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American Equity

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Re: American Equity

#281

Post by touchofevil »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #223
touchofevil wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Senate doesn't reflect majority rule based on population. California has 38.3 million residents, Wyoming has 600K residents [1] but both states have 2 senate votes. Due to this, Wyoming residents have much greater voting power in the Senate than residents of CA. Edit: And since bills must be passed by both the House and the Senate, Wyoming residents have much more power over what becomes law than CA residents do.…

Hmm, well perhaps (I'm venturing into the unknown here) the problem isn't really protecting the majority from the minority (or vice versa) but protecting the weak from the powerful. When I see proposals like: >end gerrymandering, and reform campaign financing I think those are good because they weaken the powerful (the current majority party and the rich) to enable the weak. But I also believe that without the senate…

Well, the real question to me is do we think of people who live in Wyoming as "Wyomingers" and those in CA as Californians? I don't think so. We just think of everyone in the USA as Americans. So why should it be that some Americans (those who live in Wyoming) having outsized voting power over national laws? A minority of Americans is controlling the country via the methods I mentioned. It doesn't seem to be working out very well. We need to make sure that the majority of Americans have veto power over things like electing Donald Trump, the current tax bill, the attempts to end Obamacare.

Re: American Equity

#282

Post by svachalek »

24gttghh wrote: post #268
touchofevil wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Senate doesn't reflect majority rule based on population. California has 38.3 million residents, Wyoming has 600K residents [1] but both states have 2 senate votes. Due to this, Wyoming residents have much greater voting power in the Senate than residents of CA. Edit: And since bills must be passed by both the House and the Senate, Wyoming residents have much more power over what becomes law than CA residents do.…

You are ignoring the fact that Wyoming only has 1 representative in the house, which is where the balancing piece comes in.

It's not a balancing piece, it's a balanced piece. Abolishing the Senate would leave only the House, the balanced piece.

Re: American Equity

#283

Post by touchofevil »

24gttghh wrote: post #268
touchofevil wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Senate doesn't reflect majority rule based on population. California has 38.3 million residents, Wyoming has 600K residents [1] but both states have 2 senate votes. Due to this, Wyoming residents have much greater voting power in the Senate than residents of CA. Edit: And since bills must be passed by both the House and the Senate, Wyoming residents have much more power over what becomes law than CA residents do.…

You are ignoring the fact that Wyoming only has 1 representative in the house, which is where the balancing piece comes in.

Yes, and this would be fine if the senate did not exist. But the senate can kill anything that the house proposes. So Wyoming has undue influence over what the (correctly balanced) house tries to make law.

Re: American Equity

#284

Post by gozur88 »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #262
gozur88 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true there's nothing perfect under the sun. But I think the financial judgement of MSFT vs some guy's hobby project is pretty sound, and in general price signals work pretty well as a message to producers.

I agree. However, fatal errors within the money system (i.e. climate change, cyclical poverty) must be addressed, which is what this whole thread is about.

Well, I would have to look at pc86's app first.

Re: American Equity

#285

Post by touchofevil »

leifaffles wrote: post #269
touchofevil wrote: post #172

I 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 nat…

Why is pure democracy a good thing in and of itself?

Because it's harder to corrupt a "pure" democracy. If you have a policy that is bad for the population at large, but good for your own interests, in a "pure" democracy then you will have to convince a majority of the voters to vote against their own interests.

Re: American Equity

#286

Post by randallsquared »

ticviking wrote: post #258
gehwartzen wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify what you mean? a UBI seems like pretty straight forward wealth re-distribution which I generally don't see described in most capitalist philosophies. Everyone gets $10k. Obviously not everyone is going to pay $10k in taxes otherwise the system would be pointless and we could instead just eliminate taxes altogether. Those at the bottom would benefit, those at the top would pay more in taxes, and some…

Each act of homesteading is an act of force against everyone else, who previously enjoyed free access to that land/resource. A UBI is a payment for the lost access.

While I don't disagree with this, I don't think that Georgism can justify a large enough payment to have the effects that people expect of UBI. The value of land (meaning all natural resources in their natural state) is ultimately pretty low compared to all the other value in the world. Per wikipedia, all US land is worth less than two times GDP.

Re: American Equity

#287

Post by beat »

megaman22 wrote: post #220
JonFish85 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the perspective of trying to get the budget balanced, taxing wealth is probably the single most efficient way to do it. Why? As a total layman, wouldn't it be incredibly inefficient? If we tax the wealth of, say, the top 100 richest Americans, wouldn't that cause some pretty terrible downsides? If we force them to sell their holdings, wouldn't that ripple through the economy? Take Jeff Bezos--if you forced him…

The problem is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

Only if they have a fixed, non-growing amount. Which isn't ever the case.

Re: American Equity

#288

Post by pcarolan »

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.

~ Bobby Kennedy 1968

Re: American Equity

#289

Post by dnautics »

There is a converse question: Why do we continuously take equity out of our citizens and deposit it mostly into the financial sector, but also directly to big contractors?

Re: American Equity

#290

Post by WalterBright »

koolba wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #16

People 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…

It'd be better to tax things we don't want, like pollution.
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