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The Middle-Class Squeeze

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31–40 of 58 posts

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes also punish retired people. When your wages disappear after retirement, it's a lot more difficult to pay the taxes on your home.

The recent run up in property prices in most major western cities makes me think the home owning class isn't in too bad of a shape. If you own a house in Vancouver, the Bay area, Toronto, London etc. you basically won the lottery. If you are a young adult, well ... hope your parents help you out? My parents were immigrants and not savvy enough to buy a house. I'm wondering how I can ever afford a 200K down payment on…

[deleted]

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#32
The problem with our capitalism is our money.

Currency is a means for us to socialize debts so we can make trade more efficient. When you give Steve money, you're saying, "my people, Steve has provided me $30 of value, so please reward him in kind." Instead of having to give Steve $30 of value directly in return, we communicate that $30 debt to the rest of society with our money.

The problem with our currency is that it forces everyone to honor the debts of every other person on the planet. There are people who destroy our environment, manipulate our politics, and deceive our people in order to earn rewards, and we're all forced to reward them because we can't identify whose socialized debt we're honoring when we reward people in exchange for money.

If we always knew whose debts were being honored, any individual could refuse to honor the debts of people they believe are harming society. You could effectively turn off people's money if they're behaving poorly. No one would work for you if they think others won't honor your debts. If you don't honor the debts of polluters, polluters lose their purchasing power and go out of business. Similarly, pharmaceutical price gougers, war profiteers, and harbingers of financial crises would have powerful disincentives.

This enforcement mechanism would incentivize socially harmonious behavior without requiring consensus on what socially harmonious behavior is. We'd have a market mechanism for social behavior, which would prevent many of capitalism's failures.

We could also prevent wealth accumulation by deciding that recent value transfers are worth more than older value transfers. This is something that people actually believe, but there's no way for our money to express that the work you did twenty years ago doesn't mean as much as the work you do today. A pleasant side effect of codifying this truth is that we could avoid the zero lower bound on interest rates that's making it hard for the world to reach full employment. If unemployment is high, just increase the value of recent work so there's a bigger incentive to put people to work.

Instead of paying people based on how much money they have, you'd pay them based on their merit, calculated however you decide as an individual.

All we need to implement merit capitalism is a ledger of who has provided value for whom to replace our currencies that obfuscate that data. Blockchains give us the power to build this ledger.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#33
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes also punish retired people. When your wages disappear after retirement, it's a lot more difficult to pay the taxes on your home.

The recent run up in property prices in most major western cities makes me think the home owning class isn't in too bad of a shape. If you own a house in Vancouver, the Bay area, Toronto, London etc. you basically won the lottery. If you are a young adult, well ... hope your parents help you out? My parents were immigrants and not savvy enough to buy a house. I'm wondering how I can ever afford a 200K down payment on…

[deleted]

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#34

A lot of the ails mentioned in the article seem to arise from Western societies' preference on income taxation vs property taxation. Low property taxes force the governments to finance its expenditures mainly through sales and income taxes. The former are optional, the latter happen to penalize those who elect to participate in the workforce (which large property owners can safely sit out).

Property taxes also punish retired people. When your wages disappear after retirement, it's a lot more difficult to pay the taxes on your home.

Why don't retired people "reverse mortgage" their house? They have no use for it after they're dead.

If they do, then someone who's going to get that house should foot the taxes.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. "Regressive" does not just mean "bad" according to some arbitrary definition of bad. If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population. A property tax is generally progressive because the poor do not own real property. The rich pay mor…

> If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population. Although this is effectively the definition of progressive and regressive taxation today—because that's how the terms are almost always used by the large number of people who have only the most…

This is an interesting generalization of my use of progressive/regressive. However, I would not go so far as to say that my definition is a "popular corruption". My restricted definition is frequently applied in the tax law, tax policy, and tax economics literature.

According to the OED, the earliest noted use of "regressive" in the context of taxation is from Richard T. Ely's writings on political economy in 1891. He was the leader of the progressive movement. His use of the terms progressive/regressive would certainly have meant reform/acting in a backward direction.

Do you have an earlier citation for your definition? I wonder if it is in fact a mathematical generalization of a progressive/populist definition.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes? I'm not a fan of the idea that the property I "own" is basically just the right to rent it from the government. There's no true land-ownership anymore. Also, as noted above, property taxes can be a huge burden on those retired/on a fixed income. Not to mention, property taxes fluctuate wildly and are incredibly hard to predict and plan for. "Reassessments" happen randomly, seem to be applied haphazard…

How about low property taxes for the 65+ crowd on their primary residence?

How about taxes paid for them by the bank that takes this residence once they pass away?

Can also be a nice buff to pension.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#37

Most of the squeezing seems to come down to cronyism, which is a problem in just about any system. For example, the government pushing of subprime mortgages (at the urging of cronies) over-inflated housing prices, and then when the balloon burst, the cronies won again by having the government take over their debt. The question should primarily be how to restrain cronyism, and thereby provide the best outcome for the…

The issue, at least with the government, is that you can't win. Whenever you hear people complain about how impossible it is to comply with all the procedures and processes and regulations for getting a government contract to develop some software, it's a safe bet that those procedures and processes and regulations were all put in place by well-intentioned people who wanted to prevent corruption. But as people found…

Why. You can. Line up suppliers, round-robin contracts between them, assess after completion. Then downrank ones who did bad work and uprank those who did good job on good money. For new companies, give them a few contracts, maybe backed by insurance in case they fail horribly.

And then you can literally left suppliers to their own devices.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#38
post #12

A lot of the ails mentioned in the article seem to arise from Western societies' preference on income taxation vs property taxation. Low property taxes force the governments to finance its expenditures mainly through sales and income taxes. The former are optional, the latter happen to penalize those who elect to participate in the workforce (which large property owners can safely sit out).

Or you could tax capital gains at the same rate as income. Poor people generally don't have capital to have gains on.

This is never brought up with any kind of seriousness, and the lack of discussion baffles me. I don't understand how we talk about salaries when the top 5% usually do not draw a major salary. They live off capital gains from selling stocks and bonds. It just seems to be a 3rd rail that is untouchable, neither here nor in conservative or liberal blogosphere. It's always about that progressive 1040 taxation.

That, or perhaps, instituting a 3% transaction tax for every damn unit of debt or equity sold. Whether its a broker or bot, tax it.

But, of course, most of the ruling class wants to talk about "skin in the game" and advocating regressive sales or property tax.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#39

A lot of the ails mentioned in the article seem to arise from Western societies' preference on income taxation vs property taxation. Low property taxes force the governments to finance its expenditures mainly through sales and income taxes. The former are optional, the latter happen to penalize those who elect to participate in the workforce (which large property owners can safely sit out).

Property taxes also punish retired people. When your wages disappear after retirement, it's a lot more difficult to pay the taxes on your home.

That situation can be easily handled through reverse mortgages.

Re: The Middle-Class Squeeze

#40

Most of the squeezing seems to come down to cronyism, which is a problem in just about any system. For example, the government pushing of subprime mortgages (at the urging of cronies) over-inflated housing prices, and then when the balloon burst, the cronies won again by having the government take over their debt. The question should primarily be how to restrain cronyism, and thereby provide the best outcome for the…

The issue, at least with the government, is that you can't win. Whenever you hear people complain about how impossible it is to comply with all the procedures and processes and regulations for getting a government contract to develop some software, it's a safe bet that those procedures and processes and regulations were all put in place by well-intentioned people who wanted to prevent corruption. But as people found…

> it's a safe bet that those procedures and processes and regulations were all put in place by well-intentioned people who wanted to prevent corruption

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P9Y4H2GyS4

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