If you start handing out money to every citizen just cause you change the incentive structure. Now the elites are incentivized for less citizens more so than they already are. That could exhibit itself in all kinds of interesting and cruel ways.
American Equity
471–480 of 552 posts
Re: American Equity
#472Guys? Wasn't sama supposed to be running the optimal capital allocation AI? Who neutered him with this egalitarian warm fuzzy friendly module? You've set interplanetary commerce back a decade.
Re: American Equity
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Generally speaking, a property is a poor investment if you already have the money, they have poor returns and they don't grow in value outside of a few bubbles." Real estate is a great investment for the risk averse (probably the best one too). Housing usually grows at the same rate as inflation if not a bit more and people will always need it. It doesnt drop 10% overnight unlike stocks. What other investments did y…
>>> It doesnt drop 10% overnight unlike stocks. You can tell that to the people in Houston who lost their home overnight. Home ownership is not risk free. ;) I am not familiar with the entirety of the US territory. If you look at properties outside of the major cities, they should be relatively stable, renters have no jobs to sustain ever increasing rent. In the far country side, properties should be deflating becaus…
>>You can tell that to the people in Houston who lost their home overnight.
And yet how many Houston like situations have happened overnight? Or over the years?
Real estate is easily one of the best savings vehicles you can have.
Re: American Equity
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It takes some special sort of entitlement to believe that despite stealing most of their money, then asked to work and make up for the remainder of the population, they will continue to work after a while and contribute to your economy.
If you are not aware of what happens in situations like this, I would like to take you to pre-1990s India. Some of the most brightest, brilliant, hard working and industrious people used to leave the country and never to return the moment they attained working age.
The people and money from whom you can take the wealth to fund your socialist schemes shrinks every year. To a point you will have a country full of entitled people, who think they were born with rights to free stuff. And will always be angry at people capable of working who don't spend away their life to make it happen for them.
Re: American Equity
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think becoming wealthy is incentive enough to become wealthy. No one is going to stop trying to be wealthy just because they might get taxed for that wealth. If anything, they will just try to hide it in another state. But the argument that a wealth tax would remove any incentive to become wealthy is not very strong.
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.
"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"
Has this effect been shown in the real world? That implies more interest in the odds than their target market demonstrates any interest in (hence the term, "for the math-impaired").
Re: American Equity
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I don't think a citation is necessary. Just the roads in this country represent enormous wealth, and they're all owned by the government. Throw in the national parks, the national forests, all the government owned land (the government owns most of Alaska). Next, all the military bases and hardware, airplanes, ships, support structure. The infrastructure, NASA, buildings, waterways, riparian rights, and, let's not forget, all the money the government collects and spends every year.
Here's even more: http://business.time.com/2013/02/05/the-federal-governments-...
As for how banks work, pretty much any book on how the banking business works will tell you that. Or you could watch that old movie "It's a Wonderful Life" where they give an accurate description at the end how banks work. And frankly, it's just common sense. Why would banks offer free checking? They're not charities. They need the money so they can turn around and loan it out. It's fundamentally how banking works.
I've never heard of a Scrooge McDuck cash vault outside of a comic book. Have you? (There is Fort Knox, but that's the feds, and it's not cash.)
https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/banking/ban...
Re: American Equity
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wants to share your money that you've worked for.
Go make that money in a bubble completely separate from society and then maybe you can claim that society isn't entitled to some of it.
While I agree with what you said, the counter-argument is that we do already pay taxes for the services that we use. You could argue that those taxes are too low because they don't capture the "gestalt" of civilization. But if you pursue that argument, then all humans, not just US citizens, should have equity since all humans contribute to the gestalt of civilization.
Re: American Equity
#478If "American Equity" were such a good idea, then World Equity would be just as good or better an idea. All humanity contributes to the gestalt of civilization and so all should benefit.
Re: American Equity
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
> buying and building are two different things Consider the way Kickstarter projects describe their "backers". On the "Why Kickstarter?" page they say backers are "helping to create something new". Yet, one could easily consider Kickstarter simply a website for pre-orders, no different from buying in any other method. The line between a buyer and a backer/builder isn't so clear.
> The line between a buyer and a backer/builder isn't so clear. It is pretty clear, if you are funding someone'e kickstart project then you did help them build it but if you pay for a product which was built using the creator's(or some other investor's) money then you did not build it.
Some Kickstarter projects are posted after the product is essentially built and just needs some finishing details. The line gets fuzzy there.
It's even more fuzzy when you consider beta customers for a software company. Heck, how about when I contribute information to Google Maps? Or give feedback and make feature requests for my accounting software?
Re: American Equity
#480Earlier 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.
"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" Has this effect been shown in the real world? That implies more interest in the odds than their target market demonstrates any interest in (hence the term, "for the math-impaired").
I'm fairly certain that the opposite held true in reality. When the multi state lottery association decreased the is of winning the Powerball last year,sales went up a lot because of the lure of the $1B payouts.