American Equity

But he starts from a different angle: he's interested in economic efficiency. So he wants a system that moves economic goods into the hands of people who value it most (and compensate the previous owner fairly at market prices).

He proposes a system where people declare the value of their various possessions with two incentives for accuracy:

- You have to sell to any comer at the declared price. Thus guarding against overvaluation. - You have to pay a small percentage of the declared annual price as an annual fee, thus guarding against undervaluation.

That concern about economically efficient allocation is mostly interesting for monopoly goods and rights, because anything else we can just produce more off.

In Georgism it's customary to name these after their most typical representative Land (sometimes with the capital L to emphasis the generalisation). It's not much of a stretch to include eg things like licences for magnetic spectrum.

I'd be wary about mixing things like insurance against theft in here. (It might be possible to give a unified system, but I am not sure it is. Look at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_sy... for some source of interesting ideas about legal systems.) My wariness comes mostly from the fact that insurance that pays the declared value encourages people to overdeclare. Better let the market sort that out. (However paying the taxes for a specific declared value for years on end is a pretty good argument to convincing any court or insurance arbiter that you really valued something at that price.)

In the system I sketched above, Hanson described some scenarios were some entrepreneurs might be on the lookout for undervalued properties, buy them, and then just try to resell them to the original owner (or someone else).

As a special case, that scheme is especially lucrative if you are looking to buy a eg a house in a specific area anyway and don't care too much about which one; then the risk of not being able to sell the property you just bought on is not a problem: you just keep it.

I'd be more wary of using such a system of wealth taxation for eg cash. If you have a working central bank with an inflation or nominal GDP target, an individual holding cash even under their mattress is essentially free for society: the central bank just prints more money to make up for the portion you are holding out of circulation. And once you bring it back into circulation, they just print less money for a while. So for society it's great if people are holding cash: they did something for the rest of society to get their hands on the cash, but didn't get anything in return (yet). Very nice of them.

(Even better would be a free banking system, where essentially the same nominal gdp stabilization happens automatically because of market forces. George Selgin has some good stuff on that, see eg https://www.alt-m.org/2017/09/14/did-free-banking-stabilize-... or https://mises.org/library/less-zero-case-falling-price-level... )

The 'you have to sell at the declared value' requirement is somewhat similar to your idea: if you don't declare eg your house, it means you implicitly declare it to be worth 0. Someone stealing something worth 0 from you, will get a slap on the wrist at most in any sane system---or they can even just force-buy it at that price from you!

The other thing to keep in mind is something called 'tax incidence'. It's the study of who actually has to bear the burden of a tax. That's often different from who has to fork over the money. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence . The other thing is deadweight losses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss).

But yeah, I like the basic idea of using a monopoly rent tax to fund a basic income. https://medium.com/basic-income/why-land-value-tax-and-unive... has a similar idea, and some worked numbers. (The author has at least one article for the UK and one for the US.)

No, it's a well defined cultural and political divide. Maybe the powerful exploit it but it exists independently of them.

>If you're saying that the electoral college and the Senate are a means of protecting those in the "flyover states",

I am.

>then I would just you how that's working out? Do you think "Wyomingers" are the ones who are going to benefit from repealing the estate tax? The House, Senate, and Executive branch are all controlled by Republicans who should, in theory, be advocating for "Wyomingers" and yet they seem to only be working on behalf of the interests of the wealthy, special interests, and corporations.

Sure because you picked a terrible example. But Wyomingers sure are glad there's a senate when gun control comes up. And they're glad there's a senate when Abortion comes up. And they're glad there's a senate when basically any political issue comes up which divides mostly along geographic boundaries.

You'll sit here and decry the influence corporations have on our country but at the same time want to ignore huge swaths of america.

Middle America exists, it votes and maybe instead of trying to reduce its political power you should try to convince the people in those states.

>If you were the NRA looking to make sure that "bump stocks" don't get banned after a gunman shoots hundreds of people in Vegas using them, where would you focus your resources? On the Senate, of course!

This is the most shit example I can imagine you using. (1) The NRA doesn't care if bump stocks get banned. (2) A bump stock ban is totally meaningless feel-good legislation. Go to youtube and search "rubberband bump fire." A bump stock is just a "cooler" way of doing the same thing you can do with any rubberband or even a shoestring. (3) A bump stock ban is the perfect example of city people with no understanding of an issue trying to legislate it. Maybe next time you should come ask us in flyover land. (;

But they're able to invest in the future because they have the spare resources. Maybe one of these random side projects will become immensely popular. Maybe one of these crazy side projects will become the most popular email interface ever. And even if they don't, the people are still valuable.

I'm not saying that some people won't just coast, but the potential for innovation shouldn't be locked away because "we can't afford it" - we obviously can.

How do you decide which stories are re-upped and which are not?

The 99th percentile ("top 1%") of wealth by household seems to have been be $8.4M in 2007, according to https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-..., the most recent calculation I could find from a quick Google before heading to work - I'd love to see these calculations done with the raw data at https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm . From the summary on that page, they surveyed some 116 million households in 2007.

Suppose you tax all holdings at the top 1% of wealth by 1%/year, which is significant but not enough to wipe you out - after 50 years that leaves you with 60% of your original savings, assuming you weren't investing it.

That yields as a minimum $97T in tax revenue per year ($8.4M * 1.16M * 1%), and almost certainly significantly more because there-s a short tail of people with much more than $8.4M net worth. But if you split even this much among the 5% of households with "very low food security", that's $16,800/year. That's a lot of food.

(An actual scheme would have some sort of progressive tax, also, not a discontinuity at a certain dollar value)