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American Equity
171–180 of 552 posts
Re: American Equity
#172I completely support this idea. Additionally, I think the USA needs to move away from anything that doesn't reflect majority rule. For example, abolish the Senate, end the electoral college, end gerrymandering, and reform campaign financing.
The USA could be a lot more democratic than it is at present and until that is fixed, you will keep seeing a minority of the population control policies that affect the whole nation.
Re: American Equity
#173Can someone actually explain what Sam wants to do here? I've read the post 4 times and I still can't see an y sort of plan, numbers, etc to actually critique, Which is odd because he specifically ask you to give feedback but never follows through on presenting the actual idea. He does motivate why he thinks a share of the GDP is so he gets the why, but never actually gets into the what, and how. I mean the GDP isn't…
Universal basic income. He wants to (numbers _entirely fabricated here_) tax 20% of US GDP and then give that money evenly to all adults, therefore giving every adult American an equal share of 20% of the GDP (which would be about $14,000 per year per adult).
Re: American Equity
#174To make this seem less socialistic. Favorable tax treatment to mutual (customer owned) and employee owned companies would be a good route to go.
Re: American Equity
#175Can someone actually explain what Sam wants to do here? I've read the post 4 times and I still can't see an y sort of plan, numbers, etc to actually critique, Which is odd because he specifically ask you to give feedback but never follows through on presenting the actual idea. He does motivate why he thinks a share of the GDP is so he gets the why, but never actually gets into the what, and how. I mean the GDP isn't…
An annual bonus just for being an American.
I think it would be an annual bonus for some Americans, and an annual tax increase for others. As someone who, I suspect, would be in the second group, I feel like we do enough of this kind of thing already.
Re: American Equity
#176People already have a share in the GDP. That's what it is, the total domestic product, the sum of all the little parts. The problem is not that people don't have share in it (and this goes for every country, not just for the USA), but that they have a disproportionate share in it. Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that rai…
> Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping. Or go a step further do what nobody has the balls to do: tax wealth That's what all the…
From the perspective of trying to get the budget balanced, taxing wealth is probably the single most efficient way to do it.
From the perspective of the tax code as an incentive system, taxing wealth is a strange thing—it makes people feel less interest in becoming wealthy, and thereby causes fewer GDP-building things to happen! (This is also, for a similar reason, why economists don't like corporate taxes or trade tariffs: they disincentivize exactly the things that help the economy the most.)
Economists are usually more in favor of a land-value tax, because it punishes people for something that doesn't build GDP (investing their wealth into property and then sitting on it as it appreciates), and encourages them to instead do things that do build GDP (like investing their wealth into companies.) A land-value tax is still essentially a luxury tax, but it doesn't have the same problem of unilaterally discouraging GDP creation that taxing wealth does.
Re: American Equity
#177In short, no. While we should address the income and wealth gaps in America through measures to guarantee more to the people at the bottom, we should resist further attempts at quantifying human life and activity in economic terms.
(Also, in reality we all own in a share of the massive debt the federal government has taken on to fund wars and corporate welfare. So much for that.)
Re: American Equity
#178> I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of us in making the country as successful as possible—the better the country does, the better everyone does—and give more people a fair shot at achieving the life they want. And we all work together to create the system that generates so much prosperity.
And here I thought I was getting a slice of the GDP when I get a paycheck every 2 weeks.
Re: American Equity
#179Whole I agree with the underlying idea, the national level seems a bit arbitrary. Why not global gdp, distributed globally, to really help engage the most disenfranchised people? Why not at a state or city level, so you feel like you can have a real impact?
Re: American Equity
#180Matt Levine has been musing on some issues adjacent to this one over the last year, e.g.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-ind...
The basic observation being that if we can get the benefits of capitalism when most equity is owned by a passive investment fund like an index tracker, then what's the problem with the state owning all the equity in that tracker, and redistributing the proceeds to the population?
Note that there are a few significant questions left unanswered in there, but the fundamental question of "if index trackers work why wouldn't communism" is quite provocative.