No we don't. We SPEND $26k/person to the government employees and contractors, but that doesn't mean we get $26k of VALUE back. How many government employees sit around doing nothing of value all day? How much military hardware gets built and then left to rust out in some field?
If you implement a basic income and 90% of people decide to become pot heads and video game bums, well now your GDP is about 10% what it originally was. So your $17 trillion GDP has shrunk to $1.7 trillion.
That is based on the assumption that everybody makes the same amount of money/GDP. That's not the case. The top 20% earn something like 80% of the wealth, and the bottom 50% earn 5% of the wealth (estimates based on numbers I vaguely recall). So if the bottom 50% all become potheads, you've probably only lost around 5-10% of your GDP.
..pointing out the innumerable flaws of such a simple representation as that you've given...
Wow, that's a lot of condescension squeezed into one post. Thanks.
Sadly, your post didn't really tell me anything new. You could have saved yourself a lot of time by just posting, "The rich will be taxed higher to pay for this". I also don't know why you felt a need to start a long discussion about what proportional taxation is (we already have this in the US), or that the rich make a larger proportion of income vs. the poor (already knew that).
If people are so greedy that half the population won't sacrifice 10% of their wealth or less to ensure the other half
10% won't put much of a dent in paying for UBI. The top 50% of earners in 2011 (most recent data I could find) made 7.3 trillion. 10% of that is 730 billion. Divided by 210 million people is around $3,500.
I've never had a merchant add any kind of credit card transaction fee to my purchase. Ever. And I've never seen any kind of discount for paying cash or debit either.
And if you give everyone in America a check for something like $20,000 every year,
The federal and state budgets of the US totaled around 5.5 trillion dollars. There are around 210 million US citizens over the age of 18. This comes out to around $26k per person. This is if you spend EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR ON THIS PROGRAM. But let's say we settle on something smaller (like $13k). You are still going to have to roughly take in 50% more tax just to cover this program. And if the overall economy shrinks because of a drop in worker participation, won't that make it even more difficult to fund this?
instead it is a slower 60 second process of sticking the whole damn card into a slot and waiting for an authorization.
Did you mean 6 seconds? Because I've never had the process take more than that. True, it's not as fast as swiping a mag stripe or tapping on a reader, but if you had a transaction take 60 seconds, there was something seriously wrong with that payment terminal.
I'm unsure how you 'retire' from collecting dividends and long term capital gains from your stock portfolio.
They look at investing in tax free bonds
There are only so many tax free bonds to buy. At some point, this will drive down the returns to where it will be more profitable to just keep investing in non-tax exempt things.
If I have to give 25% of every dollar I earn to the government, there is NO justification for wealthy people paying only 15%. If we suddenly find that 25% is just too darn high, then we can lower the tax rates for EVERYBODY equally.
And, good news, solar and wind creates, on average, about 10 times the jobs per GW that fossil fuels do.
How is this a 'good thing'? I doubt you would be excited if you found out that your local DMV has a new registration method that requires 10 times the jobs per 1,000 driver license applications.
The business model of modern corporations require you to consume their products as fast as you can, whether you need it or not. I could see needing to upgrade to a new computer every few years twenty years ago, but not anymore. I recently retired my 10 year old PC, and I can't tell much of a difference between it and my new PC I built. Unless you need the latest processor power for some special application, a new PC every five years in this day and age is just overkill.
Yes. If people can work and pay a 25% tax rate, people can invest and pay a 25% tax rate. What, you think rich people will suddenly stop investing because they have to pay slightly more taxes?
I don't know how they get the position of the key so accurate, but my 2015 Santa Fe can tell the difference between me standing right next to the driver door with the key in my pocket, or the key sitting in the center console (only 3 feet difference). I once accidentally left the key in the center console, got out of the car, and attempted to lock the car. It would not let me. I was actually getting pretty pissed because I thought the car wasn't working correctly because I thought the key was in my pocket. Nice little feature to keep idiots like me from locking myself out. That came in REALLY handy that day, since I had my sister-in-law's wedding dress in the car... and I was delivering it for her to get ready for her wedding. Hyundai engineers kept me from having to smash the window of my brand new car. Thanks guys!
Normally I don't reply to AC, but there is so much stuff that is so wrong with this post, I couldn't resist...
If someone holds stock for 20 years and it goes from being worth $100,000 to $20,000,000 there is nothing to tax.
There is if you sell it. There would be a taxable gain of $19,900,000. We're talking about taxable events, like selling things, receiving a dividend, or earning a paycheck.
Any more than you can tax someone on their home value increasing or someone holding an asset that becomes more valuable with time.
My annual property tax bill disagrees with your completely wrong assertion.
Plus rich people are smart, you don't cash in the stock --- you do things like take a loan against the stock.
Oh, my. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'm sure somewhere at some point you read about some rich person 'taking a loan against their stock'. But I think you misunderstand why they do that. A CEO of a company might want to cash out (for whatever reason), but doesn't want to make it look like he is bailing out on his company. Or somebody has stock that has a sell restriction on it. Because, you see, there isn't a good TAX reason to take a loan against the stock. You have to pay that loan back, with interest. How do you pay the loan back? With... wait for it... MONEY! That money has to come from somewhere. Probably from, oh, I don't know, selling some stock? Which generates a taxable gain. So they haven't avoided any taxes at all.
Or you don't sell a building --- you sell the company that owns the building --- thus no real estate transaction occurred.
[face-palm] Wow. Just... wow. You do realize that the building is part of the value of the company. And you will be taxed on the gain of the value of the company. So, unless they plan to sell the company at a loss, I don't see how they avoid paying taxes. Again. As far as property taxes go, that only helps the purchaser of the company/building. It in no way helps the seller, because they no longer own the building. Obviously.
Corporation account and wealthy people accounting is in an entirely different dimension.
And your understanding of either is nearly non-existent.
I still haven't seen a very good reason to use Apple Pay over just taking out my credit card. I know that my credit card is going to be accepted and work in about 99.9% of the places I go, rather than the (insert randomly low percentage) of places that Apple Pay will work.
Just treat all income the same. Wages, dividends and capital gains should all be taxed as regular income. Where do you think the 1% make most of their money? Hint: it's not from their paycheck.
A dedicated bus lane is a horrible waste of a resource. A perfectly good street sitting there empty 95% of the time while all those cars are putting along and idling in traffic?
A minor inconvenience for the masses on the bus is more than acceptable versus segregating handicapped riders onto separate buses or making them specifically requisition services that come automatically to the able-bodied.
But if that 'minor inconvenience' causes a lot of people to avoid using mass transit, then you could be costing yourself a lot of revenue.
I know for a fact that this is wrong. I have a few exercise apps that I use at night. If I forget to manually shut them down, I find my iPhone is dead or nearly dead when I wake up in the morning.
Also, when I first had my iPhone, I started opening all the apps to see what they do. I had no idea that they were still in the background. After a few days, I wondered why my battery was draining so quickly, to the point that I thought there might be something wrong with my iPhone. Then I discovered how to view and shut down the apps in the background. Every single app I had ever opened was still sitting there open. Oops...
Electronics/sensors/cameras/etc. have all become so cheap (and continue to become so cheap) that the extra hardware you have to add to a car will be a small amount of the total price of the car. So there will be little difference in price between a self-driving and manual driving car. Those that buy new cars will continue to buy the new automated cars, and they will eventually filter down into the used car market over time.
Google said its car's safety driver thought the bus would yield.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!! Has this guy ever driven in SF before? A bus YIELDING to another car? In your dreams.
I drove through SF for years, and buses didn't give a crap who was around them. When they pulled off to pick-up/drop-off passengers, they would intentionally park at an angle to keep the lane blocked so they could more easily start back into the lane. Even if they didn't block the lane, if they wanted to get moving in that lane, they just go. They know that they are bigger than the cars, so they know the car will slow down or move out of the way. If a lane became more narrow than they liked due to parked cars on the side of the road, they would just take up two lanes. If you are next to it in the lane that they now want to occupy? You better move the fuck over. They would run red lights at will. Watch out if you are trying to cross at an intersection with a traffic light and a bus is coming through.
Without a doubt, bus drivers in SF were the worst.
Slashdot Mirror
No we don't. We SPEND $26k/person to the government employees and contractors, but that doesn't mean we get $26k of VALUE back. How many government employees sit around doing nothing of value all day? How much military hardware gets built and then left to rust out in some field?
If you implement a basic income and 90% of people decide to become pot heads and video game bums, well now your GDP is about 10% what it originally was. So your $17 trillion GDP has shrunk to $1.7 trillion.
That is based on the assumption that everybody makes the same amount of money/GDP. That's not the case. The top 20% earn something like 80% of the wealth, and the bottom 50% earn 5% of the wealth (estimates based on numbers I vaguely recall). So if the bottom 50% all become potheads, you've probably only lost around 5-10% of your GDP.
Your little example is extremely superficial
..pointing out the innumerable flaws of such a simple representation as that you've given...
Wow, that's a lot of condescension squeezed into one post. Thanks.
Sadly, your post didn't really tell me anything new. You could have saved yourself a lot of time by just posting, "The rich will be taxed higher to pay for this". I also don't know why you felt a need to start a long discussion about what proportional taxation is (we already have this in the US), or that the rich make a larger proportion of income vs. the poor (already knew that).
If people are so greedy that half the population won't sacrifice 10% of their wealth or less to ensure the other half
10% won't put much of a dent in paying for UBI. The top 50% of earners in 2011 (most recent data I could find) made 7.3 trillion. 10% of that is 730 billion. Divided by 210 million people is around $3,500.
I've never had a merchant add any kind of credit card transaction fee to my purchase. Ever. And I've never seen any kind of discount for paying cash or debit either.
And if you give everyone in America a check for something like $20,000 every year,
The federal and state budgets of the US totaled around 5.5 trillion dollars. There are around 210 million US citizens over the age of 18. This comes out to around $26k per person. This is if you spend EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR ON THIS PROGRAM. But let's say we settle on something smaller (like $13k). You are still going to have to roughly take in 50% more tax just to cover this program. And if the overall economy shrinks because of a drop in worker participation, won't that make it even more difficult to fund this?
What fees are you paying on your credit card? Outside of foreign transactions fees, I've NEVER paid for a credit card in any way.
instead it is a slower 60 second process of sticking the whole damn card into a slot and waiting for an authorization.
Did you mean 6 seconds? Because I've never had the process take more than that. True, it's not as fast as swiping a mag stripe or tapping on a reader, but if you had a transaction take 60 seconds, there was something seriously wrong with that payment terminal.
They look at retiring sooner.
I'm unsure how you 'retire' from collecting dividends and long term capital gains from your stock portfolio.
They look at investing in tax free bonds
There are only so many tax free bonds to buy. At some point, this will drive down the returns to where it will be more profitable to just keep investing in non-tax exempt things.
If I have to give 25% of every dollar I earn to the government, there is NO justification for wealthy people paying only 15%. If we suddenly find that 25% is just too darn high, then we can lower the tax rates for EVERYBODY equally.
And, good news, solar and wind creates, on average, about 10 times the jobs per GW that fossil fuels do.
How is this a 'good thing'? I doubt you would be excited if you found out that your local DMV has a new registration method that requires 10 times the jobs per 1,000 driver license applications.
The business model of modern corporations require you to consume their products as fast as you can, whether you need it or not. I could see needing to upgrade to a new computer every few years twenty years ago, but not anymore. I recently retired my 10 year old PC, and I can't tell much of a difference between it and my new PC I built. Unless you need the latest processor power for some special application, a new PC every five years in this day and age is just overkill.
Yes. If people can work and pay a 25% tax rate, people can invest and pay a 25% tax rate. What, you think rich people will suddenly stop investing because they have to pay slightly more taxes?
I don't know how they get the position of the key so accurate, but my 2015 Santa Fe can tell the difference between me standing right next to the driver door with the key in my pocket, or the key sitting in the center console (only 3 feet difference). I once accidentally left the key in the center console, got out of the car, and attempted to lock the car. It would not let me. I was actually getting pretty pissed because I thought the car wasn't working correctly because I thought the key was in my pocket. Nice little feature to keep idiots like me from locking myself out. That came in REALLY handy that day, since I had my sister-in-law's wedding dress in the car... and I was delivering it for her to get ready for her wedding. Hyundai engineers kept me from having to smash the window of my brand new car. Thanks guys!
A person starting up a business can pay the same income tax I can.
Normally I don't reply to AC, but there is so much stuff that is so wrong with this post, I couldn't resist...
If someone holds stock for 20 years and it goes from being worth $100,000 to $20,000,000 there is nothing to tax.
There is if you sell it. There would be a taxable gain of $19,900,000. We're talking about taxable events, like selling things, receiving a dividend, or earning a paycheck.
Any more than you can tax someone on their home value increasing or someone holding an asset that becomes more valuable with time.
My annual property tax bill disagrees with your completely wrong assertion.
Plus rich people are smart, you don't cash in the stock --- you do things like take a loan against the stock.
Oh, my. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'm sure somewhere at some point you read about some rich person 'taking a loan against their stock'. But I think you misunderstand why they do that. A CEO of a company might want to cash out (for whatever reason), but doesn't want to make it look like he is bailing out on his company. Or somebody has stock that has a sell restriction on it. Because, you see, there isn't a good TAX reason to take a loan against the stock. You have to pay that loan back, with interest. How do you pay the loan back? With... wait for it... MONEY! That money has to come from somewhere. Probably from, oh, I don't know, selling some stock? Which generates a taxable gain. So they haven't avoided any taxes at all.
Or you don't sell a building --- you sell the company that owns the building --- thus no real estate transaction occurred.
[face-palm] Wow. Just... wow. You do realize that the building is part of the value of the company. And you will be taxed on the gain of the value of the company. So, unless they plan to sell the company at a loss, I don't see how they avoid paying taxes. Again. As far as property taxes go, that only helps the purchaser of the company/building. It in no way helps the seller, because they no longer own the building. Obviously.
Corporation account and wealthy people accounting is in an entirely different dimension.
And your understanding of either is nearly non-existent.
You don't understand accounting at all
[giggles]
I still haven't seen a very good reason to use Apple Pay over just taking out my credit card. I know that my credit card is going to be accepted and work in about 99.9% of the places I go, rather than the (insert randomly low percentage) of places that Apple Pay will work.
Just treat all income the same. Wages, dividends and capital gains should all be taxed as regular income. Where do you think the 1% make most of their money? Hint: it's not from their paycheck.
Then why charge for the service at all? If you make the service free, LOTS more people will use it.
My 1999 Ford Mustang disagrees with your ABS assertion.
A dedicated bus lane is a horrible waste of a resource. A perfectly good street sitting there empty 95% of the time while all those cars are putting along and idling in traffic?
Kinda sucks when a 45 minute walk is replaced by a 2 hour plus process.
A 45 minute walk would only be about 2-3 miles. I question what bus system would take 2 hours to go that short of a distance.
A minor inconvenience for the masses on the bus is more than acceptable versus segregating handicapped riders onto separate buses or making them specifically requisition services that come automatically to the able-bodied.
But if that 'minor inconvenience' causes a lot of people to avoid using mass transit, then you could be costing yourself a lot of revenue.
Plus, all that black ink they place over all the redacted sections isn't free, either...
I know for a fact that this is wrong. I have a few exercise apps that I use at night. If I forget to manually shut them down, I find my iPhone is dead or nearly dead when I wake up in the morning.
Also, when I first had my iPhone, I started opening all the apps to see what they do. I had no idea that they were still in the background. After a few days, I wondered why my battery was draining so quickly, to the point that I thought there might be something wrong with my iPhone. Then I discovered how to view and shut down the apps in the background. Every single app I had ever opened was still sitting there open. Oops...
Electronics/sensors/cameras/etc. have all become so cheap (and continue to become so cheap) that the extra hardware you have to add to a car will be a small amount of the total price of the car. So there will be little difference in price between a self-driving and manual driving car. Those that buy new cars will continue to buy the new automated cars, and they will eventually filter down into the used car market over time.
Google said its car's safety driver thought the bus would yield.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!! Has this guy ever driven in SF before? A bus YIELDING to another car? In your dreams. I drove through SF for years, and buses didn't give a crap who was around them. When they pulled off to pick-up/drop-off passengers, they would intentionally park at an angle to keep the lane blocked so they could more easily start back into the lane. Even if they didn't block the lane, if they wanted to get moving in that lane, they just go. They know that they are bigger than the cars, so they know the car will slow down or move out of the way. If a lane became more narrow than they liked due to parked cars on the side of the road, they would just take up two lanes. If you are next to it in the lane that they now want to occupy? You better move the fuck over. They would run red lights at will. Watch out if you are trying to cross at an intersection with a traffic light and a bus is coming through. Without a doubt, bus drivers in SF were the worst.