He's not trying to smuggle a plan for the rich. Read the part where he advocates for a progressive consumption tax again.
At this point you might be thinking “Yes, but wouldn’t eliminating all income and consumption taxes be a giveaway to the rich?” No, it would be restoring fairness by taxing the thrifty and spendthrift at equal rates. If we think the rich should pay more tax, then let’s put a progressive consumption tax into effect. This is easy to do, just turn the regressive FICA into a progressive payroll tax, with much higher rates for those with high wages and salaries. This sort of tax can achieve any desired degree of progressivity. Unlike most libertarians, I think a progressive payroll tax is desirable for simple utilitarian reasons.
He is explaining that there is no reason to tax capital gains if your goal is to reduce inequality. From the second article:
What “principle” suggests that patient people should be taxed at higher rates than impatient people—even if they have the same lifetime wealth?
Your only answer that seems to be that they have different wealth, which he explains is not true, so what reason remains for taxing capital gains?
As for what is wrong with discouraging saving, he never says that saving is inherently good. He gives a very clear and specific reason for why it's bad to discourage saving.
The inheritance tax discourages saving, and thus reduces the capital stock. This lowers the real wage of workers who work with physical capital.
This one may clarify a few things.
Glassnoser
11d ago
Taxing capital gains is not a way of avoiding taxing labour. The capital gain is a return on an initial investment that was earned with labour. Taxing it is taxing labour, just in a way that creates a deadweight loss by taxing someone who saves more than someone who spends. You get all of the deadweight loss of taxing labour and then some.
In my third link, Scott Sumner directly addresses the point about inequality. Taxing capital gains doesn't reduce inequality. The two brothers in his example are equally wealthy. But one chooses to invest his wealth and the other chooses to spend it. The fact that the one who invests it earns a capital gain does not mean he is wealthier. His brother had the same opportunity and didn't take it because he valued earlier consumption over later consumption. Claiming there is a difference in equality is just like claiming there is a difference inequality between someone who bought watermelon and someone who bought blueberries.
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.
He's not saying that at all. You've completely misunderstood. You should read the articles more carefully because he directly addresses this kind of argument.
Glassnoser
11d ago
Were you specifically asking how the state is supposed to go from 50% nonwhite to 0% nonwhite?
No, I was asking who counts as white.
Glassnoser
12d ago
A sales tax is a tax on consumption. A capital gains tax is a tax on capital. Taxing capital is taxing savings. It is not really taxing wealth, because an equally rich person who spends his money right away avoids it. It is actually easier to just tax consumption with a sales tax and then you can tax extreme wealth but in a way that is fair and doesn't discourage saving and investing.
The capital gains tax is especially absurd (compared to other taxes on capital) because it not only penalizes saving but also penalizes frequently selling assets, and the tax is on the nominal returns, not the real returns. If you invest in government bonds, your real tax after-tax return will be negative.
Scott Sumner is excellent on this subject and has written many blog posts on it. It's hard to pick the best one, but you should read a few. Here are some:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/a-consumption-tax-is-a-wealth-tax/
https://www.econlib.org/capital-gains-nonsense/
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/income-a-meaningless-misleading-and-pernicious-concept/
Glassnoser
12d ago
That is still really vague. I am talking about people who want to restrict immigration based on race. What would that actually mean? Once they can answer that, we can talk about whether that actually makes sense, whether it could work, how it would be done, and whether there are better ways of achieving those goals. White nationalists don't seem to want to do any of those things. But they are decisions they would eventually have to make.
Glassnoser
12d ago
I'm a bit confused by this concept. Elsewhere, I've read that Scotland should also be on the other side of the line. Is this actually a robust concept and does it really explain anything?
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
The Canadian government is increasing the capital gains tax for the relatively well off. They claim it only affects 0.13% of Canadians, but this is a lie, since capital gains are extremely lumpy, mostly affecting estates. A much larger share of the population will be in that 0.13% at some point in their lives. The tax will affect a lot of middle class people, distort the economy, and, as I'll explain at the end, redistribute wealth to foreigners.
Currently, 50% of capital gains count towards your taxable income and so you'd pay half the marginal rate, which tops out at between 44.5% and 54.8% depending on which province or territory you live in. The new rule would raise the portion of capital gains that is taxable from half to two thirds for capital gains over $250,000. Primary residences are exempt and it doesn't affect tax protected savings accounts like RRSP and the relatively new TFSA. Most people don't save enough to have savings outside of these accounts and their primary residences, but you certainly don't need to be rich to do so. You could be someone who chose never to own his primary residence and increased savings in the stock market instead. You could own a cottage, to which the capital gains tax applies when you either give it to your children or when you die. Lots of middle class people will be affected.
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. Someone who is equally wealthy but doesn't save his income for as long would pay less tax. So it taxes savers more than spenders and discourages investment. There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This brings me to my last point. The Liberals are far behind the Conservatives in the polls and an election is at most a year and a half away. The main issues tanking their popularity are housing and immigration, particularly for young people, who see a connection between those two issues. Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades). However, this new tax rule is being promoted in the name of generational fairness.
This makes no sense. The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do). 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. What is the point of inflating asset prices with immigration if you're just going to redistirbute the gains to those immigrants? If your goal is to be maximally charitable to immigrants, fine, but this is not in the best interests of Canadians.
The tax increase does exempt primary residences, but not other assets like secondary residences, and the reason for this tax increase is to fund the enormous increase in spending on things like subsidies for new home buyers and affordable housing. The deficit has ballooned to $40 billion dollars under Trudeau and I think the government is actually starting to get desperate and trying to think of ways to raise revenue without spending political capital. Corporations and trusts will also pay this higher capital gains tax. This will reduce business investment. The tax seems calculated to actually raise a fair bit of money while minimizing the number of people who think they'll have to pay it.
Glassnoser
20d ago
I was able to see them in the snow just before and after the total eclipse. They were interesting. They were like waves of faint shadows all running in the same direction as the moon.
Glassnoser
21d ago
I can't tell how much of this is a joke.
I'm going on a 3.5 hour drive tomorrow to get to the centre of the path of totality for the solar eclipse. I have the solar glasses. I have solar binoculars and regular binoculars. I know about shadow bands and am thinking of bringing something to make them easier to see. Is there anything else I should do to take full advantage of it that I'm probably not thinking of? How hard are shadow bands to see? I saw videos of people using white sheets to see them. I'll probably be on a beach if that matters.
UPDATE: I saw the shadow bands in the snow. They were very faint at first but very clear right before the eclipse. Overall, an amazing experience and totally worth the trip. It's hard to describe the impression it made. A few minutes before the eclipse, it got noticeably darker, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Then, very quickly, it's as dark as night with a full moon, and you can suddenly see this back orb where sun was a moment ago, ringed with bright light and extraordinary white whisps of still smoke coming out of it. I am not a religious person, but angelic is best descriptor that comes to mind.
Glassnoser
21d ago
What a funny name.
Glassnoser
28d ago
I use it every day, mostly for work. I don't do much prompt engineering. I don't usually find it necessary and it's very difficult to get it to to do what you want anyway. For example, no matter how much I insist I don't like lists, ChatGPT insists on explaining things with lists. I use it mostly for finding bugs in code and for telling me how to do something simple that I don't know or don't remember how to do. I also sometimes ask it to do things that are a little complicated that I am not sure how to do. This is very hit or miss, but might give me an idea for a better way to do it. Anything too complex, it can't handle.
Less often, I use it as a better Google search. There are certain kinds of things it is way better at getting information on. I also use it to take pictures of things and tell me what they are or to ask questions about it.
People are work use it to write emails for them, but I don't do this because it takes me just as long to write the email myself as it does to explain to ChatGPT what to write, and I'll do a better job anyway.
My favourite model is ChatGPT-4, because it is the only advanced LLM I can use in Canada.
Glassnoser
28d ago
You do get people advocating for specific popular policies that they think are obviously good, and when they don't see politicians doing enacting them, they assume they must be corrupt. For example, in Canada, there is a strong push right now to ban AirBnb completely or to ban corporations from owning houses, or even to ban anyone from owning multiple properties such that renters would only be allowed to rent from government owned housing or co-ops. Whenever these ideas come out on social media, the support to opposition ratio is easily 100:1.
Whenever there is any discussion about why these policies are not being enacted, there is always agreement that the problem is that politicians either don't care about the people or that they have investment interests that they're trying to protect. They never consider that some people might think their ideas won't work.
Politicians could maybe avoid this problem by increasing the housing supply, but if there are any problems with housing at all, then there will be a lot of outrage directed at them for not enacting these specific policies. I read a paper once that argued that this is South America's problem. There are lots of educated people who know that their policies are terrible, but the electorate has so little trust in politicians, that in order to get elected, you need to promise to enact these populist measures. In the West, the electorate tolerates the political class not doing exactly what they want because they have a certain level of trust.
Glassnoser
28d ago
I see the job of a politician in a democracy as trying to enact the best policies possible under the constraint of needing to get elected. If they did whatever the people wanted, it would lead to disaster, and they'd probably actually be voted out because of it.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
A lot of problems with the American healthcare system seem to be caused by the fact that so much of it is paid for with insurance. Insurance is for catastrophes that are unlikely to happen. Most people should never file an insurance claim in their lives. The fact that it's used for things like having a baby is absurd.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
This is what Canada does.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Why should doctors need to be able to prove they can speak English to be allowed to work in the US? The point of medical licensing is to make sure that doctors know what they're doing, something that is not easily verified by patients. But patients can tell immediately if a doctor speaks English. If he can't, no one is actually going to be harmed by it and he may still be able to help patients who speak some other language.
If insurers in the US negotiated a lower price for drugs, that would kill the incentive to develop new drugs.
How would allowing re-importation help? Edit: who is downvoting me just for asking a question? Can we not turn this into Reddit?
Glassnoser
1mo ago
I've never seen that.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Right. The debate isn't really about our survival. Like you said, we'll all die unless AI saves us. The debate is really about our descendants. Do we want human descendants or computer descendants. If the fear is that AI is going to kill us this century, then I get why people prefer the human descendants, but this preference makes less and less sense the farther out this showdown is likely to occur. (I think it's likely very far out). Our biological descendants will only get more different from us and our computer descendants could take a number of different forms, so it gets harder and harder to see why we should care what happens in a far away basically unpredictable future where nothing recognizably human exists anyway. And any argument that the AIs have to win based on selection has to recognize that the same selective forces act on humans too. They should converge on the same thing in the long run.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
A lot of the effective altruist types seem to be saying we should all stay home instead of enjoying the party because there is a small chance the punch is poisoned. I'm willing to take that risk. Staying home sucks and the party looks way more fun.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Compared to an amoeba, I'm a God and so are my adversaries. Actually, I don't really have adversaries. I live in a pretty functional world with eight billion Gods (relatively speaking) and I'm still here. They haven't killed me. What is qualitatively different about the world where our powers are scaled up by the amount AI will allow?
The pro-regulation argument depends on the highly unlikely belief that AI will soon reach a point where we cannot control it. Alignment, I strongly believe, is a complete non-issue. The problem is entirely about control. I think our experience with LLMs shows that alignment is actually pretty easy. The problem will not be AI that we can't get to understand exactly what we mean when we ask it to achieve some goal. The problem will be people deliberately designing AI to do bad things. The question of whether AI destroys us in the short to medium term will depend only on whether we can stop it. Only if AI makes destruction vastly easier than protection will it pose an existential risk.
In the long run, the risk is greater because destructive AI may gradually outcompete us. Natural selection might gradually select for AI that does not value humans. However, this is likely to be extremely slow because its speed will not be a function of how good the AI is but how much selection there is at the civilizational, and I think it's currently about zero and is slowing down. Without war, it doesn't really exist.
The biggest risk is probably that we give the AI the vote and then it votes to exterminate us, but that still requires a long period of likely slow selection and a whole series of other unlikely things that need to go wrong.
I won't say the very long run risk is negligible, it may even be high, but really, the problem is we just can't predict the future that far out. We'll have lots of time to figure this out. There will be a long period where we have extremely advanced AI but are still in control. They will be the time to figure out what to do about it and if we can stop AI from killing is now with smart regulation, we'll certainly be able to do so in the future.
The other thing those arguing for regulation don't understand is that regulation almost never works. The only thing it does reliably is to grind innovation and progress to a halt. AI is one of the few areas of technology that is progressing and it's in large part because of the lack of regulation. What regulation that has been rushed out so far has only proven this more concretely by banning many important uses of the technology and raising unnecessary barriers to entry. There is very little that is likely to reduce existential risk beyond the general stifling of the technology.
I don't just say this because the real risk of AI almost certainly comes from it taking over another country which then invades us, but because even the scenario commonly envisioned by decelerationists is one where we cannot align it, and therefore, requiring training runs to be approved by the government and for standardized safety protocols to be followed has basically no chance of ensuring alignment.
The most likely medium term existential risk I can see is that some kind of symbiosis occurs resulting in an AI industrial complex that takes over the government. Regulation is itself our greatest existential risk. The problem of government alignment is our greatest civilizational threat, not AI.
The actual focus of regulators has been all along and will remain fighting minor perceived social problems that they think AI will exacerbate, like racism, involuntary nudity, defamation, misinformation, job loss, and every form of discrimination justified or not. The purpose is to resist change, not to avoid catastrophe. But stopping the few good kinds of change in a sclerotic, degenerating civilization is setting up a catastrophe of its own. Putting the final nail in the coffin of technological progress means that the problems of stagnation, low fertility, dysgenics, environmental destruction, regulatory burden, and organizational rot will continue.
Here is another proposal: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/tax-luxury-not-wealth-or-income/
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