101–110 of 127 posts
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Right, so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically about the problem and helping those in the middle instead of some arbitrary line your mind made up?
Never underestimate how many good policies go nowhere because some median voter is irrationally mad at them due to something that happened decades ago.
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Actually, optimal taxation models tend to show that a base transfer at zero income with an initially "high" marginal rate for clawing back the transfer at the lowest end (but still no higher than 100%, and falling very quickly as earnings increase!) works very well. (Marginal rates then rise progressively for higher incomes, and paradoxically become lower again at the very top end, trending towards zero at the extrem…
I'd be curious to read more about that, because none of what you've written makes any sense to me right now. (Why would we want zero marginal tax on top earner who already get zero marginal utility for her money in the first place ?).
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I'd be curious to read more about that, because none of what you've written makes any sense to me right now. (Why would we want zero marginal tax on top earner who already get zero marginal utility for her money in the first place ?).
The zero marginal tax only strictly applies to the very last cent the extreme top-earner is expected to earn in the tax period. The idea is that at this theoretical extreme top-end tax bracket basically no one is paying infra-marginal taxes, hence the share of the incentive effect compared to the pure revenue effect is maximized. So you'll want to ensure that this extreme top-earner is only paying in lower, infra-mar…
And again, the utility of income for an individual is logarithmic with regard to their income, which means the marginal utility is the inverse function and that never stopped the top earners to want more.
I can't find the original tweet, but someone (half?) jokingly proposed a law that all benefits must be defined as continuously differentiable functions (thus making cliffs impossible). "Yeah, I made $1M last year. Here's my SNAP check for six cents."
If you continue with the idea of transfers, which is, in effect, the current government buying off parts of its constituents, then "democracy", whatever has remained of it in the West, will die for good. What happens if I receive money from the Government but in the same time I'm also actively opposed to said Government's actions? Will I be allowed to speak against the Government that is, as a matter of fact, paying…
Nothing? That's how it's worked in literally all functioning democracies. The purpose of any government, democratic or not, is to benefit its constituents. If it doesn't do that, we have a moral obligation to destroy the tyrants. Those benefits range in their tangible value, from hard to quantify things, like establishing public expectations of behavior (laws), to easy to quantify (subsidies like wellfare, farming subsidies, etc).
I'm truly baffled by your take that seems to insist that helping the needy somehow makes you moreso a slave to the government than the whole monopoly on legitimate use of force thing.
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The zero marginal tax only strictly applies to the very last cent the extreme top-earner is expected to earn in the tax period. The idea is that at this theoretical extreme top-end tax bracket basically no one is paying infra-marginal taxes, hence the share of the incentive effect compared to the pure revenue effect is maximized. So you'll want to ensure that this extreme top-earner is only paying in lower, infra-mar…
It's only real if you assume top earners have monetary incentives to work more, which is a very bold assumption in a world where the top earners don't even earn money through their work in the first place. And again, the utility of income for an individual is logarithmic with regard to their income, which means the marginal utility is the inverse function and that never stopped the top earners to want more.
(Besides, optimal taxation models also say that capital income should not be taxed at all, and you should concentrate "capital" taxes on sources of pure rent instead, with the rest of the burden falling on labor income and/or consumption! The intuition is that taxing invested capital is basically double taxation, since the apparent "returns" on capital are in fact wholly accounted for by time value and risk. There are important offsetting arguments, but these also become less relevant at the extreme top end of the scale.)
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Never underestimate how many good policies go nowhere because some median voter is irrationally mad at them due to something that happened decades ago.
Who would this policy be good for, and if it's not good for me, why should I care?
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Every employee is off welfare. Employment is very lucrative.
That's not true for the US, because minimum wage is so low you can be working full time and still be below the poverty line. The poverty line is not minimum wage, it's the amount it takes to afford to live.
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It's only real if you assume top earners have monetary incentives to work more, which is a very bold assumption in a world where the top earners don't even earn money through their work in the first place. And again, the utility of income for an individual is logarithmic with regard to their income, which means the marginal utility is the inverse function and that never stopped the top earners to want more.
Labor income is very important at the top end. The work a CEO performs in her superintendence of a large company generates what's economically labor income, even when paid as stock grants, options or the like. Basically all professional income (including that of devs) is labor income, not capital income. (Besides, optimal taxation models also say that capital income should not be taxed at all, and you should concentr…
If the CEO has a significant voting power in his company, then it's capital income even if the said income is “a salary”. Like it or not.
> Besides, optimal taxation models also say that capital income should not be taxed at all
It would be nice if people advocating for their political view could stop labeling their view as “optimal”, but hey, this is economics so here we are.
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Right, so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically about the problem and helping those in the middle instead of some arbitrary line your mind made up?
>so people who would use their trauma to prevent themselves from thinking logically You're using your trauma here. You keep yearning for the kindergarten lessons to be true, that we're all the same people and we should all share and all the other nonsense that was only taught to you so that the elemntary school teachers didn't have a city-burning-down-riot on their hands every day. Even if you insist that I'm the one…