411–420 of 444 posts
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Amazon's tax rate is not 0%. Their payroll tax bill for any given month is more than any and all of the taxes you will pay in your lifetime. To say nothing of the many other taxes they pay.
You can say nothing about the many other taxes they pay because there aren't any that are more than round-off error. What, they pay sales tax when they buy pencils?
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Wealth is not taxed. If you have a large amount of wealth, you don't need income, and it's likely that — if you do have income — your income represents a very small percentage of your net worth growth over time. Most of it is capital gains, which: 1. Are taxed at a much lower rate, and, 2. Are only taxed when the gains are "realized," e.g. when you sell at a profit. As a result, if you have a large amount of wealth,…
It does't make sense to take wealth though. The only way wealth can increase (in a usuable liquid form at least) is through income, which is already taxed. If I eat beans and rice for 10 years to help save for a awesome retirement, I should be able to save that money.
Taxing upon realization also makes sense to me, but the very low long-term capital gains tax makes less sense to me. If you made a million dollars, I don't care if you made it via investment or by working for someone — you should support society in the same degree.
I like the idea of freeing people to be able to quit and get a new job any time, where quitting today means a real threat of losing one's home, transportation, or ability to eat (never mind fueling the cycle of debt that keeps so many down). I think it would be a net benefit if people could tell oppressive employers to fuck off without fear. However, a welfare state is a real thing to be worried about. My sister work…
To be fair though, how much of that is due to the harsh winter conditions and long winter nights? A quick glance of the Google query "Alaska depressed winter" makes it look like it might be more of a weather/sun issue.
Also
>Alaska's alcohol mortality rate is three times the national average
http://www.newsminer.com/news/akrecovery/alaska-still-wrestl...
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It effectively raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits.
It's functionally shows up as a cost, but that doesn't make it a tax. Consider: if a company had no profits at all, then for some period of time it would still (1) pay its employees (2) pay the payroll tax on behalf of those employees. The amount of payroll tax is 100% determined by employee compensation, not corporate profit (even if those two are indirectly connected). You're more or less arguing that employee comp…
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“A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil” It’s always puzzling to me when people equate wealth with evil. Why the unnecessary moralizing? Just say “concentrated wealth in the hands of the few has the potential to cause systemic societal harm” No need to paint it as a battle of good vs evil, it severely diminishes the substance of your point.
Actually a lot of them do very bad things with their money that are very harmful to society, whether it's Bill Gates fraternizing with a convicted child sex trafficker, Peter Thiel platforming for racist demagogue Trump, Vinod Khosla spending unlimited amounts of money to carve out private access to beaches, or running for president and sinking a record setting amount of money on his campaign like Michael Bloomberg i…
A rather large chunk of billionaire's money is used to pay for a huge portion of the government (directly). Not to mention the amount of extra wealth in the world that (some of them) have created, which also turns into tax revenue.
My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.
Is this an issue with UBI though? Of course the prices will go up because of supply/demand changes. And thus 12k/year won’t go as far as it does now. That’s not a bad thing though. The people who are at rock bottom still > 0. Leeches won’t be able to do nothing and exist off 12k. For most rent payers, their life will remain the same as it is today: the economy will reach a new equilibrium and their lives will be no b…
In fact, it would make the lives of the middle/lower class worse off because the tax is in the form of VAT and the removal of welfare benefits.
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Okay, but we're talking about UBI, and in UBI systems, there aren't any people that are just barely over the threshold. I don't really see folks resenting welfare. I see a whole lot of folks who have probably never experienced welfare, though, and who are ready to judge those who do receive it. I don't consider this a reasonable line of thought, though, but rather an indicator of bigotry and poor empathy.
The rich have no reason to resent the system, they've done quite well through it, and the vast majority will treat any new tax as simply a cost to minimize. From a game-theory POV, they act predictably. In contrast, low-income locales often do not act logically: https://thefederalist.com/2015/12/01/why-poor-locales-vote-f... The working poor resent the non-working poor for being lazy and freeloading. As you mentioned…
The article you linked commits a dire mistake: They claim that a government that took care of its lazy and poor would encourage the poor to be lazier and the lazy to be poorer, but when has there ever been such a government that actually does care for its lazy and poor? Their claim is without evidence and based upon a style of governance that hasn't yet been tried. In other words, their claim is anti-inductive and generates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Your last two paragraphs are in conflict. UBI would lift people out of poverty in ways that existing welfare programs don't, and it's via the same effect I pointed out before: UBI's effects taper off slowly as people improve their situations, rather than producing more all-or-nothing thresholds which trap people.
The bigotry that I am complaining about is the bigotry that you exhibit: That of putting words and actions in the mouths of the poor. I wonder whether you have ever lived below the poverty line.
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Every redistributive program that gives the poor more money increases demand for goods that poor people want - that's the whole point! It's no problem because supply can adjust to compensate - the exception to this is land, which is why a UBI ought to be funded with a land value tax. This is why Yang's UBI isn't very good, because it is sales tax funded (he's too much of a centrist to tackle land and capital, touchin…
I think it's smarter to go after automation and consumption than land value tax as of this moment. It's a lot harder to measure the true value of land compared to consumption. Also, the VAT can also be adjusted for non essential goods. Consumption is quite strong in this country. It's wise to target that.
Excluding others from a valuable natural resource is deeply immoral unless compensation to those excluded is paid.
The difficulty(or not) of measuring the "true value" of that compensation isn't a justifiable reason that we should as close to it as is reasonably possible.
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Working homelessness is a thing in California because of outrageous housing costs. The problem there isn't insufficient wages, it's insufficient local housing. You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.
> You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty. I live in the Midwest, and this is simply not an accurate description of Midwest finances. These people who live on $12k/yr are either already asset rich (i.e., own their own house/car/etc) or are having their friends/family/roommates or the state pick up some of their living expenses, in one way or another. If they do…
The federal poverty line for the lower 48 states is $12,490. Is your objection only that you want to make the UBI $12,500 instead of $12,000?
Notice that you could also make up the other $500 by working a minimum wage job for less than two weeks out of the year.
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> " ...the other key about UBI is everyone gets it, no matter if wealthy or poor " Of course if you have anything above poverty level income, it gets snatched right back plus whole lot more though taxes to cover the other UBI recipients who don't. The "everybody gets UBI" rhetoric doesn't really fool anybody; money doesn't come out of thin air.
This is factually incorrect, although it's possible you know that and are just overstating your case. Specifically, you have to spend $120k/year on nonessentials to break even with the Freedom Dividend plan. That's a far cry from "anything above poverty level... gets snatched back plus a whole lot more".
Moreover, even if things go as planned initially, eventually that $1k a month will start creeping up because of public and other political pressure. The world is not going to stand still.
Even the great European democracies can't afford UBI (and they're not even covering the costs for their own military defense!). There is no reason to believe that the United States can.