There's a simple solution: eliminate the corporate tax rate and increase sales tax and income tax. That way, all the taxes related to activity within a country stay within that country. And that way, people would realize how much they are actually paying, because whether you call it "corporate tax" or "sales tax", in the end, the people end up paying those taxes anyway.
Despite this they STILL manage to have similar poverty numbers to the USA,
They would have similar poverty numbers even if Germany completely bankrupted itself. The fact that Germany and the US have comparable "poverty numbers" but US median income is much higher than Germany's tells you that Germans are a lot worse off than Americans.
But with the danger of a flag waving contest, by which metric are Norway and Luxembourg merely close? Not in terms of economy. Even compared to New York [wolframalpha.com] state only.
We're talking about how well people are doing, and for that you need to compare PPP and disposable income:
Your comparison with "New York" also makes no sense. New York is a huge, rural state. Perhaps you meant New York City, but that's a huge city with many immigrants and many low income neighborhoods; wealthy "New Yorkers" live in places like Somerset County, NJ.
A more sensible comparison for Luxembourg and Norway are individual counties of comparable size in the US, and there are many that are doing extremely well:
Note that that table gives you Median Household Income figures, you probably have to multiply that with a factor of 2 to get to something equivalent to per capita GDP, far outstripping both Norway and Luxembourg.
However comparing Europe as a whole to the US will probably have to wait 50 to 100 years more.
The EU and US have similar sizes and largely free trade and mobility within their borders; economically and in terms of wealth, comparing all of the EU to all of the US is the right comparison.
For instance Denmark and Romania are about as similar as the state of New York vs Bolivia both culturally, language and economically.
Here, too, your economics are way off. On household income, for example, Denmark and Romania are closer (in relative terms) than Maryland and Mississippi. (In absolute terms, I think if you look for the statistics, you'll also find that Danes are doing about as well as people in Mississippi, at the bottom of all US states). And culturally, there are huge differences between the states.
Your last off-topic comment makes you seem to hold a biased grudge against Europe. What's up?
Unfortunately, my comment is quite on-topic: your misconceptions about the US standard of living, your accusations against me of US nationalism, and your blindness to your own nationalism have a long and malignant history in European politics. I wouldn't care that much, except that US progressives are using such erroneous data and propaganda to try to push through European-style politics in the US, and that really threatens my country and my standard of living.
What you're missing here is the distinction between relative and absolute poverty. There are many people in the US who live in relative poverty: they make much less money than the rest of society. But they don't live in absolute poverty: they are generally well clothed, well fed, and have access to education, communication, and all the other things human beings need; the fact that they have smartphones is an indication of that. I am for the elimination of absolute poverty. But you seem to be arguing for the elimination of relative poverty, and I'm against that because relative poverty can't ever be meaningfully eliminated.
A significant percentage of your country live in grinding generational poverty [nytimes.com]. That just doesn't happen as much in other developed nations, although we're catching that flu more than we used to.
The percentage of people living below the national poverty line is 15.5% in Germany vs 15.1% in the US. But that statistic actually doesn't tell the whole story because the German poverty line is lower and the US poverty line calculation doesn't include most government aid.
Your error is that you read US media and political debates and don't understand what they are about.
Norway and Luxembourg kick your arse
Even if they did (they don't, they are merely close), that's an invalid comparison. The only reasonable economic comparison between the US and European nations is to compare US statistics to the entire EU: an integrated area with free mobility, a single currency, and strong states rights.
my flag waving friend, as does a significant portion of the western Europe.
You'd think that after two world wars and in the midst of a major financial crisis, Europeans would finally come to their senses. But I see that the arrogance and nationalism that brought us everything from the 30 years war to colonialism, Stalin, and WWII is still alive and well, facts be damned. You're a shining example of what has been wrong with Europe for centuries.
"Fairly sophisticated" compared to what? Large cities, writing, legal codes, democracy, entire empires existed in the Mediterranean and Asia for thousands of years BC. The Olmec empire in the Americas started in 1500BC. What has sub-Saharan Africa produced that comes even close?
Food prices and housing prices have generally been going down over time. People spend more in absolute dollars on food and housing because they buy better food and larger houses than they used to. But Americans in general spend the least percentage of their income on food of any major nation. If you live in a desirable metropolitan area, rents are going to be high. There are many really cheap places around the country to live and work, however.
The top right now are using their wealth and privilege to gut companies' pensions and equity.
The fault isn't with "the top", the fault is with the US government, which allows these companies to get out of their obligations in bankruptcy and then let the tax payer deal with the fallout. But the original sin there was to create pensions (and health care) tied to companies in the first place, instead of making sure everybody paid into their own retirement plan. Corporations lobbied for that and Democrats are just as responsible for going down that road as Republicans.
You're not going to fix that with more regulation or more taxes. The solution is to phase out any tax and legal advantages for employer-provided pension and health care plans and have everybody buy their own plans independent of employers (with social security and public health care as a fallback).
or we give up on the idea that the only way to pay for things is to work for them.
That's exactly what a market economy gives you: as robots produce more and more stuff, the stuff gets cheaper and you need to work less and less for it.
And that's been happening all around you, you just aren't noticing. Many things that used to cost tons of money you can now get effectively free if you want to: Internet access, phone calls, classic literature, tons of entertainment, courses and lectures, etc.
I assure you that spending thirty-five bucks a month on mobile communications is far from extravagant living large.
I didn't say anything about "extravagant"; by definition, nothing poor people have is ever "extravagant". I objected to your implication that poor people can't even afford modern technology; in fact, they can, and that's a measure of progress. You don't need to be rich anymore to be connected or get an education. Things that were accessible only to the ultra-rich when I grew up are now in the hands of people even at the poverty line.
Probably true while speaking of Europe as if it was an actual nation. But replace 'Europe' with either Norway, Sweden, Germany and few others, and I'd be surprised they weren't competitive in most your listed claims.
Norway and Luxembourg are close because of oil and banking. Citizens in all other European nations are generally considerably worse off than the US.
What exactly do you envy? The lower wages? The smaller houses? The lower retirement benefits? The lower levels of education? The lower standard of living? The higher taxes? The religious and ethnic conflicts? Do tell.
Imagine trying to sustain a European welfare system with that anchor tied around your neck.
True: US military spending is a drag on the US. However, we've been getting something in return, namely peace in Europe and Asia. After centuries of vicious wars and disruptions to the global economy originating there, that's been money well spent. Of course, it's debatable whether we need to continue spending it, but until a few years ago, it was absolutely necessary.
Labor participation is higher than in the any time since around 1980. There have been big changes, mostly due to women entering the workforce.
That didn't come out right. Labor participation today is about where it was in 1980. It was higher in 1980 than at any time since WWII. It reached peak a couple of points higher than today, but those were workers that had been recruited into the labor force by a booming economy, and the slight decline from that peak is hardly cause for concern.
Wait for the robot replacing the service economy. A robot in the future could cut your hair or goes in your heart to fix your valve. The service economy is not immune to automatization.
So... when all of our major needs are taken care of by robots (producing food, producing machines, producing more robots, services), then that means that a few hours of work a month will earn you the money to pay for that. Sounds good to me.
Think about it: if there's no purchasing power, no matter how much the employer is rewarded, there's no cash flow to keep the business viable.
If automation removes most of the labor costs, then products become very cheap and people don't have to work very much to buy everything they want. That's what wealth means.
The best thing to do to national economy is to tax/destroy wealth at the top and create it at the bottom.
You don't actually need to "tax wealth", it just inflates away if people don't do anything productive with their money. On the other hand, redistribution by taxation does not "create wealth", it just removes the incentives for the recipients to become more productive.
That, and tax/moderate the financial markets regressively, but in relation to time between purchase and sale -- and start from 99.5% or so regressing to 15% in about ten years, forcing investors to care about the long term health of companies and aiming for stable and predictable markets. Oh, and cut the copyright to 25 years from first publication.
Both of those are reasonable proposals, but they have nothing whatsoever with "taxing at the top".
Also, global warming doesn't imply warm winters in any particular location. It means more thermal energy in our atmosphere and oceans, which can destabilize that very complex dynamical system that we call "weather".
The primary effect of AGW is indeed that it is getting warmer all over the globe. That does have some secondary effects, but they are not as important. Secondly, your assumption that weather or climate is something stable that can be "destabilized" is wrong. Even without AGW, we are always at risk for rapid warming or rapid cooling. AGW drives this change in a particular direction, but that's not necessarily bad. Warmer is better than colder.
I used to believe that climate change was a real threat: positive feedback loops, massive release of methane from clathrates and frozen soil, flooding, etc. I used to argue that emission of large amounts of CO2 was a dangerous global experiment with unforeseeable consequences.
After reading up on the details (including the IPCC reports) and climate history, I changed my mind and I am not worried anymore. I believe global warming is happening, and it will have some costs and negative effects. But the horror scenarios people have been painting have no basis in reality.
And a lot of the ways in which (solid) climate change science is presented and used to justify policy is manipulative and misleading; these people have done a huge disservice to science and the credibility of scientists.
Also, $60 Billion dollars really isn't a lot of money.
That's about $200 per American. That's a lot of money.
And I think my main point is that under Democratic leadership most of that $60 billion won't go to rebuilding $5+ million dollar homes. It'll go to rebuilding $50-$100k homes.
What planet are you from? There are no "$50-$100k homes" near the ocean where Sandy struck. And if there were, why should I pay for them to rebuild?
West coast: earthquakes. Mid-west: tornadoes. East coast and south: hurricanes. So where exactly do you propose people live where there aren't any natural disasters looming?
Natural disasters are possible anywhere, the question is how probable they are, how you prepare, and who insures them. By insuring people in high risk areas for free, the federal government encourages settlement in such area and discourages people from taking appropriate precautions; it amounts to a large subsidy for people living in those areas. It's worse than that, though. You'd hope that such a subsidy would lower the cost of houses in those areas, but it doesn't; the market just adjusts for it, and the now insured-for-free homes are as expensive as they would have been without free government insurance. And worst of all, you remove any incentive for people to minimize cost and risk when moving to disaster prone areas. So, in different words, people would live in exactly the same places they are living right now but they would be paying less for their homes and live in safer houses.
And if you really don't like the risk, there are plenty of safe places around the country; anything that's not dark brown or dark red is fairly low risk:
Nope, not really - as evidenced by the last hurricane. It's not as simple as "cold places get warmer, hot places get hotter."
Really? You're saying that if we stop emitting CO2 there won't be any hurricanes anymore? Get real. If you live on the East Coast close to the water, hurricanes and floods have always been a threat. Global warming only affects their frequency a bit.
The UK, for example, is royally fucked - they rely on the jetstream for warm air.
I said "as far as the US is concerned". Anyway, I've never heard of the "jet stream" bringing warm air to the UK. People commonly talk of the gulf stream being responsible for mild UK winters, but that has been disproven. And even if it were so, UK cities would be no more "fucked" than Canadian cities, which seem to exist happily at the same latitudes (and with higher temperatures, it would be even milder).
The summary is missing the fine print, namely that this is 13% more than previous estimates and amounts to about 2 years of human carbon emissions. So, whatever is going to happen is going to happen two years earlier. Sure, it's an interesting scientific result, but hardly big news.
this was pointed out during the recent storms (Sandy), and there were several pundits that pointed out that Democrats tended to staff FEMA with professional disaster management folks while the Republicans tended to give those positions out to friends, family and donors
You're missing the real "corruption" here, namely that people choose to live in areas predictably endangered by hurricanes, can't get insurance or don't bother to pay for it, and then decade after decade rely on the federal government to pay for the damage that invariably occurs.
Obama just requested $60bn of handouts to these people. Why should someone living in a safe and boring place trying to make ends meet pay so that people in The Hamptons have their beach front properties taken care of by the federal government?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a simple solution: eliminate the corporate tax rate and increase sales tax and income tax. That way, all the taxes related to activity within a country stay within that country. And that way, people would realize how much they are actually paying, because whether you call it "corporate tax" or "sales tax", in the end, the people end up paying those taxes anyway.
They would have similar poverty numbers even if Germany completely bankrupted itself. The fact that Germany and the US have comparable "poverty numbers" but US median income is much higher than Germany's tells you that Germans are a lot worse off than Americans.
We're talking about how well people are doing, and for that you need to compare PPP and disposable income:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
Your comparison with "New York" also makes no sense. New York is a huge, rural state. Perhaps you meant New York City, but that's a huge city with many immigrants and many low income neighborhoods; wealthy "New Yorkers" live in places like Somerset County, NJ.
A more sensible comparison for Luxembourg and Norway are individual counties of comparable size in the US, and there are many that are doing extremely well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States
Note that that table gives you Median Household Income figures, you probably have to multiply that with a factor of 2 to get to something equivalent to per capita GDP, far outstripping both Norway and Luxembourg.
The EU and US have similar sizes and largely free trade and mobility within their borders; economically and in terms of wealth, comparing all of the EU to all of the US is the right comparison.
Here, too, your economics are way off. On household income, for example, Denmark and Romania are closer (in relative terms) than Maryland and Mississippi. (In absolute terms, I think if you look for the statistics, you'll also find that Danes are doing about as well as people in Mississippi, at the bottom of all US states). And culturally, there are huge differences between the states.
Unfortunately, my comment is quite on-topic: your misconceptions about the US standard of living, your accusations against me of US nationalism, and your blindness to your own nationalism have a long and malignant history in European politics. I wouldn't care that much, except that US progressives are using such erroneous data and propaganda to try to push through European-style politics in the US, and that really threatens my country and my standard of living.
What you're missing here is the distinction between relative and absolute poverty. There are many people in the US who live in relative poverty: they make much less money than the rest of society. But they don't live in absolute poverty: they are generally well clothed, well fed, and have access to education, communication, and all the other things human beings need; the fact that they have smartphones is an indication of that. I am for the elimination of absolute poverty. But you seem to be arguing for the elimination of relative poverty, and I'm against that because relative poverty can't ever be meaningfully eliminated.
The percentage of people living below the national poverty line is 15.5% in Germany vs 15.1% in the US. But that statistic actually doesn't tell the whole story because the German poverty line is lower and the US poverty line calculation doesn't include most government aid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty
Your error is that you read US media and political debates and don't understand what they are about.
Even if they did (they don't, they are merely close), that's an invalid comparison. The only reasonable economic comparison between the US and European nations is to compare US statistics to the entire EU: an integrated area with free mobility, a single currency, and strong states rights.
You'd think that after two world wars and in the midst of a major financial crisis, Europeans would finally come to their senses. But I see that the arrogance and nationalism that brought us everything from the 30 years war to colonialism, Stalin, and WWII is still alive and well, facts be damned. You're a shining example of what has been wrong with Europe for centuries.
You can find a list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kingdoms_in_pre-colonial_Africa
"Fairly sophisticated" compared to what? Large cities, writing, legal codes, democracy, entire empires existed in the Mediterranean and Asia for thousands of years BC. The Olmec empire in the Americas started in 1500BC. What has sub-Saharan Africa produced that comes even close?
Food prices and housing prices have generally been going down over time. People spend more in absolute dollars on food and housing because they buy better food and larger houses than they used to. But Americans in general spend the least percentage of their income on food of any major nation. If you live in a desirable metropolitan area, rents are going to be high. There are many really cheap places around the country to live and work, however.
The fault isn't with "the top", the fault is with the US government, which allows these companies to get out of their obligations in bankruptcy and then let the tax payer deal with the fallout. But the original sin there was to create pensions (and health care) tied to companies in the first place, instead of making sure everybody paid into their own retirement plan. Corporations lobbied for that and Democrats are just as responsible for going down that road as Republicans.
You're not going to fix that with more regulation or more taxes. The solution is to phase out any tax and legal advantages for employer-provided pension and health care plans and have everybody buy their own plans independent of employers (with social security and public health care as a fallback).
That's exactly what a market economy gives you: as robots produce more and more stuff, the stuff gets cheaper and you need to work less and less for it.
And that's been happening all around you, you just aren't noticing. Many things that used to cost tons of money you can now get effectively free if you want to: Internet access, phone calls, classic literature, tons of entertainment, courses and lectures, etc.
I didn't say anything about "extravagant"; by definition, nothing poor people have is ever "extravagant". I objected to your implication that poor people can't even afford modern technology; in fact, they can, and that's a measure of progress. You don't need to be rich anymore to be connected or get an education. Things that were accessible only to the ultra-rich when I grew up are now in the hands of people even at the poverty line.
Norway and Luxembourg are close because of oil and banking. Citizens in all other European nations are generally considerably worse off than the US.
People coming from households making less than $30000 have 34% smartphone ownership. That seems pretty high to me.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/195006/percentage-of-us-smartphone-owners-by-household-income/
What exactly do you envy? The lower wages? The smaller houses? The lower retirement benefits? The lower levels of education? The lower standard of living? The higher taxes? The religious and ethnic conflicts? Do tell.
True: US military spending is a drag on the US. However, we've been getting something in return, namely peace in Europe and Asia. After centuries of vicious wars and disruptions to the global economy originating there, that's been money well spent. Of course, it's debatable whether we need to continue spending it, but until a few years ago, it was absolutely necessary.
That didn't come out right. Labor participation today is about where it was in 1980. It was higher in 1980 than at any time since WWII. It reached peak a couple of points higher than today, but those were workers that had been recruited into the labor force by a booming economy, and the slight decline from that peak is hardly cause for concern.
The trend line is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Labor_Participation_Rate_1948-2011_by_gender.svg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force
Labor participation is higher than in the any time since around 1980. There have been big changes, mostly due to women entering the workforce.
No, it wasn't. Look at the graph.
Really, before going off on lengthy tirades, why not do a 10 second Google search?
So... when all of our major needs are taken care of by robots (producing food, producing machines, producing more robots, services), then that means that a few hours of work a month will earn you the money to pay for that. Sounds good to me.
If automation removes most of the labor costs, then products become very cheap and people don't have to work very much to buy everything they want. That's what wealth means.
You don't actually need to "tax wealth", it just inflates away if people don't do anything productive with their money. On the other hand, redistribution by taxation does not "create wealth", it just removes the incentives for the recipients to become more productive.
Both of those are reasonable proposals, but they have nothing whatsoever with "taxing at the top".
The primary effect of AGW is indeed that it is getting warmer all over the globe. That does have some secondary effects, but they are not as important. Secondly, your assumption that weather or climate is something stable that can be "destabilized" is wrong. Even without AGW, we are always at risk for rapid warming or rapid cooling. AGW drives this change in a particular direction, but that's not necessarily bad. Warmer is better than colder.
I used to believe that climate change was a real threat: positive feedback loops, massive release of methane from clathrates and frozen soil, flooding, etc. I used to argue that emission of large amounts of CO2 was a dangerous global experiment with unforeseeable consequences.
After reading up on the details (including the IPCC reports) and climate history, I changed my mind and I am not worried anymore. I believe global warming is happening, and it will have some costs and negative effects. But the horror scenarios people have been painting have no basis in reality.
And a lot of the ways in which (solid) climate change science is presented and used to justify policy is manipulative and misleading; these people have done a huge disservice to science and the credibility of scientists.
That's about $200 per American. That's a lot of money.
What planet are you from? There are no "$50-$100k homes" near the ocean where Sandy struck. And if there were, why should I pay for them to rebuild?
Natural disasters are possible anywhere, the question is how probable they are, how you prepare, and who insures them. By insuring people in high risk areas for free, the federal government encourages settlement in such area and discourages people from taking appropriate precautions; it amounts to a large subsidy for people living in those areas. It's worse than that, though. You'd hope that such a subsidy would lower the cost of houses in those areas, but it doesn't; the market just adjusts for it, and the now insured-for-free homes are as expensive as they would have been without free government insurance. And worst of all, you remove any incentive for people to minimize cost and risk when moving to disaster prone areas. So, in different words, people would live in exactly the same places they are living right now but they would be paying less for their homes and live in safer houses.
And if you really don't like the risk, there are plenty of safe places around the country; anything that's not dark brown or dark red is fairly low risk:
http://www.inscenter.com/info-center/disaster-planning/risk-profile
Really? You're saying that if we stop emitting CO2 there won't be any hurricanes anymore? Get real. If you live on the East Coast close to the water, hurricanes and floods have always been a threat. Global warming only affects their frequency a bit.
I said "as far as the US is concerned". Anyway, I've never heard of the "jet stream" bringing warm air to the UK. People commonly talk of the gulf stream being responsible for mild UK winters, but that has been disproven. And even if it were so, UK cities would be no more "fucked" than Canadian cities, which seem to exist happily at the same latitudes (and with higher temperatures, it would be even milder).
But methane is degraded pretty quickly to carbon dioxide (less than a decade), making it much less of a concern.
"The worst" as far as the US is concerned isn't all that bad: southern states will suffer, northern states will benefit.
The summary is missing the fine print, namely that this is 13% more than previous estimates and amounts to about 2 years of human carbon emissions. So, whatever is going to happen is going to happen two years earlier. Sure, it's an interesting scientific result, but hardly big news.
You're missing the real "corruption" here, namely that people choose to live in areas predictably endangered by hurricanes, can't get insurance or don't bother to pay for it, and then decade after decade rely on the federal government to pay for the damage that invariably occurs.
Obama just requested $60bn of handouts to these people. Why should someone living in a safe and boring place trying to make ends meet pay so that people in The Hamptons have their beach front properties taken care of by the federal government?