81–90 of 116 posts
Capitalism
CNBC told me the economy is doing great. My neighbor is borrowing money from me. My friend is borrowing money from me. GoFundMe is becoming more for basic needs. Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. According to every metric BUT stonks, the economy is holding on by a thread.
Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong. It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.
Oh and bird flu can do a number on egg prices.
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Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here? The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax. All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less…
I do not live in the UK, but across the channel.. Had to look it up a bit as I do not follow this in great detail but there is some significant debate there on inheritance taxes I believe? I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effect…
(Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
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This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path. It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
The main problem being, you can’t operate the bunker yourself. How do you ensure the non-billionaires on your staff don’t murder you and use your bunker themselves? This is assuming a catastrophe that forces a move to a bunker and changes the rules of society.
It’s an intractable problem, billionaires are reliant on the rest of us to do their bidding. That does not change in a crisis/catastrophe.
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> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. - For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry. - For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which a…
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This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem. The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
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How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
Not how progressive tax works, but it is the reality, e.g. in The Netherlands. Once you go over certain thresholds, you lose certain benefits leading to a poverty trap in some sense where the incentives of the system do not align with the implied goals of a healthy economy.
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people. We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mod…
Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times.
Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption.
The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout).
Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory.
Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.
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Buying gold and silver to get through the inevitable stock bubble pop is out of reach for normal people with normal wages and savings. Houses and stocks got cheaper per ounce of gold last 20 years. But in terms of dollars they got way more expensive... inflation has been robbing us for more than 2 decades.
Since 1971. The world economic system became what I term financialism, where money is simply a debt instrument. The Treasury issues a debt note, in exchange for which they receive Fed Notes, and that debt obligation becomes the backing for more loans issued by the Fed to member banks. The Fed Notes handed to banks are then loaned too. Thus, debts in a single sector (if large enough) can crash the entire system. The i…
Pain doesn't buy anything, by the way.