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American Equity

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Re: American Equity

#451

Post by jacquesm »

sokoloff wrote: post #439
jacquesm wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming you stop earning, but of course most people will not stop earning. Also, the typical way this works is that the wealth tax gets added to your income, so if you end up not paying income tax by definition you don't pay wealth tax. Example: Say I'm worth 1M credits today and my wealth tax is 10K (1%), that means my income gets another 10K added to it. Real income is 50K, + 10K so I pay tax as if I earned…

So your wealth tax is more like 0.4% then?

No, it's effectively variable between 0% and .62 * 1.2% depending on how much income you earn.

Re: American Equity

#452

Post by rtpg »

r00fus wrote: post #423
unfunco wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An annual bonus just for being an American.

s/bonus/dividend/ Alaska does this [1]. The only problem with the idea is that some things aren't considered GDP while they grow the pie - open source and volunteering being good examples. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

"voting with the wallet"

This is why research grants and outright government spending is a good tool in the toolbox. People are still paying for it through taxes, but because of the indirect nature we can judge the problem a bit more on its merits ("of course we want cancer research to happen and be funded")

Re: American Equity

#453

Post by sheepmullet »

geofft wrote: post #396
oarsinsync wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#define financially independent That phrase means different things to different people. In some parts of the world, $50k could consider you to be financially independent. $500k in others, and in some parts, you'd need $5m - $50m. What if I told you it cost $5/day to rent a luxury hotel room with cleaning, full board, and high speed broadband provided as standard? What if I told you it cost $1500/month for a small stu…

> If you work a 40 hour week already and make a decent living at 40-50%, and now get told that anything above that will get taxed at 75%, unless you're going to somehow generate more than double, you're going to spend that time doing more productive things (like spending it with your family). Hold up - 1. Why is this about working more hours , instead of working harder / more effectively? There are 168 hours in a wee…

> Why is this about working more hours, instead of working harder / more effectively?

Because they are tightly linked for most people.

I've managed to increase my income ~5x from what it was when I started but to do that I have had to put in 2 hours/day of side study.

Re: American Equity

#454

Post by robotresearcher »

jerf wrote: post #447
robotresearcher wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We reduce welfare spending when times are hard. Same deal. Not a substantial argument against welfare or UBI.

Bwuh? Citation needed; I'm pretty sure it went the other way around in the previous downturn.

So I guess we didn't run out of money per jerf's scenario, then.

Re: American Equity

#455

Post by cryptonector »

majormajor wrote: post #368
cryptonector wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a lottery ticket's prices goes up, and the purse goes down and/or the odds get longer, you'll be less inclined to buy a ticket. It's the same with work. If hard work is less likely to pay off, or if you'll have to work harder, or both, you'll be less likely to work harder. Some people will work harder anyways, and many will be discouraged. Marginal effects matter. This is why dynamic analysis is important.

And the marginal effects of having 100M in the bank over 10M in the bank over 1M over 100K are all still huge for any feasible tax scheme I could imagine. What does your world look like where you'd be too taxed to bother wanting to be financially independent?

I don't buy lottery tickets as it is. Many people in marginal financial positions do, and lots of tickets at that. Now suppose that ticket prices went up by a factor of 10 and purses down by a factor of ten, and odds lengthened some. Why would anyone in a marginal financial situation not then reduce their total number of tickets bought?! Of course they would!

Now to answer your question, consider say, a prospective engineering student. They could go to school and come out with $150k or more in debt. But if their post-tax income potential goes down (especially initially), thus their ability to pay off that debt goes down, thus making it more crushing than it already would be, why on Earth would they even consider bothering to go to school then?! Of course a lot of potential students would find something else to do! It's utterly obvious. Painfully obvious. So right there you'll have a decrease in the number of people pursuing certain careers -- hard work being avoided.

Even beyond the economic effect on students, there is just a basic personal calculus as well. You might choose to live with a lower income and more free time to enjoy as you wish (if with fewer luxuries than you might like) than work harder and harder for less and less reward. You only have so many prime years for enjoying the one life you have. Everything is a trade-off. You might work harder now if it means you'll be better able to enjoy some free time later, but if working harder will make little difference to your ability to enjoy free time in the future, why work harder?

And beyond that, we know what low incentives did to would-be hard workers' desire to work hard in the U.S.S.R. and such places. Spoilers: they certainly didn't work harder when they didn't have guns to their heads incentivizing them.

By the way, the same sorts who say that increasing income taxes (or otherwise putting a ceiling on incomes) wouldn't have an effect on how hard people work... also tend to argue that higher tobacco taxes will reduce tobacco use. We all know about the prodigious powers of doublethink in some quarters, but don't think for a minute that everyone accepts doublethink, let alone masters it. And sure, you yourself didn't just make that argument, but I bet you do when it comes to topics where that argument is convenient. I, on the other hand, accept that punitive/confiscatory taxes only serve to reduce the amount of activity being taxed regardless of whether it is an activity I appreciate. If you ever find yourself making that argument, please recognize it and choose consistency.

Re: American Equity

#456

Post by cryptonector »

majormajor wrote: post #386
oarsinsync wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#define financially independent That phrase means different things to different people. In some parts of the world, $50k could consider you to be financially independent. $500k in others, and in some parts, you'd need $5m - $50m. What if I told you it cost $5/day to rent a luxury hotel room with cleaning, full board, and high speed broadband provided as standard? What if I told you it cost $1500/month for a small stu…

There's a header of "American" on this very post, and it's specifically talking about the US, so I'm starting there. The biggest potential cost of someone in the US, with employer-tied healthcare, seems like medical. You could hit the unlucky jackpot and have a seven-figure+ medical bill over the course of a few years or life. So let's set "able to handle that for yourself and your family" as the baseline for being c…

For young people just starting out in life, medical expenses are their lowest.

Always always consider the young.

Europe's fertility rates are a disaster (and post-2008 American fertility rates too were disastrous). In particular they are a disaster because so much of their economies depend on the tax base growing, which means that productivity growth has to be even higher than it would have to have been with a higher fertility rate. The causes of this surely include making the burdens unbearable on the young who might want to start families. Beating up the young because they have good health, is an unspeakable insanity.

Re: American Equity

#458

Post by heylook »

WalterBright wrote: post #298
toomuchtodo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the long run, every dollar of wealth gets spent. Not necessarily. "Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Oracle (ORCL) are sitting on $504 billion, or 30%, of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015, according to an analysis released Friday by ratings agency Moody's Investors Service. That's even more cash concentration than…

> Not necessarily Nobody has a Scrooge McDuck cash vault, not Apple, Microsoft, nor anyone else. It's all invested - even money in a checking account isn't actually there, it's loaned out to someone who spends it. > the top 1 percent owns 90 percent of wealth in the US No, the government owns/controls most of it.

Not to be a dick, but the above cited sources and you made assertions without anything pointing to anything to back them up. What reason do any of us have to put any stock in what you've written?

Re: American Equity

#459

Post by heylook »

dnautics wrote: post #308
ThomPete wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discouraging savings is actually the point. We should tax money that sits idle and provides tax benefits to money invested. If you can build wealth around being active rather than just reaping the benefit of interest of interests then that should be encouraged rather than just grabbing and keeping.

You would force people to consume? There's diminishing returns to that. At some point there are fewer worthwhile things to spend on and you start creating an system of make-work with the attendant environmental destruction and resource exhaustion. Free markets are neutral on these questions, it's policy that distorts social preference away from conservation and towards unsustainable growth that exacerbate the situati…

> We should tax money that sits idle and provide tax benefits to money invested

>> You would force people to consume?

That's a complete misreading of the comment

Re: American Equity

#460

Post by millermp12 »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #98
lovich wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did bill gates build Microsoft? He had a larger part than probably anyone, but he wouldn't even be remembered if he ran it on his own. The reason people think it's something to be solved is because for some reason our society attaches all the reasons for success, and the associated benefits, to a handful of people for enterprises that are a group endeavor

Than any one person through the lens of an authoritarian hierarchy that’s structured to reinforce the necessity of top-down rule. In reality, all the laborers at Microsoft built it into what it is today. And it (like most companies) are at a scale of complexity that is far beyond the fiction that workers are acting out CEO’s “visions.”

You need both but what is more valuable, the sculptor or the clay?
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