They're not jumping through any hoops, I think they're simply complying with reporting requirements. It's not on their balance sheet because being recorded as strait debt would itself be misleading. My understanding is that these sort of off-balance sheet "debt" is mostly in the form of deal terms that may or may not be expressed at some point in the future.
An analogy that comes to mind is when companies used to book future sales in the present. They got in trouble for this and is now forbidden. I recall reading that one deal had terms that transferred assets if certain conditions were not met. If terms-based debt should be booked now, then terms-based assets should as well. This stuff makes my head hurt.
Either way, as long as it's not hidden (and it's not for the public companies), then it's fine.
"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
People have literally started revolutions and wars over taxes. Empires have fallen because of taxes. People are often emotional and don't even want to think logically about taxes. I suspect that it's been like this since taxes were invented :-)
Yes and no. it's not like they ever extracted taxes from most of the natives living in the amazon jungle. Saying that you rule over people that have literally never heard of you is, IMO, stretching the definition of "rule" quite a bit :-)
Your statement doesn't make sense to me, perhaps you could clarify it? Did you mean that 85% of the population didn't vote for the current leader of the executive branch? If so then perhaps "that 85% [...] did not vote for" might be more appropriate. Or were your referring to the electoral college used to elect the POTUS?
For the first, 100% of citizens cannot vote for the federal government representatives (children, most felons, etc do not have the franchise), and about 1/2 of citizens who are eligible to vote do not. The vast majority of adult citizens can vote.
For the electoral college, that only applies to the POTUS. I agree that the electoral college is deeply flawed. But both senators and congressmen are elected directly. They are the ones who make the laws. The executive branch just enforces and executes those laws. The responsibility for the many vague laws that hand over power to the executive is on congress.
IMO, to say "85% of Americans pay taxes to a federal government that they cannot vote for" is misleading at best.
An analogy that comes to mind is when companies used to book future sales in the present. They got in trouble for this and is now forbidden. I recall reading that one deal had terms that transferred assets if certain conditions were not met. If terms-based debt should be booked now, then terms-based assets should as well. This stuff makes my head hurt.
Either way, as long as it's not hidden (and it's not for the public companies), then it's fine.