Soriek
6mo ago
Even if you multiplied that by two for a household, a 3.44% increase in the tax wouldn't come close to $2565.
Soriek
6mo ago
Do we want a larger share of power and capital in the hands of dumb people?
I'd like for them to be provided for in retirement! Certainly better than them being up-in-arms against their poverty, even if it's self inflicted. The problem is much larger than a cohort of dumb people at the bottom of the population as well, insofar as you trust self-reported surveys, various studies are always showing that even surprisingly numbers of well-off people report living paycheck-to-paycheck (25% of people making over $200k, 30% of people making over $250k). If these were middle income folks I would happily accept the counter that raising their payroll taxes would make this worse, but if even the Americans with the most disposable income don't save any of it, it's hard to imagine this would be better in a less-guaranteed retirement system.
Similarly, the "funding solutions" you consider all involve taxing labour more...As Western Europe has already experienced, social democracy via tax-and-spend plus regulation ends up in a trap of stagnation that is politically hard to escape:
These just aren't very high taxes on labor. 0.3% isn't going to bring us to anywhere near Europe. I'll note that even if we were, the Scandanavian countries are the pretty central example of high taxes on labor/consumption, low taxes on capital, and have done some of the best in terms of keeping pace with the US.
But we could even skip that and go with option 2 and only tax the top 5% of laborers. If you'd rather fund it by taxing capital I'm fine with that too. But even the conservative Tax Foundation agrees payroll taxes are more efficient than taxes on capital:
due to the inelasticity of the supply of labor, payroll taxes generate a comparatively small amount of deadweight loss compared to other forms of taxation. This means that payroll taxes lead to a relatively small amount of economic inefficiency, since the quantity of labor in the market does not dramatically decline as a result. Overall, payroll taxes do much less economic harm than taxes on capital. This is evidenced by our analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders’ tax proposals, whose payroll tax rate increase raised nearly four times as much revenue as his proposed increases on capital gains and dividends, but with a fourth less of the impact on GDP.
We've also been pretty committed to keeping entitlements funded via payroll tax partially because it's the least unpopular tax, since people see it more as an investment.
Agreed that part of the problem with taxing wages is that businesses can respond by shifting compensation, generally to benefits. That's one of the problems "option 3: Widen the tax base" is trying to account for. Worth noting though that payroll tax is already considered the hardest to dodge:
payroll taxes are very hard to evade. According to the IRS’ criminal enforcement data, investigations into payroll tax abuse make up less than 3 percent of all tax investigations, despite payroll taxes generating about a third of all federal tax revenue.
I'll also note that the (conservative, pro-low tax) Tax Foundation has similarly ambitious estimates for raising the whole cap:
removing the payroll tax cap entirely would lead to $1.8 trillion in additional federal revenue over ten years on a static basis, and primarily impact high-earners. Furthermore, this additional revenue could be used to lower marginal rates on corporate and personal income, growing both wages and GDP by 2.2%, while still raising revenue.
Alternatively you could take the option of raising taxes very slightly on normal people, or even just tax capital directly if we really want to be sure the rich to pay.
Soriek
6mo ago
Because the $250,000 isn't indexed to inflation it's just a slow transition into removing the cap on taxed income while providing benefits only on the social security max income.
Yeah, the title of that section was "Raise the Payroll Cap", this wasn't hidden. Unpleasant decisions will half to be made either way, a decade and a half transition from the payroll cap that fundraises a trillion in the first decade off the top 5% of earners is one of the more reasonable ones I've seen.
It's high time for benefit shortfalls to match funding shortfalls.
Should we cut benefits by over almost a quarter? That's what we're on track to do currently.
Soriek
6mo ago
Fair point. The regressivity is broader than just the cap, generally as you get poorer people pay a larger sharer of the income for payroll, but payouts should ofc be factored in too.
Soriek
8mo ago
The buried assumption here is that putting more money into schools with larger shares of poor students will improve their education. But that's exactly what we were trying to determine! This is circular.
I think you're imagining researchers comparing a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood and assuming the difference in outcomes is down to funding. They're not, they're comparing poor neighborhoods and finding that the stand out difference between them (after controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population density) is the better performing poor school has more funding per student. This is a reasonable conclusion. I'm sure there are counterarguments or complaints to be made about their data or something but no one here is providing them
The world is a big place, 45 days isn't slow.
The claim on the part of the skeptics is that the scientist made an abrupt 180 on their views in only a few days because of pressure from the NIH. Instead they had a month and half during which relevant research was published that overturned the main cited uncertainty.
OK, but any other theory was called a conspiracy theory (at best). So they put forth one possibility and suppressed anything else... You don't see a problem here?
This is what the scientists had to say about the lab leak theory vs the market:
As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location....
Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.
Pretty reasonable imo. Anyone is welcome to dispute their scientific claims. Again, the same government you're accusing of supressing the lab leak has also repeatedly endorsed the lab leak. Seems like a pretty sloppy coverup imo.
Is that not what you’re referring to with this passage?
History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)
A discussion of “the more disastrous decisions in the 20th century” and “pointless wars caused by masculine leaders” that didn’t include fascism would be an odd one indeed. We could certainly add other countries, but ie the Soviet Union of course was no more reliant on women’s support than any other dictatorship from that era.
Soriek
11mo ago
You wouldn't happen to have anything written in English on that would you? I might try to do a deeper dig in the topic for an effort post later on.
From that position? You lock your bicep on one side of the neck and forearm on the other, then pin that hand to your other upper arm to keep it locked. Then take your other hand and push down on the back of the head and it’ll cut off bloodflow, causing someone to go unconscious. It looks like this all together.
Soriek
11mo ago
I‘m fine with people carrying and using guns, tasers, and pepper spray in self defense. Not that these are valid comparisons, the latter two are pretty obviously less likely to result in a dead guy than choking.
Strange how there are exactly zero responsible and reasonable uses of force, at least after the fact if something goes badly and someone dies.
Maybe you think you’re responding to someone other than the guy who’s said like five times that lethal force could be valid in this situation.
Soriek
11mo ago
No, you spar, where you're trying to attack another person who is resisting you and trying to attack you. This is a very far cry from "having other people play along," and you regularly see people pass out from using this move in sparring, making it extremely unlikely that anyone would be familiar with it and not understand what it does.
I've said several times in this thread I don't have a stance on whether his response was right or wrong, at least until more info comes out, because if someone attacks you in real life sometimes lethal force is warranted. What I question is that he wasn't aware that this move had lethal implications, it's genuinely really clear to anyone who's used it. The "how would people react in an uncontrolled situation vs a controlled situation?" isn't the question here, it's "how would someone's bloodflow react to this move in an uncontrolled vs controlled situation?", to which the answer is "the same".
Soriek
11mo ago
Yeah fair to say. I don’t think i have a strong objection to the policy myself.
Soriek
1yr ago
IANAL but my understanding is that the Ninth Amendment has never been held to confer substantive rights (which seems to be what the linked wiki page affirms as well). If it is supposed to do that, and Americans have always had a right to freedom of association, then surely segregation was always unconstitutional and the CRA just reestablished the right to association that we were supposed to have.
Soriek
1yr ago
Sure, but most transit advocates don't actually want trains to replace cars, they just don't want cars to replace trains (in the areas trains are viable, AKA cities)
Soriek
1yr ago
We stray ever further into our personal experiences but this is another case where I’m sure what you say is true for you, but I just feel the exact opposite. The fact that a car is a private place in a public place is one of my least favorite things about it! It means my most valuable possession, and whatever possessions I might want to store in it, are outside of my house where I can’t keep an eye of them. Instead they sit on the street with the weirdos, and any time I want to go somewhere I have to hope none of the people passing by are gonna mess with it despite the fact that I hear about more car break-ins every week.
I don’t find cars very comfortable either, but in fairness I haven’t had nice cars.
Of course YMMV.
Soriek
1yr ago
Doing a bit of googling to confirm this: that's for a five year loan. A new car lasts a few times as long as that. Google says the average age of a modern vehicle is 11.4 years. So pay $716 for 5 years and then get a paid off car for a hell of a lot longer.
Thanks for crunching that out, others have also pointed out my table napkin math was (predictably) off, so I switched to O’Toole’s Bureau of Economic Administration stat that in 2017 drivers spent $1.15 trillion on cars.
I saw a Federal agency's list of per passenger mile fuel consumption for various means of transportation and public busses were shocking bad. Worse than a single person driving a big truck. A full bus is very fuel efficient per passenger mile. But most city busses are mostly empty most of the day, so they are horribly inefficient uses of fuel on average.
You’ve described the long and the short of it really: transit is much more effective than cars when full, but less efficient when empty, which raises the question if we should keep pushing policies that distort the market away from the most efficient form of transit, like single family zoning, municipal parking minimums, and diverting sales and property tax to road infrastructure.
The things you care about.
Affordability, efficiency, pollution, and use of public space are things that people on all sides of this debate are comparing, from Randal O’Toole to the most militant /r/fuckcars poster.
Soriek
1yr ago
I think this was true for a while but nowadays the yimbyist-transit crowd have developed a growing consensus around opposing things like zoning and environmental road blocks to construction. The mouthpiece for this crowd are people like Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who talk about "supply-side progressivism" and fighting veto-points.
No, communism did not leave China any poorer than Singapore; their GDP per capita was neck and neck in the early 70s. Yet it has been a very long time since communism and China now massively underperforms relative to modern Singapore, despite a fifteen head start on liberalization and more supposedly favorable demographics
Soriek
2mo ago
Isn't the obvious objection here that during the first period, citizenship and power in institutions mostly rested with WASPs and similar demographics while in the second one, although immigration had been restricted, now a large share of the native born population consisted of (descendants of) Italians, Irish etc., i.e. ethnic groups that down to the present day have markedly different attitudes towards redistribution or even things like free speech in comparison to English- or German-Americans?
I've seen people try to track with data that various European groups have consistent attitudes on policy over time, but I feel like it's pretty hard to square with how things actually worked in practice. Those same ethnic groups that supported the New Deal democrat party also supported the Democrats when they were the extreme laissez faire, anti-interventionist party, while the WASP-dominant Republicans were much more pro-intervention. I think an easier explanation is just that immigrants probably cluster around the pro-immigration party. The bulk of Irish and German immigration happened in the mid nineteenth century, but it wasn't till the better part of a century later than they (and southern whites and many other native demographics) were sold on more statist policies, so it's hard to draw a straight line from their entry into America towards larger redistribution.
I'd wager that continually adding more people who come from countries that practice more distribution and, when asked in surveys like the GSS, explicitly say that the government should intervene more and reduce income inequality, will in fact eventually result in a society that redistributes more and values economic freedom less.
This was the OP's wager as well and it's not unreasonable. But I don't think it's a claim we see much demonstrated in our own long history of mass immigration. Also worth remembering that immigrants are not perfectly representative of their own countries. The kind of person who crosses an ocean or a desert to start life all over is gonna be a little unique.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you or you meant spending coming back down from the highs of WWII, this claim doesn't seem true, whether for overall spending or social spending in particular, both of which have a strong upward trend starting in the early 20th century.
You're right, I overstated his actual claim, which was that the rate of growth of spending as a percent of GDP slowed.
The federal government radically restricted immigration from 1922 to 1967, when federal expenditures grew from 4.5 percent to 18.3 percent - a four-fold increase...In the 45 years after the modest immigration liberalization of the late 1960s, federal expenditures climbed to 20.6 percent, a mere 8.7 percent increase...The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and other large expansions of government all happened when the border was closed.
From the Civil War till WW1, the heyday of mass immigration, federal expenditures as a percent of GDP stay barely above 0% and even fell over time.
You want to take the chance on the Guatemalan plumber? The tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots?
?
Guatemalan tradesman are pretty normal in America. As far as I know there is no constituency of people demanding government retribution for Mayan house-flooding practices.
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