Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
The traditional economics is that taxing capital doesn’t raise any net tax revenue.
This doesn't seem right to me at all. Obviously there are distortionary effects, but you're effectively saying the laffer curve reaches its apex at 0%, which doesn't jive with traditional economics.
Yes, a higher capgains rate will theoretically lead to somewhat higher interest rates, but I find it exceedingly unlikely that it would perfectly cancel out especially when marginal investors decide to spend their money instead, leading to an increase in revenues through consumption taxes.
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
Confession. I only read gattsuru posts while on ADHD meds and even then, I can't break them down on my own. I have to have a conversation with bots regarding them.
During such a conversation, you get to do things like ask what a leekspinner is, get an immediate response, and go verify it.
This is intriguing, are you saying you copy+paste his writing into chatGPT and then ask questions of it? Do you do this for other pieces of writing as well? I've been looking for actual use-cases for chatbots and this seems promising.
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
I personally like having things like roads and the military for protection.
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
All taxes are distortionary. A few like carbon taxes or cigarette taxes distort in good ways, while most distort in bad ways. Taxing labor income is almost exclusively bad, since it promotes sloth and working less, while taxing capital gains is a mix. There's the bad aspect of discouraging investment along with the positive aspect of reducing inequality. The author is saying the current privileged mix of taxing investments less than labor income isn't good enough, that we should institute massive taxes on labor to reduce all taxes from investments to 0.
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
This is predicated on Russia being willing to negotiate in ways that aren't essentially just a surrender of Ukraine. They've shown very little willingness to do this so far.
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
To keep it from strangling the bottom. Some investment is good and necessary for a functioning economy, but letting it go unchecked creates inequality and other problems. I think for a starter that labor income and investment income should be taxed at the same rates.
Ben___Garrison
12d ago
Valuable comment and perspective, thanks for responding.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
You seem like a Perun-watcher. I watch him too. He's great.
I should have specified a bit more clearly: Russia will be able to reconstitute the majority of its combat capacity in 5-10 years. There will be some lingering areas that take longer of course, but people are acting like Russia is going to be incapable of launching another invasion for 20+ years. The US army was severely battered after Vietnam, yet it reconstituted itself very effectively in 18 years to curbstomp Saddam in '91. It probably could have done so a lot earlier too.
An officer corps of 20-years experience takes 20 years to build
This seems like it would be referencing NCOs, but Russia never had a robust and empowered NCO contingent. It's always been a very top-heavy organization relative to other militaries. This conflict practically erased the reforms trying to implement the Battalion Tactical Group as a coherent fighting unit, but in many ways this conflict has been a return to the basics for Russia. It's a big stupid artillery-centric army that tries to solve problems by blasting them with a truckload of artillery and frontal assaults using infiltration tactics in good scenarios and cannonfodder kamikazes in bad ones. In other words, there's not really a lot to relearn here.
The Russian production rates of aircraft
The naval losses
Both the Russian aerospace forces and its navy would be irrelevant in any larger conflict with the West. It might be relevant if Trump causes NATO to collapse and Russia manages it's diplomacy to 1v1 a country like Finland, but otherwise it was never much of threat.
The bigger issue for the Russian military-industrial complex is the Russian arms export industry.
Yes, this is definitely happening. As of now this market share is mostly going to countries like France and South Korea, but in the long run it will likely go to China which will probably be a lot worse simply since they're more of a long term threat.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
It is not really taxing wealth, because an equally rich person who spends his money right away avoids it.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes. The two are symmetrical in that way.
There's nothing inherently "unfair" with taxing investments, as opposed to taxing something like labor income. I read all 3 of your links since they were short, and basically the only argument he presents for not taxing investments is that saving is intrinsically good, but he gives no real reasoning for this. Yes, some saving is good, but he wants to replace capgains taxes with massive taxes on labor income. So doctors and engineers would be hit massively harshly (or "unfairly"), while trust-fund kids would get a windfall. He's trying to smuggle a plan for the rich with vague notions of "fairness" and "saving good" without examining externalities related to high inequality or dynastic wealth. High inequality is just as acidic for the civil polity as massive unassimilated immigration is, so we should generally avoid it where possible.
If you invest in government bonds, your real tax after-tax return will be negative.
Well that's just flatly not correct, as "government bonds" encompasses a range of investment vehicles including higher rate munis. Assuming you were talking about T-bills... it's still not really correct. Returns would depend on the prevailing rate set by the open market, the level of inflation, and timeframe. E.g. today the 30 year T bill is 4.77%, which is quite a bit higher than inflation.
I'm not generally opposed to adjusting capgains for inflation, as long as the total rate of capgains across the board doesn't change (it'd need to rise in other places to compensate). But the prevailing rates offered would likely decrease to the point where it was mostly a wash, and you were the same as before except with more complicated taxes where you'd need to calculate inflation rates.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
bleeding Russia is on sale right at an amazing discount right now, so we're buying a bit.
I'm as pro-Ukraine as they get, but this point never seemed correct to me. Russia will be able to reconstitute itself 5-10 years max after the war is over. Rebuilding doesn't take that long. And we're mostly just burning through Russia's legacy Soviet stockpile, which would have become more and more obsolete anyways as time passed by. Even the long-term damage Russia will experience from sanctions and the like won't matter much, since Russia isn't really a long-term threat like China is.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Capgains taxes are fine, and even desirable if you want to lower or stabilize the gini coefficient. Rich people tend to get most of their money through their existing wealth, not through directly working which would be subject to income taxes. It's the closest thing to a tax on wealth that most societies can really achieve. A society that lets wealth accumulate unhindered ends up looking like France in the Belle Epoque period, where dynasties of the ultra-wealthy control almost everything.
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again.
You can say something similar for a sales tax, where post-tax money is taxed again, and if inflation happens then the absolute value of the tax increases. None of this makes either tax "unfair" or "absurd".
Now, the government is doing the one thing that messes this up: they're redistributing much of those gains to the younger generations who include, in very large and increasing numbers, immigrants and their children
I do agree that trying to fix the problem by subsidizing housing for the young is silly. It's treating the symptoms instead of the cause, which is almost certainly NIMBYs and zoning restrictions like it is in the USA. But those are typically local issues that the national government doesn't have jurisdiction over, so they try to seem like they're "doing something" by just throwing money at the problem.
It's really a scheme to tax old people and give the benefits to younger people, which isn't the worst idea but the underlying issues of the housing crisis really do need to be resolved as well.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Thanks for the link. So he basically said he would... keep doing what Biden was doing, but "bigger" in an unspecified way.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Huh? Nobody's obligated to either respond to an entire post or nothing at all. I called out a bit I found particularly objectionable.
I could easily turn it back on you: why did you respond to MY comment without addressing the issue of whether a statement like "is too stupid to be allowed to vote" should be disallowed or not?
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
It wasn't with the opposite valence but rather in a goofy thread about bats vs knives about a month ago. The use of the word "retard" probably didn't help, but the part about not being able to vote was also quoted by the mod giving the person a warning.
And I'd say that probably should be a warnable or banable thing to say. Saying a group of people is so stupid that their right to vote should be taken away is a textbook case of "boo outgroup".
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Strelkov started the chain of events that bubbled up to the war.
You're talking about 2014 here, right? If so, then sure, that checks out.
Putin didn't "just woke up" and create a war, there was already a war.
There was the frozen conflict that had been bubbling since 2014, but 2015-2021 was massively different from the invasion in 2022. There was little reason that status quo couldn't continue for another decade at least from the West's perspective, but then Putin decided he was unsatisfied with the state of affairs and that's how the invasion came to be.
I'm not saying there was no conflict prior to 2022. I'm saying the massive invasion itself that happened in 2022 was Putin's doing.
I don't think we're disagreeing on this point.
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
This was not a change, at least on the US's part! The US didn't let Ukraine join NATO, but they didn't rule it out either, same as 2015-2021. The US wanted to kick the can down the road some more (or indefinitely) by keeping Ukraine in limbo, and it was Putin who said that wasn't good enough now.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
If you're implying I haven't been paying attention to the Ukraine war, you're very mistaken.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
I'm talking about proximate causes. The long term reasons for competition between Russia and the West exist, and anyone can trot out Mearsheimer if they want the Russian view, but for the immediate causes of the war there wasn't really anything other than Putin. There was no reason he couldn't have kept it a frozen conflict for another decade.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
sending most of their men off to die in trenches
This is not congruent with reality. Russia itself claims UA has lost 444k soldiers killed and wounded up to 2/27/24. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split of males:females, this means they have lost (KIA or WIA) around 2% of their prewar male population. And of course that number is coming from Russia, so that's massively inflated for obvious reasons, as well as for reasons unique to Russian reporting statistics. That's obviously a huge tragedy in human terms, and there's also the ~5M mostly women and children that have fled as refugees, but it's nowhere near "most of their men dying in trenches".
On the other hand, Russia's aims have always been transparently genocidal. The "misguided mini Russians" need to be put in their place according to the Russian government, and that's how stuff like Bucha happens, or that video of Russians decapitating a screaming Ukrainian POW, or the various castrations of POWs. Real ethnic solidarity there.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Strelkov was important in 2014, but pretty marginal in 2022. Putin alone was indeed the main instigator of the war. Nothing had changed in 2022 in terms of Ukraine's ability to join NATO, as the US refused to let them in as it had for the previous 8 years. Putin just woke up one morning and decided he wanted an invasion, and the rest is history.
That bill would have enshrined minimal allowable amounts of illegal immigration into law before the proposed countermeasures kicked in, and would have transferred great authority over such enforcement to the discretion of DHS. It was a bad bill that deserved to die.
It did no such thing. It had trigger clauses that would allow the USFG to take measures above and beyond what they're currently capable of doing. The DHS authority is to get around the court clog of the DoJ, which is currently responsible for one of the main loopholes via missing court dates. Here's a good primer. It was the most conservative immigration bill in a generation, and Trump ensured its death for purely self-serving reasons. It makes sense, given he was basically no better than Obama when it comes to actual illegal detainment numbers.
Ukraine is not getting Crimea back, and probably not much of anything else they've lost. The only question is how long it will take for everyone to accept this reality.
Crimea would have been an easier target than the original breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Had the UA offensive succeeded in pushing to Azov, they could have plausibly disabled the Kerch bridge, and then the entire southern front would have been a redo of Kherson. If UA retakes the imitative then that's still plausible, although the modern situation so heavily favors the defense that it is indeed pretty unlikely even if the UA does fix its medium term issues.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
I mean, you also didn't respond to Dean either, who wrote more eloquently than I did about the faults of the position. I'll also note the bolding here wasn't present on the original post.
It's just bad logic that Europe has no agency, that they're all US puppets, and that the US is for some reason sending Boris instead of Blinken or Biden. Was Macron's recent remark about sending troops also a threat that the US was about to intervene with troops of its own?
When the US is funding 90% of the war
This isn't true today, and was never true before. If you look at total commitments, the combined EU outweighs the US by quite a lot. You probably would be frustrated with me for making a point like this and say you clearly implied it was for lethal aid, but even that wasn't true either. Poland + the Baltics sent pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down in the first few days, and other European powers like Germany have slowly ramped up their commitments to pick up the slack thereafter. The US remains the largest single source of military aid, but its handily beat by the combined EU today.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Some Hungarians are there but they're only a tiny fringe along the Carpathians. Ukraine is indeed split with some supporting Ukraine (and the West) and some supporting Russia. But having a Russian contingent isn't unusual, as the Baltics and Moldova also have that. I doubt most Estonians would want a chunk cleaved out of their territory to appease the ethnic Russians.
credibledefense bans all opposing views... it's an echochamber like most of reddit.
It has a UA tilt, but they definitely don't autoban pro-RU people. Glideer for instance is pretty prolific and often gets downvoted, but the threads are sorted by new so his posts aren't hard to find. There are also plenty of rather eloquent pro-UA but pessimistic people, like Duncan-M.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Source on this part? So far I've only seen articles saying he'd force UA to give up land, or else risk getting cut off from all US aid, and maybe other punishments on top. I haven't heard his idea of strong-arming Russia.
Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Oikophobia in the traditional clinical context usually arises from the patient's home not feeling like a home.
This doesn't make much sense to me. Why would construction costs be rising so much? Did we run out of trees or something? Are safe modern materials (like not using asbestos and lead-based paint) just massively more expensive than the alternatives? I could see labor costs rising to some degree due to the baumol effect, but that doesn't come close to explaining the total rise.
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