371–380 of 681 posts
I see no one in this active discussion has mentioned yet Charles Murray's book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 in which Murray goes into detail about how much a program of guaranteed income for everyone would cost in the United States, and some probable effects that would have on everyone's everyday behavior. I read the book a year or two after it was publi…
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You started off with an interesting addition to the conversation, and I was hoping for a reference regarding the relationship between corporate taxes and the ultra-weathy, but instead I got a gratuitous, tired, over-used, boring, ad-hominem about Republicans that added nothing to conversation.
No he didn't. The national Republican Party is outspoken about raising taxes on lower income people, in "broadening the base". In the election-year expose of Romney's secret fundraising speeches, we learned about "the 49%" of Americans who don't pay taxes. Well, we didn't learn about it, it's a very common trope for conservative politicians. It's no secret that Republicans largely support "base broadening", as well a…
Your comment and jellicle's comment are not quite the same thing.
Even then, you are painting some of the party's platform in a negative light without showing why exactly that is their platform to begin with nor why you consider them terrible ideas. Some of their reasons may be bad, but that doesn't mean all of their reasons are.
I don't understand how people oppose unconditional basic income without also opposing the fact that automation decreases the amount of working hours available for a person(or in other words, the amount of jobs ), and thus decreases the amount of income per person, while maintaining productivity stable if not increasing it, thus making all sorts of goods cheaper. Someone enlighten me. These discussions always seem so…
If instead the basic income allows for discretionary spending, then there would be a huge market of consumers to serve, and jobs would appear to serve them. Some people will be willing to work occasionally so that they can have even more spending money for other things.
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What evidence is there of that? Because we've had a slow recovery from the last recession? That couldn't possibly be because of bad policy, no?
No, it's basically a tautology based on continual technological progression. Imagine if we could build a robot that was exactly equivalent to a human. If it ran on less energy than a human, then basically no human would be needed for any task. Now imagine a continuum of less sophisticated robots that excel in certain tasks beyond what certain humans can do. Another example I like http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/20…
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Non-financial non-real estate assets account for 5.8% of the total according to the Fed's flow of funds report (Z.1) table B.100: http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1r-5.pdf . Note this also includes non-profits but that's a relatively small distortion. Wealth is the value of everything you have less what you owe. Every item can be valued by seeing what people would pay for it, which is usually just i…
> Every item can be valued by seeing what people would pay for it "What people would pay for it" is a controversial quantity that can only be speculatively and uncertainly answered unless you are actually selling it in an open, unrestricted auction (even actual sale under real-world conditions often doesn't answer this, since its possible that both buyer and seller have non-financial interests which motivate the sale…
Real-estate appraisals are imperfect but getting within 20% most of the time is quite achievable. The main problem is for unusual or expensive properties which could be handled similarly to hard-to-value assets.
Your statement doesn't follow unless defining that subset is easy. What should be included or excluded? As we're discussing corporations, we have ample evidence of the ability to game. You could suggest closing loopholes but most of the loopholes also have legitimate uses.
You write that "capital assets are valued at sale for income purposes" is a solution to the difficulty in measuring their value. Why is this the case? Remember that the origin of this discussion is whether it's better to tax corporate income or the wealth of those who own the vast majority of that income. Are you asserting that valuing a person's equity holdings is difficult?
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> Raised taxes represent an additional expense (for the purposes of this discussion) Raised income taxes aren't really an additional expense, because they are taken out of after-tax net income, not gross income. That complicates the analysis substantially.
This is precisely the reason I don't understand it when people say the cost of the tax will be passed onto consumers. What cost? The tax is on profits...
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Seriously? What tax rate do you pay on your regular 40h a weke job? What tax rate do you pay on investments? Most people are taxed roughly 36% (28% income tax, 2% medicare, 6% social security) on their labor, however investments are only taxed at a flat 15%. Hence, the US disproportionately taxes labor over investments. Do you have other evidence that shows that investment income is in-fact taxed higher than labor in…
Corporate profits are taxed, and then they are taxed again when they redistribute the dividends. Arguably, you get double-taxed if you own stocks.
Your employer makes money and is taxed. Some of the resulting money is given to you as payroll and is taxed.
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> you still have capital gains from stock trading, etc. That's the whole point -- without corporate taxation, shares in corporations are more valuable, and the taxation is drawn from capital gains instead -- and capital gains tax should be far higher, of course (and ideally progressive as well, based on your total income). Sure, companies can "sit on their money", but they already can. And that money is presumably in…
> Sure, companies can "sit on their money", but they already can. Not entirely, it is taxed at least once when earned (corp earnings tax). Personally, high capital gains tax gives me a lot of hesitation, as you actually want to encourage people to invest and not dissuade them from doing it. Not sure exactly how this works, but Switzerland appears to be taxing total networth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_S…
Interesting. I hold the opposite position as I would rather make company re-investments more attractive.
> ...Switzerland appears to be taxing total networth.
This is a wonderful idea! Though I could imagine the games that could be played with valuations.
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The problem is that when consumer make bad decisions (i.e. don't go to the doctor and develop serious health problems), the government in the end still has to foot the bill. You can't turn people away from emergency rooms and have them die on the street.
Indeed, but the point is that with BI, they would be on the hook for those excess costs. Preventative medicine is cheaper and when the excess cost of an ER visit comes directly out of patients' pockets, they will be more diligent about prevention. Good analogy is car maintenance. Most people are very diligent about oil changes because they (inherently, I would argue) recognize the cost structure.
And I would say people don't change their oil because they know their engine will die if they go too long. They do it because it's been ingrained in their head as required maintenance, and that sort of thing is normally taken care of nowadays in a much larger package that includes filters and belts (because people vaguely remember about oil, but they're clueless about the other things.)
I'm not the one you were responding to, but my point here is that people aren't going to ensure prevention without a ton of conditioning or some greater authority forcing them to do so. The voter turnout for Australia, where people are forced by law to vote, was 93% in 2010.[0] In the USA? 41%.[1] People can't be asked to run over to their local elementary school for 20 minutes and pick the first name that pops into their head once every four years, so I doubt any sort of repercussion not mandated by law will have an effect.
I see no one in this active discussion has mentioned yet Charles Murray's book In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0844742236 in which Murray goes into detail about how much a program of guaranteed income for everyone would cost in the United States, and some probable effects that would have on everyone's everyday behavior. I read the book a year or two after it was publi…
From the author of the overtly racist Bell Curve.