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American Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: American Equity

#531

Post by dragonwriter »

WorldMaker wrote: post #528
dragonwriter wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UBI is not identical to NIT because the difference is marketing, not math. But it's not even there, as proponents of both have stated that they are equivalent, and alternate names for the same thing, and they are marketed with the same arguments, and are widely acknowledged by their proponents to be names of the same thing. That is, the marketing isn't different, it's the same, both in content and on that the marke…

There are UBI plans that are definitely not equivalent to NIT plans. Some UBI plans require UBI to be taxable income for them to work. In that way they become more like guaranteed short-term (year long) loans for upper middle class/rich tax brackets. There's no similar proposal from the NIT side.

> Some UBI plans require UBI to be taxable income for them to work

That's still equivalent to an NIT (specifically, it's equivalent to adding the kind of refundable credit that creates an NIT, and reducing the standard deduction by the size of the credit, which may result in a negative standard deduction.)

Re: American Equity

#532

Post by jeff18 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #516
jeff18 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you read this essay, but Sam advocates for startups to be significantly more generous on employee equity: https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity (at least compared to other VCs, you may still disagree with his absolute numbers)

He could actually implement these ideas if he was serious.

YC is a competitive accelerator that gives you a small seed investment in exchange for a few things, but mostly for the expert advice. On this topic, the advice to companies is to be generous with equity. What else should be done?

Re: American Equity

#533

Post by kgwgk »

Retric wrote: post #512
kgwgk wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banks that collapsed during the last crisis are not the kind of banks that take deposits and give out loans. They were the kind of non-banking businesses that you talk about. And one of the reasons for the crisis was “shadow banking”, because many home loans were not really given by banks (some were directly created by other institutions, some were first created by banks but then packaged and sold). The subprime…

Here is a short list of recent bank failures most of which are very much traditional banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U... Including the United States' largest savings and loan association, until its collapse in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U...

You are right, I was thinking of large (systemic) failures and actually I had completely forgotten about WaMu. Clearly forbidding the banking business (as in savings and loans) would prevent bank failures. But I´m not sure the alternative businesses that would fill the void would be much better.

Re: American Equity

#534

Post by prirun »

If we all get shares in the US, doesn't that mean we also get the debt? No thanks. The US govt doesn't know how to manage its debts.

Re: American Equity

#535

Post by theptip »

chollida1 wrote: post #3

Can someone actually explain what Sam wants to do here? I've read the post 4 times and I still can't see an y sort of plan, numbers, etc to actually critique, Which is odd because he specifically ask you to give feedback but never follows through on presenting the actual idea. He does motivate why he thinks a share of the GDP is so he gets the why, but never actually gets into the what, and how. I mean the GDP isn't…

One possible implementation would be to build an index tracking fund that tracks a significant portion of the US economy, and pays dividends to all citizens.

It seems like it would be difficult to lock an entitlement program to GDP without encountering funding gaps at some point, though I suppose a funding gap hasn't stopped the Social Security program from continuing to pay out.

Re: American Equity

#536

Post by theptip »

Animats wrote: post #416

This is an old idea in science fiction. See Mack Reynolds, "The Fracas Factor" (1978), where he lays out the system in some detail.[1] He called it "United States Basic Common Stock". Everyone got some shares of "Inalienable Basic" at birth, providing a basic income. People could buy and sell "Variable Basic" as well. Thus, a welfare state. He outlines how the transition takes place. Reynold's old books from the 1960…

> Also, if all of your income comes from dividends, you have to be able to handle considerable volatility, even across the whole market. At least 2x. That's not acceptable as a basic income scheme. People will starve.

Good point -- but if this became a significant problem, then one could imagine purchasing a hedging service to smooth out the peaks and troughs. That would have to be considered when fleshing out this portion of the OP:

> We’d also need to figure out rules about transferability and borrowing against this equity.

Re: American Equity

#537

Post by avar »

dragonwriter wrote: post #514
avar wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replied to most of this in a side-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15795996 But I'd like to elaborate a bit here. UBI is not identical to NIT because the difference is marketing , not math . Most of the electorate's basis for evaluating a given policy is not to perform a mathematical comparison of two systems and checking whether they yield the same results. How something is done is as important in po…

> UBI is not identical to NIT because the difference is marketing, not math. But it's not even there, as proponents of both have stated that they are equivalent, and alternate names for the same thing, and they are marketed with the same arguments, and are widely acknowledged by their proponents to be names of the same thing. That is, the marketing isn't different, it's the same, both in content and on that the marke…

The proponents of both have, in the words of a paper on the subject[1] agreed that "the two achieve the same distributive outcome through an appropriate tax-benefit system, [but] are fundamentally different from economic and ethical points of view".

Consider trying to introduce a universal health care system. You might say why do we need a system that subsidizes Jeff Bezos's health care? He can damn well pay for it himself, he might even agree since it's going to cost him less in terms of his tax contributions.

That's the equivalent of trying to sell NIT. Right out of the gate you have to not say "this is for everyone" but "it's just for the poor, but don't worry because...". That's what I mean by the marketing being different.

Of course with UBI the benefit is literally fungible, it's money. So it's really not like universal health care, but in the minds of a lot of people it is. They find it easier to accept the state providing a service if it's provided to them as well, even though it's a net cost center for them.

Humans.

1. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2052/1/MPRA_paper_2052.pdf

Re: American Equity

#538

Post by sheepmullet »

geofft wrote: post #519
sheepmullet wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of cutoff are we talking about?

In another thread, someone else suggested $10M and I suggested $100M. (This is wealth, i.e., total assets / net worth, not annual income.) 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 cal…

> That yields as a minimum $97T in tax revenue per year

Total US GDP for 2016 was ~$18T.

It seems a bit unrealistic to me to think we can get 5x GDP in tax revenue each year.

So what is the catch?

Re: American Equity

#539

Post by geofft »

sheepmullet wrote: post #538
geofft wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another thread, someone else suggested $10M and I suggested $100M. (This is wealth, i.e., total assets / net worth, not annual income.) 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 cal…

> That yields as a minimum $97T in tax revenue per year Total US GDP for 2016 was ~$18T. It seems a bit unrealistic to me to think we can get 5x GDP in tax revenue each year. So what is the catch?

The catch is that my math is wrong and I meant $97B. Thanks for the gut-check.

I'm still interested in doing or seeing an analysis with the full Fed dataset.

Re: American Equity

#540

Post by Retric »

kgwgk wrote: post #491
geofft wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why this is a blanket terrible idea - a ban on loans with interest, which are the only sort of loans that are economically rational for the lender, is a moral principle of one of the world's most popular religions (Islam) and used to be a moral principle of another (Christianity) until it was corrupted by capitalism in its lands. So we must at least concede that the idea of a world where loans are forbidd…

There is a whole industry of sharia-compliant finance to work around the ban on loans. The solution for the christian dislike for money-lending back on those days was for non-christians to do it. A world where people don’t need loans might be nice, but not all the people can use your parents’ money (and depending on what you want to do and how rich is your family, even you might need additional financing).

That's more about compliance in name only than actually following the faith. Like arguments if turning on the lights counts as setting a fire.
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