191–200 of 618 posts
Without their bizarre accounting, the actual number is closer to $2T spent. It's apples and oranges, but since people love making the comparison, the last 20 years of war would be enough to cover the cost of Medicare for All for... 6 months.
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Since this is based on US spending I am assuming you are talking about US taxes, in which case, no you are not paying 55% in taxes.
The top US tax bracket is 37% and top California bracket is 13.3% for a total marginal rate of of 50.3%. If you're self-employed or a contractor you'll have the employer side too so I could see that hitting 55%. And that's just income tax; property and sales tax could easy push higher than that. A poor person isn't paying that rate, but a wealthy person may well
2. FICA-SS makes up the majority of FICA tax and caps out at ~$140k which means that it has diminishing effective tax rate beyond that amount. Though Medicare does go from 1.45 up to 2.something at some amount of income.
3. Tax rates generally don't stack the way that you made them. ie: You can't just add tax rates together.
4. Sales and Property taxes are consumption taxes and are choices.
You can play all these games about taxes, but when you actually do the tax math, it's never as much as people think it is. That's not to say taxes aren't high in California: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#vDUUV..., but being single and earning $1MM gets you to like a 47% effective tax rate. Even with a large property tax bill and sales tax, you aren't getting to 55%.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wages are quite inflated in the USA and $1000/year is not a livable income (i.e. sufficient for cheap housing, cheap food, water, electricity, basic appliances like a fridge and washing machine, heating, and pretty much nothing else) even in Europe where I'm from. Or am I missing the point of a UBI?
$1000 per person is a big deal, and would cover rent or mortgage costs for most of the people I know. Though honestly, a lot my family members would squander it on things like new cars or electronics instead of paying off debt or investing for retirement..
Perhaps they should've spent this much on medical research instead. For the same money perhaps we could save a few million people dying of various diseases or cancer. It would take a whole lot of terrorist events to counter the benefits of significant R&D funding for medicine (or maybe a lot of other things).
First, is there any equivalent political will for any of the examples you, or anybody else, mentioned?
Second, it’s hard to imagine mobilizing as many doctors into temporary housing as you can soldiers, continuously for almost 2 decades. From a practical perspective this seems unlikely no matter how well intended.
Third, I haven’t seen any consideration of logistical factors for any counter examples in any of the comments here. This is the one thing that separates fantasy from reality, even more than money or willpower.
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I feel this is not as simple as this. It's a nice appeal but very removed from reality. If you didn't have strong enough army to protect you, then you might loose, schools hospitals and what not... Unfortunatly, in a real world a war is not a maybe question but a when question. The question is what amount of defense expenditure is adequate? And that a political question, with no right or wrong answers that for the vo…
> If you didn't have strong enough army to protect you, then you might loose, schools hospitals and what not... Who the hell is going to attack us before we can mount a response?! We lost a mere 3000 people and launched into 20 years of madness and insanity, all because we were unwilling to blame a president and a political party who was asleep at the wheel, who didn't even bother to pay attention to the terrorist at…
To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…
In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army. In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing w…
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> $1000 a year would have made a nice universal basic income for the last 20 years. I think you mean per month, not year. The idea of UBI is to give everyone a subsistence income so they can devote themselves to skill development and career advancement, even/especially while caring for kids. $1000/year doesn't remotely accomplish that.
No, $20,000 per tax payer is $1,000 per year over the last 20 years we've been in Afghanistan. Which comes out to a whopping $83.33 per month. I think this just illustrates how expensive these UBI plans really are... particularly the ones that flaunt several thousand dollar payments to every tax payer per month.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is half of the military budget, which is less than half of discretionary spending, which is much less than half of total federal spending.
The other thing to keep in mind is that most of the UBI money would be immediately recaptured in income tax. Making it Universal keeps the logistics simpler, but a wealthy person should end up with little to negative extra money from a reasonable UBI implementation.
> particularly the ones that flaunt several thousand dollar payments to every tax payer per month.
Who's suggesting that much? And are they suggesting it for normal circumstances where people are able to work?
To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…
In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army. In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing w…
The dumbest thing we did in Iraq was to do the functional equivalent of the Taliban doing reprisals by disbanding the military, government, and Ba’ath party. It created a mass unemployment problem and swelled the ranks of the opposition with listless now unemployed people.
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In terms of cutting costs, the way we exited Afghanistan is the best way to do it. Pull out overnight, abandon all the equipment, and the rapid takeover by the Taliban means we don't need to keep running bombing missions to support a slowly retreating national army. In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing w…
We also literally left giant weapon caches for the Taliban to use. We will pay for that, but in a different way.
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Climate change will destabilize the world more than any "terrorists" could. Also would've been nice to have seen 6.4 trillion go into renewables tech and investments ~ 20 years ago.
$6.4T into renewables and storage over the past 20 years would have decarbonized the US grid several time over, accelerated the tech curve drastically, nearly completely transitioned us to EVs, and we'd probably have decarbonized a good chunk of industry that is hard to decarbonize now. We'd have cheaper energy than we do today, and cheaper energy forever. We could have been looking at current levels of climate chang…