It's amazing how every economic issue can be solved by demanding less of the rich and powerful and demanding more of the poor.
Taxing Growth
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Taxing Growth
#12Flat tax and dregulation. Pretending like they are new ideas.
Every time someone shares something it has to be new, otherwise it's not worthy of your attention? Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind, instead of the sharing the first knee-jerky reaction that popped up in your head that just touches the surface?
But the episode has just as little behind their claims. Tech sector is up. Why? Because of deregulation. Ok, how? Nah, moving on to classic cars.
Re: Taxing Growth
#13Flat tax and dregulation. Pretending like they are new ideas.
In the US about twenty years ago, there was a minor movement for a flat sales tax that would replace all other taxes. I lived in Georgia at the time, which was the epicenter of support for the idea. Proponents got themselves stuck in a metaphoric tarpit when they wouldn't accept that most people's way of calculating sales tax was different than what they promoted. At least in the US, if there's a 7% sales tax, it means if you buy something for a dollar, you pay seven cents in tax. Their flat sales tax would have been 30% using this method, but they wanted to promote it as being only 23% since $0.30 is 23% of $1.30.
I'm sure there were other reasons why it failed, but for the people I knew who supported it, claiming it to be a 23% sales tax instead of a 30% sales tax was a hill they were willing to let the whole thing die on (and it did die). Lots of people who casually supported it at first when they heard 23%, lost interest when it was clarified what that really meant. The difference between 23% and 30% isn't all that great but if you're going to overhaul the tax system, trust in those who are doing it is needed.
Re: Taxing Growth
#14GDP per capita has been declining in the UK and this is indeed a big issue (people are getting poorer) hidden behind the marginal growth of the overall GDP created by high immigration. This is linked to a long-standing productivity problem.
Some of the ideas bring us back to the Brexit debate. Being outside the EU allows a freedom of action but, depending how far deregulation and law taxes are taken, that also means retaliatory barriers from the EU, which is still the largest trading partner (41% of exports, twice the volume to the 2nd export market, which is the US).
Re: Taxing Growth
#15Flat tax and dregulation. Pretending like they are new ideas.
Gosh, they have statistics! By a man. A man from Goldman! "I was quoted by a man from Goldman's in the mansion house, that in Hong Kong it cost them $70 to onboard a client. In the UK, it now costs them $10,000 to onboard a client just because of the regulation." Well I'll be darned!
It’s probably because of bureaucracy at Goldman - know your customer checks are pretty cheap and there’s APIs that can do it.
Re: Taxing Growth
#16The problem with the UK tax system is not that it is progressive. In fact, once you add NI it is not all that strongly progressive.
The problem is that complexity of tax law, the number of loopholes, incentives, refunds....
The really big problem is that people on low incomes do not have an incentive to work because the loss of benefits means they are barely any better off from working. That is a strong argument for UBI, or at least a much slower rate of loss of benefits so people keep more of their income.
There are a lot of imprecise and misleading claims made here, for example:
> people who are talented, people who are wealthy, people who have capital, people who have entrepreneurial skills, they can move.
Talent, wealth, and entrepreneurial skills are not the same thing. Wealth is often inherited, talented people may be employed and not all talents are all that portable. While capital can be moved the assets that it is tied up in cannot - you can see your business and move, but that just means someone else buys your business. A wealthy person does not have to live where their investments are.
Re: Taxing Growth
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time someone shares something it has to be new, otherwise it's not worthy of your attention? Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind, instead of the sharing the first knee-jerky reaction that popped up in your head that just touches the surface?
But the episode has just as little behind their claims. Tech sector is up. Why? Because of deregulation. Ok, how? Nah, moving on to classic cars.
Ok, share those opinions, views and perspectives then, instead of just attacking the surface of "Well, nothing here is new so no one should care".
Re: Taxing Growth
#18Flat tax and dregulation. Pretending like they are new ideas.
Every time someone shares something it has to be new, otherwise it's not worthy of your attention? Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind, instead of the sharing the first knee-jerky reaction that popped up in your head that just touches the surface?
The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic. It’s very rare these days to see citations or even arguments that explain personal reasoning. Just like Reddit and Facebook, commenters mostly write what they think or feel as if it were unyielding fact, and the most common denominator (read: boring, derivative, often oversimplified assumptions) rise to the top via the voting system.
Re: Taxing Growth
#19> Please write a transcript of an interview with an imaginary economist who considers that neoliberalism doesn't work because we haven't been far enough and blame any sort of regulations. Don't mention any material constraints like the availability of cheap energy sources. Don't mention libertarianism. Please also provide a prompt for the TTS model (the discussion needs to sound serious and academic).
Re: Taxing Growth
#20Flat tax and dregulation. Pretending like they are new ideas.
Every time someone shares something it has to be new, otherwise it's not worthy of your attention? Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind, instead of the sharing the first knee-jerky reaction that popped up in your head that just touches the surface?
The constructive criticism is that this has been the economic policy of the US for the last 40 years.
It's been a disaster that's lead to wealth consolidation not seen since the gilded age while bringing back old terrible concepts (such as company towns [1]). It's wrecked the middle class.
The fact is, tax isn't what gets in the way of company growth and innovation. It shockingly is actually the opposite. When you have buybacks, low taxes, and easy mergers and acquisitions, it encourages companies to behave in manners not good for the company but good for the owners of the company. That means sending money to stock buybacks, buying out competition, suppressing wages, and cutting corners which overall kill quality. That's because the name of the game is capturing as much money as possible.
High tax and strong corporate regulations like we had in the 50s, 60s, and 70s changes the perspective of companies. If you give a company owner the choice to spend a dollar in taxes or spend it on employee benefits, they'll spend it on employee benefits. But leave a loophole for how they can circuitously capture that dollar for themselves and they'll do that every time.
The tax cut and deregulation era of Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden has been a trainwreck that has lead us right up to the problems we have today. Nothing is affordable and the unrestrained capitalism has made it more expensive than ever just to live with everything getting worse year over year.
This guy pretends like the economic policy he's proposing isn't what we've been running and that's why it's so laughable dumb.