281–290 of 405 posts
How the hell do Americans not think that this is BRIBERY? Are you kidding me? It's one thing to "talk" to politicians, it's another to tell them to vote a certain way and then giving them money". For crying out loud. Sometimes the U.S. can be really backwards* compared to other modern societies.
How the hell do Americans not think that this is BRIBERY? Are you kidding me? It's one thing to "talk" to politicians, it's another to tell them to vote a certain way and then giving them money". For crying out loud. Sometimes the U.S. can be really backwards* compared to other modern societies.
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I think you are confusing flat tax (proportional) with poll tax (constant).
No, I don't think he is at all. Linearly proportional taxes are regressive both because of the declining marginal utility of income, and the lower proportion of income that's discretionary at the bottom end of the income distribution.
This whole thread is full of comments from people who obviously haven't read the article / listened to the podcast in question[1]. Joseph Bankman proposed ReadyReturn in California, which is the kind of tax return pretty much the entirety of the rest of the western world uses. I.e. instead of an empty return, it's pre-filled in with the details the government knows anyway. This vastly simplifies things for most peopl…
>since taxpayers might end up paying taxes already on the books that they might have previously unintentionally evaded. To take the charitable explanation of this position: studies have shown that prices go up when the payer gets more separated from the actual payment process: credit cards, automated tollbooths, and further open-road tolling have all been shown to significantly (statistically) correlate to higher pri…
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Right! We can't make the government less awful, because happy people might not show us the support we need for our cause to make the government less awful.
The goal of those types of politicians isn't to make the government less awful. Their goal is to make "the government" out to be the enemy so that the citizens don't start thinking that they can use government to actually offset the power that corporations have (through plain capital and through regulatory capture).
You're saying people can "use" the government to compensate for the government itself preventing competition with their cronies.
Isn't that a bit of a fool's errand, even disregarding the fact that in reality we don't use the government - the government very much uses us.
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Right! We can't make the government less awful, because happy people might not show us the support we need for our cause to make the government less awful.
it is not about the government being objectively awful , it is about the government regulating . A great deal of the tax code is about giving certain groups tax breaks while preventing other people from using those to create loopholes to avoid taxes. The conservative tax lobbyists actually want to reduce the effectiveness of taxation not its complexity.
Well, the government is no more awful than any other Mafia.
Think about it. If you don't pay protection money / taxes, you get kneecaps busted / imprisoned.
Neither is something you want to happen, so you pay up. Government is essentially just a vehicle for exploiting people on a massive scale.
Your average mafia couldn't possibly pull off extorting 300 million people, but a government can and does, because people believe it's necessary "for the common good".
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We put all candidates online, for free. They are not allowed to spend money on getting elected - although they can spend their time (generally speaking, sometimes studying, a particular problem, history, how other countries do it, etc). Citizens subscribe to individuals, and groups of individuals, that best reflect their views. Additionally, citizens will be exposed to views that are slightly or significantly differe…
Either the media can talk about politicians, in which case most election outcomes will be determined by press coverage (and your system would be ineffective). Or, the media is forbidden from discussing politicians, which has a chilling effect on free speech and journalism.
Democracy rests on only 2 pillars: the freedom of speech, and a fair vote. Everything else we call democracy flows from these two things, and we cannot afford to ever give them up.
It turns out, though, that if you say something often enough, people start to believe it. This violates the spirit of the law, because "free speech" is about sharing views, not programming dependent (as opposed to independent) minds. Note that the notion of "free speech" arose in a time when it meant actually speaking in front of a crowd, or printing and distributing an anonymous flier, critical of the current ruler. It did not mean protecting the right of the ruler to use his power to repeat something so often that his people start to believe it.
It is time for a revolution in the way individuals relate to information. It is time for individuals to assert their right to refuse input that is not in their interest. It is time for communication to be by consent only. It is time for us all to stop defending the right of institutional oligarchs to use power-tools to force-feed us speech in the name of defending free speech.
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That's not withholding though (as the parent referred to; withholding towards your federal income tax bill); as you mention, that's payroll taxes, which you're going to get in retirement back as entitlements. Consider what would happen if the IRS was efficient enough (through these automated tax accounting systems) to not get an interest free loan from working America for an entire year (ie dynamically modifying ever…
"IRS gets a loan" is metaphorically true in a sense but really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The IRS doesn't actually get money from taxpayers at all. The IRS is just the bureaucracy that determines things. The money that you "pay" in federal taxes is just dollars that are deleted out of existence so that the dollars created by federal spending don't create inflation. The federal government's "cash flow" is made up en…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not withholding though (as the parent referred to; withholding towards your federal income tax bill); as you mention, that's payroll taxes, which you're going to get in retirement back as entitlements. Consider what would happen if the IRS was efficient enough (through these automated tax accounting systems) to not get an interest free loan from working America for an entire year (ie dynamically modifying ever…
"IRS gets a loan" is metaphorically true in a sense but really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The IRS doesn't actually get money from taxpayers at all. The IRS is just the bureaucracy that determines things. The money that you "pay" in federal taxes is just dollars that are deleted out of existence so that the dollars created by federal spending don't create inflation. The federal government's "cash flow" is made up en…
No, it's not. Federal government revenue is real revenue, federal government borrowing is real borrowing, and federal government spending is real spending. The Federal Reserve creates and destroys money, but that monetary action is separate from the fiscal action of government revenue, borrowing, and spending.
There's a lot of talk here about efficiency and many efforts to strive for it. What would it take to raise 10x that much and provide Prof. Bankman with a war chest that stands a good chance of succeeding?