If you have never entered into a mortgage before, a big bank or RM will make everything very easy for you - but it will cost more.

If you have done this before and feel comfortable with the mortgage process, a good CU will win on price. I got a hell of a deal with Penfed CU a couple of years ago.

The $1 version is definitely the way to go. You don't have to perform the dark deed of cleanup, just throw it away and move on to the next one.

Of all the things I put my dick in when I was a teen, why didn't I think of a toaster?

Corporations pay lots of tax money too. If you pick a specific corporation in a specific year, sure it's easy to find one that doesn't that year but over any given span of 5-10 years they pay up and their lawyers remind Congress about that loudly and often.

I sometimes find it funny how people accuse corporations of buying Senators to do their bidding, but then claim those same corporations aren't paying taxes. Aren't both activities ... taxes to buy influence?

Politicians always lie. Liberal politicians do too, of course, for their own special interests and donors.

It's all about convincing Joe Public who doesn't know very much or give much thought to these matters to peacefully line up at the polls instead of violently marching on the streets. Not much more than that, but that's socially useful too.

Why? For example, Amazon used revenue to build a very effective logistics network the likes of which were never seen before. Successful companies do societally useful things.

Governments use revenue to bomb people who live somewhere else, or create propaganda, or whatever else serves the needs of the political leaders. It isn't always used for "the people", not by a long shot.

Don't bring out facts about historical returns. We can't be outraged about that.

He gets a pretty sweet deal to be sure. Most monarchs either were killed by the mob or their heirs were. Charles doesn't have to worry about that since he wields no real political power, and he knows it. Basically he leads the life of a pampered but irrelevant national symbol.

Well of course it does. Keep in mind that many "regular people" pensions are directly tied to those shareholder returns too. If you're a union worker (firefighter, teacher, etc.) your pension absolutely depends on how well investments go.

Every economist in the world knows full well that the simplistic assumptions you've mentioned here aren't really true and are only there to help Econ 101 students start to learn the subject. If you study the field more deeply you'll see these assumptions are relaxed to varying degrees.

You aren't exactly breaking new ground here, you're just operating under the assumption that Econ 101 is being taught as the "Truth" to everything when in fact it isn't.

Taxes are normally paid on net cash received during the year. Net income on a financial statement is not necessarily cash received, it's just what you legally earned during the year whether you were paid in 2022 or not. This is a topic covered in intermediate accounting.

For example, suppose you get paid every two weeks and your last paycheck this year falls on Friday, 12/23. You will work the last week of December and not receive payment for it until 2023.

If you were to prepare a "corporate" financial statement your net income would include that final week because you earned the money in 2022, but you don't pay tax on it for a full year because you didn't receive the money until later. It takes multiple years for the two measures of income to line up due to timing differences like this.

Lots of these alarmist clickbait titles completely ignore similar distinctions. Another one that gets people riled up is that professional sports leagues are nonprofits. Actually, they generally are - they collect tons of money and immediately turn around and pay it out to their member teams, leaving the league with just enough to run the front office and next to no profit if any at all. The teams are the ones that make the profit and pay the taxes, not the league.

I lost both parents very suddenly like this four years apart, and I agree. Although it was shocking it is also much easier than spending years taking care of someone you know will never get better.