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Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

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Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#221

Post by tptacek »

mattmcknight wrote: post #102
tptacek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty disingenuous. I've held low-wage jobs, and so have most of the members of my immediate family, and taxes took a serious bite out our paychecks. You are referring to the federal income tax, as many people do in debates like this, but lower-middle class people pay a much greater percentage of their income in payroll taxes than do wealthy people; the "income tax" debate is misleading.

That's only because payroll taxes were sold as a retirement plan contribution for yourself. The idea is that you get all of that money back plus interest. Sadly, it's not run that way. People have the let the money be spent on other items for years, and now they are retiring and it's not there.

It isn't? Social security is solvent assuming no funding changes until 2037.

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#222

Post by sliverstorm »

forensic wrote: post #30

Scott Adams is just talking about moving towards a visible aristocracy. These are the first baby steps. Soon the rich will have special privileges just like the old days.

On the other hand, a mild aristocracy does seem better than the nation crumbling under debt.

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#223

Post by jws »

cookiecaper wrote: post #183
jws wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except with wealth you can pay a local lawyer to plead it to a non-moving violation, a ludicrously inflated "court cost", and a "donation" to the local law enforcement retirement fund. (Kirksville Missouri, I'm looking at you.) The wealthy can opt for a "pay X now" instead of "Y over time where Y>X" option. Wealth buys you a discount.

And all of that is likely to cost much more than just paying the fine and moving on. It sounds like the rich guy got taken to task for his attempts to weasel out of it in the case you're referring to. He eventually got what he wanted, I guess, which is no points, but it sounds like it cost a lot of money (unless his donation to the pension fund and his lawyer's hourly rate was $25).

The points would have cost much more in future insurance policy premiums.

The total cost of the fix is about $250 and you get to keep your "safe driver" rate or whatever the insurance company does for point-free/accident-free drivers.

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#224

Post by philwelch »

nostrademons wrote: post #192
philwelch wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aristocracy is different from this. Generally, aristocracy is both hereditary and disconnected from actual wealth. In the UK, JK Rowling, even though she is richer than the Queen, is not an aristocrat. She is, in fact, upper middle class. Someone who's born into the aristocracy, even if they're not especially wealthy, is an aristocrat.

I wonder if we're headed towards a hereditary aristocracy as well, because of assortative mating. People tend to marry others in the same social class; rich marry rich, smart marry smart, and highly-educated marry highly-educated. And then they tend to pass on those advantages to their children. It doesn't take all that many generations before that becomes entrenched and it becomes impossible to jump from one class t…

People can move up or down a social class or two. I know people who came from fairly little wealth who earn decent urban-professional six-figure salaries, and people come out of families in the upper-middle professional class and become multimillionaire entrepreneurs. (Likewise, other people move down.)

Entrenched aristocracies happen when you have old money that looks down on the "nouveau riche". Every country has an old money class that considers itself more elite than the nouveau riche, of course, but they aren't really an entrenched aristocracy unless the rest of society agrees with them.

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#225

Post by orijing »

grego wrote: post #166

How about just let the rich be rich and get richer, but making it very hard to pass on inheritance. So their kids would be on equal playing field with everybody else. That would make it their vested interest to improve conditions in that field for all.

What would stop them from just giving their money away before they die?

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#227

Post by alsomike »

nostrademons wrote: post #188
LiveTheDream wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the plan provides for everyone to earn 90k regardless of what they actually do, there is no incentive to be productive at all, (much less to be productive enough to account for those who produce very little). Having my name on a list as the X most productive person is not incentive. Being able to spend the money I earn, is.

What do you need to spend money on that you can't afford with $90K? And why do you want to buy it over something that you could afford? In my experience, virtually everything that falls into that category is some sort of status symbol. The grandparent poster is suggesting replacing these implicit status symbols with an explicit one. The part about his proposal that I'd miss is the ability to save up your high income…

> I'd miss is the ability to save up your high income for a few years so that you could compensate for a low income the next few years

I was thinking that people could work part-time and earn 50% of standard income. Median household income is around $50k right now, so this is a decent standard of living.

> if you provide some useful service and that service would be made more useful if you could hire a graphic designer to make it pretty, you wouldn't be able to

A two-person household where both members worked full time would be making 3.6x the current median household income, which is way more than they need. This surplus could be used as investment capital, where it would be distributed and decentralized, so it would be much easier to do Kickstarter-style funding. If we accept $75k at the point where money stops having an impact on happiness, individuals would have 20% above that line to play with for those kinds of things. Essentially, the stack ranking converts your surplus productivity into status for you, and distributed evenly to your friends and neighbors, who have the power to return it to you if they think your project is socially or economically valuable.

Some good points though, especially the part about profit as an index of what makes people happy. The problem with our current system is that this is only true if your profits come from people who make less than $75k. 40% of consumer spending is driven by people in the top 10% ($82,500 annual income), so it's fair to say that that spending is misallocated and doesn't contribute to overall happiness.

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#228

Post by sixtofour »

izendejas wrote: post #217
axod wrote: post #76

Taxing the rich (even more than they are already which IMHO is a lot ) is just punishing success and rewarding failure.

Of all those that agree with such argument, I'd like to get an answer to these questions: 1) have you traveled to a developing|third-world country? 2) if you haven't, you should. if you have... 2a) what price tag do you put on first-class infrastructure that makes your business run smoothly, not to mention make it safer to deliver? 2b) what price tag do you pay to ensure that you have a well-nourished and healthy wor…

2d) a workforce that is relatively well off enough that there's little incentive for them to steal your assets or time.

Edit: 2e) comfortable enough not to wage revolution against your ass.

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#229

Post by seabee »

reubenyeah wrote: post #196
megablast wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it, lots of my friends like it as well. If they did not enact it, things on the road would be worse. They just need to make it more. The cost of public transport is ridiculous, London has to be the most expensive city to travel around.

Really? You think £1.30 to get a bus as far as you like is expensive? and £4 to get as many buses as you like in a day is expensive?

Maybe not for you. I did a little calculation at http://listentotaxman.com/ and put in the minimum wage for a 37.5 hour week. If you need to take a few buses to get to work, over 10% of your £190 weekly pay packet gets eaten up on travel.

It's definitely cheaper (though less flexible) than running a car on your own, but some of the costs of a car can be spread between more than one person, which isn't the case with public transport.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that teenagers now get free bus travel and discounted Tube fares. I could've done with that a few years ago!

Re: Scott Adams: How to Tax the Rich

#230

Post by zbanks »

ramanujan wrote: post #219
jarek wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get a ticket for exceeding the speed limit by 1 mph, there are larger issues at hand than how much this ticket will cost you. Yes, speed limits are to an extent arbitrary, but practical alternative is a total judgment call. Do you always know the entirety of the condition of your car, and if not, should you be limited to 30 mph? Should drivers' licenses include a quantifiable evaluation of your skill and abili…

> practical alternative is a total judgment call Right. So is the Autobahn actually all that accident prone? 55 was initially marketed as something that saved gas. After that was debunked, it was changed to "55 saves lives".

It's also been shown that you can maximize the throughput of a highway if the speed limit is 45mph. Too high, and you need to increase the space between cars.

Although 55mph != 45mph, it's pretty close. It also doesn't serve the individual, but if can't get the cars through fast enough, the traffic will build up eventually.

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