People crafting their identity around fictional characters (* ahem * Tyler Durden * ahem * ) and shunning their relationship to their real environment. It's people arguing over iPhones vs Androids. What is the spectacle, then? Debord has a great way of summarizing it: the colonization of human life by commodities. Everybody acknowledge we live in the society of spectacle, but either don't believe its rules apply to them or adopt a defeatist attitude towards it. The spectacle is a concept that's very swanky to talk about in dinner parties like George Orwell's 1984, but it is often simplified and, ironically enough, objectified by its debaters. How ironic that just a few weeks after the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, which laid bare how easy it is for a wealthy individual to exploit the loopholes baked into the Internal Revenue Code, the G.O.P.Re-read this bad boy for research purposes. has set out to undo the last Congress’s effort to resuscitate the underfunded agency tasked with ensuring tax code compliance. I earned my living teaching my wealthy clients how to legally utilize the numerous (and often ridiculous) rules and regulations that benefit the super-wealthy at the expense of the wage-earning Everyman. Trump’s paying no income tax is misplaced. The uproar should be directed at Congress, which over the years has stuffed the Internal Revenue Code with scores of nonsensical “exceptions” to avoid taxation. Trump may have (undoubtedly?) cheated on his taxes to exaggerate his losses, but the main culprits in the broader sense are not the wealthy taxpayers who follow the rules, but rather the code, which offers them the ammunition to do so.Īnd the G.O.P. is now determined to reduce the agency’s ability to pursue cheats and to block necessary legislation to change the code.Įric K. The writer is a retired certified public accountant. Why then would they want to gut the equivalent of a company’s accounts receivable department, the Internal Revenue Service? Doesn’t sound like a good business move to me! Republicans for years have argued that the government should be run more like a business, and that business leaders make good elected officials. What those in Washington, and particularly Republicans, fail to understand is that the I.R.S. I don’t like to pay taxes, but when I consider the benefits I sigh and write the check. I also contemplate that my taxes would probably be a bit lower if everyone paid what they legally owe. And I haven’t even mentioned the various sweetheart deals (carried interest) that should be eliminated. so the majority of Americans can get a bit of a tax break. 7), about bottlenecks and surging crowds at the museum, to the detriment of the viewing experience: Re “ The Louvre Limits Visitors by One-Third” (Arts, Jan. Too often I have had to toil my way through crowds at a museum to get my turn in front of a canvas, only to feel a sharp elbow in my side, or the contact of a boot against my leg. Is this a museum or a mud-wrestling match?Ĭan we please ban the use of cellphones to take selfies in front of the art? Your glamorous self blocking half of Queen Elizabeth I’s regalia or the entirety of van Gogh’s haunted face is not what we come to a museum to look at. Instead, museums should install an outdoor covered terrace with a rotating set of good reproductions and beautiful lighting that the Instagram preeners can use for their backgrounds. Then museums might not have to limit the number of visitors. I recently fled the Louvre with my heart pounding. Never in my lifetime in New York City had I experienced such crowd-crushing terror.
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