a few more skyscrapers while they're at it. We'll be your bitch.

Got a link to those ads?

Sounds like this one was more than tax breaks:

law,

ies, it has long been noted that the tax-free real estate of state property is a drain on the local community's services.

redress this inequity.

Property taxes are a great idea. You can't relocate real property to an off

-shore tax haven.

One of John Larkin's unsupported assertions.

let it be bought, like a business license.

Collecting directly from the business that is making the profit is as direc t and efficient as you can get. Waiting until the profit has been turned in to income and taxing the people who get that income isn't wise. The profit have a habit of flowing to trust funds located in off-shore tax havens, whi ch are much harder to tax (by design).

Society - as a whole - diverts some of it output into educating the next ge neration, rather than putting them to work as child labour. Most countries give the central government a role in this. The US - with it's antiquated c onstitution - doesn't.

It does make life complicated. Small women buying tax free cloths because t hey can wear kid sizes does come to mind.

There are lots reasons to be jealous of wealth. The Koch brothers spend som e of their wealth spreading lies about climate change, and some more on cre ating the Tea Party movement to wreck the republican party. We'd all like t o have these kinds of toys to play with.

The US does have a pretty much unique obesity problem. That cheap food seem s to be engineered to make people eat too much of it. Other advanced indust rial countries don't have this problem.

And US poverty levels are high, for an advanced industrial country

Denmark leads the world with only 5.5% in poverty. Australia is unimpressiv e with 13%, and the US is at the tail of the pack, between Turkey and Brazi l.