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  I mean all people.

Well, they're comparing apples and oranges in that chart. They're basically taking a bunch of programs, not counting them as income in the blue, then sharing out that money to everyone and marking it red. Yeah, when you ignore the people who are helped by the programs you're dismantling, everyone else looks like they're in better shape.

That's a known economic fallacy. Localism generally makes an economy weaker and poorer, save for when the local economy is at a trade advantage.

For example: it's expensive to ship meat and produce around the country; as a result, people who live in Wisconsin or various big farm states have access to meat, cheese, and so forth at low prices. At one point, farmers used to get $8/crate (90 pounds) for oranges, which showed up at my local market for $8/5lb (literally 18 times as expensive), with nobody along the way profiting more than 10%!

In such a case, buying local reduces the cost of goods, leaving you with more money to buy more stuff. Buying as direct as viable will shift your income away from middle-men and to other producers and middle-men. Buying things locally-made in local stores, for example, avoids the enormous cost of overland nationwide distribution (a pair of pants costs like 6.5 cents to get here from China, and about $7 overall to get from the port to the Wal-Mart where you buy them). That, then, means you can buy more goods, and so there are more cashiers and local distribution drivers to carry pumpkins from the farm to the super market 2 miles away.

On the other hand, pants cost about $6 import ($6.12 per pair from China, 6.5 cents is shipping oversea). With American minimum-wage labor, this goes up, and so Americans have to work longer hours to afford them. The minimum-wage labor isn't just $8.25/hr; there's a massive amount of payroll going to social insurances (OASDI, medicare, unemployment on the first $7,000 of income) and benefits.

That triples the price of pants and cuts back the amount of labor you might expect to make all the pants we import from China (~178,000 factory jobs) dramatically. It also reduces the number of objects shipped and sold, meaning fewer truck drivers, fewer cashiers, and fewer retail inventory management crew members. In total, you end up losing nearly a net 9,000 American jobs.

The average American factory worker makes something like $21/hr and costs the employer $78/hr, versus around $3.20/hr in China. Buying local would be a disaster for jobs and the economy at large.

We have a lot of cities that are blown-out rust holes because they now lack any notable productive capacity. Folks there don't make anything anyone wants; if they did, they'd make it at a cost greater than anyone else who makes it anywhere else, and anyone who buys it from them would be poorer. Money wouldn't flow into their local economy, and people in their local would work harder and longer to use the same labor-hours and attached money to buy a lot less stuff and be a lot poorer in a desperate and misguided attempt at self-sufficiency and support of their local economy.

That's actually one reason I want a Universal Social Security. One of its side-effects is an inflow of money to such communities, giving them consumer purchasing power. They might import goods, sure; and someone needs to sell them. Fast food, retail, local entertainment... the last-mile service economy will grow. People will find jobs and grow wealth. With a stronger economy, they can then begin building a basis from which to supply something to the rest of the world. They might not all find it, but they'll be more-adaptable, more-ready, and more-supported while they wait as labor reserve for the rest of us.

It's been surprisingly-hard to pitch a universal social security because of class warfare. Since we're not in a recession now, people aren't hurt and scared; they're still angry. Thing is, it doesn't cost any more money to supply a universal social security--that is to say: after all is done and said, on a half-month cycle, people are perpetually ahead in after-tax spendable money under that system compared to today's. I mean all people.

You'd be surprised how many folks

Why is it corruption? Lobbying your senators is hard.

Look at me. I've written up a policy for a universal social security that cuts taxes on literally every single individual, cuts business income taxes, and cuts payroll taxes. It stabilizes OASDI (because it replaces part of it, and that proportion becomes larger over time). It stabilizes the middle-class through tough economic times, cutting back the severity and duration of recessions. It remediates a large part of the welfare system and, as a result, eliminates homelessness and hunger in the United States.

I can describe the ins and outs of this policy; I can show how to deploy it; I can show how and why it works; I can defend every piece of it. I've drawn up transition plans, I've described how to manage it using the existing Social Security system, I've pointed out the risks in welfare and immigrant concerns and how to control them. I've described how to use this to improve and then replace HUD housing assistance, and I've described how to use the Social Security credit system to phase-in naturalized Americans so as to avoid any threat of economic parasitism.

All the technical end, I can handle.

Now: How do I present it?

Never mind just getting Congress to hear me speak; what do I say? How do I engage in a Congressional dialogue with power and persuasion? Congress will ask for questions, will raise concerns, and will want follow-up if they do find any interest; how do I collect, analyze, and present the economic data?

Do you think Congress will just listen, nod, decide that everything seems well-and-proper, and go with it? Do you think they'll even look? Maybe, with what I can do on my own, I'll be able to get their attention; tell me what you think.

I need people. I need public attention to the issue. I need pictures, prepared speeches, graphs, charts, and videos to speak to the American People and to Congress. I need to be able to think on my feet--or to hire someone who can. I need to pull together enormous amounts of data and work with it.

To engage the American people, I need graphics designers, programmers, video editors, marketers. To engage Congress, I may need analysts and economists, highly-skilled business negotiators, and maybe even multiple suits at once to send individually to meet with Congressmen repeatedly. I need to collect the concerns of the Congressmen, analyze them, find answers, and send my people back to them to deliver what we've found.

Do you know how much that costs?

Even if you can skip the public campaign, what if you have dozens of complex issues to deal with?

Imagine how much the costs scale.

Most of it isn't kickbacks and back-room deals. Some of it is; that's why we have a few Senators and Governors in prison. A lot of the time, the Congressman and his staff will take to reminding you that it's not their job to do weeks of research at your request; if you want their attention, you bring the data.

Besides that, year-after-year costs will always go up with inflation, just like movie tickets. If it's a few percent, it's just inflation; if it's more, it's more lobbying activity.

That's a short and undetailed version, yes. My point was that rapid roll-out of new technology eliminates jobs faster than people can transition, which causes an economic crash. Mature tech doesn't show up overnight (usually), so you want to encourage industry to look at up-and-coming tech so that it gets deployed in pieces. That gets into complex business concepts about risk, competition, ROIs, speculation, and so forth; the short of it is businesses don't agree on when the most-advantageous time is to make a move (even when they all agree on what the state-of-the-art is), or on the rate at which to move (all at once, staged roll-out, pilots, early growth and late replacement, etc.).

One thing, though.

People who drive taxis now can learn to do other jobs later

People who get excessed generally apply the same skills elsewhere. Coal miners become salt miners, various types of engineers, or construction workers and foremen, etc., mostly with the skills they have or with minimal retraining. There's a fantasy of turning coal miners into programmers that exists largely so people can point out that you don't turn coal miners into programmers. Essentially, "retraining" is a myth; the displaced only expand their skill set, like a Java programmer becoming a C# programmer (no, programming isn't about knowing a programming language; I know tons of programming languages on a deep and technical level, and I'm missing foundational skills required to be an effective programmer).

If you transition too many people too fast, you just get unemployment. You drop people out in mid-career with no equivalent career into which to move.

Otherwise, you get things like the older bunch just retiring (many people take a few years of late retirement, but they don't generally seek jobs if they get lain off after retirement age), the younger bunch either staying in college longer or adjusting their career path (fewer entrants into the industry), and less new immigrant labor.

It can be awfully hard on people in transition, or people who didn't want to transition, but we can do things to make it easier for them.

Those "things" that we can do now (but haven't yet implemented) would do hilarious things to our economy, like reduce the severity and duration of recessions, eliminate all homelessness and hunger, slow down technological replacement of jobs by reducing the cost of labor, speed the uptake of replacement jobs by increasing consumer stability, and so forth. That doesn't even get into the other niceties like stabilizing our welfare system and eliminating all current problems in the OASDI system in particular.

It's far from a perfect world, but it's one that we'd be embarrassed to admit we didn't build sooner if we ever saw it.

The problem is we've got the modern class warfare politics. Trump built his support base on the radicalized middle-class, a phenomena that has occurred every 30-50 years throughout history. Basically, convince 80% of the population that either the rich are taking all the fucking money ("Hillary is pro-establishment, Trump is anti-establishment" is about this), the poor are taking all the fucking money (focus on welfare systems as broken and costly instead of on social problems as requiring improvements to our welfare system are this), or both, and you get 80% of the votes.

So why is this important?

Well, let's say we implemented a universal social security (I designed one; it's a favorite topic of mine; you've seen it before). Two-adult, married-filing-jointly households with no income source get $17,502 of untaxed income every year under this system. The entire impact on those looks like this.

See the problem?

Hint: it's all the way to the right.

That red line is current take-home inco

The Social Security system is one of the most-successful anti-poverty systems in the world, if not the most-successful. I've been targeting a Universal Social Security, and I figure it will fare rather well. Unfortunately I'm bad at Web design and communicating in general.

Also the argument about the welfare system sucking down tons of money in either overhead or abuse is a red herring. That's not a real thing; most such systems are actually quite efficient, and nearly all of the so-called abuse is bureaucratic--caseworkers tend to see that you technically don't qualify for food stamps, but that you're exactly the type of case for which we have SNAP and WIC, and so they approve applications which later fail bureaucratic review and get flagged as inappropriate disbursements.

Most UBI advocates have a distorted view of welfare, of economics, and of the dynamics of government. They have no idea what they're talking about and are easily-dismissed. That's a big problem, because a universal social security is a good policy if implemented properly, and the loud voice of the public is a ridiculous ass-dance that ties itself to the idea. Sort of a giant well-poisoning attack against any such thing.

Other things UBI advocates imagine that don't line up with reality are corporate-supplied welfare (bullshit jobs, make-work, any idea of a job existing because people need jobs instead of because corporations need labor); the end of work thanks to automation; and a great need to tax the rich, either because they have too much or because of a lack of capacity to figure out how to finance a UBI.

Problem: you can't just hand people money. Nobody is working; who is building these houses, maintaining these roads, and making the food?

For like 400 years, people have been saying that, just next decade, these new machines will end all human labor, and we'll all live with our mechanical servants caring for us. It hasn't happened yet, for important reasons: any machine which can do that has to be a sentient, creative intellect, which is essentially human, will want rights, will want pay, will want free time, and thus won't be free. Anything less just paves the way for us to apply our labor to make even more shit.

More to the point, though, every industry has a break in it. The major break is the logistics of marketing: every business wants to exceed its peers, or at least keep its position, and so we have competition; and robots can't compete. Humans can utilize robots as they compete.

That doesn't get down to the recursion problem: robots aren't self-maintaining, and we need machinists and QA and such to keep the robots running. There are little things for which we'd use more labor to build and maintain robots than to do on our own. Instead of 3,500 people running a candy factory, we use fewer than 300; and we use those 300 people because the robots can't do some stuff cheaply enough.

In a decade, it'll be 30.

So you have two considerable situations: The rich have nothing because nothing is made, because they can't sell to anyone, and so can't remain rich; or everyone is rich because the means to make things are cheap and easy. Neither of these actually works out.

Thus you have the only remaining option: we have the same kind of working population as we have now. Oh, we might cut our working hours in half, because suddenly we can produce 3x as much and nobody wants that as much as they want 1.5x as much stuff and half the time spent working to get it. We'll still be a working society.

With a universal social security, the bottom of society--the poorest--have a minimal standard. What's just above that, though?

I've been trying to get a good visual down for this, but I'm not the world's best Web designer (I can't, at all). The policy is easy to work out, while the politics are... hard. Bear with me for a minute.

A universal Social Security, sufficient to better achieve the mission of our welfare services, without dismantling our welfare system, causes a reduction in taxes at all levels. In payroll, it's 0.9% marginal lowered taxes; in corporate profits, we fall from 35% to 32.5%; and the individual has greater retained take-home income when you include the benefits check that comes twice a month.

Currently, our personal income tax brackets range from 10%+6.2%(OASDI) to 28%+6.2%, then fall to 28% and climb back up to 39.6%. I've cut my proposal back to only tackle the naive implementation and leave straightening it out to the CBO, which means I inherit that flaw: the blunt proposal has the highest tax bracket on the middle class, like our 34.2% tax bracket on $91k (single)/$153k (married, 2 incomes under $118k).

Under that proposal, the impacts on taxable wages hit a low point around $200k, with only $2,800 more income (single earner). In other words: the total Federal taxes paid on $200k as a single earner falls from 27.53% to 26.15%.

At $50,000, it's about $5k more spendable income single, $13k more spendable income married.

Let's look at minimum wage, though.

The poorest of poor end up with $8,751/year, or $17,502 for a two-adult household. That's in untaxed income (benefits disbursement). If you have no job and no income, that's where you stand.

At minimum wage ($8.25/hr), one full-time income gets a single earner $7,204 more income than today, $21,579/year, or $12,828 more

It's not that so much as the dialogue. "Look at how much poverty we have! The rich need to pay their fair share!" "How will that help?" "They have too much money!" .... what?

I'm looking hard at the politics now as I seriously consider addressing the problem.

what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".

It's pretty much this, yeah. Economics is complex and difficult. People want to believe that you have a solid linkage between lever A and trapdoor B; it's not like that. It takes me several hours of research and a few pages of dissertation to work out how moving imports to American manufacture affects America, and it's always three parts: it makes all Americans poorer, no matter what we pay the factory workers; it might create jobs if we pay the Americans as little as possible, and will net-reduce American total jobs faster and faster as we increase the American wage for these factory jobs; and the job change doesn't matter anyway because population and labor force rapidly expand and contract to move toward a stable unemployment level.

If you want to send a signal to reassure Americans, well. Welcome to politics. Fact: we've created more jobs than population growth year-after-year since the recession (that's what's driving unemployment down). In tech, we've created far more tech jobs than the total lay-offs, year-after-year, meaning those H1-Bs aren't cutting into the total tech job market. These are comforting facts.

It's also an economic fact that prices are constrained by costs: you can't price something so low that your revenue won't pay the wages required to make it. That's not just about hiring $80,000 Indians instead of $140,000 Americans; the core of wealth is technical progress. Economic growth can be from population growth (when population is below carry capacity) or technical progress; technical progress reduces the wage-hours invested to produce goods and service, meaning we end up able to make and buy more for the same hours of labor worked. Prices come down because of competitive market forces, but only so far as is both profitable and mathematically sustainable.

That means somebody's gotta lose their job eventually.

So yes, that reassurance? It's true. It's also political: even without the H1-B labor, we're going to have rounds of layoffs every time things get better. That part you don't call attention to in this context.

You can call attention to it in another context. Americans do need reassurance against the pain distributed by those general economic forces, after all; and we're currently able to supply that, but only with new policy--and no new taxes. What our nation really hungers for is a new deal for the American people, and it's about time we commit ourselves thusly.

what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".

It's pretty much this, yeah. Economics is complex and difficult. People want to believe that you have a solid linkage between lever A and trapdoor B; it's not like that. It takes me several hours of research and a few pages of dissertation to work out how moving imports to American manufacture affects America, and it's always three parts: it makes all Americans poorer, no matter what we pay the factory workers; it might create jobs if we pay the Americans as little as possible, and will net-reduce American total jobs faster and faster as we increase the American wage for these factory jobs; and the job change doesn't matter anyway because population and labor force rapidly expand and contract to move toward a stable unemployment level.

If you want to send a signal to reassure Americans, well. Welcome to politics. Fact: we've created more jobs than population growth year-after-year since the recession (that's what's driving unemployment down). In tech, we've created far more tech jobs than the total lay-offs, year-after-year, meaning those H1-Bs aren't cutting into the total tech job market. These are comforting facts.

It's also an economic fact that prices are constrained by costs: you can't price something so low that your revenue won't pay the wages required to make it. That's not just about hiring $80,000 Indians instead of $140,000 Americans; the core of wealth is technical progress. Economic growth can be from population growth (when population is below carry capacity) or technical progress; technical progress reduces the wage-hours invested to produce goods and service, meaning we end up able to make and buy more for the same hours of labor worked. Prices come down because of competitive market forces, but only so far as is both profitable and mathematically sustainable.

That means somebody's gotta lose their job eventually.

So yes, that reassurance? It's true. It's also political: even without the H1-B labor, we're going to have rounds of layoffs every time things get better. That part you don't call attention to in this context.

You can call attention to it in another context. Americans do need reassurance against the pain distributed by those general economic forces, after all; and we're currently able to supply that, but only with new policy--and no new taxes. What our nation really hungers for is a new deal for the American people, and it's about time we commit ourselves thusly.