State-Run Single-Payer Health Care: Prohibitively Expensive—and Illegal?

“State lawmakers in California and New York voted this year to pass state-run single payer health care plans, despite the fact that both states would need to double their existing tax revenue to pay for the new entitlement.  But even if those political hurdles are overcome, and even if the two states figure out how they are going to come up with the necessary tax revenue—about $400 billion in California’s case, and somewhere between $91 billion and $225 billion in New York’s—to make those systems functional, both may run into another problem: The whole thing could be against the law.”

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/06/06/state-run-single-payer-health-care-would

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Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Loses His Life Sentence Appeal

“As Judge Katherine Forrest explained at the time, Ulbricht’s life sentence was intended also to send a message to other would-be dark web drug kingpins. Her strategy appears to have backfired, at least in the short term: Sales on Silk Road successor sites doubled in the immediate wake of Ulbricht’s sentence, as news of the trial’s outcome raised awareness of the dark web drug market.”

Read more: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/silk-road-creator-ross-ulbricht-loses-life-sentence-appeal/

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5 things you need to know about what’s going on with Saudi Arabia and Qatar

“Although the states are arguing over their differences, it is their similarities that are the real root of the crisis.”

Read more: http://theduran.com/5-things-need-know-whats-going-qatar/

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U.K. report on terrorism and Saudi Arabia ‘too sensitive’ to be made public

“The results of a government-sponsored inquiry into the sources of funding for Islamist militant groups operating in the U.K. may be kept hidden forever due to the nature of its findings, the U.K.’s Home Office has said, according to local media. A Home Office spokesperson told the publication that a decision may be made on the inquiry after the nation’s next government is elected, but the article provided no further details.”

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/uk-report-terror-saudi-arabia-public-finding-618508

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Forget Terrorism: The Real Reason Behind The Qatar Crisis Is Natural Gas

Bloomberg also debunks the ‘official narrative’ behind the Gulf crisis and suggests that Saudi Arabia’s isolation of Qatar, ‘and the dispute’s long past and likely lingering future are best explained by natural gas.’  The reasons for nat gas as the source of discord are numerous and start in 1995 ‘when the tiny desert peninsula was about to make its first shipment of liquid natural gas from the world’s largest reservoir. The offshore North Field, which provides virtually all of Qatar’s gas, is shared with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s hated rival.'”

Read more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-06/forget-terrorism-real-reason-behind-qatar-crisis-natural-gas

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The New Gold Rush Is All About Vaults

“A rush into haven assets that began during the financial crisis is getting a new lease on life from an upsurge in populist politics and a quickening of inflation. Two firms say they’re planning to open vaults in Europe capable of holding more than 100 million euros ($112 million) in gold, offering customers lower costs than exchange-traded products and protection from rising prices.”

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/the-new-gold-rush-is-all-about-vaults

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American Retirement Under Siege By Federal Budget Circus

401(k) deductions are under attack and tax advantages of inherited IRAs are being eliminated, while retirees move to Ecuador to escape outrageous expenses.

After floating a trial balloon to see how the public would react to the elimination of 401(k) deductions or imposing immediate taxation on internal gains, similar to a campaign pledge to impose immediate taxation on internal gains of permanent life insurance policies issued starting in 2017, the Trump administration backpedaled and, after conferring, indicated that the 401(k) deduction would not be among the individual deductions eliminated by the Trump tax plan after all.

However, inherited IRAs may not be so lucky: under a Finance Committee proposal, IRA amounts that exceed $450,000 will be required to be distributed to the beneficiary within five years of the IRA owner’s death, subject to specific exceptions.  Previously, the beneficiary of the IRA would have been able to stretch the distributions over his lifetime, continuing tax deferral on the IRA owner’s original contributions for that entire period.

Meanwhile, even while tax incentives for individual retirement savings are being whittled away by politicians who will be able to count on state-funded pensions and lucrative private-sector consulting gigs for their own retirement, Americans increasingly find retirement in the US to be an arithmetical impossibility.  Consequently, American retirees are scattering to the four corners of Latin America in order to maintain their standard of living, and experiencing pushback from the locals as welfare states that depend on a high birthrate-to-immigration ratio buckle under their own weight.

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U.S. States Protect, Subsidize Bitcoin While Feds Moan About ‘Terrorism’ And ‘Illicit Activity’

The tax-haven U.S. states of Montana and New Hampshire fired first this week ahead of an ominous House hearing.

New Hampshire specifically exempted “convertible virtual currency” (a FinCEN definition from a landmark 2013 regulation) from the state’s money transmission regulations.  This means that in New Hampshire, no license, permit or fee will be required to engage in virtual currency transactions for profit.  This reversed a 2015 law which had incorporated cryptocurrency into the state’s money transmission law.

Montana has issued a $416K grant to a local Bitcoin mining firm.  The grant comes out of an economic development trust that is funded with taxes on coal miners.

Nevada has banned proposed taxes on blockchain usage as well as allowing blockchain records to be used as legal records.

Arizona now considers both blockchain records and smart contracts to be legal equivalents of all other records and contracts.

Meanwhile, a committee in the House of Representatives will focus on exploring “terrorists and illicit use of … FinTech, the national security implications of virtual currencies such as bitcoin, and the use of ‘blockchain’ technologies to record transactions and uncover illicit activities”.

In 2017, the contrast between the feds’ paranoia and obstinance and the relative forward thinking of state governments could not be more pronounced.

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7 Years of Work on Food Forest Destroyed Over Permit

The city council felled an entire stretch of this Urban Food Street, even preventing residents from collecting the fruit before the destruction.”

Read more: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/7-years-of-work-on-food-forest-destroyed-over-permit/

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Brave Police Save Town From Man Selling Veggies

“You need food, so you grow some vegetables. If you have extra you sell them on a street corner to your neighbors, and if you live in California you get arrested for it.”

Read more: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/brave-police-save-town-from-man-selling-veggies/

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