I’m sorry, I’m not sure what the source of confusion is. We both think making bad posts is bad, but I think his posts were good, so it doesn’t apply.
His input was a genuine loss imo. He made some of the only well argued pieces from points of view we never get here, and people would dogpile him, personally insult him, and bring up everything he ever said that they ideologically disagreed with. If people were regularly as shitty to me as they were to him I’m sure I would get in more verbal scuffles as well. Part of why I don’t have conversations about American culture war issues is because people have been shitty to me the times I tried, here and in DMs, and I have limited patience for that.
Soriek
6mo ago
I'm not gonna look through his reddit profile cause I've always found that thing kinda weird, but pretty much everyone here assuredly (hopefully) sounds different on the non-motte subs they visit. While he was here he was a long-time familiar face on the quality contributions page.
Soriek
6mo ago
Everyone understands this, they're clearly talking about earmarked tax payments plus interest exceeding defined tax outlays. If you want to be precise and call it accumulated payroll tax receipts plus 6% of money the US government will pay on treasuries, you can, but who cares? This is a semantic argument that doesn't have implications for the fiscal operations of the trust funds.
Soriek
6mo ago
Everyone including the SSA themself refers to the trust fund's accumulated surpluses as reserves.
Soriek
6mo ago
Where did you get that number from? In 2017 the average person paid about $3,045 in SS tax. Even if you multiplied that by two for a household, a 3.44% increase in the tax wouldn't come close to $2565.
Remember that even though workers really shoulder the full burden of the tax, half of it comes from your employer's account so that's not literally a 3.44% increase on whatever your takehome salary was before.
Soriek
6mo ago
This proposal doesn't hit people making over $160k, it hits people making over $250k, about 100 stacks more and solidly in the top 5% of the nation. I empathize with their higher cost of living, but if we have a funding shortfall, who other than the most well off should we be raising taxes on first?
Soriek
6mo ago
Yes wealthy people would be paying a larger share under this sytem and the benefits would be distributed downwards, like most other taxes.
Soriek
6mo ago
I will strongly oppose any increase/stealth increase (raising the payroll cap/widening the tax base) in taxes. Raising the payroll cap is just kicking the can down the road as the CBO mentions
I'm referencing the second of the two options they describe:
The second alternative would apply the 12.4 percent payroll tax to earnings over $250,000 in addition to earnings below the maximum taxable amount under current law. The taxable maximum would continue to grow with average wages but the $250,000 threshold would not change, so the gap between the two would shrink. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the taxable maximum would exceed $250,000 in calendar year 2039; after that, all earnings from jobs covered by Social Security would be subject to the payroll tax. Earnings under the current-law taxable maximum would still be used for calculating benefits, so scheduled benefits would not change under this alternative.
Soriek
6mo ago
Agreed it is nonsense to consider Korea an exceptionally feminist society, at least for the developed world, and they genuinely do have a very large anti-feminist movement that played a big role in the last election. It should be said though the Ministry of Gender Equality wore a lot of people's patience thin for non-ideological reasons, like their attempts to ban videogames, or reduce prostitution by issuing checks to anyone who promised not to visit a prostitute.
Soriek
8mo ago
Their entire logic rests on the assumption that the higher spending is causing higher test scores.
If they're taking two neighborhoods and controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population, pop density, and so on, and find that the difference in the better performing school is more funding per student, this is a reasonable argument to make. As far as I can tell you haven't made a counterargument here. If anyone has any actual objections with the adequacy model they're welcome to raise it, but the entire thing is besides the point because, again, the EPI paper isn't saying "funding is equal but they should be given more for the adequacy score," they're saying "poor districts are funded worse, period." It's also besides the point because my OP isn't some philosophical argument about who deserves what or what's the best way to fund schools; I'm asking a pretty specific question about how these two different think tanks found different conclusions from the same data.
I like this piece, but then and now feel like he's a little too dissmissive of the "cons" side of the calculation. Study #9, for instance, estimates that European-style price regulation could decrease innovation by as much as one third. I could reply with the Kaiser Family Foundation statistic that right now one third of people can't pick up their perscriptions at all because of the cost. If we reduce innovation by a third while expanding access to existing (and still increasing) innovation by a third, I'm not so sure we actually did that badly for ourselves.
I understand the study tries to account for the access side of things, but when they say that x reduced dollars leads to x less life years, I have to ask: aren't we basically already at about the peak of how long humans live? Are these extra life years at the very tail end of someone's life, low-quality, painful years that I probably wouldn't weight as highly as people who have their whole lives ahead of them gaining better medical care now? (As one commenter pointed out, if we really value all future life years equally, then the policy responsible for "worst thing in human history" would just be contraception). I could also add that this policy suggests Americans would get thousands more in savings, and that increases in income add life years in of themselves; likewise debt is a major driver of suicide - things I don't think the study accounts for in their life year ledger.
Also (unless I'm misreading) these studies seem to be addressing actual, old fashioned price controls, not pricing negotiations, which seem less drastic - it's what PBMs already do right now and no one seems to think they decrease innovation. I could be misunderstanding though.
This isn't to say that I don't take the argument seriously; we clearly gain from innovation and there should definitely be a big financial incentive to keep pharma companies churning out drugs. I'm just not sure if we're at the reasonable cutoff. When I tried googling, for instance, if we saw more pharma patents after Trump raised the patent period by four years, I couldn't find anthing. And as Scott points out, pharma companies wouldn't need to secure returns quite so crazy high if we didn’t make them go through a $billion+ ten-year approval process first.
But the guys in the 2-Gun Action Challenges understand that guns are lethal even without actually being shot, and someone who has trained or sparred in bjj would understand the implications of a rear naked choke hold.
Soriek
11mo ago
No, you practice it live too. We have children do this, I’d be shocked if actual marines don’t as well.
Soriek
1yr ago
Works for me, but doesn't change that the argument that freedom of association is listed in the constitution is incorrect, hence why the states were capable of infringing upon that right during segregation.
As best as I can tell, the first time the Courts ruled that we did have a right to freedom of association it was NAACP vs. Alabama, which is much my point above - that the Civil Rights Era was a legal expansion of freedom of association rather than a contraction of it.
It’s the same reason that people like Eisenhower refused to prop up the British or French empires after WW2, because they genuinely believed that America, as a former colony itself, must be on the “anti colonial” side.
Sometimes the west does stuff for ideological reasons, though just as or more often because of realpolitik. To pettily focus on just one part of your post, having just read his biography, Eisenhower (and the mid-century foreign policy blob in general) really didn't side against Britain and France in Suez for ideological reasons, but rather because:
1: He didn't want to lose undecided countries to become Soviet allies following the terrible PR of the invasion getting condemned everywhere.
2: To diffuse a situation that at worst could have spiraled towards nuclear war following the Soviet Union threatening to do anything to get them out - and the USSR was genuinely desperate to rehabilitate it's anti-imperialist credentials right after all the bad press they were getting from crushing the Hungarian uprising
3: Britain and France lied to the US about their intentions and plans and had their diplomats intentionally deceive ours while launching a military strategy we had expressly forbidden. If you're gonna be the hegemon you can't be tolerating that.
As for Vietnam, America just didn't want another Korean War.
Remember, this is the same guy who signed orders to coup anti-colonial leaders in between rounds of golf, he didn't identify with their movement.
Soriek
5mo ago
I have nothing super insightful to add, just thought this was a great post. Adaptations and repurposing cultural narratives are as told as time and as trad as Rome.
Soriek
6mo ago
I’m terribly sorry to hear everything you’ve been through and I hope very much your luck turns around.
Soriek
6mo ago
Both of these comments were fine, well above the standards of posting here. The second one I thought was just plain good, well written and makes a cogent argument that bigotry is natural rather than invented (by insert-your-political-enemies), and points out the hypocrisy of the most pro-assimilationist people here themselves being contrarians who vociferously resist assimilation.
Plenty of people would disagree strongly with his conclusions and maybe they'd be right. Good. This place should have actual differences in opinion, rather than different flavors of right wing arguing endlessly about the best way to fight wokeness. The fact that people think these are trolls are a sign of how unused to genuine disagreement and debate the userbase has grown.
Accusing him of dismissing the views of people he disagrees with is weak and holds him to a standard no one here is held to; dismissing and mocking progressive views is the single most consistent thing this sub does.
Soriek
6mo ago
Well, let's look at a [not even slightly] concrete example.
What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
Soriek
6mo ago
So your principle is that, if someone threatens you after they suffer the consequences of bad decisions, then you'll give them what they want?
My principle is that if you can 100% count on people to mess up, prudence suggests preparing in advance. To not do so is poor governance.
This falls foul of the Lucas Critique: you're inferring saving behaviour under Policy Regime A from behaviour under Policy Regime B, when a switch from B to A would change the incentives for saving behaviour.
Well, that was why I tried to look into real world examples of what the system looked like in practice. Per the quote in the Brookings Report: “the system [in Chile, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, and Bolivia] has done little to stimulate voluntary savings; few workers have channeled additional resources to their accounts.”
(Of course, someone might argue that European social democracy is preferable even given this relative stagnation, but that's a different argument.
I would be one of those people in favor for social democracy, partially because I’m pretty unconvinced taxation is really the root of their slower growth. Europe has had consistently high taxes than America for a long time but the divergence is only in the last 20 years, if anything a period marked more in Europe by slightly falling taxes. But as you say, that’s another argument.
My thesis is only that funding Social Security via increased taxation is one more step in that direction, and that that direction is not without costs.)
Sure, no disagreement there, my position is just that cutting SS by almost a quarter also has costs, and they seem larger to me than a small tax raise.
Soriek
6mo ago
From my OP:
- Raise Payroll Taxes - “even a modest change, such as a gradual increase of 0.3 percentage points each for employees and employers (or less than $3 per week for an average earner), could close about one-fifth of the gap.”
Soriek
6mo ago
No worries, I chopped a bunch of stuff to make it less long. The tax increase in general is def pretty obvious, I just thought it would be helpful to give some specific proposals and estimates.
Soriek
8mo ago
The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007). Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs. In addition, other factors, such as labor costs (e.g., districts in areas with higher costs of living will need to pay their employees more), size (economies of scale), and population density, all affect the “value of the education dollar.” The model, therefore, first estimates the relationships between district spending and these important factors, including testing outcomes. Importantly, the model accounts for the fact that school funding both affects and is affected by testing outcomes (For example, a district with higher test scores will tend to have higher property values than a district with lower scores. This high valuation allows the former district to collect more property tax revenues, which, in turn, boosts spending and positively affects testing outcomes. The NECM uses econometric methods to account for this endogeneity and tease out the causal relationship between spending and outcomes.)
This initial model yields a kind of “relationship inventory” of how each factor is related to spending. We then use the “inventory” to predict the cost (spending levels) of achieving a common outcome level (e.g., national average math and reading test scores) for each individual district, based on that district’s configuration of characteristics (in a sense, by comparing each district to other similar districts). These “required spending” estimates can then be compared with actual spending levels (total spending, direct to elementary and secondary education) in each district (this same basic process also yields our state-level estimates, which are aggregated district-level estimates). The difference between actual and required spending is a measure of adequacy relative to the common goal of national average scores.
Notably these are the highest tax areas in the United States. My point is redistribution has a pretty questionable impact on innovation and growth.
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