Capitalism isn't an infinitely sustainable economic model
All the developed nations implement some form of capitalist welfare state.
This type of economy - in one form or another - has been evolving for centuries. England, for example, had the Poor Law since the 16th century, and that in turn built on earlier welfare systems. Today's implementations of welfare are typically much better in most developed nations, such as the European nations.
Despite propaganda from the socialists, these nations (such as Sweden) are not socialist - because socialism (Marx,Engels) means the workers control the means of production and that's not the case for any modern developed state. Some worker ownership exists, primarily in small family-owned businesses, but it's not a big part of the overall economy.
Instead of socialism, these nations use high taxes on traditional capitalist businesses to fund the welfare state. Hence, they are capitalist nations.
Norway actually comes the closest to being socialist, in terms of percentage of GDP, due to the state owned oil company. But even in Norway, that's only 30% of the country's GDP, and it's probably best viewed as a historical fluke.
There's still a lot of inefficiency in the implementation of capitalist welfare states, and some unwanted side effects in some countries such as high levels of household debt and high black market participation rates (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, 2016, by Michael Booth).
A lot of the policies implemented along the way, such as sales taxes (especially VAT taxes), property taxes, and minimum wage, are probably counter-productive from an economics perspective, leading to higher levels of taxes than are actually needed to implement the welfare state, and to all kinds of problems with unintended side effects.
But on the whole, capitalism doesn't seem to be going away. Europe has about as many billionaires as the USA does.
The USA is also a capitalist welfare state, but one with a very poor implementation and a lot of corruption leading to over-concentration of wealth. Rent-seeking, implemented in law, is an especially big problem. See, for example, Lindsey and Teles "The Captured Economy".
Despite a lot of myths to the contrary, capitalism doesn't mean an absence of regulation. In fact, capitalism can not exist without regulation: for example, having a reasonably strong system of contracts enforced by government is both a requirement and it involves regulation.
In practice, today's implementation of contracts is often overly strong, in large part due to rent-seeking on the part of legal professionals (unethical practice of law), and does more economic (and social) harm than good. A lot of provisions routinely make it into contracts that shouldn't be there, and the durations of things like copyright are tied to contract over the long term when they shouldn't be, leading to excessive duration of copyright and lots of other problems (the legal profession has a huge ethical conflict of interest with respect to this matter - and the status quo not being in the long term interests of society as a whole can be viewed as another example of rent-seeking).
Jerry Z. Muller's course "Thinking about Capitalism" is a good overview of the ideas involved in capitalism for those that don't have a good educational background in economics. A course along these lines should probably be a requirement for a high school degree.
Bingo. It's the same with patents. The law only helps those that are already in positions of power and wealth. It's funny because all the little guys think patents and copyright will protect them, so they cheer on the ridiculous extensions. But it'll never save them from a big team of lawyers and they're more likely to get bitten by it than helped.
It's more accurate to say the law primarily helps those with power and wealth. Occasionally the little guy wins. But on the whole IP law causes lots of economic problems for society, including concentration of wealth. There's an interesting discussion of this topic (with references to a number of economic studies) in The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles.
Even aside from the economic considerations, there's really no doubt that current US copyright and patent law is implemented in a fashion that violates the Bill of Rights. The dual rights to ethical government and ethical practice of law can be asserted under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people), and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Current patent law violates both rights, and current copyright law violates the right to ethical practice of law.
In short, the Constitutional authority of the federal government to promote the useful arts and sciences has been implemented in an illegal fashion.
This, of course, has all kinds of negative implications for society.
Unfortunately we seem to have judges selected by politicians with an interest in preserving the mostly-illegal status quo, as opposed to actually doing their jobs. Some of these politicians accept large campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. The phase "Land of the Lawsuit" doesn't even being to describe the full scope of the ethics problems in the USA. It's a huge mess.
How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?
How about a better approach where first almost everyone works, contributes to society, and pays taxes so such a system is financially viable? It is hard to have one without the other, especially when there is already a $21 trillion debt which is increasing at over $2 thousand dollars a second.
The debt is certainly a problem, but it doesn't preclude progress on the health care issue.
The USA is ALREADY spending roughly 17-18% of its GDP on health care, including all public and private spending.
European nations with health care programs are spending 9-11% of their GDP on health care - and getting better results in many key statistics. The same applies to the rest of the developed world, such as Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
In short, the USA is spending a lot more than it needs to on health care, and getting generally poorer results. The rich get good health care, of course, but when you look at the health care statistics of the nation as a whole, they are not that impressive compared to the other developed nations. For example, many nations (more than 40), have lower child mortality rates than the USA - that's pretty awful.
Note that these other health care systems are not all single payer systems. Every nation seems to be slightly different in how they do this. Switzerland, for example, does not have a single payer system. As I understand things, they have strict regulation of health insurance companies, and public votes on key issues.
In short, there are many options.
Whatever option is chosen, the USA should be able to drop it's health care spending to say, 11% of GDP, either through a sensible single payer system, or perhaps copying the Swiss system outright and the extra 6-7% of GDP could be used to pay off the debt.
This would require raising taxes, but done properly the tax raise would be no more than what people are already spending on health care, so it wouldn't be a net impact on people's current take-home pay after health care expenses.
You might need to have some reform of the legal system, but's that long overdue and would have happened a long time ago if politicians weren't routinely accepting campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. This would remove the impact of lawyer-insurance (or the "lawyer tax"), not just from the doctors from the entire supply chains leading the to production of medical goods and services, and hence would remove the compounding effect of overhead applying at each step in the supply chain (like compound interest, this grows quickly).
It's really a low hanging fruit - you have to get past the corruption and vote buying on the part of the few special interest groups (the insurance companies, the lawyers, some of the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies, some of the pharmacies), but there's nothing else government could do as easily that would free up such a huge amount of money to help pay off the debt. Putting things in perspective, ANY cut in government spending or tax raise will face opposition - and in most cases the amount at stake is far less for just as tough of a political battle.
A competent government with integrity could make this happen. A corrupt and unethical government, allied with a largely unethical legal profession, might have trouble doing this - unless the public wakes up and forces the issue. Who knows, it might even be an opportunity to fix a lot of the corruption and ethics problems... ?
Of course, if you fixed the regressive tax problem in the USA (mostly an issue the state and local level), replacing most or all of these taxes with a progressive income tax, and got rid of most of the tax code (to remove loopholes), and appropriately taxed movement of money overseas (to prevent evasion), you could probably fund the whole system without raising taxes for the poor and the lower middle class - but that would require undoing a huge amount of deeply entrenched corruption, so it's perhaps unlikely.
People are less likely to leave California than any other state in the US.
I'm going to repeat that again for you: California residents are less likely to move out of the state than residents of any other state in the US.
That depends on the demographic group. California is #1 in population, but #45 in percentage of retirees (World Atlas: Percentage Of Senior Citizens By State).
In other words, people are moving away in huge numbers when they retire, due to the high cost of living. Given the fantastic weather in California, this is particularly noteworthy - many people move to get better weather when they retire, but that's clearly not the key consideration here.
A middle class couple, with a house, moving from a town in California to a town in Florida would probably save 20k-25k a year, due to the differences in taxes and cost-of-living. The amount would be even higher for people leaving one of the big cities.
According to Schlomach (2017), econometric studies show that 64-73% of the cost of living differences of US states can be accounted for by government policy differences, so the high cost of houses (or land) in California is probably due primarily to government policy, not supply and demand. In other words, supply and demand still play a role, but it's swamped by the consequences of government policy decisions.
Lindsey and Teles (2017, The Captured Economy) suggest that government policies involving rent-seeking on the part of special interest groups are a big part of the high cost of housing.
In other words, the combination of corrupt or incompetent government, as well as unethical practice of law, seems to play a key role in the cost of living in California.
Lindset and Teles also state that historical migration patterns of the poor to the cities of California as places of opportunity have changed significantly in recent decades due to cost of housing issues.
California ranks #35 in percentage of poor among US states (Wikipedia). This could suggest they have very good programs for the poor, but given that the person with an average income in Mississippi has more useful spending power than in California (again Schlomach), this actually suggests instead that the poor are also moving elsewhere in large numbers, along with the retirees (there is of course some overlap between those groups).
Similarly, California has fewer military personnel, relative to it's population, than many other states (~12% of the population, 9% of the military). This is despite the importance of the West Coast ports - which would suggest a higher military presence - so here the military is clearly following a deliberate policy of moving people on relatively low incomes away from California (they probably would have even fewer there, if it weren't for the existence of government owned land with housing, the ownership of which goes back to WW2 or even earlier - land that is probably immensely valuable right now).
Collectively, this suggests California is a very bad place to be for those on a low income, and these people are probably moving away in large numbers to places where the cost of living is lower, but being replaced by people with higher incomes or other forms of support (such as an extended family where people take care of each other). Even with high incomes, a lot of technical folks that move to California are sharing a rental, not owning a home.
As the saying goes, California would be a fantastic place to live if it weren't for the government and most of the existing population.
Attempts to control, what other people remember about you, are tyrannical and (until very recently) unprecedented.
Once you tell other people something, the information is theirs. There is no basis to allow control of other people's heads, notebooks, or computers...
That is complete and utter nonsense. People have been attempting to control what others remember about them since the dawn of human history.
It got a lot worse in the 20th century, especially in the various socialist / communist states.
Further, privacy laws are not about controlling what people remember. They are about controlling what machines remember, and what organizations remember. Neither organizations nor machines are people.
This is not thought control, and attempting to portray it as such is pure propaganda.
It could have been possible maybe. In a 20th century history elective in college, our professor had us read one of those "everything you know about ww2 is wrong" books. The author posited that the bulk of what gets into mass media... Patton and the 3rd army, the atomic bombs, The French resistance, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Doolittle raid, MacArthur's island-hopping strategy, the USS Enterprise, the involvement of the various other allied powers, etc... was mostly just miscellanea. Rather, his position was that what won the war was 1/3rd Bletchley Park, 1/3rd American manufacturing, and 1/3rd the previously-mentioned miscellaneous.
The conclusion was that without the US factories, *maybe* the UK could have used Ultra to most effectively utilize its limited resources and still pull off a win. And, without the UK codebreakers, *maybe* the US could have simply constructed so much more war materiel than Germany's and Japan's navies could sink that we'd have eventually just Zerg rushed them and won anyway. But it was the combination of the codebreakers and factories that really secured the allied victory. The argument, especially since more and more about Ultra and Magic that had never been known before was reaching the public eye at the time, was fairly compelling.
The code breaking was important, but the importance is often greatly exaggerated. The code-breakers had relatively little direct impact on the fighting in the Eastern Front, and that was critical to the overall outcome of the war.
The major role of the Allied code-breaking in affecting the Eastern Front was indirect: they help get convoys across the Atlantic. But the Germans had their own code-breakers, and at times they were the one's reading the Allied codes. It wasn't at all a one-sided affair.
Other technologies such as radar, improved sonar, escort carriers, and specialized sub-killing weapons played a key role in the Battle of the Atlantic as well, it wasn't just code-breaking. It eventually reached a point where it really didn't matter if the Germans knew where the convoys were, because the Allied escorts were so much better at finding and killing the Germans subs than the subs were at escaping (and that was independent of the code breaking, which at best might give a rough location for some of the subs - and radio direction finding could do this independent of the code breaking).
The same, incidentally, was not true for the Japanese: they were far less effective at killing Allied subs. They didn't have the same advanced technology in this area. They had plenty of other advanced technology, but convey escort wasn't something they invested sufficiently in - which ended up being a catastrophic mistake.
But even considering only the battle of the Atlantic is misleading. During the long days of the Arctic summer, in the early war, the Allies couldn't ship much to the Soviet Union - at that point in the war it was too easy for surface, air, and submarine assets to kill ships, and daylight made it easy to find the ships. So the Allies ended up developing other techniques for getting goods to the Soviet Union.
A lot the essential items went on Soviet-flag ships directly from the USA. Since the Japanese were at peace with the Soviets, they didn't interfere with this traffic, so long as it was industrial items, food, clothing, etc and not actual warplanes or tanks - but the goods shipped were nevertheless critical to the Soviet war effort - they fed and clothed the Red Army, helped build the weapons and ammunition, and kept the Red Air Force operational.
The Allies also build a network of air bases in the Northern USA and Canada to fly combat aircraft to the Soviet Union. The American P-39 fighter (and variants) was popular with Soviet pilots and would be used from 1942 to the very end of the war - accounting for more enemy aircraft killed than any other US-made plane.
Finally, with a major effort the Allies built a railroad in the Middle East to move supp
Sales tax is the fairest because it is a use or consumption tax. Replacing the current US income tax with a national sales tax would be incredible. No more april 15th and all of the related tax code hassles. The current US income tax code is so convoluted and corrupt that it's become a jobs programs HR Block and other personal tax companies.
To ease the effect on the poor every citizen would receive a monthly check for the same amount for the estimated monthly sales taxes paid by someone at the poverty line.
That's a common myth.
Sales tax is not even remotely fair. You can't simply issue a check to compensate the poor, because the cost of living differs enormously from place to place.
You could to try to force poor people to relocate so they live far from their jobs and have a really bad commute, to put them in a place with a lower cost of living, but that doesn't seem fair. The Communists in the Soviet Union enforced mass migrations for their convenience, but that somehow doesn't seem appropriate for the USA.
Unfortunately, a sales tax strongly compounds across the logistics chains needed to produce goods and services - even though the tax isn't necessarily being applied at every step. A VAT is applied at every step, a US-style sales tax is theoretically not applied directly at every step - but in practice (in the real world) there are still effects that apply at every step (or every node in the logistics chain).
Tax fuel, for example, and you increase the costs of transportation for nodes in the logistics chains that produce food. Costs go up both for directly shipping the food (not to mention the raw materials used to make the food), and for the labour needed to run the trucks and the warehouses and factories that produce the food.
The net effect is you raise the cost of getting food to stores - so now the poor have to pay more for food. You can't simply avoid the effects, since everybody needs food. Also everybody else has to pay more to support the welfare system - and since you're funding government with a regressive tax, it means the middle class is bearing most of the new tax burden.
It's not just fuel. The modern world is complex. There are a lot of goods and services that businesses need to operate. Tax any of these, and the costs ripple through the logistics chains to all businesses downstream. This is similar to how compound interest works.
Some states try to deal with this by having very complex regulations that let businesses theoretically not pay the sales tax (in principle only the end consumer does). In practice, that ends up getting very complicated and it doesn't work well, plus it adds a lot of overhead (and since natural language is ambiguous, human beings have to make a lot of judgement calls - it's not something you can just automate with a computer). The net effect is that these systems still ends up raising costs for everybody - and they do it in way that is especially harmful to small businesses.
As state and local tax codes have gotten more and more complicated over the years, and also more regressive, we've seen a decline in small business in the USA, a fact which has lots of negative economic implications for society as a whole - including the loss of many job opportunities for the poor.
The impact of a progressive income tax is far lower on society than a sales tax. It still has some effect on logistics chains, but it is much smaller and weaker because the differences end up being basically a rounding error in the incomes of the rich, thus affecting only a few people, while a sales tax affects everything and everybody.
In effect, a sales tax is a tax break for the rich: every dollar in a government's budget that comes from a regressive tax is a dollar that doesn't come from a progressive tax.
You could, of course, go the EU route and have endless rules concerning when the taxes are applied and who is affected to try to mitigate the damage the taxes do - but that too has
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
This is a fig leaf, used to pretend that property taxes are something good.
In reality, all of these things can be paid for by taxes on income, or on wealth, or on transfers of money.
If you pierce the illusion that "property taxes are good", and examine the reality of how they work, you find lots of problems.
For example, there is a history of using property taxes as a tool to disenfranchise minorities - especially those who have land but don't have much income. Developers view this as an opportunity: they can collude with local government to obtain that land, develop it, and sell it for a much higher prices (usually to people outside the minority group), which benefits both the developer and the local government. There are occasional lawsuits filed against this, but it's hard to fight corruption with a lawsuit (lawsuits in the USA are far more likely to be a tool of corruption or rent-seeking).
Another problem is the connection between property taxes and education. This creates a huge advantage for rich school districts, which further opens up the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots". It's also a big problem for minorities, who seldom live in those rich districts.
Property taxes can also make it hard for minorities to move into certain parts of the country, even if there are otherwise great job opportunities there.
Property taxes tend to lead to over-development, which has environmental consequences. A lot of habitat is destroyed as a result - and we lose the economic benefits that wild land can provide over both the short term and the long. There shouldn't be any property taxes at all on land that is left in a wild state, with free access for the public.
Property taxes also tend to work against the concept of a family owned farm, where people are far more likely to take pride in doing things right, as opposed to a commercial farm owned by a corporation. It's not an accident that so many of these family owned enterprises have disappeared over the years - and we are now having a lot of problems with the quality of our food supply.
Yet another problem is the difficulty of accurately assessing property taxes. This is one of the tools that is sometimes used to target minorities, but it is also used in some places as a form of rent-seeking by various groups such as legal professionals. In these areas, the corrupt government always increases the property tax amounts more than people feel it should, so most people end up hiring lawyers to dispute the increase, so the government's role has been subverted into shifting income to the legal profession.
Also, in practice, property taxes tend to be regressive. The amount of tax has very little to do with income or wealth. Things are especially bad in California, thanks to Prop 13 (some people and businesses are paying 10x or 20x the amount of property taxes for essentially identical lots), but this is a problem in general.
Finally, a property tax - at least on homes - represents an interesting form of unethical government, and unethical practice of law. After all, it's a effectively a form of rent - which means you can't actually own property, all you can do is rent - but one of the fundamental principles in a free society is the freedom to own property. Hence, we have a contradiction - and contradictions in the legal system always involve both unethical practice of law and unethical government. A competent and ethical government would work over the long term to maintain the legal system, like a team of good engineers maintaining a software package, cleaning up these sorts of problems as they are discovered. The last thing we want to do is encourage government and the legal
No. This was no more correct the first 50 times someone tried to alter history by passing this off.
WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong, and even a brief look at actual history shows that.
Even at the immediate end of the war, the myth doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
For example, there's the issue that most of Britain's industry was beyond the effective range of Germany's bombers - and hence did not take significant damage. In fact, that industry was far stronger at the end of WW2 than it had been at the beginning. A lot of the old Victorian-era industries had received long-overdue modernization. Many new factories were built for wartime production. Large numbers of women entered the industrial workplace and learned new skills - vastly increasing the size and capability of the potential industrial workforce.
Other advanced British Commonwealth nations such as Australia and Canada didn't take significant wartime damage either - and received many infrastructure improvements that improved their economies as a result of the war. For example, huge amounts of surveying, road building, and construction were done in Canada to support flying aircraft to the Soviet Union.
Sweden, which stayed neutral during the war, was still supplying a large percentage of the world's supply of ball bearings - a major industrial contribution.
The Soviet Union suffered some industrial damage, but was able to move many factories before the Germans reached then, and also received massive amounts of aid from the USA and Britain - including huge numbers of vehicles (especially trucks and trains), advanced technology, lots of machine tools (and entire factories). It seems likely they ended up with a stronger industrial base than they started with.
In short, as you mention, the ideas that the rest of the world was bombed into the stone age and hence unable to compete with the USA for many decades after the war ended, or the idea that the rest of the world was hopelessly dependent on the USA, are simply not supported by the facts.
For that matter, if there had been "hopeless dependence", Britain and all those former British Commonwealth nations would now drive on the right side of the road (instead of the wrong side).
There was no guarantee that the USA wouldn't come out of the war and go straight back into an economic depression. A lot of people at the time expected it to happen. That it didn't happen was due - as much as anything - to the fact that FDR died and many of his bad policies were finally dismantled.
Germany invades Poland and conquers it in 5 weeks. France and England largely stood by and did nothing, except for a small operation called the Saar Offensive, which officially began the Phoney War. This offensive was so light that it didn't even tickle Germany. The USSR (on friendly terms with Germany at this point) invaded Finland, and then Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. This caused France to get cold feet, so they picked up what meager forces they sent and ran home.
That is a very brief summary of what happened, and you'll find it to be accurate if you research it.
It's not particularly accurate. Neither Britain nor France had the ability to project power that could seriously threaten Germany at that point. As much as anything it was a question of logistics and preparation. Poland was simply too far away. The French could have attacked Germany on the shared border, but they didn't have the logistical capability to sustain the offence long enough to make a military difference. Had they attacked in strength anyway, it could easily have made a political difference, but a purely military solution was not sustainable.
The real world is not a computer game or a board game like A&A - real armies have to deal with logistics. Logistics in warfare is a much more complex subject than most people suspect - and modern warfare makes matters far tougher. For example, ammunition gets used up a lot faster, and you also need to supply gasoline, lubricants, and spare parts. Also, in addition to feeding combatants, you need to feed all the people taking care of the equipment. Just the sheer size of modern armies is a huge logistical challenge (many of the accounts by ancient historians of huge armies are provably impossible - they just made up the numbers - only the "modern" world could really support large armies, and then only with great difficulty). You might try looking at Martin van Creveld's book "Supplying War" for an introduction to this topic.
It would take the British (and Americans) years to develop the specialized equipment needed to land a large army in a contested amphibious assault (let alone supply it). Nobody was prepared to do that in 1940, so that wasn't an option.
The British had a strategic bomber force, but it wasn't ready for war. It would take years of combat experience before they would be able to project power on a strategic scale (and even then it's debatable how effective it was).
In short, neither Britain nor France had the capability to directly help Poland in any meaningful way - and it would take years of work and real combat experience to develop that capability. The Soviet Union invading Poland from the other side (16 days after the Germans invaded) ensured that Poland had no chance at all.
In spite of France having a large and well armed and prepared Army (which they never tried to use to break Polish invasion,) they surrendered in 6 weeks.
The French Army was well prepared for a defensive war (involving relatively fixed lines) by WW1 standards. There were lots of problems with respect to WW2 standards. As mentioned above, they didn't have sufficient logistical capability for a sustained offence.
On the defence, the professional French forces fought quite well, and generally stopped the Germans cold in their sectors. The big breakthrough happened in a supposedly quiet sector that was manned by reservists, not professionals. They were simply overwhelmed by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe), which was effectively being used as a mobile artillery force, in combination with German ground forces. This allowed the Germans to get behind the main French and British forces and led to disaster.
The doctrine of the regular French forces was not up to the task of handling modern warfare once they lost their defensive position: the Germans were ahead in this regard, and this seemingly made it impossible for France recover at that point (problems in political leadership prob
Of course, California would have less debt if it were its own country, since Federal tax money is constantly taken from CA and used to support red states.
That's absolutely true.
That's absolutely false. It's a popular American political myth - but the myth has been debunked numerous times.
The right way to look at this is as following: California makes investments in other states via federal taxes spent in those states. These investments produce a great return to the California economy - far more than the money spent. It's a net gain for California.
For example:
California gets the water that drives it's agriculture and supports its population at FAR below cost (see Cadillac Desert: Mark Reisner). This in itself is enormously import. People die in a matter of days if they don't have water. You also need huge amounts of water for agriculture.
California imports staples such as wheat, allowing it to use that subsidized water to grow high-profit luxury crops (such as almonds) instead of low-profit staple crops. High profit crops provide a huge economic boost. The basic idea here is a principle economics call "comparative advantage".
While California has a strong agricultural economy, many agricultural products are far more efficiently produced in places outside California. Arkansas leads the US in rice production, Illinois and Iowa in corn and soybeans, Georgia in peanuts, Idaho and Washington in potatoes, and so forth. We're talking about pretty basic foods that a lot of people depend upon. Federal spending - things like agricultural research and support for the highway/rail/water transport systems - helps lower the costs California residents pay for these products, which in turn puts more money into the California economy for spending on local products (and allows California to have higher taxes).
California imports lumber, allowing more construction and repair of houses at a lower cost. California could do more cutting of trees inside the state, but there's a lot of fanatical opposition to that - and the relative lack of water makes it harder to replace the trees, so being able to import wood is economically important. It's especially important for a place that gets a lot of wildfires and loses large numbers of houses on a pretty regular basis.
California imports a significant amount of power. This reduces the cost of providing power, allowing people to spend less money on utility bills, and allowing industry to run at a lower cost.
California can tax it's residents at higher rates - and people can spend more in the CA economy while they live there - because they know that when they retire they can move to other states (CA is #1 in population, #45 in retirees).
California can send it's poor people to other states, where they can live at a lower cost of living (CA is #1 in population, #35 in poor). The high cost of housing has forced this to happen, the long historical population flows have completely reversed in recent decades as a result of increased housing costs (see The Captured Economy by Lindsey and Teles for references to the economic studies showing the changes in historical population flows). For most of human history, the big cities were places of opportunity for the poor - that's no longer the case in California.
Note that these housing costs are largely the result of government policy - econometric studies show that 64 to 73% of the cost of living differences between US states can be accounted for solely by government policy differences (Schlomach, 2017).
California can send it's military personnel to live in other states (12% of the population lives in CA - and a higher percentage of the military-age population - but only 9% of the military live in CA).
All this population movement frees up housing for higher income people to live in the state, who pay more in taxes, and contribute more to the local economy. In return, California has to pay a paltr
The problem is that individuals' wages don't increase because of rent increases. Most people can't go to their boss and say "hay, my landlord put the rent up, I need you to give me a raise to pay for it."
Instead they are forced out and replaced with workers who can demand higher wages due to skills/experience. And then they cycle repeats.
This is bad for everyone.
Rent control in the form of government price fixing is not the solution. Government price fixing can always be expected to cause bad problems over the long term.
The solution is to let the market set the price, but to not allow rent to increase for a fixed number of years once the contract is signed (or perhaps to fix the rate of increase to reflect some some inflation amount). 5-10 years would be reasonable. The logic here is that we want market forces to work over the long term, but we don't want people to have to move too often. Too much disruption in people's lives is not good for society or for the economy - and moving is always disruptive.
Yes, this slightly reduces the maximum short term profits landlords can get from their property, but it's not the government's job to maximize profits of the wealthy, it's the government's job to look out for the long term best interests of society. Landlords will still make plenty of money - in fact, they'll probably do better over the long term, on average, then they will with traditional rent control systems that involve government price fixing - and there will be more incentive to build additional units, so the overall cost of housing will be lower for the public.
Land ownership should be a long term investment, people that want short term gains can gamble on the stock market.
This. And this is why raising taxes for education is the lure. Nobody would willingly raise taxes to give a retired government worker 3x the retirement of a non-government worker. The state government employees know this. They divert funds from everything the public wants into their bloated pension plans. Then they tell you your roads and bridges are crumbling, schools are failing and the state is broke because you aren't paying enough.
These pension plans are theft. The people who defend them say things like "government employees pass on higher paying options in the private sector and deserve such a pension." Except this is not true. Many jobs in government pay more up front, come with amazing benefits AND have a defined pension plan.
The problem is, so many people are now dependent on these pensions so you cannot just take them away. A lot of recipients never saved for retirement expecting the pension would be there.
That said, the problem is not that people aren't paying enough. The problem is that we are paying too much and that money is not going to the things we expect.
Moving forward, no state should offer its employees a state paid pension plan. Somwthing like a 401k with some form of matching is better. Let employees take ownership of their retirement goals.
I would go further, and say that government pension plans are a violation of fundamental rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people).
In general, future generations have a right to not be born into debt, whether individual or government debt. We can allow some exceptions (e.g. an asteroid is about to smash into the earth, destroying the human race, so we'll spend as much money as needed to divert it). We might even allow a World War exception. Ordinary wars (everything since WW2) should not be grounds for government debt. Any war (other than a World War) that does not involve an actual physical invasion of the homeland should not be grounds for government debt.
In short, government should be paying "cash on the barrelhead" - and should have a "rainy day" fund to address emergencies.
Hence, it follows that most government debt exists in violation of fundamental rights protected by the US Bill of Rights - and a violation of the oaths of office sworn by government officials.
Pension plans are a form of debt, and hence a violation of fundamental rights. Creating them is an illegal exercise of government authority, as was creating the social security system. Pay government employees what the market demands, and let them use the same retirement systems as everybody else (if those systems aren't working, then fix the rules).
Having said this, we're clearly stuck with existing commitments - they have to be honoured. But government at all levels needs to get rid of pension plans for future employees - and social security should disappear entirely (welfare systems with appropriate reform, or some sort of reasonable UBI/reverse income tax, could handle any issues here, such as people that will never be competent to plan their own retirement).
The government has a history of breaking the law, and is continuing to break the law today, but that is no reason to tolerate this moving forward. A government that can not comply with the law is not a legitimate government - and loses it's moral authority, which creates all kinds of problems for society.
Many things we should expect government to do in a competent and efficient manner do not happen because government debt consumes too much of the budget. Road infrastructure, for example, lags many years beyond the needs of the population - instead, it should happen BEFORE it is needed. Infrastructure maintenance is often deferred, at which point things become much more expensive to fix. Facilities such as rest areas get closed due to lack of funds, limiting the right to travel. Mass transit is a disaster. Police forces are being used as mobile tax c
I don't like sales tax, but it's still better than property tax, where I have to pay tax on my house whether I can afford to or not.
You shouldn't have to buy your freedom every year for your land.
In a free country, people should be free to own property. This is a reasonable expectation that goes along with living in a free country. You can not own something if you are paying a landlord rent. Any regular payment to some third party such as the government - whether a property tax, a vehicle registration, and so forth - can be viewed a rent payment. You do not own your home, or your car, instead you rent it from the government - fail to pay your rent and you lose the property. Hence, property taxes represent a violation of fundamental rights.
The violation of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is a criminal offence in the US Federal Code - as it should be. It's also a violation of rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment - and thus the enforcement of laws that violate fundamental rights is a violation of the oaths legal professionals swear to uphold the law. Hence, by implementing property taxes, we have an explicit contradiction in the law - and contradictions in the law are both a) logically unsound, and b) inherently unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals involved in writing, approving, and implementing the law (which is a violation of yet another fundamental right: the right to ethical practice of law).
The usual "justifications" for things like property tax, and sales tax, are really just fig leafs: they exist to create the illusion of legitimacy for the tax. In other words, the government is doing something wrong, and wants to hide it behind a bodyguard of lies. Everything that is currently paid for by these taxes can instead be paid for by other forms of tax, such as income tax. Thus, claims to the effect that "property tax" or "sales tax" is necessary - for schools, or police, or fire-fighters, or roads, or the other infrastructure that supports a sale, or whatever - are entirely without merit: all of these could (and should) be paid for by other means (other taxes, perhaps supplemented by private sources).
Similarly, claims that "property tax" is necessary to ensure that land "gets used" are without merit. First, even by not using land, it gets used - it provides habitat for native species, and that has economic value. It should also be available for use by hikers and others, in those jurisdictions that recognize the right to roam - a fundamental right in any free country - and that too has economic value. If the land contains wetlands, that's especially good - it may provide storm protection as well as highly valuable habitat. Second, if the land becomes valuable enough, it will probably get sold or used - market forces take care of that, there's no need to force things, it will happen naturally.
Fundamentally, both of these taxes are regressive, although in somewhat different ways. In fact, they are so strongly regressive that they largely alter the fundamental nature of the US tax system (consider the effect of federal, state, and local taxes as a single system: the combined system is at best slightly progressive, and a case could be made that it is actually regressive). These regressive taxes are likely to be a major reason for the increasing imbalance in the distribution of wealth in recent decades (along with rent-seeking behaviour embedded in the legal system, see The Captured Economy).
Further, there seems to be a history of abuse of property taxes against minorities. Another problem with property taxes is they create a huge imbalance in educational opportunity. Yet another problem with these taxes is they are often implemented in a way that violates the right to travel (such as California's Prop 13 - California is certainly not unique in violating this right, plenty
I don't like sales tax, but it's still better than property tax, where I have to pay tax on my house whether I can afford to or not.
You shouldn't have to buy your freedom every year for your land.
In a free country, people should be free to own property. This is a reasonable expectation that goes along with living in a free country. You can not own something if you are paying a landlord rent. Any regular payment to some third party such as the government - whether a property tax, a vehicle registration, and so forth - can be viewed a rent payment. You do not own your home, or your car, instead you rent it from the government - fail to pay your rent and you lose the property. Hence, property taxes represent a violation of fundamental rights.
The violation of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is a criminal offence in the US Federal Code - as it should be. It's also a violation of rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment - and thus the enforcement of laws that violate fundamental rights is a violation of the oaths legal professionals swear to uphold the law. Hence, by implementing property rights, we have an explicit contradiction in the law - and contradictions in the law are both a) logically unsound, and b) inherently unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals involved in writing, approving, and implementing the law (which is a violation of yet another fundamental right: the right to ethical practice of law).
The usual "justifications" for things like property tax, and sales tax, are really just fig leafs: they exist to create the illusion of legitimacy for the tax. In other words, the government is doing something wrong, and wants to hide it behind a bodyguard of lies. Everything that is currently paid for by these taxes can instead be paid for by other forms of tax, such as income tax. Thus, claims to the effect that "property tax" or "sales tax" is necessary - for schools, or police, or fire-fighters, or roads, or the other infrastructure that supports a sale, or whatever - are entirely without merit: all of these could (and should) be paid for by other means (other taxes, perhaps supplemented by private sources).
Similarly, claims that "property tax" is necessary to ensure that land "gets used" are without merit. First, even by not using land, it gets used - it provides habitat for native species, and that has economic value. It should also be available for use by hikers and others, in those jurisdictions that recognize the right to roam - a fundamental right in any free country - and that too has economic value. If the land contains wetlands, that's especially good - it may provide storm protection as well as highly valuable habitat. Second, if the land becomes valuable enough, it will probably get sold or used - market forces take care of that, there's no need to force things, it will happen naturally.
Fundamentally, both of these taxes are regressive, although in somewhat different ways. In fact, they are so strongly regressive that they largely alter the fundamental nature of the US tax system (consider the effect of federal, state, and local taxes as a single system: the combined system is at best slightly progressive, and a case could be made that it is actually regressive). These regressive taxes are likely to be a major reason for the increasing imbalance in the distribution of wealth in recent decades (along with rent-seeking behaviour embedded in the legal system, see The Captured Economy).
Further, there seems to be a history of abuse of property taxes against minorities. Another problem with property taxes is they create a huge imbalance in educational opportunity. Yet another problem with these taxes is they are often implemented in a way that violates the right to travel (such as California's Prop 13 - California is certainly not unique in violating this right, plenty of places charge
Capitalism. And a government that has been bought and paid for by those big ass corporations.
You realize that those two things are diametrically opposed? I mean, you admit that one of the problems is the government. Government interference in a market is a socialism thing.
Not even remotely true. In the first book on capitalism - The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith made the point in 1776 that some regulation of a market based system is necessary for the general good. People are free to participate or not participate in the market without government fixing prices - that's what the phrase "free market" means - but if they do participate they have to follow the regulations set by government in the public interest.
Capitalism depends on government regulation - it is what protects private property, prevents fraud, makes reasonable contracts enforceable, and so forth. It is entirely false to claim that capitalism can exist without such regulation.
It is equally true that there can be extremely bad regulations that do not work to the general good. It's been estimated, for example, that half the income of the US legal profession comes from "rent-seeking" elements embodied in the US legal system - this represents a huge negative effect of the abuse of regulation (and one which compounds throughout the economy, acting as a regressive tax - one that primarily affects the poor and the middle class while being largely ignored by the rich). For another example, on this forum we've discussed at length the harm that poor regulations for copyright and patent do to society (and economists have done studies that back up the arguments with numbers).
Socialism - despite the wishes of legions of fanatics that don't understand the meaning of the word - simply means the workers control the means of production, so they and not the capitalists get the lion's share of the benefits from their labour. It has nothing to do with health care or any of the other things people wrongly associate with socialism.
Most of the EU nations that people incorrectly label as socialist are instead accurately described as capitalist welfare states - there is little worker ownership of the means of production (for the most part, only very small businesses, Norwegian oil is a special case). If one is going to describe those states as socialist, one might as well call a small animal that hunts mice a duck instead of calling it a cat.
Often the phrase socialism is used as a tool of deception, part of the bodyguard of lies used to prevent reform of bad regulations - which makes it all that more important for people to have a clear understanding of the word. Truth is the best antidote to lies - and that includes knowing the true meaning of words.
That's one of those things that's supposed to be covered by the Bill of Rights, specifically the 9th Amendment (unspecified rights retained by the people), and the 10th Amendment (unspecified rights reserved to the people).
Rights such as the right to ethical practice of law seem applicable. Even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternative exist. Lots of small print and complexity creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers - a clear conflict of interest.
There's also a question of rights one might reasonably expect to apply in a free country - any such rights would naturally be protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments. Excessive law, excessive government, excessive bureaucracy all seem to be things that are incompatible with living in a free country - and thus violate fundamental rights.
As rights retained by the people are, by definition, retained by the people, they can't be taken away by any entity of government, up to and including the Supreme Court.
The fact that most people don't read the terms of services should create a presumption that a violation of rights retained by the people in inherent in such documents, that a 9th Amendment right is in play in any situation involving such documents.
Infringement of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" has been grounds for both criminal and civil action under US federal law for a long time - and contract law is a form of law.
As all of this is obvious, it is interesting to wonder why the US legal profession nevertheless ends up doing so many things - including many things in contracts - that clearly contradict fundamental rights that can be asserted under the Bill of Rights. Are they really so greedy and sociopathic that they think they can get away with this stuff - it's really unethical practice of law - forever? Is the corruption really that bad, that global, that pervasive, that deeply entrenched that they don't even have to care?
If the US didn't learn from the Great Depression that a regulated economy is necessary to avoid misapplication of resources and improper allocation of financial responsibility, then we are all fucked (globally)
It's pretty clearly established that bad government regulation caused the Great Depression - and kept it going for far longer than needed. The economics literature is full of studies - and there are a number of books out there as well.
For example, federal mis-handling of the money supply was a primary contributor. Also, the majority of the bank failures were caused by regulations that limited the investments the "county" banks could make, making them very vulnerable to failure.
Hoover and especially FDR made matters worse with numerous bad decisions - the worst of which was implementing and keeping the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (which in and of itself would have been an economic disaster even in the absence of the other bad policies). At times in the "Roaring 20's" the US had the lowest unemployment in the developed nations - but after 8 years of FDR the US wasn't even in the top 10. Correction of the process started when many of FDR's policies had to be suspended due to WW2 - and the Great Depression was finally ended when those policies were thrown out entirely after the war.
The literature is full of other examples. You might start with the book "New Deal or Raw Deal" by Folsom, or FDR's Folly by Powell. "Out of Work" by Vedder and Gallaway is also informative.
Yes, regulation is needed - Adam Smith made that point clear in 1776, and there is lots of history since then to confirm the point, but bad regulation is not desirable. It is very difficult for government officials to know what regulations are appropriate, and they often get it wrong (as evidenced by the failures of Keynesian policy over the years since WW2).
Despite myths to the contrary, the US industrial system during WW2 was very much a capitalist system with only some government regulation - it was set up by William S. Knudsen, who resigned from his position as CEO of General Motors out of patriotism to take on the task for one dollar a year. Nobody in the government knew how to run industrial production - but Knudsen did, and he set things up to balance the capabilities of industry with the needs of the war effort (taking into account both what large businesses could do, and how smaller businesses could help). It was not something a government bureaucrat could have achieved - it took a capitalist with a deep understanding of capitalism and manufacturing (Knudsen had come up through the ranks, starting as a machinist), balanced with strong patriotism, to make things work.
What democratic countries really need to teach their kids is a bit of statistics and probability. Armed with a basic understanding of both, people will make better choices at the polling booth, be less prone to gambling, and less susceptible to marketing fluff. Humans do not have an instinctive understanding of these topics, especially where orders of magnitude are involved, making it very easy to deceive and mislead them.
I'd go further and say that we need to teach the kids some basic social science, and something about law. A social science class based upon teaching people the skills needed to evaluate research would be very helpful. A lot of this topic would involve teaching people how statistics can be misused and misinterpreted. Applications to things like criminal justice and economics would be helpful.
The little book How to Lie with Statistics is a good start, but people would benefit from a deeper exposure to topics typically only covered in good college level social science research design class.
Federal spending done in other states on items such transportation infrastructure, agricultural research, water and power infrastructure and so forth both directly reduces the day-to-day cost of living for Californians, allows many of them to live in a desert, and enable substantial increases in the California economy.
So if Californians weren't taxed to pay for those things, not only would they pay less in taxes but the providers of those things would be forced to compete for our discretionary dollars and lower their prices?
What's the downside to this revolutionary form of capitalism you are describing?
No. Think of these out-of-state tax dollars as an investment, which provides a return. There's nothing revolutionary about it.
Take wood, for example. California imports a substantial amount of wood - and the amount has been going up ever since 1992. That wood moves by rail and by truck and by sea. The federal government spends huge amounts of money to regulate, maintain, and develop the rail system, the highway system, and sea transport (including things like regulating how much ships can carry, and paying for the Coast Guard). Without that money, that lumber wouldn't be able to get to California - or somebody else would have to pay enormous amounts of money to replace the money spent by the federal government (which, incidentally, Trump is cutting: federal subsidies for transportation are going down).
Money does not grow on trees: somebody has to provide it. Having government do so is far preferable to the alternatives, such as having privately run toll roads everywhere.
The net effect is Californians would have to pay more for wood - or would have to authorize more in-state cutting of trees (always a difficult proposition), if their tax dollars weren't already subsidizing the transportation infrastructure that supplies wood - including that infrastructure physically located in other states.
There are lots of other aspects of federal spending that are associated with the import of lumber. A lot of the lumber-related activity is carried out in national forests - which means the federal government is spending money to hire scientists, researchers, forest rangers to oversee that activity - and to do research into how to do it better and how to make it sustainable - a whole host of people. Any good textbook on Forestry will give you a lot more detail.
As a net importer of lumber, California has a vested interest in supporting these activities so the forests in other states are used efficiently, and are able to continue producing products over the long term.
Discretionary spending doesn't come in here: people need shelter, so they are going to prioritize building and repair houses over many other things (especially after all those forest fires!). The least expensive way to do that in the USA is still wood (though concrete forms may eventually replace wood, especially in fire-prone areas).
That's just one product - and there are huge amounts of federal spending associated with it in order to allow Californians to buy products at lower prices than would otherwise be the case.
Extend the logic of this example to everything that gets imported from other states - look at the whole economy - and you realize just how interdependent the states are.
Relatively few of the products that California imports from other states are luxuries - so competition for discretionary spending isn't a big factor. In fact, because California imports so many staples and raw materials it is able to produce more luxuries than would otherwise be the case - and luxuries have far larger profit margins than staples, thus giving California's economy a huge boost. For example, California can grow almond trees instead of the tree varieties that are used for lumber (let's not forget about the role of the federal government in making sure California has the water to do that - water which is provided at FAR below the act
The reason California taxes everything else so high is partly because of its social and environmental protections, partly because it has such a low property tax and must make up the difference, and partly because it and other blue states subsidize most of the red states [redstatesocialism.org].
It would be simpler if red states simply found ways to refuse federal subsidies. This is basic rightism. What a grand chance to show the world their virtue.
I know that a lot of my tax money goes to the less fortunate, and I'm fine with that. That blue states are willing to subsidize red states is no surprise. That red states are willing to accept it is hypocrisy.
Claims that "blue states" are funding "red states" or that "red states" are "welfare states" have been repeatedly debunked on this forum and others. Please learn how to look at the evidence from a social scientist's perspective. You have to consider who actually benefits, not just where the money is spent. Even with the best of intentions (which probably doesn't apply in the case of these claims), it's easy to do bad research, and there's a lot of it out there.
California benefits an enormous amount from California-derived money being spent in other states: it both increases the money available to be spent in the California economy, raises California state and local tax income, helps provide water and power and lumber and many basic staple crops (freeing up many California farmers to grow luxuries and thus providing a huge boost to the economy - or to ship staples like wheat overseas to places like Japan at considerable profit) - and so forth.
Federal spending done in other states on items such transportation infrastructure, agricultural research, water and power infrastructure and so forth both directly reduces the day-to-day cost of living for Californians, allows many of them to live in a desert, and enable substantial increases in the California economy.
Just the option to retire elsewhere is enormously important to Californians - the state is number 1 in population in the USA but not even in the top 44 states (it's number 45, according to the World Atlas) in terms of the percentage of retirees. This allows California to tax incomes at a higher level before people retire, and produces more money in the California economy from simple everyday spending, indirectly supporting sales and property taxes - all that because people living there know they can leave and retire elsewhere and thus are not compelled to save as much (or to fight as hard against proposed tax increases or existing tax policy - some of which can certainly be considered to violate the Bill of Rights in the case of California). The retirees naturally take their social security and medi-care benefits with them, thus increasing federal spending in other states.
Further, the distinction between a "red" and "blue" state isn't all that well defined, which makes comparisons highly problematic.
There just isn't any convincing evidence that the oft-stated claims about "red" versus "blue" federal spending are anything more than propaganda. Similar claims about "urban" versus "rural" do not stand up to scrutiny either. People routinely underestimate - by an enormous amount - the true costs of the goods and services that they consume, not realizing the role of government in reducing those costs in the public interest. Certainly there are problems with bad decisions, with corruption, and with rent-seeking (economics term) - but one must look much deeper to find them - and California is probably at least as guilty there as any of the others.
It reminds me of Airliners. Commercial Airliners always want to push out General Aviation, as if they aren't paying their "fair share". Really they just want to own more of the sky. The airspace is for all Americans to use and so is the road as long as you can use it responsibly. We need to prevent profit-seeking corporations from co-opting the public welfare. It almost never works out the way they claim.
Unfortunately, what economists call rent-seeking behaviour has become a dominant aspect of the US economy and politics - and in our increasingly global economy it is being exported to other countries via treaties. This is probably the single most important cause of the massive concentration of wealth in the upper income brackets that has occurred in recent decades - and it has all kinds of negative implications for society.
Lindsey and Teles have a decent introduction to this topic in their book "The Captured Economy". They discuss rent-seeking in the context of finance, land zoning, patant/copyright, and occupational licensing - but note that there are many other forms this disease takes.
Thus, it's a not just question of preventing this behaviour moving forward - it's a question of undoing the results of many decades of self-centered sociopathic greed, results that are deeply embedded in the legal system and that have strong special interest groups protecting them. Typically, the rent-seeking conduct is protected by a bodyguard of lies, which further complicates matters.
From a Bill of Rights perspective, most and perhaps all forms of rent-seeking behaviour ultimately involve some sort of violation of the right to ethical practice of law, or the right to ethical government - both universal and inalienable rights in any society based on the rule of law, and certainly two of the rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment. Thus, it is clear that many of the laws in the US (including federal, state, and local law) are in violation of the Bill of Rights.
However, the US legal profession has a long and sordid history of ignoring their obligations in this matter, perhaps because they are one of the largest and most powerful rent-seeking special interest groups in the country. By some estimates, half of the average pay of US lawyers comes from rent-seeking. This means that any type of reform faces a very difficult uphill battle, even though the laws supporting the rent-seeking behaviour are in clear violation of the highest law in the land.
California is among the least federally dependent states in the US.
Unfortunately, this claim is a myth - like a lot of what people believe in US politics (both red and blue).
If you evaluate the work done from a social science perspective, it's terrible research.
The problem is that states get many substantial indirect benefits from federal spending in other states - and the "researchers" don't account for that in their numbers.
For example, Californians have the option to retire in other states where the cost of living is lower - and they frequently do. California isn't in the top 10 states for the percentage of elderly people - but it's number 1 in total population. This is a huge disparity.
This option is a financial benefit to California: it means that people don't have to save as much money while they are residing in California as they otherwise would. That money in turn gets spent a) in the California economy and b) in the form of higher state taxes than would otherwise be the case. Basically people don't need to hold their money as tightly since they know they have other options: they are more free to spend money, and more willing to tolerate high taxes.
But when these people move to another state to retire, they take their federal pensions, social security, medi-care, VA benefits, and so forth to the other state. This means that there is more federal spending in the other states, in some major spending categories.
The net effect is to create a illusory disparity in federal spending that leads people to a false conclusion of lower federal dependency than is actually the case (or, conversely, it creates the illusion that other states have a higher federal dependency).
This is just one example of many: you can look up others on this forum (this myth comes up often). Just to give you a few hints: think about agriculture and staple crops (where are they grown and who benefits - note that staple crops are not the same thing as luxuries), about power and water (where is it generated/found and who uses it), and about cost of living for the poor (where is it lower and why). Then think about how all of these factors (and many others) can be viewed as providing financial benefits to California - and creating disproportionate federal spending in other states.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody actually has any good numbers on what the state-federal dependency relationship actually is - doing good social science measurement is really hard - but it could even be the opposite of what is commonly claimed.
There's also a big problem with the definition of a "red" versus a "blue" state. Again, you can look that up.
People that are not well versed in research design have a strong tendency to come to false conclusions that simply confirm pre-existing bias when looking at data.
Works well in Texas, where all the major highways in Austin, Houston, and Dallas are tollways. In fact, some cities like Austin refuse to do traffic improvements, and if wasn't for CTRMA, there would be no effective way to go through or around the city. Even with the state funding the private companies to do the construction, the whole project nearly got canned anyway.
Toll roads just make sense. You use it; you pay for it.
Nice propaganda. In reality, a toll is a regressive tax: it hurts the poor a lot, it hurts the middle class some, the rich don't notice it. The fact that there are ANY toll roads at all in the United States is one of the reasons for the increasing concentration of wealth in that country: the rich keep getting richer.
Everybody else suffers, in one way or another.
There are lots of negative consequences for a society as a result of the existence of tolls, in addition to the direct penalty imposed by the regressive tax. Please turn your brain on and think about this.
The power to tax is the power to harm others, or destroy them. It should always be used wisely, and it usually isn't - especially in places like the USA with deeply entrenched corruption and a substantially unethical legal profession.
Everything government does should be funded by a progressive income tax, or by tariffs, with a very simple tax code (not thousands of pages in which hordes of loopholes are or can be hidden, leading to continual bribing of politicians by special interest groups).
The big problem is that the constitution doesn't state the exact time limit of copyrights.
Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 - Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
It would have been helpful if the copyright term limits were specifically spelled out in the constitution. Since it only states "for limited times" as long as the law has a definitive time period for copyrights it doesn't violate the constitution. The US Supreme Court upheld this view in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Now if copyrights are extended again it may be arguable that the effect copyright has become effectively indefinite but that would take another court challenge.
It's only a big problem because the US legal profession routinely ignores legal ethics issues whenever they think they can get away with it.
The issue with copyright isn't the duration: the issue is that the copyright is subject to contract for the entire duration. This has lots of negative implications, including the creation of artificial monopoly for long periods of time - with everything that implies.
Contract related matters are fundamental to the profits of the US legal profession: as such the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to having long periods of time in which copyrights are subject to contract. This inherently creates a long window in which lawyers can expect (extremely lucrative) copyright related contract business to come their way, creating an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals and enhancing the average lifetime income of all legal professionals.
The right to ethical practice of law is an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. As such, this is a right "retained by" and "reserved to" the people and protected under the 9th and 10th Amendments. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
Hence, to be complaint with the Bill of Rights, US copyright law would have to greatly limit the amount of time in which copyright was subject to contract. Five or ten years would be reasonable, I could even go a little longer.
After that time, the material should no longer be subject to contract, in order to avoid the issue of ethical conflict of interest. That doesn't mean it has to go fully into the public domain: you could still require that any copying for gain would require compensating the creators of a work for the duration of their lives. You might, for example, require that the creators get 10%-20% of the gross for any product in which their work appears (perhaps divided evenly). This is far more than most musicians or authors or song-writers actually get, so the creative types would on the whole be pretty happy with it.
Note that this completely removes the incentive for corporations (and associations of legal professionals) to give bribes - err, I mean "campaign contributions" - to politicians to extend copyright. Also, the long duration could still be used to protect "moral rights", which is worth doing - and that's the only legitimate justification for having a long duration. The material could go into the public domain with respect to not-for-gain copying after 20-30 years, while still protecting moral rights.
Hence, you could have long durations, without negative effects for society - and this fully satisfies the exclusive use for a limited time provision.
Note that no change to the Constitution is required here: we simply need to get the lawyers to start respecting the existing text of the Bill of Rights - which is supposed to be the highest law in the land, a law that they've already sworn oaths to uphold (and are required to do so by the "good behaviour" provision).
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Capitalism isn't an infinitely sustainable economic model
All the developed nations implement some form of capitalist welfare state.
This type of economy - in one form or another - has been evolving for centuries. England, for example, had the Poor Law since the 16th century, and that in turn built on earlier welfare systems. Today's implementations of welfare are typically much better in most developed nations, such as the European nations.
Despite propaganda from the socialists, these nations (such as Sweden) are not socialist - because socialism (Marx,Engels) means the workers control the means of production and that's not the case for any modern developed state. Some worker ownership exists, primarily in small family-owned businesses, but it's not a big part of the overall economy.
Instead of socialism, these nations use high taxes on traditional capitalist businesses to fund the welfare state. Hence, they are capitalist nations.
Norway actually comes the closest to being socialist, in terms of percentage of GDP, due to the state owned oil company. But even in Norway, that's only 30% of the country's GDP, and it's probably best viewed as a historical fluke.
There's still a lot of inefficiency in the implementation of capitalist welfare states, and some unwanted side effects in some countries such as high levels of household debt and high black market participation rates (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, 2016,
by Michael Booth).
A lot of the policies implemented along the way, such as sales taxes (especially VAT taxes), property taxes, and minimum wage, are probably counter-productive from an economics perspective, leading to higher levels of taxes than are actually needed to implement the welfare state, and to all kinds of problems with unintended side effects.
But on the whole, capitalism doesn't seem to be going away. Europe has about as many billionaires as the USA does.
The USA is also a capitalist welfare state, but one with a very poor implementation and a lot of corruption leading to over-concentration of wealth. Rent-seeking, implemented in law, is an especially big problem. See, for example, Lindsey and Teles "The Captured Economy".
Despite a lot of myths to the contrary, capitalism doesn't mean an absence of regulation. In fact, capitalism can not exist without regulation: for example, having a reasonably strong system of contracts enforced by government is both a requirement and it involves regulation.
In practice, today's implementation of contracts is often overly strong, in large part due to rent-seeking on the part of legal professionals (unethical practice of law), and does more economic (and social) harm than good. A lot of provisions routinely make it into contracts that shouldn't be there, and the durations of things like copyright are tied to contract over the long term when they shouldn't be, leading to excessive duration of copyright and lots of other problems (the legal profession has a huge ethical conflict of interest with respect to this matter - and the status quo not being in the long term interests of society as a whole can be viewed as another example of rent-seeking).
Jerry Z. Muller's course "Thinking about Capitalism" is a good overview of the ideas involved in capitalism for those that don't have a good educational background in economics. A course along these lines should probably be a requirement for a high school degree.
Bingo. It's the same with patents. The law only helps those that are already in positions of power and wealth. It's funny because all the little guys think patents and copyright will protect them, so they cheer on the ridiculous extensions. But it'll never save them from a big team of lawyers and they're more likely to get bitten by it than helped.
It's more accurate to say the law primarily helps those with power and wealth. Occasionally the little guy wins. But on the whole IP law causes lots of economic problems for society, including concentration of wealth. There's an interesting discussion of this topic (with references to a number of economic studies) in The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles.
Even aside from the economic considerations, there's really no doubt that current US copyright and patent law is implemented in a fashion that violates the Bill of Rights. The dual rights to ethical government and ethical practice of law can be asserted under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people), and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Current patent law violates both rights, and current copyright law violates the right to ethical practice of law.
In short, the Constitutional authority of the federal government to promote the useful arts and sciences has been implemented in an illegal fashion.
This, of course, has all kinds of negative implications for society.
Unfortunately we seem to have judges selected by politicians with an interest in preserving the mostly-illegal status quo, as opposed to actually doing their jobs. Some of these politicians accept large campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. The phase "Land of the Lawsuit" doesn't even being to describe the full scope of the ethics problems in the USA. It's a huge mess.
How about a better approach to healthcare in your country, where you should be able to get life saving treatment for decades without bankrupting you or your dependents...?
How about a better approach where first almost everyone works, contributes to society, and pays taxes so such a system is financially viable? It is hard to have one without the other, especially when there is already a $21 trillion debt which is increasing at over $2 thousand dollars a second.
The debt is certainly a problem, but it doesn't preclude progress on the health care issue.
The USA is ALREADY spending roughly 17-18% of its GDP on health care, including all public and private spending.
European nations with health care programs are spending 9-11% of their GDP on health care - and getting better results in many key statistics. The same applies to the rest of the developed world, such as Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
In short, the USA is spending a lot more than it needs to on health care, and getting generally poorer results. The rich get good health care, of course, but when you look at the health care statistics of the nation as a whole, they are not that impressive compared to the other developed nations. For example, many nations (more than 40), have lower child mortality rates than the USA - that's pretty awful.
Note that these other health care systems are not all single payer systems. Every nation seems to be slightly different in how they do this. Switzerland, for example, does not have a single payer system. As I understand things, they have strict regulation of health insurance companies, and public votes on key issues.
In short, there are many options.
Whatever option is chosen, the USA should be able to drop it's health care spending to say, 11% of GDP, either through a sensible single payer system, or perhaps copying the Swiss system outright and the extra 6-7% of GDP could be used to pay off the debt.
This would require raising taxes, but done properly the tax raise would be no more than what people are already spending on health care, so it wouldn't be a net impact on people's current take-home pay after health care expenses.
You might need to have some reform of the legal system, but's that long overdue and would have happened a long time ago if politicians weren't routinely accepting campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals. This would remove the impact of lawyer-insurance (or the "lawyer tax"), not just from the doctors from the entire supply chains leading the to production of medical goods and services, and hence would remove the compounding effect of overhead applying at each step in the supply chain (like compound interest, this grows quickly).
It's really a low hanging fruit - you have to get past the corruption and vote buying on the part of the few special interest groups (the insurance companies, the lawyers, some of the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies, some of the pharmacies), but there's nothing else government could do as easily that would free up such a huge amount of money to help pay off the debt. Putting things in perspective, ANY cut in government spending or tax raise will face opposition - and in most cases the amount at stake is far less for just as tough of a political battle.
A competent government with integrity could make this happen. A corrupt and unethical government, allied with a largely unethical legal profession, might have trouble doing this - unless the public wakes up and forces the issue. Who knows, it might even be an opportunity to fix a lot of the corruption and ethics problems ... ?
Of course, if you fixed the regressive tax problem in the USA (mostly an issue the state and local level), replacing most or all of these taxes with a progressive income tax, and got rid of most of the tax code (to remove loopholes), and appropriately taxed movement of money overseas (to prevent evasion), you could probably fund the whole system without raising taxes for the poor and the lower middle class - but that would require undoing a huge amount of deeply entrenched corruption, so it's perhaps unlikely.
People are less likely to leave California than any other state in the US.
I'm going to repeat that again for you: California residents are less likely to move out of the state than residents of any other state in the US.
That depends on the demographic group. California is #1 in population, but #45 in percentage of retirees (World Atlas: Percentage Of Senior Citizens By State).
In other words, people are moving away in huge numbers when they retire, due to the high cost of living. Given the fantastic weather in California, this is particularly noteworthy - many people move to get better weather when they retire, but that's clearly not the key consideration here.
A middle class couple, with a house, moving from a town in California to a town in Florida would probably save 20k-25k a year, due to the differences in taxes and cost-of-living. The amount would be even higher for people leaving one of the big cities.
According to Schlomach (2017), econometric studies show that 64-73% of the cost of living differences of US states can be accounted for by government policy differences, so the high cost of houses (or land) in California is probably due primarily to government policy, not supply and demand. In other words, supply and demand still play a role, but it's swamped by the consequences of government policy decisions.
Lindsey and Teles (2017, The Captured Economy) suggest that government policies involving rent-seeking on the part of special interest groups are a big part of the high cost of housing.
In other words, the combination of corrupt or incompetent government, as well as unethical practice of law, seems to play a key role in the cost of living in California.
Lindset and Teles also state that historical migration patterns of the poor to the cities of California as places of opportunity have changed significantly in recent decades due to cost of housing issues.
California ranks #35 in percentage of poor among US states (Wikipedia). This could suggest they have very good programs for the poor, but given that the person with an average income in Mississippi has more useful spending power than in California (again Schlomach), this actually suggests instead that the poor are also moving elsewhere in large numbers, along with the retirees (there is of course some overlap between those groups).
Similarly, California has fewer military personnel, relative to it's population, than many other states (~12% of the population, 9% of the military). This is despite the importance of the West Coast ports - which would suggest a higher military presence - so here the military is clearly following a deliberate policy of moving people on relatively low incomes away from California (they probably would have even fewer there, if it weren't for the existence of government owned land with housing, the ownership of which goes back to WW2 or even earlier - land that is probably immensely valuable right now).
Collectively, this suggests California is a very bad place to be for those on a low income, and these people are probably moving away in large numbers to places where the cost of living is lower, but being replaced by people with higher incomes or other forms of support (such as an extended family where people take care of each other). Even with high incomes, a lot of technical folks that move to California are sharing a rental, not owning a home.
As the saying goes, California would be a fantastic place to live if it weren't for the government and most of the existing population.
Attempts to control, what other people remember about you, are tyrannical and (until very recently) unprecedented.
Once you tell other people something, the information is theirs. There is no basis to allow control of other people's heads, notebooks, or computers...
That is complete and utter nonsense. People have been attempting to control what others remember about them since the dawn of human history.
It got a lot worse in the 20th century, especially in the various socialist / communist states.
Further, privacy laws are not about controlling what people remember. They are about controlling what machines remember, and what organizations remember. Neither organizations nor machines are people.
This is not thought control, and attempting to portray it as such is pure propaganda.
It could have been possible maybe. In a 20th century history elective in college, our professor had us read one of those "everything you know about ww2 is wrong" books. The author posited that the bulk of what gets into mass media... Patton and the 3rd army, the atomic bombs, The French resistance, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Doolittle raid, MacArthur's island-hopping strategy, the USS Enterprise, the involvement of the various other allied powers, etc... was mostly just miscellanea. Rather, his position was that what won the war was 1/3rd Bletchley Park, 1/3rd American manufacturing, and 1/3rd the previously-mentioned miscellaneous.
The conclusion was that without the US factories, *maybe* the UK could have used Ultra to most effectively utilize its limited resources and still pull off a win. And, without the UK codebreakers, *maybe* the US could have simply constructed so much more war materiel than Germany's and Japan's navies could sink that we'd have eventually just Zerg rushed them and won anyway. But it was the combination of the codebreakers and factories that really secured the allied victory. The argument, especially since more and more about Ultra and Magic that had never been known before was reaching the public eye at the time, was fairly compelling.
The code breaking was important, but the importance is often greatly exaggerated. The code-breakers had relatively little direct impact on the fighting in the Eastern Front, and that was critical to the overall outcome of the war.
The major role of the Allied code-breaking in affecting the Eastern Front was indirect: they help get convoys across the Atlantic. But the Germans had their own code-breakers, and at times they were the one's reading the Allied codes. It wasn't at all a one-sided affair.
Other technologies such as radar, improved sonar, escort carriers, and specialized sub-killing weapons played a key role in the Battle of the Atlantic as well, it wasn't just code-breaking. It eventually reached a point where it really didn't matter if the Germans knew where the convoys were, because the Allied escorts were so much better at finding and killing the Germans subs than the subs were at escaping (and that was independent of the code breaking, which at best might give a rough location for some of the subs - and radio direction finding could do this independent of the code breaking).
The same, incidentally, was not true for the Japanese: they were far less effective at killing Allied subs. They didn't have the same advanced technology in this area. They had plenty of other advanced technology, but convey escort wasn't something they invested sufficiently in - which ended up being a catastrophic mistake.
But even considering only the battle of the Atlantic is misleading. During the long days of the Arctic summer, in the early war, the Allies couldn't ship much to the Soviet Union - at that point in the war it was too easy for surface, air, and submarine assets to kill ships, and daylight made it easy to find the ships. So the Allies ended up developing other techniques for getting goods to the Soviet Union.
A lot the essential items went on Soviet-flag ships directly from the USA. Since the Japanese were at peace with the Soviets, they didn't interfere with this traffic, so long as it was industrial items, food, clothing, etc and not actual warplanes or tanks - but the goods shipped were nevertheless critical to the Soviet war effort - they fed and clothed the Red Army, helped build the weapons and ammunition, and kept the Red Air Force operational.
The Allies also build a network of air bases in the Northern USA and Canada to fly combat aircraft to the Soviet Union. The American P-39 fighter (and variants) was popular with Soviet pilots and would be used from 1942 to the very end of the war - accounting for more enemy aircraft killed than any other US-made plane.
Finally, with a major effort the Allies built a railroad in the Middle East to move supp
Sales tax is the fairest because it is a use or consumption tax. Replacing the current US income tax with a national sales tax would be incredible. No more april 15th and all of the related tax code hassles. The current US income tax code is so convoluted and corrupt that it's become a jobs programs HR Block and other personal tax companies.
To ease the effect on the poor every citizen would receive a monthly check for the same amount for the estimated monthly sales taxes paid by someone at the poverty line.
That's a common myth.
Sales tax is not even remotely fair. You can't simply issue a check to compensate the poor, because the cost of living differs enormously from place to place.
You could to try to force poor people to relocate so they live far from their jobs and have a really bad commute, to put them in a place with a lower cost of living, but that doesn't seem fair. The Communists in the Soviet Union enforced mass migrations for their convenience, but that somehow doesn't seem appropriate for the USA.
Unfortunately, a sales tax strongly compounds across the logistics chains needed to produce goods and services - even though the tax isn't necessarily being applied at every step. A VAT is applied at every step, a US-style sales tax is theoretically not applied directly at every step - but in practice (in the real world) there are still effects that apply at every step (or every node in the logistics chain).
Tax fuel, for example, and you increase the costs of transportation for nodes in the logistics chains that produce food. Costs go up both for directly shipping the food (not to mention the raw materials used to make the food), and for the labour needed to run the trucks and the warehouses and factories that produce the food.
The net effect is you raise the cost of getting food to stores - so now the poor have to pay more for food. You can't simply avoid the effects, since everybody needs food. Also everybody else has to pay more to support the welfare system - and since you're funding government with a regressive tax, it means the middle class is bearing most of the new tax burden.
It's not just fuel. The modern world is complex. There are a lot of goods and services that businesses need to operate. Tax any of these, and the costs ripple through the logistics chains to all businesses downstream. This is similar to how compound interest works.
Some states try to deal with this by having very complex regulations that let businesses theoretically not pay the sales tax (in principle only the end consumer does). In practice, that ends up getting very complicated and it doesn't work well, plus it adds a lot of overhead (and since natural language is ambiguous, human beings have to make a lot of judgement calls - it's not something you can just automate with a computer). The net effect is that these systems still ends up raising costs for everybody - and they do it in way that is especially harmful to small businesses.
As state and local tax codes have gotten more and more complicated over the years, and also more regressive, we've seen a decline in small business in the USA, a fact which has lots of negative economic implications for society as a whole - including the loss of many job opportunities for the poor.
The impact of a progressive income tax is far lower on society than a sales tax. It still has some effect on logistics chains, but it is much smaller and weaker because the differences end up being basically a rounding error in the incomes of the rich, thus affecting only a few people, while a sales tax affects everything and everybody.
In effect, a sales tax is a tax break for the rich: every dollar in a government's budget that comes from a regressive tax is a dollar that doesn't come from a progressive tax.
You could, of course, go the EU route and have endless rules concerning when the taxes are applied and who is affected to try to mitigate the damage the taxes do - but that too has
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
This is a fig leaf, used to pretend that property taxes are something good.
In reality, all of these things can be paid for by taxes on income, or on wealth, or on transfers of money.
If you pierce the illusion that "property taxes are good", and examine the reality of how they work, you find lots of problems.
For example, there is a history of using property taxes as a tool to disenfranchise minorities - especially those who have land but don't have much income. Developers view this as an opportunity: they can collude with local government to obtain that land, develop it, and sell it for a much higher prices (usually to people outside the minority group), which benefits both the developer and the local government. There are occasional lawsuits filed against this, but it's hard to fight corruption with a lawsuit (lawsuits in the USA are far more likely to be a tool of corruption or rent-seeking).
Another problem is the connection between property taxes and education. This creates a huge advantage for rich school districts, which further opens up the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots". It's also a big problem for minorities, who seldom live in those rich districts.
Property taxes can also make it hard for minorities to move into certain parts of the country, even if there are otherwise great job opportunities there.
Property taxes tend to lead to over-development, which has environmental consequences. A lot of habitat is destroyed as a result - and we lose the economic benefits that wild land can provide over both the short term and the long. There shouldn't be any property taxes at all on land that is left in a wild state, with free access for the public.
Property taxes also tend to work against the concept of a family owned farm, where people are far more likely to take pride in doing things right, as opposed to a commercial farm owned by a corporation. It's not an accident that so many of these family owned enterprises have disappeared over the years - and we are now having a lot of problems with the quality of our food supply.
Yet another problem is the difficulty of accurately assessing property taxes. This is one of the tools that is sometimes used to target minorities, but it is also used in some places as a form of rent-seeking by various groups such as legal professionals. In these areas, the corrupt government always increases the property tax amounts more than people feel it should, so most people end up hiring lawyers to dispute the increase, so the government's role has been subverted into shifting income to the legal profession.
Also, in practice, property taxes tend to be regressive. The amount of tax has very little to do with income or wealth. Things are especially bad in California, thanks to Prop 13 (some people and businesses are paying 10x or 20x the amount of property taxes for essentially identical lots), but this is a problem in general.
Finally, a property tax - at least on homes - represents an interesting form of unethical government, and unethical practice of law. After all, it's a effectively a form of rent - which means you can't actually own property, all you can do is rent - but one of the fundamental principles in a free society is the freedom to own property. Hence, we have a contradiction - and contradictions in the legal system always involve both unethical practice of law and unethical government. A competent and ethical government would work over the long term to maintain the legal system, like a team of good engineers maintaining a software package, cleaning up these sorts of problems as they are discovered. The last thing we want to do is encourage government and the legal
No. This was no more correct the first 50 times someone tried to alter history by passing this off.
WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong, and even a brief look at actual history shows that.
Even at the immediate end of the war, the myth doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
For example, there's the issue that most of Britain's industry was beyond the effective range of Germany's bombers - and hence did not take significant damage. In fact, that industry was far stronger at the end of WW2 than it had been at the beginning. A lot of the old Victorian-era industries had received long-overdue modernization. Many new factories were built for wartime production. Large numbers of women entered the industrial workplace and learned new skills - vastly increasing the size and capability of the potential industrial workforce.
Other advanced British Commonwealth nations such as Australia and Canada didn't take significant wartime damage either - and received many infrastructure improvements that improved their economies as a result of the war. For example, huge amounts of surveying, road building, and construction were done in Canada to support flying aircraft to the Soviet Union.
Sweden, which stayed neutral during the war, was still supplying a large percentage of the world's supply of ball bearings - a major industrial contribution.
The Soviet Union suffered some industrial damage, but was able to move many factories before the Germans reached then, and also received massive amounts of aid from the USA and Britain - including huge numbers of vehicles (especially trucks and trains), advanced technology, lots of machine tools (and entire factories). It seems likely they ended up with a stronger industrial base than they started with.
In short, as you mention, the ideas that the rest of the world was bombed into the stone age and hence unable to compete with the USA for many decades after the war ended, or the idea that the rest of the world was hopelessly dependent on the USA, are simply not supported by the facts.
For that matter, if there had been "hopeless dependence", Britain and all those former British Commonwealth nations would now drive on the right side of the road (instead of the wrong side).
There was no guarantee that the USA wouldn't come out of the war and go straight back into an economic depression. A lot of people at the time expected it to happen. That it didn't happen was due - as much as anything - to the fact that FDR died and many of his bad policies were finally dismantled.
Germany invades Poland and conquers it in 5 weeks. France and England largely stood by and did nothing, except for a small operation called the Saar Offensive, which officially began the Phoney War. This offensive was so light that it didn't even tickle Germany. The USSR (on friendly terms with Germany at this point) invaded Finland, and then Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. This caused France to get cold feet, so they picked up what meager forces they sent and ran home.
That is a very brief summary of what happened, and you'll find it to be accurate if you research it.
It's not particularly accurate. Neither Britain nor France had the ability to project power that could seriously threaten Germany at that point. As much as anything it was a question of logistics and preparation. Poland was simply too far away. The French could have attacked Germany on the shared border, but they didn't have the logistical capability to sustain the offence long enough to make a military difference. Had they attacked in strength anyway, it could easily have made a political difference, but a purely military solution was not sustainable.
The real world is not a computer game or a board game like A&A - real armies have to deal with logistics. Logistics in warfare is a much more complex subject than most people suspect - and modern warfare makes matters far tougher. For example, ammunition gets used up a lot faster, and you also need to supply gasoline, lubricants, and spare parts. Also, in addition to feeding combatants, you need to feed all the people taking care of the equipment. Just the sheer size of modern armies is a huge logistical challenge (many of the accounts by ancient historians of huge armies are provably impossible - they just made up the numbers - only the "modern" world could really support large armies, and then only with great difficulty). You might try looking at Martin van Creveld's book "Supplying War" for an introduction to this topic.
It would take the British (and Americans) years to develop the specialized equipment needed to land a large army in a contested amphibious assault (let alone supply it). Nobody was prepared to do that in 1940, so that wasn't an option.
The British had a strategic bomber force, but it wasn't ready for war. It would take years of combat experience before they would be able to project power on a strategic scale (and even then it's debatable how effective it was).
In short, neither Britain nor France had the capability to directly help Poland in any meaningful way - and it would take years of work and real combat experience to develop that capability. The Soviet Union invading Poland from the other side (16 days after the Germans invaded) ensured that Poland had no chance at all.
In spite of France having a large and well armed and prepared Army (which they never tried to use to break Polish invasion,) they surrendered in 6 weeks.
The French Army was well prepared for a defensive war (involving relatively fixed lines) by WW1 standards. There were lots of problems with respect to WW2 standards. As mentioned above, they didn't have sufficient logistical capability for a sustained offence.
On the defence, the professional French forces fought quite well, and generally stopped the Germans cold in their sectors. The big breakthrough happened in a supposedly quiet sector that was manned by reservists, not professionals. They were simply overwhelmed by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe), which was effectively being used as a mobile artillery force, in combination with German ground forces. This allowed the Germans to get behind the main French and British forces and led to disaster.
The doctrine of the regular French forces was not up to the task of handling modern warfare once they lost their defensive position: the Germans were ahead in this regard, and this seemingly made it impossible for France recover at that point (problems in political leadership prob
Of course, California would have less debt if it were its own country, since Federal tax money is constantly taken from CA and used to support red states.
That's absolutely true.
That's absolutely false. It's a popular American political myth - but the myth has been debunked numerous times.
The right way to look at this is as following: California makes investments in other states via federal taxes spent in those states. These investments produce a great return to the California economy - far more than the money spent. It's a net gain for California.
For example:
California gets the water that drives it's agriculture and supports its population at FAR below cost (see Cadillac Desert: Mark Reisner). This in itself is enormously import. People die in a matter of days if they don't have water. You also need huge amounts of water for agriculture.
California imports staples such as wheat, allowing it to use that subsidized water to grow high-profit luxury crops (such as almonds) instead of low-profit staple crops. High profit crops provide a huge economic boost. The basic idea here is a principle economics call "comparative advantage".
While California has a strong agricultural economy, many agricultural products are far more efficiently produced in places outside California. Arkansas leads the US in rice production, Illinois and Iowa in corn and soybeans, Georgia in peanuts, Idaho and Washington in potatoes, and so forth. We're talking about pretty basic foods that a lot of people depend upon. Federal spending - things like agricultural research and support for the highway/rail/water transport systems - helps lower the costs California residents pay for these products, which in turn puts more money into the California economy for spending on local products (and allows California to have higher taxes).
California imports lumber, allowing more construction and repair of houses at a lower cost. California could do more cutting of trees inside the state, but there's a lot of fanatical opposition to that - and the relative lack of water makes it harder to replace the trees, so being able to import wood is economically important. It's especially important for a place that gets a lot of wildfires and loses large numbers of houses on a pretty regular basis.
California imports a significant amount of power. This reduces the cost of providing power, allowing people to spend less money on utility bills, and allowing industry to run at a lower cost.
California can tax it's residents at higher rates - and people can spend more in the CA economy while they live there - because they know that when they retire they can move to other states (CA is #1 in population, #45 in retirees).
California can send it's poor people to other states, where they can live at a lower cost of living (CA is #1 in population, #35 in poor). The high cost of housing has forced this to happen, the long historical population flows have completely reversed in recent decades as a result of increased housing costs (see The Captured Economy by Lindsey and Teles for references to the economic studies showing the changes in historical population flows). For most of human history, the big cities were places of opportunity for the poor - that's no longer the case in California.
Note that these housing costs are largely the result of government policy - econometric studies show that 64 to 73% of the cost of living differences between US states can be accounted for solely by government policy differences (Schlomach, 2017).
California can send it's military personnel to live in other states (12% of the population lives in CA - and a higher percentage of the military-age population - but only 9% of the military live in CA).
All this population movement frees up housing for higher income people to live in the state, who pay more in taxes, and contribute more to the local economy. In return, California has to pay a paltr
The problem is that individuals' wages don't increase because of rent increases. Most people can't go to their boss and say "hay, my landlord put the rent up, I need you to give me a raise to pay for it."
Instead they are forced out and replaced with workers who can demand higher wages due to skills/experience. And then they cycle repeats.
This is bad for everyone.
Rent control in the form of government price fixing is not the solution. Government price fixing can always be expected to cause bad problems over the long term.
The solution is to let the market set the price, but to not allow rent to increase for a fixed number of years once the contract is signed (or perhaps to fix the rate of increase to reflect some some inflation amount). 5-10 years would be reasonable. The logic here is that we want market forces to work over the long term, but we don't want people to have to move too often. Too much disruption in people's lives is not good for society or for the economy - and moving is always disruptive.
Yes, this slightly reduces the maximum short term profits landlords can get from their property, but it's not the government's job to maximize profits of the wealthy, it's the government's job to look out for the long term best interests of society. Landlords will still make plenty of money - in fact, they'll probably do better over the long term, on average, then they will with traditional rent control systems that involve government price fixing - and there will be more incentive to build additional units, so the overall cost of housing will be lower for the public.
Land ownership should be a long term investment, people that want short term gains can gamble on the stock market.
This. And this is why raising taxes for education is the lure. Nobody would willingly raise taxes to give a retired government worker 3x the retirement of a non-government worker. The state government employees know this. They divert funds from everything the public wants into their bloated pension plans. Then they tell you your roads and bridges are crumbling, schools are failing and the state is broke because you aren't paying enough.
These pension plans are theft. The people who defend them say things like "government employees pass on higher paying options in the private sector and deserve such a pension." Except this is not true. Many jobs in government pay more up front, come with amazing benefits AND have a defined pension plan.
The problem is, so many people are now dependent on these pensions so you cannot just take them away. A lot of recipients never saved for retirement expecting the pension would be there.
That said, the problem is not that people aren't paying enough. The problem is that we are paying too much and that money is not going to the things we expect.
Moving forward, no state should offer its employees a state paid pension plan. Somwthing like a 401k with some form of matching is better. Let employees take ownership of their retirement goals.
I would go further, and say that government pension plans are a violation of fundamental rights arising under the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people).
In general, future generations have a right to not be born into debt, whether individual or government debt. We can allow some exceptions (e.g. an asteroid is about to smash into the earth, destroying the human race, so we'll spend as much money as needed to divert it). We might even allow a World War exception. Ordinary wars (everything since WW2) should not be grounds for government debt. Any war (other than a World War) that does not involve an actual physical invasion of the homeland should not be grounds for government debt.
In short, government should be paying "cash on the barrelhead" - and should have a "rainy day" fund to address emergencies.
Hence, it follows that most government debt exists in violation of fundamental rights protected by the US Bill of Rights - and a violation of the oaths of office sworn by government officials.
Pension plans are a form of debt, and hence a violation of fundamental rights. Creating them is an illegal exercise of government authority, as was creating the social security system. Pay government employees what the market demands, and let them use the same retirement systems as everybody else (if those systems aren't working, then fix the rules).
Having said this, we're clearly stuck with existing commitments - they have to be honoured. But government at all levels needs to get rid of pension plans for future employees - and social security should disappear entirely (welfare systems with appropriate reform, or some sort of reasonable UBI/reverse income tax, could handle any issues here, such as people that will never be competent to plan their own retirement).
The government has a history of breaking the law, and is continuing to break the law today, but that is no reason to tolerate this moving forward. A government that can not comply with the law is not a legitimate government - and loses it's moral authority, which creates all kinds of problems for society.
Many things we should expect government to do in a competent and efficient manner do not happen because government debt consumes too much of the budget. Road infrastructure, for example, lags many years beyond the needs of the population - instead, it should happen BEFORE it is needed. Infrastructure maintenance is often deferred, at which point things become much more expensive to fix. Facilities such as rest areas get closed due to lack of funds, limiting the right to travel. Mass transit is a disaster. Police forces are being used as mobile tax c
Correction.
I don't like sales tax, but it's still better than property tax, where I have to pay tax on my house whether I can afford to or not.
You shouldn't have to buy your freedom every year for your land.
In a free country, people should be free to own property. This is a reasonable expectation that goes along with living in a free country. You can not own something if you are paying a landlord rent. Any regular payment to some third party such as the government - whether a property tax, a vehicle registration, and so forth - can be viewed a rent payment. You do not own your home, or your car, instead you rent it from the government - fail to pay your rent and you lose the property. Hence, property taxes represent a violation of fundamental rights.
The violation of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is a criminal offence in the US Federal Code - as it should be. It's also a violation of rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment - and thus the enforcement of laws that violate fundamental rights is a violation of the oaths legal professionals swear to uphold the law. Hence, by implementing property taxes, we have an explicit contradiction in the law - and contradictions in the law are both a) logically unsound, and b) inherently unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals involved in writing, approving, and implementing the law (which is a violation of yet another fundamental right: the right to ethical practice of law).
The usual "justifications" for things like property tax, and sales tax, are really just fig leafs: they exist to create the illusion of legitimacy for the tax. In other words, the government is doing something wrong, and wants to hide it behind a bodyguard of lies. Everything that is currently paid for by these taxes can instead be paid for by other forms of tax, such as income tax. Thus, claims to the effect that "property tax" or "sales tax" is necessary - for schools, or police, or fire-fighters, or roads, or the other infrastructure that supports a sale, or whatever - are entirely without merit: all of these could (and should) be paid for by other means (other taxes, perhaps supplemented by private sources).
Similarly, claims that "property tax" is necessary to ensure that land "gets used" are without merit. First, even by not using land, it gets used - it provides habitat for native species, and that has economic value. It should also be available for use by hikers and others, in those jurisdictions that recognize the right to roam - a fundamental right in any free country - and that too has economic value. If the land contains wetlands, that's especially good - it may provide storm protection as well as highly valuable habitat. Second, if the land becomes valuable enough, it will probably get sold or used - market forces take care of that, there's no need to force things, it will happen naturally.
Fundamentally, both of these taxes are regressive, although in somewhat different ways. In fact, they are so strongly regressive that they largely alter the fundamental nature of the US tax system (consider the effect of federal, state, and local taxes as a single system: the combined system is at best slightly progressive, and a case could be made that it is actually regressive). These regressive taxes are likely to be a major reason for the increasing imbalance in the distribution of wealth in recent decades (along with rent-seeking behaviour embedded in the legal system, see The Captured Economy).
Further, there seems to be a history of abuse of property taxes against minorities. Another problem with property taxes is they create a huge imbalance in educational opportunity. Yet another problem with these taxes is they are often implemented in a way that violates the right to travel (such as California's Prop 13 - California is certainly not unique in violating this right, plenty
I don't like sales tax, but it's still better than property tax, where I have to pay tax on my house whether I can afford to or not.
You shouldn't have to buy your freedom every year for your land.
In a free country, people should be free to own property. This is a reasonable expectation that goes along with living in a free country. You can not own something if you are paying a landlord rent. Any regular payment to some third party such as the government - whether a property tax, a vehicle registration, and so forth - can be viewed a rent payment. You do not own your home, or your car, instead you rent it from the government - fail to pay your rent and you lose the property. Hence, property taxes represent a violation of fundamental rights.
The violation of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is a criminal offence in the US Federal Code - as it should be. It's also a violation of rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment - and thus the enforcement of laws that violate fundamental rights is a violation of the oaths legal professionals swear to uphold the law. Hence, by implementing property rights, we have an explicit contradiction in the law - and contradictions in the law are both a) logically unsound, and b) inherently unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals involved in writing, approving, and implementing the law (which is a violation of yet another fundamental right: the right to ethical practice of law).
The usual "justifications" for things like property tax, and sales tax, are really just fig leafs: they exist to create the illusion of legitimacy for the tax. In other words, the government is doing something wrong, and wants to hide it behind a bodyguard of lies. Everything that is currently paid for by these taxes can instead be paid for by other forms of tax, such as income tax. Thus, claims to the effect that "property tax" or "sales tax" is necessary - for schools, or police, or fire-fighters, or roads, or the other infrastructure that supports a sale, or whatever - are entirely without merit: all of these could (and should) be paid for by other means (other taxes, perhaps supplemented by private sources).
Similarly, claims that "property tax" is necessary to ensure that land "gets used" are without merit. First, even by not using land, it gets used - it provides habitat for native species, and that has economic value. It should also be available for use by hikers and others, in those jurisdictions that recognize the right to roam - a fundamental right in any free country - and that too has economic value. If the land contains wetlands, that's especially good - it may provide storm protection as well as highly valuable habitat. Second, if the land becomes valuable enough, it will probably get sold or used - market forces take care of that, there's no need to force things, it will happen naturally.
Fundamentally, both of these taxes are regressive, although in somewhat different ways. In fact, they are so strongly regressive that they largely alter the fundamental nature of the US tax system (consider the effect of federal, state, and local taxes as a single system: the combined system is at best slightly progressive, and a case could be made that it is actually regressive). These regressive taxes are likely to be a major reason for the increasing imbalance in the distribution of wealth in recent decades (along with rent-seeking behaviour embedded in the legal system, see The Captured Economy).
Further, there seems to be a history of abuse of property taxes against minorities. Another problem with property taxes is they create a huge imbalance in educational opportunity. Yet another problem with these taxes is they are often implemented in a way that violates the right to travel (such as California's Prop 13 - California is certainly not unique in violating this right, plenty of places charge
Capitalism. And a government that has been bought and paid for by those big ass corporations.
You realize that those two things are diametrically opposed? I mean, you admit that one of the problems is the government. Government interference in a market is a socialism thing.
Not even remotely true. In the first book on capitalism - The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith made the point in 1776 that some regulation of a market based system is necessary for the general good. People are free to participate or not participate in the market without government fixing prices - that's what the phrase "free market" means - but if they do participate they have to follow the regulations set by government in the public interest.
Capitalism depends on government regulation - it is what protects private property, prevents fraud, makes reasonable contracts enforceable, and so forth. It is entirely false to claim that capitalism can exist without such regulation.
It is equally true that there can be extremely bad regulations that do not work to the general good. It's been estimated, for example, that half the income of the US legal profession comes from "rent-seeking" elements embodied in the US legal system - this represents a huge negative effect of the abuse of regulation (and one which compounds throughout the economy, acting as a regressive tax - one that primarily affects the poor and the middle class while being largely ignored by the rich). For another example, on this forum we've discussed at length the harm that poor regulations for copyright and patent do to society (and economists have done studies that back up the arguments with numbers).
Socialism - despite the wishes of legions of fanatics that don't understand the meaning of the word - simply means the workers control the means of production, so they and not the capitalists get the lion's share of the benefits from their labour. It has nothing to do with health care or any of the other things people wrongly associate with socialism.
Most of the EU nations that people incorrectly label as socialist are instead accurately described as capitalist welfare states - there is little worker ownership of the means of production (for the most part, only very small businesses, Norwegian oil is a special case). If one is going to describe those states as socialist, one might as well call a small animal that hunts mice a duck instead of calling it a cat.
Often the phrase socialism is used as a tool of deception, part of the bodyguard of lies used to prevent reform of bad regulations - which makes it all that more important for people to have a clear understanding of the word. Truth is the best antidote to lies - and that includes knowing the true meaning of words.
Terms of Service need to be heavily regulated.
That's one of those things that's supposed to be covered by the Bill of Rights, specifically the 9th Amendment (unspecified rights retained by the people), and the 10th Amendment (unspecified rights reserved to the people).
Rights such as the right to ethical practice of law seem applicable. Even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternative exist. Lots of small print and complexity creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers - a clear conflict of interest.
There's also a question of rights one might reasonably expect to apply in a free country - any such rights would naturally be protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments. Excessive law, excessive government, excessive bureaucracy all seem to be things that are incompatible with living in a free country - and thus violate fundamental rights.
As rights retained by the people are, by definition, retained by the people, they can't be taken away by any entity of government, up to and including the Supreme Court.
The fact that most people don't read the terms of services should create a presumption that a violation of rights retained by the people in inherent in such documents, that a 9th Amendment right is in play in any situation involving such documents.
Infringement of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" has been grounds for both criminal and civil action under US federal law for a long time - and contract law is a form of law.
As all of this is obvious, it is interesting to wonder why the US legal profession nevertheless ends up doing so many things - including many things in contracts - that clearly contradict fundamental rights that can be asserted under the Bill of Rights. Are they really so greedy and sociopathic that they think they can get away with this stuff - it's really unethical practice of law - forever? Is the corruption really that bad, that global, that pervasive, that deeply entrenched that they don't even have to care?
If the US didn't learn from the Great Depression that a regulated economy is necessary to avoid misapplication of resources and improper allocation of financial responsibility, then we are all fucked (globally)
It's pretty clearly established that bad government regulation caused the Great Depression - and kept it going for far longer than needed. The economics literature is full of studies - and there are a number of books out there as well.
For example, federal mis-handling of the money supply was a primary contributor. Also, the majority of the bank failures were caused by regulations that limited the investments the "county" banks could make, making them very vulnerable to failure.
Hoover and especially FDR made matters worse with numerous bad decisions - the worst of which was implementing and keeping the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (which in and of itself would have been an economic disaster even in the absence of the other bad policies). At times in the "Roaring 20's" the US had the lowest unemployment in the developed nations - but after 8 years of FDR the US wasn't even in the top 10. Correction of the process started when many of FDR's policies had to be suspended due to WW2 - and the Great Depression was finally ended when those policies were thrown out entirely after the war.
The literature is full of other examples. You might start with the book "New Deal or Raw Deal" by Folsom, or FDR's Folly by Powell. "Out of Work" by Vedder and Gallaway is also informative.
Yes, regulation is needed - Adam Smith made that point clear in 1776, and there is lots of history since then to confirm the point, but bad regulation is not desirable. It is very difficult for government officials to know what regulations are appropriate, and they often get it wrong (as evidenced by the failures of Keynesian policy over the years since WW2).
Despite myths to the contrary, the US industrial system during WW2 was very much a capitalist system with only some government regulation - it was set up by William S. Knudsen, who resigned from his position as CEO of General Motors out of patriotism to take on the task for one dollar a year. Nobody in the government knew how to run industrial production - but Knudsen did, and he set things up to balance the capabilities of industry with the needs of the war effort (taking into account both what large businesses could do, and how smaller businesses could help). It was not something a government bureaucrat could have achieved - it took a capitalist with a deep understanding of capitalism and manufacturing (Knudsen had come up through the ranks, starting as a machinist), balanced with strong patriotism, to make things work.
What democratic countries really need to teach their kids is a bit of statistics and probability. Armed with a basic understanding of both, people will make better choices at the polling booth, be less prone to gambling, and less susceptible to marketing fluff. Humans do not have an instinctive understanding of these topics, especially where orders of magnitude are involved, making it very easy to deceive and mislead them.
I'd go further and say that we need to teach the kids some basic social science, and something about law. A social science class based upon teaching people the skills needed to evaluate research would be very helpful. A lot of this topic would involve teaching people how statistics can be misused and misinterpreted. Applications to things like criminal justice and economics would be helpful.
The little book How to Lie with Statistics is a good start, but people would benefit from a deeper exposure to topics typically only covered in good college level social science research design class.
Federal spending done in other states on items such transportation infrastructure, agricultural research, water and power infrastructure and so forth both directly reduces the day-to-day cost of living for Californians, allows many of them to live in a desert, and enable substantial increases in the California economy.
So if Californians weren't taxed to pay for those things, not only would they pay less in taxes but the providers of those things would be forced to compete for our discretionary dollars and lower their prices?
What's the downside to this revolutionary form of capitalism you are describing?
No. Think of these out-of-state tax dollars as an investment, which provides a return. There's nothing revolutionary about it.
Take wood, for example. California imports a substantial amount of wood - and the amount has been going up ever since 1992. That wood moves by rail and by truck and by sea. The federal government spends huge amounts of money to regulate, maintain, and develop the rail system, the highway system, and sea transport (including things like regulating how much ships can carry, and paying for the Coast Guard). Without that money, that lumber wouldn't be able to get to California - or somebody else would have to pay enormous amounts of money to replace the money spent by the federal government (which, incidentally, Trump is cutting: federal subsidies for transportation are going down).
Money does not grow on trees: somebody has to provide it. Having government do so is far preferable to the alternatives, such as having privately run toll roads everywhere.
The net effect is Californians would have to pay more for wood - or would have to authorize more in-state cutting of trees (always a difficult proposition), if their tax dollars weren't already subsidizing the transportation infrastructure that supplies wood - including that infrastructure physically located in other states.
There are lots of other aspects of federal spending that are associated with the import of lumber. A lot of the lumber-related activity is carried out in national forests - which means the federal government is spending money to hire scientists, researchers, forest rangers to oversee that activity - and to do research into how to do it better and how to make it sustainable - a whole host of people. Any good textbook on Forestry will give you a lot more detail.
As a net importer of lumber, California has a vested interest in supporting these activities so the forests in other states are used efficiently, and are able to continue producing products over the long term.
Discretionary spending doesn't come in here: people need shelter, so they are going to prioritize building and repair houses over many other things (especially after all those forest fires!). The least expensive way to do that in the USA is still wood (though concrete forms may eventually replace wood, especially in fire-prone areas).
That's just one product - and there are huge amounts of federal spending associated with it in order to allow Californians to buy products at lower prices than would otherwise be the case.
Extend the logic of this example to everything that gets imported from other states - look at the whole economy - and you realize just how interdependent the states are.
Relatively few of the products that California imports from other states are luxuries - so competition for discretionary spending isn't a big factor. In fact, because California imports so many staples and raw materials it is able to produce more luxuries than would otherwise be the case - and luxuries have far larger profit margins than staples, thus giving California's economy a huge boost. For example, California can grow almond trees instead of the tree varieties that are used for lumber (let's not forget about the role of the federal government in making sure California has the water to do that - water which is provided at FAR below the act
The reason California taxes everything else so high is partly because of its social and environmental protections, partly because it has such a low property tax and must make up the difference, and partly because it and other blue states subsidize most of the red states [redstatesocialism.org].
It would be simpler if red states simply found ways to refuse federal subsidies. This is basic rightism. What a grand chance to show the world their virtue.
I know that a lot of my tax money goes to the less fortunate, and I'm fine with that. That blue states are willing to subsidize red states is no surprise. That red states are willing to accept it is hypocrisy.
Claims that "blue states" are funding "red states" or that "red states" are "welfare states" have been repeatedly debunked on this forum and others. Please learn how to look at the evidence from a social scientist's perspective. You have to consider who actually benefits, not just where the money is spent. Even with the best of intentions (which probably doesn't apply in the case of these claims), it's easy to do bad research, and there's a lot of it out there.
California benefits an enormous amount from California-derived money being spent in other states: it both increases the money available to be spent in the California economy, raises California state and local tax income, helps provide water and power and lumber and many basic staple crops (freeing up many California farmers to grow luxuries and thus providing a huge boost to the economy - or to ship staples like wheat overseas to places like Japan at considerable profit) - and so forth.
Federal spending done in other states on items such transportation infrastructure, agricultural research, water and power infrastructure and so forth both directly reduces the day-to-day cost of living for Californians, allows many of them to live in a desert, and enable substantial increases in the California economy.
Just the option to retire elsewhere is enormously important to Californians - the state is number 1 in population in the USA but not even in the top 44 states (it's number 45, according to the World Atlas) in terms of the percentage of retirees. This allows California to tax incomes at a higher level before people retire, and produces more money in the California economy from simple everyday spending, indirectly supporting sales and property taxes - all that because people living there know they can leave and retire elsewhere and thus are not compelled to save as much (or to fight as hard against proposed tax increases or existing tax policy - some of which can certainly be considered to violate the Bill of Rights in the case of California). The retirees naturally take their social security and medi-care benefits with them, thus increasing federal spending in other states.
Further, the distinction between a "red" and "blue" state isn't all that well defined, which makes comparisons highly problematic.
There just isn't any convincing evidence that the oft-stated claims about "red" versus "blue" federal spending are anything more than propaganda. Similar claims about "urban" versus "rural" do not stand up to scrutiny either. People routinely underestimate - by an enormous amount - the true costs of the goods and services that they consume, not realizing the role of government in reducing those costs in the public interest. Certainly there are problems with bad decisions, with corruption, and with rent-seeking (economics term) - but one must look much deeper to find them - and California is probably at least as guilty there as any of the others.
It reminds me of Airliners. Commercial Airliners always want to push out General Aviation, as if they aren't paying their "fair share". Really they just want to own more of the sky. The airspace is for all Americans to use and so is the road as long as you can use it responsibly. We need to prevent profit-seeking corporations from co-opting the public welfare. It almost never works out the way they claim.
Unfortunately, what economists call rent-seeking behaviour has become a dominant aspect of the US economy and politics - and in our increasingly global economy it is being exported to other countries via treaties. This is probably the single most important cause of the massive concentration of wealth in the upper income brackets that has occurred in recent decades - and it has all kinds of negative implications for society.
Lindsey and Teles have a decent introduction to this topic in their book "The Captured Economy". They discuss rent-seeking in the context of finance, land zoning, patant/copyright, and occupational licensing - but note that there are many other forms this disease takes.
Thus, it's a not just question of preventing this behaviour moving forward - it's a question of undoing the results of many decades of self-centered sociopathic greed, results that are deeply embedded in the legal system and that have strong special interest groups protecting them. Typically, the rent-seeking conduct is protected by a bodyguard of lies, which further complicates matters.
From a Bill of Rights perspective, most and perhaps all forms of rent-seeking behaviour ultimately involve some sort of violation of the right to ethical practice of law, or the right to ethical government - both universal and inalienable rights in any society based on the rule of law, and certainly two of the rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment. Thus, it is clear that many of the laws in the US (including federal, state, and local law) are in violation of the Bill of Rights.
However, the US legal profession has a long and sordid history of ignoring their obligations in this matter, perhaps because they are one of the largest and most powerful rent-seeking special interest groups in the country. By some estimates, half of the average pay of US lawyers comes from rent-seeking. This means that any type of reform faces a very difficult uphill battle, even though the laws supporting the rent-seeking behaviour are in clear violation of the highest law in the land.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
California is among the least federally dependent states in the US.
Unfortunately, this claim is a myth - like a lot of what people believe in US politics (both red and blue).
If you evaluate the work done from a social science perspective, it's terrible research.
The problem is that states get many substantial indirect benefits from federal spending in other states - and the "researchers" don't account for that in their numbers.
For example, Californians have the option to retire in other states where the cost of living is lower - and they frequently do. California isn't in the top 10 states for the percentage of elderly people - but it's number 1 in total population. This is a huge disparity.
This option is a financial benefit to California: it means that people don't have to save as much money while they are residing in California as they otherwise would. That money in turn gets spent a) in the California economy and b) in the form of higher state taxes than would otherwise be the case. Basically people don't need to hold their money as tightly since they know they have other options: they are more free to spend money, and more willing to tolerate high taxes.
But when these people move to another state to retire, they take their federal pensions, social security, medi-care, VA benefits, and so forth to the other state. This means that there is more federal spending in the other states, in some major spending categories.
The net effect is to create a illusory disparity in federal spending that leads people to a false conclusion of lower federal dependency than is actually the case (or, conversely, it creates the illusion that other states have a higher federal dependency).
This is just one example of many: you can look up others on this forum (this myth comes up often). Just to give you a few hints: think about agriculture and staple crops (where are they grown and who benefits - note that staple crops are not the same thing as luxuries), about power and water (where is it generated/found and who uses it), and about cost of living for the poor (where is it lower and why). Then think about how all of these factors (and many others) can be viewed as providing financial benefits to California - and creating disproportionate federal spending in other states.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody actually has any good numbers on what the state-federal dependency relationship actually is - doing good social science measurement is really hard - but it could even be the opposite of what is commonly claimed.
There's also a big problem with the definition of a "red" versus a "blue" state. Again, you can look that up.
People that are not well versed in research design have a strong tendency to come to false conclusions that simply confirm pre-existing bias when looking at data.
Works well in Texas, where all the major highways in Austin, Houston, and Dallas are tollways. In fact, some cities like Austin refuse to do traffic improvements, and if wasn't for CTRMA, there would be no effective way to go through or around the city. Even with the state funding the private companies to do the construction, the whole project nearly got canned anyway.
Toll roads just make sense. You use it; you pay for it.
Nice propaganda. In reality, a toll is a regressive tax: it hurts the poor a lot, it hurts the middle class some, the rich don't notice it. The fact that there are ANY toll roads at all in the United States is one of the reasons for the increasing concentration of wealth in that country: the rich keep getting richer.
Everybody else suffers, in one way or another.
There are lots of negative consequences for a society as a result of the existence of tolls, in addition to the direct penalty imposed by the regressive tax. Please turn your brain on and think about this.
The power to tax is the power to harm others, or destroy them. It should always be used wisely, and it usually isn't - especially in places like the USA with deeply entrenched corruption and a substantially unethical legal profession.
Everything government does should be funded by a progressive income tax, or by tariffs, with a very simple tax code (not thousands of pages in which hordes of loopholes are or can be hidden, leading to continual bribing of politicians by special interest groups).
The big problem is that the constitution doesn't state the exact time limit of copyrights.
Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 - Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
It would have been helpful if the copyright term limits were specifically spelled out in the constitution. Since it only states "for limited times" as long as the law has a definitive time period for copyrights it doesn't violate the constitution. The US Supreme Court upheld this view in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Now if copyrights are extended again it may be arguable that the effect copyright has become effectively indefinite but that would take another court challenge.
It's only a big problem because the US legal profession routinely ignores legal ethics issues whenever they think they can get away with it.
The issue with copyright isn't the duration: the issue is that the copyright is subject to contract for the entire duration. This has lots of negative implications, including the creation of artificial monopoly for long periods of time - with everything that implies.
Contract related matters are fundamental to the profits of the US legal profession: as such the legal profession is in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to having long periods of time in which copyrights are subject to contract. This inherently creates a long window in which lawyers can expect (extremely lucrative) copyright related contract business to come their way, creating an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals and enhancing the average lifetime income of all legal professionals.
The right to ethical practice of law is an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. As such, this is a right "retained by" and "reserved to" the people and protected under the 9th and 10th Amendments. Even the appearance of ethical conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
Hence, to be complaint with the Bill of Rights, US copyright law would have to greatly limit the amount of time in which copyright was subject to contract. Five or ten years would be reasonable, I could even go a little longer.
After that time, the material should no longer be subject to contract, in order to avoid the issue of ethical conflict of interest. That doesn't mean it has to go fully into the public domain: you could still require that any copying for gain would require compensating the creators of a work for the duration of their lives. You might, for example, require that the creators get 10%-20% of the gross for any product in which their work appears (perhaps divided evenly). This is far more than most musicians or authors or song-writers actually get, so the creative types would on the whole be pretty happy with it.
Note that this completely removes the incentive for corporations (and associations of legal professionals) to give bribes - err, I mean "campaign contributions" - to politicians to extend copyright. Also, the long duration could still be used to protect "moral rights", which is worth doing - and that's the only legitimate justification for having a long duration. The material could go into the public domain with respect to not-for-gain copying after 20-30 years, while still protecting moral rights.
Hence, you could have long durations, without negative effects for society - and this fully satisfies the exclusive use for a limited time provision.
Note that no change to the Constitution is required here: we simply need to get the lawyers to start respecting the existing text of the Bill of Rights - which is supposed to be the highest law in the land, a law that they've already sworn oaths to uphold (and are required to do so by the "good behaviour" provision).
Since US copyright law clearly isn'