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Hint: most of those 47% are dirt poor minimum wage workers who don’t pay income taxes because the tax code explicitly exempts them due to them being dirt poor.

Incorrect. The 40th percentile is about $50,000 which is nowhere near 'dirt poor'.

You start out by asking for some math how about this as a starting place:
https://dqydj.com/scripts/fullhtml/base_2015_negativeincometax.html

It's an open source calculator, which shows its assumptions and has some documentation:
https://dqydj.com/negative-income-tax-cost-calculator-united-states/

You will argue it's not a multi-thousand page report, and that's valid. You might argue it's not well enough studied, I think most would agree with you. However, keep in mind that we've already done this kind of experiment once in the united states. It's called the Earned Income Tax Credit. From what I can tell, we didn't do the serious studying your suggesting we would need to do when we put the EITC into place. Instead we just did it very slowly. We could so something of similar kind for UBI. That would take away the risk of it blowing up and the need to huge amounts of study.

Say for example a 1% tax increase with a x dollar check included in every tax return, rising every year for the next 15-20 years then having the payout tied to inflation. At the same time you'd roll back other programs, such as taking away x dollars of social security payout. While we could fill in all of pieces, that isn't our jobs as citizens. That's the job of our legislature and executive branches, they have the resources.

The last element I want to address is if our legislation should bother to investigate this when you clearly think this is a risky option. I'd suggest you compare this to the Trump tax cuts, which were put in place based upon a theory that they would pay for themselves when no serious study suggested that could happen. Why would you hold this legislation to a higher bar than the way our existing legislation is produced at?

You start out by asking for some math how about this as a starting place:
https://dqydj.com/scripts/fullhtml/base_2015_negativeincometax.html

It's an open source calculator, which shows its assumptions and has some documentation:
https://dqydj.com/negative-income-tax-cost-calculator-united-states/

You will argue it's not a multi-thousand page report, and that's valid. You might argue it's not well enough studied, I think most would agree with you. However, keep in mind that we've already done this kind of experiment once in the united states. It's called the Earned Income Tax Credit. From what I can tell, we didn't do the serious studying your suggesting we would need to do when we put the EITC into place. Instead we just did it very slowly. We could so something of similar kind for UBI. That would take away the risk of it blowing up and the need to huge amounts of study.

Say for example a 1% tax increase with a x dollar check included in every tax return, rising every year for the next 15-20 years then having the payout tied to inflation. At the same time you'd roll back other programs, such as taking away x dollars of social security payout. While we could fill in all of pieces, that isn't our jobs as citizens. That's the job of our legislature and executive branches, they have the resources.

The last element I want to address is if our legislation should bother to investigate this when you clearly think this is a risky option. I'd suggest you compare this to the Trump tax cuts, which were put in place based upon a theory that they would pay for themselves when no serious study suggested that could happen. Why would you hold this legislation to a higher bar than the way our existing legislation is produced at?

I should have known something wasn't right about that 80% number. This percentile chart looks more correct:

https://dqydj.com/household-in...

That puts 30% making over 90K. As you said, we would expect that 50% make over $59K, so ...

I'm not sure now where I got that number. I suspect it might have been an individual income of $90K puts you in the 80th percentile, maybe.

In actual fact, high income earners tend to work substantially more than low income earners, so the fact that that they nominally more vacations hardly matters. People working around 60h/week make a median of $63000, whereas pepole working 40h/week make a median of $38000. A week or two of extra paid vacation isn't even a blip compared to 20h/week differences in work.

Agreed. And the FISA courts are just part of that.

This is old but illustrates the point: https://unredacted.com/2010/04..., and is backed up by this: https://dqydj.com/the-governme...

More and more secrets / Less and less declassification. And it seems like FOIA got much tougher under Bush, then worse under Obama, and are now are deflectable with ludicrous excuses/lies.

"The Trump Organization" is actually his father's apartment rental company, Elizabeth Trump & Son Co; he later renamed it after running it for years, as he wanted to diversify. His self-reported wealth in 1982 was $200M, when his company was still tied with his father. According to this calculator, that would be worth $4B today if invested in the market. Of course, that's not all that he got from his father - his father gave him (undisclosed) amounts of loans and gifts during his lifetime, and after his father's death in 1999, Donald and his siblings received most of Fred's assets; a portion of the real estate holdings alone were sold in 2003 for half a billion dollars. Much of Trump's other assets have come from his name - simple licensing rights (Trump pegs the value at $3,3B, Forbes says $253M); $241M from celebrity apprentice; etc. He also ditched a huge amount of debt through bankruptcy; before the proceedings, the Trump Organization owed $9B and Trump personally nearly $1B. When he settled with the banks after selling off assets, those figures were around $5B and $1B, respectively.

I think the better point to take away is that for the first time in 8 years there is optimism and measurable gains in the market

WTF are you talking about? Measurable gains? The S&P 500 has gone up 17% per year (dividends reinvested) for the last 8 years for a total return of 230% for the time period (source). Don't get me wrong, I'm liking the Trump Bump, but to claim the market hasn't had measurable gains in the last 8 years is easily refutable and delusionally wrong.

The 1% (that is about 3.5 million people) means an income of somewhere above $250k-300k after taxes. It goes up if you count households and not people but the effect is close to the same. If you go by net worth, then it is like $2.5M.

Different tools estimate slightly differently, but this site: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-in... says that the 1% level is reached at a household net worth of $7.87 million.

... tax the rich bastards

Careful, you're revealing your ulterior motives (envy and greed).

... at a 50% tax rate

Golden rule: how would you like to be taxed at 50%?

... which would benefit everyone.

The fact that you are included in the "everyone" group did not escape my notice.

That money could be used to feed the hungry, rebuild roads and bridges ...

You're so altruistic when planning how to spend other people's money.

... pay for basic research that corporations no longer do...

Because IBM (just to name a single example) isn't filing huge numbers of patents and innovations every year, right?
Also, I like how vague and condescending your term "basic research" is.

... and help us pay off the crushing debt we are already under.

Or we could stop giving money to foreign governments, stop handing out "free" stuff to our own citizens, stop spending fortunes on cruise missiles and drones, etc. ...

The Forbes 400 for America says that they own about $2.4 trillion. So you would have to go after a much larger number of people than that if you want to really punish those evil greedy rich people whose money we wish we had.
The federal budget is about $3.95 trillion with a deficit of $616 billion and a total debt of just short of $20 trillion.
This article gives the net worth required to be in a percentile of wealth.

Please check my math: 0.01 * 338 million = 338,000 people => 338,000 * $30,644,280 gives us a guess of their net worth being about $97,448,810,400,000 (ninety seven trillion dollars assuming that they all have about a thirty million dollar net worth).

If confiscated then that would be sufficient to pay the national debt... You were saying merely that we should tax them at higher rates (50%). It really just means taking their money over time rather than all at once.

The end effect is the same. In the long term, it would produce the following problems:
1. The rich will just leave. Nobody will sit around while most or all of their wealth is confiscated. It doesn't matter how justified you think it is, they won't just sit there and be shafted. Next year you won't have anyone to confiscate the wealth from.
2. All businesses who can possibly manage to do so will flee the country. What do you think that would do to the GDP? Do you think tax revenues would go up or down?
3. You will have set the precedent that in this country we'll just take your stuff if you have it and we want it. Talk about the destruction of Western civilization. Everything is predicated upon the notion of "ownership" in our culture, society, and civilization. If you can just take someone else's stuff because you want it (individually or collectively) then what incentive is there to work, to earn and save, to do anything other than the absolute bare minimum to get through today? Would you work for free? Would you work for subsistence wages? Would you think it was fair if most of your income were taken away from you and given to others? Why do you think anyone else would or should?
4. With the evacuation of businesses (and jobs) and the ultra-rich a power vacuum and societal upheaval will leave the country vulnerable. Probably you would get a dictator in a couple years promising to make things better and to punish those responsible... read a history book or recall your history lessons in school and you'll see how such

Primarily, I think you've got several screws loose. I think the rich voted for Trump because of things like the estate tax...

This implies that rich and upper-middleclass people are stupid. 90% of Americans have a net worth < $1 million. 99.5% have a net worth < $11.8 Million. Under current tax law, you only pay federal estate taxes on the part of your net worth that exceeds $10.9 Million for 2016, which is automatically adjusted for inflation. That < 1% of the population obviously couldn't have elected trump on their own, so the rest of the rich and semi-rich who voted for him must either be stupid or naively optimistic about their future earning prospects. Even if the Democrats were in power and bumped the estate tax exemption down to the pre-Bush $1 million level, that's still only 10% of Americans who'd pay a penny in estate taxes.

Speculating about the higher order effects of how large structural changes in the tax code will effect the income distribution is akin to astrology, but the 1st order effects are clearly more beneficial for a small minority of the wealthiest Americans.

Note that this post isn't rhetorical. It's entirely possible that Trump voters did vote primarily on personal economics and fall into these three categories:

• 1. Think Trump's tax policies will directly benefit them, but just can't or didn't bother to do the very simple math.(i.e. the stupid and the lazy)
• 2. Understand that Trump's tax policies will lower taxes on people richer than them a lot more than it will lower taxes on them directly, but believe the higher-order effects will have a net benefit to them (i.e. trickle-down economics).
• 3. Are really rich and will benefit from Trump's tax policies

I'm just saying that #3 is far too small a voting block to even move the needle in the popular or electoral college votes. If economics was a deciding factor for a significant number of voters, some combination of #1 and #2 were heavily involved.

It's great that you've embraced the Web and have your own website. But it's even better that you have a weblog.

Weblogs, by their nature, are meant to be updated all the time. And while your articles and books are great there's something special when a celebrity such as yourself (and others, like the singer Moby and the actor Wil Wheaton), is willing to take on a project that really allows the fan to see you as one of us; as if we're holding a conversation.

Thus, do you recommend to your other high-profile friends, such as Rock Bottom Remainders band-mate Stephen King, to start a weblog instead of the rarely updated-type website?