greenwich26

>Edit: Come to think of it, also there were also a few Roman Emperors from North Africa!

North Africa, like most of the Mediterranean, was white in Roman times. North Africa is only swarthy today in the aftermath of Arab conquest in the 7th and 8th centuries.

> What does "white" mean? Are you telling me the Romans were British? German? Nordic?

It means that the second image, showing Roman senators played by a few dozen white Italian extras, is a perfectly likely depiction, and the caption about how real Roman senators were much more swarthy ("like modern Italians", he claims) is nonsense.

(Of course, the HBO show was filmed in Italy, and almost all the extras and background characters were Italians.)

Even if I am wrong, he is wrong too.

I was responding to his lengthy diversion on the commutabality of British and Italian actors, which seems to be rooted in the delusional American notion (dating back to the late 19th century, recently revived by lefties who deny the existence of white native European nations) that Italians aren't "white". In reality, Italian and British phenotype variation overlaps significantly.

According to the 2020 figures, national defense was 11% of federal spending. Discretionary vs. mandatory seems irrelevant here. We might as well say military spending is 100% of military spending. It's just dividing it by something to make it sound higher, usually for propaganda purposes.

Nevertheless I totally agree some part of that 11% will benefit business and commerce. But it is still a terrible deal. In any other context no one would ever buy something with a 90% "commission".

US federal spending 2020: $7 trillion

The entire budget of #1 is about 3% of that, and #2 and #3 around 1%.

What a terrible deal.

These sort of administrative and bureaucratic activities are less than 1% of federal spending though. So your argument makes no sense.

Various levels of local governments provide many services and benefits for my physical property located in their jurisdictions, so I do not oppose a reasonable property tax. But the federal government provides no services or benefits to the securities in my vault, so a general federal wealth tax on them is altogether different, and I oppose it.

Sounds pretty authoritarian.

> Except the uber wealthy who can afford to lose money to pay taxes for the infrastructure that has enabled their explosive asset growth.

Federal income tax almost never gets used for infrastructure. Infrastructure is mostly built by state and local governments, which receive most of their income from sales tax and property tax, and other taxes, which are already almost entirely paid by businesses. So, they are already paying for the infrastructure that enabled their growth.

Not an argument.

Food stamp recipients are usually obese

They can't "rise up" from the couch, do you really think they are going to "rise up" and start a revolution?

$900 million = 5 days of federal food stamps spending

$3-4 billion = 3 weeks of federal food stamps spending

I know which I think is the better government expenditure

Cicero was a conservative in some ways. But I don't think he was particularly prejudiced or classist, for the time. Remember that he was technically a plebeian himself, although obviously a privileged and successful one.

Countries competing with each other to offer attractive business environments with the lowest taxes is a race to the top, not the bottom.