Roddenberry's Star Trek was "above all, a critique of Robert Heinlein"
Heinlein's early books just took big government and big military as a given and explored ideas about how they might function; I don't think that means that he viewed such societies as desirable. Heinlein's main body of work clearly advocated and favored individualism and self-governance, and describes it as far superior to the large hierarchical organizations and bumbling militaries of Earth's nation states. Roddenberry, on the other hand, places little value on individualism: Star Fleet is rigidly hierarchical, free enterprise doesn't seem to exist in the Federation anymore, and the few misfits and individualists we encounter have usually turned their back on the Federation, often in pursuit of nefarious or at least dangerous goals. Other than that, we learn little about how Roddenberry envisioned Federation society would actually function, other than that elections are somehow involved, resources appear to be allocated centrally (rather than through trade and money), and that it magically makes Earth extremely wealthy.
So, yes, Star Trek was a "critique of Heinlein": Roddenberry envisions technocratic, non-capitalist, hierarchical societies as being highly successful, tolerant, and stable and probably hated Heinlein's characterization of them as unfree, imperialistic, and doomed to failure. These visions are diametrically opposed, and I think Heinlein got it right. But that doesn't keep large numbers of idealistic people from following Roddenberry's unrealistic dream.
"The Space Patrol, autonomous and unaccountable, is the opposite of the kind democratic and open society championed by Star Trek."
Star Trek's society is neither democratic or open; citizens seem to have a lot of restrictions on what they can do. After the founding of the Federation, there are almost no examples of major research or exploration efforts outside Star Fleet; the only Federation citizens who seem to do anything outside Star Fleet either do so in collaboration with outsiders, or are in self-imposed exile of some form or another.
What Star Trek really describes is a kind of technocracy, or an ideal of progressive or socialist government: for the most part, it has competent and effective leaders and adminstrators, strong guarantees of "human rights" (both positive and negative rights), it delivers on its economic and social promises, and the occasional bad actor is dealt with effectively. That kind of government appeals to lots of people, while other people loathe it. Unfortunately, even if you are among the people it appeals to, you need to understand that that kind of government is fiction, and will always remain fiction. And it is certainly incompatible with a "democratic and open society".
"(1) they are letting [the tenant] use something valuable and you can do a lot of damage to it" - umm yes.... but they are charging [the tenant] an absolute fortune to do this... and that is what deposits are for
A deposit doesn't even begin to cover the potential damage a renter can cause.
- and if you don't like the risk of doing that business... ummm... don't... go and do something else.
That is exactly what landlords have been doing. It's why there is a housing shorting, why rentals are being converted, and why more and more of the remaining landlords are assholes with an army of lawyers. It's also why good landlords and tenants meet by word of mouth and personal acquaintances.
The definition of "normal" is not for this company, or my landlord, to decide.
It is, however, for your landlord to decide whether he rents to you. It is their property and their choice whether to rent it and to who.
I think Tenant Assured might find that European law has quite a different view on that.
Different from who? Laws are not that different across OECD countries. So drop the Eurocentric attitude. And if you actually thought about it, you might find that a lot of these laws that appear at first glance to "help" people have unintended consequences: housing shortages, bad landlord/tenant relationships, discrimination, etc. People the usually try to fix the unintended negative consequences with even more laws and regulations.
Note that I'm not defending what the landlord is doing; I think using Tenant Assured is stupid and indicative of a bad landlord. But you aren't going to turn a bad landlord into a good one with legislation. Your best bet as a potential renter is to walk away from a landlord who uses Tenant Assured. You should thank your lucky stars that they made it so easy to spot them before you spent much time and effort moving in there.
You can find many property management companies and related businesses on Yelp and other reviews. They are usually also covered in news sources, you can find out past and current lawsuits against them, and get information about their financials. So, you actually have a lot of sources of information.
Furthermore, the reason landlords have become very cautious is because (1) they are letting you use something valuable and you can do a lot of damage to it, and (2) laws in many places make it difficult to evict renters even when they misbehave.
If your knee-jerk reaction is "legislation time" every time a company misbehaves, then "housing allocation" is pretty much what you end up with: a small number of politically connected, powerful megabusinesses running everything--if you're lucky--or state-owned housing otherwise.
Housing otherwise is still supposed to be a free market; that is, buyers and renters voluntarily agree with sellers and owners to engage in transactions. When the seller/owner is a jerk, your best choice is to walk away, not to call for legislation.
As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report, unlike with credit reports. Landlords first, employers next...and then?
If the landlord thinks this is a good idea, be thankful. Why? Because you don't want to rent from such a jerk.
'm not too worried about the tiniest fraction of a percent of people who are the absolute richest of the richest of the rich,
The question we're talking about isn't whether you are "worried" about those people, but your claim that nobody would pay 70% income tax under your UBI calculation, which I think we have conclusively shown to be false now.
Funding public goods by income taxes is redistribution, of exactly the same structure as a basic income is: you give everyone the same, equal benefit, and put the burden of paying for it on those who can most easily bear it.
No, that's not true. While government spending on public goods can be used for redistribution, it often is not. For example, roads are intentionally paid for through taxes on road users, paid by rich and poor alike.
Mind you, this distribution of burden and benefit is directly because of the statistically abnormal distribution of incomes in the country. If there were a nice shallow gaussian curve where most people make close to the mean, most people would get very little benefit or see very little cost
The idea that income distributions should be a "nice shallow gaussian curve" is ludicrously wrong. That would mean that people just coming out of school make approximately the same amount of money as people with 40 years experience; it would mean no salary increases over time.
The natural income distribution is a log-normal curve. Furthermore, US pre-tax income inequality is lower than that of many other countries.
But because so much wealth is concentrated so tightly at one end of the curve
Wealth inequality (Gini) in the US is similar to Denmark and Switzerland. Pre-tax income inequality (Gini) in the US is actually below several European nations. Go look it up for yourself if you don't believe me.
pplying the same formula leads to enormous benefits for almost everyone at moderate cost to most of the rest and then a sharp pinch on the tiny, tiny handful who're holding all the wealth of society.
You have an erroneous zero-sum view of US society. In reality, everyone wins or loses together. If you take money from one group and give it to another, you reduce inequality in the short term, but you make everybody, including the poor, worse off in the long term.
With current tax brackets plus a 25% flat tax it would be impossible for someone even making infinite money to be taxed even at 65%. Even someone in the 99th percentile would still only be taxed around 44%
Someone making $1 million / year has an effective (not marginal, effective) federal income tax of 35% and their effective state and local income tax is at 10%. Add 25% on top of that and you're at 70%. In fact, with AMT, high income earners must pay 35% income tax.
Only if you discount unearned income from incomes (which apparently you do)
We're talking not about the philosophical meaning of the term "income", but who would pay what under your plan, and the fact is that for tax purposes, income is distinct from capital gains. Furthermore, the ultra-wealthy may not even have large capital gains, because capital gains only accrue when they are realized.
Ignoring your leading-question language: because given that taxation is wrong
There is nothing "leading" about it, and I didn't say that all taxation is wrong. Taxation can and does serve many purposes, and is traditionally justified by spending on infrastructure and public goods like defense. Redistribution and making people happy is not a traditional purpose of taxation, at least in the US.
the least bad way to tax and spend is to tax those who it hurts the least (due to diminishing marginal utility), and spend it on those who it helps the most (due to that same marginal utility), you've barely even bothered the billionaire while you maybe made the beggar's day.
But you aren't just taxing "billionaires" an extra 25%, you are taxing everybody an extra 25% on their earned income, which is going to start hurting them when the extra $1000 you give them amounts to the 25% they will have to pay, or about $4000/month ($48000/year of earned income). So, your promise that your taxes are only going to hurt Scroogy McScroogeface are wrong.
Second, you assume that the only thing that Scroogy McScroogeface is doing with his money is putting it in his pool and swimming in it. But what he is actually mostly doing is investing it in the stock market; those are the investments that cause jobs to exist in the first place. You are destroying businesses and taking the proceeds from that and give it to people who then spend it on whatever they like. And there is no evidence that that redistribution even helps the people receiving it.
Finally, you erroneously assume that people are just going to let that happen. The higher you make top marginal rates and the more broadly you define "income", the less inclined people are to make money, to invest in businesses, or to spend time learning complex skills. Instead, they'll spend their time of having fun and/or simply leave the country altogether. There is necessarily a point beyond which increasing tax rates causes tax revenue to drop, in addition to harming the economy, and everybody loses. And the tax rates you advocate are almost certainly beyond that point.
Their motivation is really only to increase sales, not validate reviews.
Of course, their motivation is to increase sales, that's why they provide reviews in the first place and get tough on bad vendors.
I could possibly see where there's a consumer protection angle in here somewhere.
There is also a "consumer protection angle" in not being forced to put your name publicly to a list of products you have purchased. And there is a huge benefit derived from people reviewing on Amazon even if they didn't buy the product there.
So if someone online is making a politician's life miserable by pointing out his lies and broken promises, they can track him down and toss him in jail on trumped up charges as a way to shut him up.
Well, yes, that is likely the real underlying motivation for the EU to want to destroy online anonymity: European elites hate it when the people think and speak for themselves.
I was just responding to the ostensible justification, namely that "fake online reviews" somehow "hurt businesses", and I was pointing out that businesses in the US evidently have decided that pseudonymous online reviews don't hurt them, otherwise they would ban them.
Has to have the political manager's name attached. All politicians' votes must be recorded too - no more voice votes. Try that for 5-10 years and if they don't mind, only then should you try it with the general public.
Sadly, few people pay enough attention to this or care about what politicians have done in the past. Look at Clinton for example: she used to oppose gay marriage but is now worshiped by the media and powerful LGBTQ organizations for her supposed support of gay marriage.
Yes, that's what I mean. Leaving all other taxation and programs as they are, you could fund an UBI of x% the mean income (as in GDP per capita) by taxing every person (whether they have an income or not) an additional x% of their income.
Well, then you end up with 70% taxes on high income earners, QED. Both the US and Europe tried this for a while and it didn't work. Top marginal income taxes in most of Europe are now lower than in the US, and some of the best performing and wealthiest countries have much lower income tax rates than the US.
The super-rich would sure like to make sure that any taxes raised are raised on the middle class only, and that their ludicrously high incomes are left untouched, but that doesn't mean that the only way to do it is to concede to their ridiculous demands.
The "super rich" don't have "ridiculously high incomes", they often don't have incomes at all, they simply are rich. If you tax income, you are going to hit the middle class and the upper middle class, people like older doctors, lawyers, and engineers while they have a few lucky years. In fact, 12% of Americans will be in the top 1% of income earners during their lifetimes, and 39% of Americans will be in the top 5% at some point.
The super rich have capital gains, but only when they actually sell stuff to consume it. If you tax capital gains, they are simply not going to invest in things that have capital gains anymore.
And if 25% isn't high enough, and I agree it's not, then we make it higher. I'd personally go for 50% myself, and have been advocating for exactly that for decades,
At that point, you reach to marginal taxes of above 100%; people certainly aren't going to work for that. Even at lower rates, many people are not going to bother working extra, or working at all, anymore. The question is not whether they can make additional money at all (which is how you think about it), but how much they value their time relative to the money they can receive. A doctor or lawyer isn't going to bother working an extra hour if he gets $20/h for it after taxes. And in the long term, smart people are just not going to bother going into those professions at all, they are going to find other ways of making money that avoid these high income taxes.
And if you make life unpleasant enough for the wealthy, they are simply going to leave the country altogether, another lesson Europe learned.
Note that high income households already pretty much are the only ones that pay substantially more into the system than they get out; even that is not sustainable:
And, seriously, even forgetting about the injustice of randomly taking away people's money and giving it to other people, what's the point of all of this? Why do you want to punish older upper-middle-class professionals?
If Amazon or eBay or Google wanted to adopt true name policies for online reviews, they could already do that (in fact, a few of them have "verified identities" and identify reviews with them). No national ID is needed, they just get it from the credit card info and verifying purchases. Obviously, they have decided that allowing pseudonymous reviews is better.
And unless you are a total idiot (like, apparently, Eurocrats are), you ought to be able to distinguish fake from true reviews fairly easily.
GDP per capita, which is the same thing as mean income.
GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced domestically averaged over all people. "Mean income" can mean GDP per capita, or it can mean average annual salary of the working population, two very different meanings.
Returning to your original point:
Pay every American 25% of GDP per capita (the mean income), and tax every American 25% of their income, even if for a lot of people that income (and thus tax) is 0, and it balances out perfectly, because that's how averages work.
No, it would amount to taxing every American nearly 25% of their income on top of what they are already spending in income tax, and on top of social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc., since the UBI only really replaces some welfare spending, which amounts to maybe $250 billion dollars out of a nearly $7 trillion of government spending. All the remaining government functions still need to be paid for as before.
Furthermore, a UBI of $1000/month just isn't enough to live on either without additional subsidies for health care premiums and retirement insurance premiums, let alone housing, transportation, and food. So, the UBI cannot be a substitute for welfare programs, it's something on top of it. And so what's the point?
And none of those calculations are taking into account the death spiral that would likely occur.
I'm sorry, but if you want to make an argument for UBI, you really need to start crunching the numbers again more carefully.
If there is one thing the UBI analyses and arguments show is that you can only pay for significant social spending by massively increasing taxes on the middle class. That's how Northern Europe is financing their welfare states (such as it is, it's not all people in the US believe it to be). Good luck trying to get that past US middle class voters.
Pay every American 25% of GDP per capita (the mean income), and tax every American 25% of their income, even if for a lot of people that income (and thus tax) is 0, and it balances out perfectly, because that's how averages work.
So you pay out based on GDP, but tax based on income? If 66% of the population just take the basic income, don't pay any taxes ("and thus tax is 0"), and also don't produce anything of value, obviously, the other 33% have to carry all the burden of paying for the basic income.
There are all sorts of traps you can fall into thinking about this in terms of "money" and "tax" and "GDP" and "income", because money and taxes respond in weird ways to policies. The real question you need to ask is: what's the ratio of non-working people to working people.
I'll probably also vote for a third party candidate. However, that's a small minority. I don't blame the strategic anything-but-X voter, for X in {Trump, Clinton, Sanders}, because these candidates are really so awful.
Sanders sucks in the way that he doesn't know what he is talking about and his political ideas don't work (they have been tried numerous times before and always led to economic decline).
And no, they gave up certain rights when they became a CEO, legally. Rights are a human construct, not a force of nature. They work how we want them to work, not how YOU want them to work.
Whatever rights he may or may not have given up, he hasn't given up the right to lobby government, petition government, or support political parties; as I was saying: although he is arguably doing this personally, even if he did it "as CEO of Google" it would be legal.
You should be very concerned about this relationship because it is TRIVIAL for him to sway and influence billions of people without anyone noticing,
If Google were foolish enough to try to do that, it would be legal. I don't believe they are such fools because they'd risk lots of money. But even if they were, that wouldn't be any different from the past half century, where TV networks and their CEOs wielded the power to influence elections, and wallowed in it.
Furthermore, people who think that the American voter is a mindless zombie who can be told who to vote for have found themselves disappointed time and again. And organizations that have tried to do that, like "the press" and the Republican party machinery, have found that they have lost the trust of Americans and paid for it.
Then threaten to expose them if Trump wins. Shame will do the rest.
All three remaining candidates (Trump, Clinton, Sanders) suck, each in their own, special way. The election comes down to whether it's worth bothering voting at all and which candidate one dislikes the least. All three of them are an utter embarrassment for the US.
Although there would be nothing wrong if Google actually supported Clinton, Eric Schmidt isn't Google. If he wants to set up think tanks or support groups for Clinton, that's his business. Ditto if Jared Cohen supports Clinton and cooperates with her. They have a right to engage in political activities just like anybody else.
(Note that I'm defending their right to do this even though I despise Clinton and Obama.)
You're mixing up a bunch of things, like number of tax payers vs number of Americans, and federal vs total income tax. So let's try to look at the real numbers.
There are 330 million Americans. If you pay each of them $1000/month, that's $12000/year, or about $4 trillion per year. That's twice as much as the US government currently collects in state and federal income taxes. Even if we try to fix your reasoning and say that you only pay the "universal" basic income to adults (250 million) and subtract total state and federal welfare spending ($1 trillion), you end up with $2 trillion in new spending. So, even under unrealistically optimistic assumptions and not making the income "universal", you would already have to double current income tax revenues, and that isn't taking into account that the US government can't even meet its current obligations.
But you can't double tax revenues simply by doubling tax rates (note that top marginal income tax rates in the US are above 55%, not 40%). In fact, there probably is no level of taxation at which you could double income tax revenues because if you tried, Americans would simply increasingly cease to engage in taxable activities and jobs would move away, resulting not only in diminishing tax revenues, but also a failing economy.
Sorry, but I don't see how a UBI financed through income taxes could possibly work.
Oh, there are many government interventions that end inequality; again, I know that first hand. Unfortunately, they also end justice, liberty, meritocracy, economic opportunity, and economic growth.
There's a sweeping statement based on ideology.
No, it's a sweeping statement based on lots of economic data and personal and family experience.
Currently, there's a lot of people who really don't have significant economic opportunity, and I'd like them to have it.
Well, gollly, and you think that makes you unique? Believe it or not, that's what people who advocate for economic liberalization, small government, and free markets also want.
What I primarily want to do is establish a lower bound for living conditions and opportunity. People will succeed and fail from there, and that's up to them.
That's nice. Unfortunately, nobody has ever found a way of "establishing a lower bound" through government action that doesn't deteriorate into dependency, corruption, and social decline. Decades of progressive attempts to help people out of poverty and manipulate their behavior through government programs have shown that. You are simply too blind to see it.
It was your claim that AI and automation replacing humans opens new jobs for those humans so everything will come up roses
No, my claim was that we have more jobs than ever before and gave you the data for it. Given that we have had lots of automation, it follows that people must have found new jobs in other areas.
I don't think everything will come up roses at all. With an expansion of welfare, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, and social security, a lot of people who lose their current jobs due to AI and automation will choose not to take new jobs. But that's not the fault of AI and automation, it's the fault of misguided government policies.
I see you have scrupulously avoided any source of news on the economy for the last 6-10 years.
That's not true. When I said that there are more jobs than ever before, that includes the last 6-10 years, including the recession that we experienced.
You demand evidence but provide none yourself.
We have been talking about your statement that "Automation destroys jobs" and claim that that is supported by data. I just pointed out that your statement is inconsistent with data, since we have had plenty of automation over the last few decades and more jobs than ever before.
Now, what would you like me to provide evidence for?
Slashdot Mirror
Heinlein's early books just took big government and big military as a given and explored ideas about how they might function; I don't think that means that he viewed such societies as desirable. Heinlein's main body of work clearly advocated and favored individualism and self-governance, and describes it as far superior to the large hierarchical organizations and bumbling militaries of Earth's nation states. Roddenberry, on the other hand, places little value on individualism: Star Fleet is rigidly hierarchical, free enterprise doesn't seem to exist in the Federation anymore, and the few misfits and individualists we encounter have usually turned their back on the Federation, often in pursuit of nefarious or at least dangerous goals. Other than that, we learn little about how Roddenberry envisioned Federation society would actually function, other than that elections are somehow involved, resources appear to be allocated centrally (rather than through trade and money), and that it magically makes Earth extremely wealthy.
So, yes, Star Trek was a "critique of Heinlein": Roddenberry envisions technocratic, non-capitalist, hierarchical societies as being highly successful, tolerant, and stable and probably hated Heinlein's characterization of them as unfree, imperialistic, and doomed to failure. These visions are diametrically opposed, and I think Heinlein got it right. But that doesn't keep large numbers of idealistic people from following Roddenberry's unrealistic dream.
Star Trek's society is neither democratic or open; citizens seem to have a lot of restrictions on what they can do. After the founding of the Federation, there are almost no examples of major research or exploration efforts outside Star Fleet; the only Federation citizens who seem to do anything outside Star Fleet either do so in collaboration with outsiders, or are in self-imposed exile of some form or another.
What Star Trek really describes is a kind of technocracy, or an ideal of progressive or socialist government: for the most part, it has competent and effective leaders and adminstrators, strong guarantees of "human rights" (both positive and negative rights), it delivers on its economic and social promises, and the occasional bad actor is dealt with effectively. That kind of government appeals to lots of people, while other people loathe it. Unfortunately, even if you are among the people it appeals to, you need to understand that that kind of government is fiction, and will always remain fiction. And it is certainly incompatible with a "democratic and open society".
A deposit doesn't even begin to cover the potential damage a renter can cause.
That is exactly what landlords have been doing. It's why there is a housing shorting, why rentals are being converted, and why more and more of the remaining landlords are assholes with an army of lawyers. It's also why good landlords and tenants meet by word of mouth and personal acquaintances.
It is, however, for your landlord to decide whether he rents to you. It is their property and their choice whether to rent it and to who.
Different from who? Laws are not that different across OECD countries. So drop the Eurocentric attitude. And if you actually thought about it, you might find that a lot of these laws that appear at first glance to "help" people have unintended consequences: housing shortages, bad landlord/tenant relationships, discrimination, etc. People the usually try to fix the unintended negative consequences with even more laws and regulations.
Note that I'm not defending what the landlord is doing; I think using Tenant Assured is stupid and indicative of a bad landlord. But you aren't going to turn a bad landlord into a good one with legislation. Your best bet as a potential renter is to walk away from a landlord who uses Tenant Assured. You should thank your lucky stars that they made it so easy to spot them before you spent much time and effort moving in there.
You can find many property management companies and related businesses on Yelp and other reviews. They are usually also covered in news sources, you can find out past and current lawsuits against them, and get information about their financials. So, you actually have a lot of sources of information.
Furthermore, the reason landlords have become very cautious is because (1) they are letting you use something valuable and you can do a lot of damage to it, and (2) laws in many places make it difficult to evict renters even when they misbehave.
If your knee-jerk reaction is "legislation time" every time a company misbehaves, then "housing allocation" is pretty much what you end up with: a small number of politically connected, powerful megabusinesses running everything--if you're lucky--or state-owned housing otherwise.
Housing otherwise is still supposed to be a free market; that is, buyers and renters voluntarily agree with sellers and owners to engage in transactions. When the seller/owner is a jerk, your best choice is to walk away, not to call for legislation.
If the landlord thinks this is a good idea, be thankful. Why? Because you don't want to rent from such a jerk.
The question we're talking about isn't whether you are "worried" about those people, but your claim that nobody would pay 70% income tax under your UBI calculation, which I think we have conclusively shown to be false now.
No, that's not true. While government spending on public goods can be used for redistribution, it often is not. For example, roads are intentionally paid for through taxes on road users, paid by rich and poor alike.
The idea that income distributions should be a "nice shallow gaussian curve" is ludicrously wrong. That would mean that people just coming out of school make approximately the same amount of money as people with 40 years experience; it would mean no salary increases over time.
The natural income distribution is a log-normal curve. Furthermore, US pre-tax income inequality is lower than that of many other countries.
Wealth inequality (Gini) in the US is similar to Denmark and Switzerland. Pre-tax income inequality (Gini) in the US is actually below several European nations. Go look it up for yourself if you don't believe me.
You have an erroneous zero-sum view of US society. In reality, everyone wins or loses together. If you take money from one group and give it to another, you reduce inequality in the short term, but you make everybody, including the poor, worse off in the long term.
Someone making $1 million / year has an effective (not marginal, effective) federal income tax of 35% and their effective state and local income tax is at 10%. Add 25% on top of that and you're at 70%. In fact, with AMT, high income earners must pay 35% income tax.
We're talking not about the philosophical meaning of the term "income", but who would pay what under your plan, and the fact is that for tax purposes, income is distinct from capital gains. Furthermore, the ultra-wealthy may not even have large capital gains, because capital gains only accrue when they are realized.
There is nothing "leading" about it, and I didn't say that all taxation is wrong. Taxation can and does serve many purposes, and is traditionally justified by spending on infrastructure and public goods like defense. Redistribution and making people happy is not a traditional purpose of taxation, at least in the US.
But you aren't just taxing "billionaires" an extra 25%, you are taxing everybody an extra 25% on their earned income, which is going to start hurting them when the extra $1000 you give them amounts to the 25% they will have to pay, or about $4000/month ($48000/year of earned income). So, your promise that your taxes are only going to hurt Scroogy McScroogeface are wrong.
Second, you assume that the only thing that Scroogy McScroogeface is doing with his money is putting it in his pool and swimming in it. But what he is actually mostly doing is investing it in the stock market; those are the investments that cause jobs to exist in the first place. You are destroying businesses and taking the proceeds from that and give it to people who then spend it on whatever they like. And there is no evidence that that redistribution even helps the people receiving it.
Finally, you erroneously assume that people are just going to let that happen. The higher you make top marginal rates and the more broadly you define "income", the less inclined people are to make money, to invest in businesses, or to spend time learning complex skills. Instead, they'll spend their time of having fun and/or simply leave the country altogether. There is necessarily a point beyond which increasing tax rates causes tax revenue to drop, in addition to harming the economy, and everybody loses. And the tax rates you advocate are almost certainly beyond that point.
Of course, their motivation is to increase sales, that's why they provide reviews in the first place and get tough on bad vendors.
There is also a "consumer protection angle" in not being forced to put your name publicly to a list of products you have purchased. And there is a huge benefit derived from people reviewing on Amazon even if they didn't buy the product there.
Well, yes, that is likely the real underlying motivation for the EU to want to destroy online anonymity: European elites hate it when the people think and speak for themselves.
I was just responding to the ostensible justification, namely that "fake online reviews" somehow "hurt businesses", and I was pointing out that businesses in the US evidently have decided that pseudonymous online reviews don't hurt them, otherwise they would ban them.
Sadly, few people pay enough attention to this or care about what politicians have done in the past. Look at Clinton for example: she used to oppose gay marriage but is now worshiped by the media and powerful LGBTQ organizations for her supposed support of gay marriage.
Well, then you end up with 70% taxes on high income earners, QED. Both the US and Europe tried this for a while and it didn't work. Top marginal income taxes in most of Europe are now lower than in the US, and some of the best performing and wealthiest countries have much lower income tax rates than the US.
The "super rich" don't have "ridiculously high incomes", they often don't have incomes at all, they simply are rich. If you tax income, you are going to hit the middle class and the upper middle class, people like older doctors, lawyers, and engineers while they have a few lucky years. In fact, 12% of Americans will be in the top 1% of income earners during their lifetimes, and 39% of Americans will be in the top 5% at some point.
The super rich have capital gains, but only when they actually sell stuff to consume it. If you tax capital gains, they are simply not going to invest in things that have capital gains anymore.
At that point, you reach to marginal taxes of above 100%; people certainly aren't going to work for that. Even at lower rates, many people are not going to bother working extra, or working at all, anymore. The question is not whether they can make additional money at all (which is how you think about it), but how much they value their time relative to the money they can receive. A doctor or lawyer isn't going to bother working an extra hour if he gets $20/h for it after taxes. And in the long term, smart people are just not going to bother going into those professions at all, they are going to find other ways of making money that avoid these high income taxes.
And if you make life unpleasant enough for the wealthy, they are simply going to leave the country altogether, another lesson Europe learned.
Note that high income households already pretty much are the only ones that pay substantially more into the system than they get out; even that is not sustainable:
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/...
http://taxfoundation.org/artic...
And, seriously, even forgetting about the injustice of randomly taking away people's money and giving it to other people, what's the point of all of this? Why do you want to punish older upper-middle-class professionals?
If Amazon or eBay or Google wanted to adopt true name policies for online reviews, they could already do that (in fact, a few of them have "verified identities" and identify reviews with them). No national ID is needed, they just get it from the credit card info and verifying purchases. Obviously, they have decided that allowing pseudonymous reviews is better.
And unless you are a total idiot (like, apparently, Eurocrats are), you ought to be able to distinguish fake from true reviews fairly easily.
GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced domestically averaged over all people. "Mean income" can mean GDP per capita, or it can mean average annual salary of the working population, two very different meanings.
Returning to your original point:
No, it would amount to taxing every American nearly 25% of their income on top of what they are already spending in income tax, and on top of social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc., since the UBI only really replaces some welfare spending, which amounts to maybe $250 billion dollars out of a nearly $7 trillion of government spending. All the remaining government functions still need to be paid for as before.
Furthermore, a UBI of $1000/month just isn't enough to live on either without additional subsidies for health care premiums and retirement insurance premiums, let alone housing, transportation, and food. So, the UBI cannot be a substitute for welfare programs, it's something on top of it. And so what's the point?
And none of those calculations are taking into account the death spiral that would likely occur.
I'm sorry, but if you want to make an argument for UBI, you really need to start crunching the numbers again more carefully.
If there is one thing the UBI analyses and arguments show is that you can only pay for significant social spending by massively increasing taxes on the middle class. That's how Northern Europe is financing their welfare states (such as it is, it's not all people in the US believe it to be). Good luck trying to get that past US middle class voters.
So you pay out based on GDP, but tax based on income? If 66% of the population just take the basic income, don't pay any taxes ("and thus tax is 0"), and also don't produce anything of value, obviously, the other 33% have to carry all the burden of paying for the basic income.
There are all sorts of traps you can fall into thinking about this in terms of "money" and "tax" and "GDP" and "income", because money and taxes respond in weird ways to policies. The real question you need to ask is: what's the ratio of non-working people to working people.
I'll probably also vote for a third party candidate. However, that's a small minority. I don't blame the strategic anything-but-X voter, for X in {Trump, Clinton, Sanders}, because these candidates are really so awful.
Sanders sucks in the way that he doesn't know what he is talking about and his political ideas don't work (they have been tried numerous times before and always led to economic decline).
Whatever rights he may or may not have given up, he hasn't given up the right to lobby government, petition government, or support political parties; as I was saying: although he is arguably doing this personally, even if he did it "as CEO of Google" it would be legal.
If Google were foolish enough to try to do that, it would be legal. I don't believe they are such fools because they'd risk lots of money. But even if they were, that wouldn't be any different from the past half century, where TV networks and their CEOs wielded the power to influence elections, and wallowed in it.
Furthermore, people who think that the American voter is a mindless zombie who can be told who to vote for have found themselves disappointed time and again. And organizations that have tried to do that, like "the press" and the Republican party machinery, have found that they have lost the trust of Americans and paid for it.
All three remaining candidates (Trump, Clinton, Sanders) suck, each in their own, special way. The election comes down to whether it's worth bothering voting at all and which candidate one dislikes the least. All three of them are an utter embarrassment for the US.
Although there would be nothing wrong if Google actually supported Clinton, Eric Schmidt isn't Google. If he wants to set up think tanks or support groups for Clinton, that's his business. Ditto if Jared Cohen supports Clinton and cooperates with her. They have a right to engage in political activities just like anybody else.
(Note that I'm defending their right to do this even though I despise Clinton and Obama.)
You're mixing up a bunch of things, like number of tax payers vs number of Americans, and federal vs total income tax. So let's try to look at the real numbers.
There are 330 million Americans. If you pay each of them $1000/month, that's $12000/year, or about $4 trillion per year. That's twice as much as the US government currently collects in state and federal income taxes. Even if we try to fix your reasoning and say that you only pay the "universal" basic income to adults (250 million) and subtract total state and federal welfare spending ($1 trillion), you end up with $2 trillion in new spending. So, even under unrealistically optimistic assumptions and not making the income "universal", you would already have to double current income tax revenues, and that isn't taking into account that the US government can't even meet its current obligations.
But you can't double tax revenues simply by doubling tax rates (note that top marginal income tax rates in the US are above 55%, not 40%). In fact, there probably is no level of taxation at which you could double income tax revenues because if you tried, Americans would simply increasingly cease to engage in taxable activities and jobs would move away, resulting not only in diminishing tax revenues, but also a failing economy.
Sorry, but I don't see how a UBI financed through income taxes could possibly work.
No, that is, in fact, what you did. I simply pointed out that you had no evidence.
I'll quit now. You are evidently an idiot and a know-nothing.
No, it's a sweeping statement based on lots of economic data and personal and family experience.
Well, gollly, and you think that makes you unique? Believe it or not, that's what people who advocate for economic liberalization, small government, and free markets also want.
That's nice. Unfortunately, nobody has ever found a way of "establishing a lower bound" through government action that doesn't deteriorate into dependency, corruption, and social decline. Decades of progressive attempts to help people out of poverty and manipulate their behavior through government programs have shown that. You are simply too blind to see it.
No, my claim was that we have more jobs than ever before and gave you the data for it. Given that we have had lots of automation, it follows that people must have found new jobs in other areas.
I don't think everything will come up roses at all. With an expansion of welfare, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, and social security, a lot of people who lose their current jobs due to AI and automation will choose not to take new jobs. But that's not the fault of AI and automation, it's the fault of misguided government policies.
That's not true. When I said that there are more jobs than ever before, that includes the last 6-10 years, including the recession that we experienced.
We have been talking about your statement that "Automation destroys jobs" and claim that that is supported by data. I just pointed out that your statement is inconsistent with data, since we have had plenty of automation over the last few decades and more jobs than ever before.
Now, what would you like me to provide evidence for?