An important corollary is that even if it is the latter, that doesn't automatically make the less-tolerant-of-mistreatment women and minorities at fault for anything. Just because one group of people are willing to put up with something doesn't make the something okay or another group somehow in the wrong for not putting up with it; maybe the people who put up with bad things don't have the balls to stand up for themselves and wrongly let themselves be pushed over. It's an open question where the line of "too sensitive" vs "not sensitive enough" is, and not an open-and-shut case that more sensitive is bad, no matter how much people who want you to put up with their shit may tell you it is.
Consider the oft-cited fact(?) that men are tougher salary negotiators. Does that make them "less tolerant of low pay", or "more sensitive about their pay", and is that then a fault? Should we be saying "poor little babies whine for more money and won't just suck it up and accept what they're offered", instead of praising them for confidence and boldness?
I feel like I'm wandering too far off the topic here, but I just find it interesting that your anecdote is opposite to mine. Nobody ever really pushed me in high school, I just coasted and slacked off and ended up with only a 3.7 GPA. Thinking of myself as the smartest kid around my whole life, I was super disappointed when I learned at graduation that there was an honors program and other graduating classmates got special recognition for it and I was just one of the plebs in the audience watching them. My family was falling apart at the end of high school and I entered adulthood with no guidance or support and my life kind of fell apart almost immediately. By the time I figured out that I still could go to college without family to pay for it, and how to get there, I was driving my own life for the first time and actually cared and tried, and when I found I got a perfect 4.0 my first semester that felt so good that it drove me even harder to keep doing that semester after semester until I finished... that associate degree I was doing en route to my bachelor's degree. Once I got to a real university and did the upper division stuff, and also had a lot more adult life problems to juggle at the same time, my grades dropped back down to a 3.9 again, but still better than high school.
Is this hyperbole or have they changed the way they calculate GPAs again? In my day 100% = 4.0 and that was it (in colleges at least; apparently high schools by then had decided it is possible to give up to 125% so as to earn a 5.0).
I mentioned that point, and how it completely ignored the point I was discussing, and how I was going to ignore it in turn. Two people starting out life with different amount of wealth, and the consequences of that on who can lend at interest and who has to borrow at interest even given the otherwise exact same preferences and abilities, has nothing whatsoever to do with "the choice to defer consumption". You're assuming that that is always the cause of differences in wealth, and so justifies the consequences of such differences, when it very obviously is not always or even usually the cause, so arguing whether or not it would justify the consequences if it was the sole cause of them is a moot point. It simply isn't, and there's no sense arguing about what if it were.
You can tell a true idiot by someone who spend all their time spouting that one is clearly superior to the other
You can acknowledge that two sandwiches are both literally full of shit, and preferably neither should be eaten, without also denying that the HIV-infested steaming fresh human shit sandwich is clearly even worse than the dry cow pie sandwich, as bad as the latter may also be. In fact you could "tell a true idiot by someone" who'll vehemently swear that they're both equally bad.
On the tracking issue, I like the idea of having an income tax system self-verifying by having expenses on things that count as other people's income be tax-deductible. That is, if Alice makes taxable income from Bob of $X, then Bob has a corresponding tax-deductible expense of $X; what we end up taxing is the sum of everyone's taxable incomes minus expenses, their net rather than their gross, like we already do with corporations. On to the point though, this means that every time someone has taxable income they might not want to report, someone else has a corresponding tax-deductible expense that they do want to report, and if there are gross mismatches — if Bob claims he paid $LARGE_SUM in taxable income to Alice but Alice doesn't report that she received it — then we know where to investigate and find out who is lying.
It's a simple syllogism: - To survive we must work (because we can't afford to retire). - We can't work (because automation destroyed the jobs). - Therefore, we can't survive.
No, but I've got no problem shooting a fucking robber-baron in the face so as to give his victims back the money with which to pay the kind doctors for their services.
Here's a brief log of my expectations over my adult(ish) life, as someone just barely young enough to count as a millennial (I turn 35 this year):
20 years ago, I thought that I was going to easily be rich and famous when I grew up, because I was consistently and effortlessly outperforming all of my peers at school, and the world of course is intrinsically just so that kind of ability will surely be rewarded as I avail myself of the opportunities equally available to all, right?
15 years ago, after falling flat on my face into poverty immediately upon adulthood and taking two years with almost zero guidance or support to figure out what the fuck I had to do to get my life back on track, I thought that maybe I could still salvage that dream after like, maybe a decade-ish of hard work? By my thirties maybe?
10 years ago, after disappointingly little progress in that regard despite my best efforts (and continued astounding academic success meanwhile), I thought that maybe I would "settle" for a "normal" life in an "ordinary" house in the suburbs working some "boring" career my whole life and doing some kind of interesting life's work that was a mere shadow of my true potential in my spare time beside that.
5 years ago, I thought that I would be lucky not to die in the street when I was old like it increasingly seemed my parents were going to do, it seeming just barely possibly to avoid that with a ridiculously enormous amount of effort and sacrifice and basically neglecting everything I ever dreamt of actually doing with my life just to, maybe, hopefully, reach the point I thought I would "settle" for, and previously thought was the normal condition of all moderately functional adults, in time to have a few years' breather before I died in which to maybe write some kind of memoirs about the things I once thought I was going to do with my life? please?
Today, even after my life has turned around dramatically from that point, thanks to that enormous effort and ridiculous sacrifice and a heaping pile of the good fortune sorely missing from most of the decades prior, I'm still not sure if that's ever going to be possible. Have since learned that my current income is twice the median American's, and I've never really made much less than the median, which only makes the difficulties endured despite that seem even more depressing. Currently living in a tiny trailer on rented land so as to be able to save enough money that someday I can put enough of a down payment down that the interest on a mortgage won't be so high as to push the date I can start saving for something besides housing back past the time I'll probably die. Long-term girlfriend patiently waiting for me to be able to afford a larger trailer with enough room for the two of us to live together and so be able to get married, currently aiming for maybe some time around when we're 40? Then probably another decade of saving after that before we can put a big enough down payment on a real house, what amounts to about half the purchase price. We don't want kids anyway, but we basically don't have the option of them at this point, not without sacrificing all hope.
That's all assuming that the past five years' miracle progress continues unabated, which is far, far from assured and I constantly expect any moment to lose absolutely everything and go back to zero again. But then, running the numbers sometimes, somehow, it seems like if all the trends over my lifetime continue at their average rates... somehow I might be able to retire in my mid-late 50s and live off investment income for the rest of my life after that? What the fuck? I don't believe it. But the math keeps telling me that. That most of life is hopeless and shit, and then around now it starts getting gradually better, and then suddenly in the moderately-near future everything is miraculously perfect forever. But I'll fucking believe it when I see it. I'm still assuming I'm going to die in the streets like my parents still look to be doing, and life can fucking prove me wrong if it can. Please. Please prove me wrong.
I think that's what he was saying. I read him as implying that the Tiny House fad robs "naive millennials" of the appreciation of land that "generates America's greatest wealth", condemning them (at their own fault, I guess?) to work until death to service rent on the land they park on.
Ignoring that stuff becoming harder to buy does not actually mean there is more value to be had (i.e. land price going up does not "generate wealth", it transfers it to whoever already has land from whoever doesn't), and that the Tiny House thing is a reaction to the difficulty of buying into the ridiculously overprices real estate market. Everyone would love to own land, but we can't, so owning a shelter that we have to park on someone else's rented land is the best alternative we can get. It's a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Your example is just criticizing Alice and Bob's time preferences for consumption. If Alice's excess is as "useless" as you claim, why does Bob constantly want it?
You seem to have reading comprehension difficulties so I may not respond beyond this.
Alice's excess is useless to her inasmuch as she is not using it, which is what makes it excess to begin with. If she were using it, she would not be able to lend it out, and it would not be excess.
In other hands, like Bob's, it would be useful, to him, because he has a use he needs to put it to.
In a truly free market, Alice would sell her excess to Bob, who has more use for it than her, in exchange for something that she has more use for than him. That's what free trade is all about: sorting things around to where they are most useful. If things were not more or less useful in different hands, all trades would be zero sum and there would be no point to them. But with rent an option, it is more in Alice's interests -- and Alice, controlling the wealth, gets to dictate the terms -- not to trade it, but to charge a permanent fee for for the temporary use of it. That distorts the market.
Also, the rest of your commentary on that hypothetical scenario assumes that Alice ended up with more than Bob because of choices she made, ignoring that we start the scenario out with them having different amounts at hand, just like different people in real life start out with different amounts of wealth available to them. In a truly free market, we would expect those differences to level out over time, as those with more sell it to those with less so as to buy the labor of those with less and live better and easier lives for a time, while those with less work the other side of that equation to accumulate more for themselves, and in time the amount of wealth had by and the amount of labor required from both parties equalizes. Rent and interest distort that, and instead cause wealth to accumulate further into the hands of those who already have it.
Which is the fundamental flaw of those articles you link. They conflate genuine wealth creation with wealth concentration. Yes, a consumption tax sure does interfere the least with the rich getting richer. But that is not a good thing, and from a genuine productivity standpoint, of actually generating the most value, that is to say alleviating the most suffering and producing the most flourishing, it's a positively bad thing. From a genuine productivity standpoint, you want to encourage the wealthy to trade their wealth for the labor of the poor; both for the raw value produced by that labor; but also so that that value produced accrues to where it is most valued, in the hands of those who need it most, the poor who are getting paid to produce it; and so that the wealthy then fall into the ranks of those who have to labor themselves, further increasing the raw amount of value generated. An economy of more-equal people all working and all accumulating the product of that labor more-equally both generates more value on the whole (since there are fewer parasites living as dead weight on the backs of others) and allocates that value to where it is valued more (those who need it most, instead of to those who already have more than they can even use themselves already) than a less-equal society where some people do all the work and some people reap all the benefits of that.
That's why market economies are more productive than feudalism or slavery, and why the last vestiges thereof -- landlords are literal vestiges of feudalism, and lending money at interest is an expansion of the same rental concept to other capital besides land -- need to go if we are going to move forward.
Not to detract from the overall quality of your post, but a business owner's customers are his bosses too, in much the same way that the electorate are the President's bosses: they're the people who ultimately pay him, and he only gets to keep the job so long as he makes them happy. A business owner who pisses off all his customers soon finds himself unemployed, as a business with no customers is no business.
Unless the interest on the requisite mortgage, which amounts to paying rent on borrowed money instead of borrowed housing, were even greater than the rent on the housing, which it easily can be. Then you're better off saving for a big enough down payment that the money you have to borrow for the cheapest available house doesn't exceed the cost of the lowest available rents. And even then, unless you can somehow buy a house with 100% down in cash, you're still paying rent on money (interest) one way or another, just hopefully less than the alternative rent on housing, eventually.
Following your line of thought, an ideal world would be one in which nobody ever actually uses ("consumes") anything, and so nobody ever gets any real direct value (use value) from anything, and humans only exist for the purpose of generating some kind of abstract "wealth" that nobody will ever enjoy. That is completely backward.
The ultimate thing of value is happiness, enjoyment, human flourishing. That requires that humans have their material needs met, that they be spared from hunger and pain and other kinds of suffering. Everything we produce is toward that end, and its usefulness toward that end is what makes it valuable. Wealth is nothing but an accumulation of things of value, which again are valuable because someone can eventually enjoy the use of them, or as you would call it, "consume" them. Wealth is potential consumption, stored future use value. The point is, as you say, to make people wealthier; but only because that enables greater consumption.
Delayed gratification so as to increase total gratification over time is an important practical strategy to employ, which is what real investment boils down to: spending some resources not directly on enjoyable things but on producing even more things to enjoy in the future. But that is still ultimately SPENDING, just on something other than a finished good or service. Wealth just sitting around not being spent is no wealth at all, until it gets spent; the only point in having accrued wealth is to ensure that your spending of it, and thus you enjoyment of it, which again is what gives it value to begin with, can continue uninterrupted despite irregularities of income; like having stores of food so you can continue eating despite a bad season, in an agrarian society.
But more to the point at hand, wealth that is being not only horded unused but employed as leverage just to accumulate more wealth from others who already have less wealth is actually of NEGATIVE real value, and that is what rent (including interest) is. Alice has more stuff than she herself is using; so she is getting no value from the excess stuff. Bob doesn't have enough stuff for his use; he would get value from it if he could have it. But rather than trade her useless excess stuff to Bob in exchange for something that is of use to her, like his labor, she lets Bob use it only temporarily, in exchange for a permant fee. At the end of the transaction, Alice who started off with more wealth now has even more wealth, and Bob who started off with less now has even less. So Bob still needs to borrow and Alice still has excess to lend and the process repeats and Alice gets even more wealth that is useless and of no real value to her, while Bob continues to lose real value to her. Of course Bob needs income to fund this process so he ends up trading his labor to Alice anyway, which she pays for out of the money she makes off Bob in exchange for nothing, with the net result that Alice get perpetual free labor from Bob, just because she started with more wealth than him.
Of course in the real world there are more than two people involved, but as classes the Bobs of the world still end up working for the Alices so as to get money with which to pay the Alices to temporarily borrow their useless excess and so on the whole the real useful wealth still gets sucked out of the Bobs into the black hole of useless excess for the Alices, destroying real wealth in the process. This is not at all investment along the lines of Alice paying Bob and Charles (money which they will spend on necessary consumption) to jointly produce something more valuable than what she had to pay them both and keeping that difference for her efforts, i.e. investing in a business venture. This is just pure parasitism that breaks all the expected positive results of a free market, which oughtn't occur at all, and if taxing it discourages it then all the better.
That is another reason why my tax on rent and interest is good: it discourages accumulating wealth beyond the point that it's directly useful to you (i.e. buying stuff for its use value, not as an investment), so if you still have income and nothing more you need to save up for, instead of hanging onto that money so that it will make you even more money for nothing, there's no point but to spend it, on paying people to do things you want since you've got all of the stuff that you want already, which increases other peoples' employment and thus income, naturally redistributing wealth from those who have it to those who lack it as a naive free market theory would expect. It's the mechanism of rent and interest that breaks that expected behavior, so until we can get rid of that mechanism entirely, counteracting by making it bear all the tax burden helps a little at least.
What we need to do is somewhere in between: tax income from wealth, minus expenses on lack of wealth. That is to say, tax based on your borrower/lender (including renter/landlord) status. If you're getting free money just from already having money, you get taxed for that; meanwhile if you're paying money just because you lack money (like because you don't own a home, and you can't exist nowhere, and wherever you do exist someone is going to charge you for that privilege), that counts against your taxable income. You're free to make whatever money you can make from your own labor and to save as much of that as is personally useful to you but as soon as you start turning your accrued wealth toward generating an unearned income they you get hit with taxes.
good advice for the millions of people born and raised in expensive places. just uproot your entire life and move to what may as well be a different country.
Or you know, people were born and raised and schooled and have all their family and friends and careers in a place and just would like to not be forced out of it. Like the 30 million or so people, 10% of Americans, who were born in California where the average income may be 20% higher but the average home price is 200% higher. Those tens of millions of people should all just move so far away it may as well be another country -- just like all the poor in the UK should all move to Russia where they can afford to live, right? Population sizes, areas, and distances there are all comparable to California vs midwest.
If people have to give up basic amenities to pay for video games, then they cannot really afford the video games. And if they don't have to give up the basic amenities to pay for video games, then it isn't a BASIC income.
The point is that the cost of a video game is noise lost in the cost of something like rent. Basic amenities don't cost a strict fixed amount that's exactly the same for every person at all times that a basic income can pay out exactly. It needs to pay out something in the ballpark of around what basic amenities cost with enough margin for error that people aren't constantly finding themselves one of today's unlucky fraction who end up not eating or out on the street, and the cost of a video game is a mere blade of grass on the edge of that ballpark, easily covered within the other end of that margin. You're doing the equivalent of complaining that they can afford to put salt on their food, the luxury! when the cost of salt is absolutely trivial next to the cost of the food.
Not to people living on UBI, and not to a very large number of people today. You find it useful, I find it useful, but like is not need.
Unless you want people living on UBI to be trapped forever living on UBI, they need to be able to apply for jobs and otherwise avail themselves of various forms of communication that are increasingly done over the internet. The point of an UBI is not to have a terrafoam box that you stuff all the world's poor into and wait for them to die off, it's a safety net to keep anyone from falling completely through the cracks, and for it to function as such, people caught in the net need the means to start climbing out of it if they try. If you only pay enough for burlap sacks of dry rice and beans and the sacks also have to double as their clothes, you're going to have a perpetual underclass with no hope of ever making something of their lives, completely opposite the point of an UBI.
Video games and the internet are way cheaper than a lot of basic amenities that an UBI would have to provide enough to cover. (Also, internet is basically a necessary utility in the modern age).
The median personal income for the united states is approximately $25k. The mean personal income is closer to $50k but that's not the kind of average people usually use in statistics like this because it is skewed way upward by the concentration of income at the top. The median american household income is also around $50k but the median household also has about two people in it so of course that is twice the personal income, there are twice the persons. And I'm not saying making $50k makes you upper class, just that that is far from a low income statistically. Owning multiple homes (somehow, despite the income you deride as low) is what makes you upper class. Raw income is irrelevant to class; borrower/lender or renter/rentier status is what matters. Do you have so much wealth that you can make money letting others use it, or do you have so little that you have to pay to use others'? That is what matters.
If you are mortgaging then you have lower class borrower status partly cancelling out your upper class rentier status. Your renter status pulls your overall class down too. But if on the whole you are making more from people paying to borrow your capital than you are paying to borrow others', that puts you on the upper side of the class line. Raw income does not define class because it may be coming at the expense of great sacrifice (of time and energy and opportunity, or of goods already owned) and it may largely go to providing other people free income that spares them such sacrifice, that is, in paying rents or interest. Class is determined more by wealth than income, by the capital that you own or not, and consequently what you have to borrow or rent or can afford to lend or rent out. You personally have a complex mix or borrowing, renting, and renting out going on, but if on the whole you are making more from renting out than you pay in interest and rent then you are upper class. And it sound like you at least are aiming for that status if you don't have it already.
$50k is twice the average American's income. I make around that much, and it's going to be a lifelong struggle to ever own a FIRST home before I die. That you've apparently bought at least four homes (your own, the rental, the one you flipped, and the one that burned down) makes you spectacularly rich beyond my wildest dreams, and I'M already spectacularly rich by most Americans' standards. Like someone else in this thread already said, I can easily afford anything I want -- except a house. If you've got several, you are rich, period.
Rent in general does this same thing already. People buy up properties just to rent them out which forces home prices up which makes it harder for people to buy and forces them to rent from the people who started that cycle by buying up the housing to rent it out.
That exact mechanism, generalized to all capital besides just real estate, is exactly what causes the runaway concentration of wealth that breaks a truly free market and turns it into capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
An important corollary is that even if it is the latter, that doesn't automatically make the less-tolerant-of-mistreatment women and minorities at fault for anything. Just because one group of people are willing to put up with something doesn't make the something okay or another group somehow in the wrong for not putting up with it; maybe the people who put up with bad things don't have the balls to stand up for themselves and wrongly let themselves be pushed over. It's an open question where the line of "too sensitive" vs "not sensitive enough" is, and not an open-and-shut case that more sensitive is bad, no matter how much people who want you to put up with their shit may tell you it is.
Consider the oft-cited fact(?) that men are tougher salary negotiators. Does that make them "less tolerant of low pay", or "more sensitive about their pay", and is that then a fault? Should we be saying "poor little babies whine for more money and won't just suck it up and accept what they're offered", instead of praising them for confidence and boldness?
I feel like I'm wandering too far off the topic here, but I just find it interesting that your anecdote is opposite to mine. Nobody ever really pushed me in high school, I just coasted and slacked off and ended up with only a 3.7 GPA. Thinking of myself as the smartest kid around my whole life, I was super disappointed when I learned at graduation that there was an honors program and other graduating classmates got special recognition for it and I was just one of the plebs in the audience watching them. My family was falling apart at the end of high school and I entered adulthood with no guidance or support and my life kind of fell apart almost immediately. By the time I figured out that I still could go to college without family to pay for it, and how to get there, I was driving my own life for the first time and actually cared and tried, and when I found I got a perfect 4.0 my first semester that felt so good that it drove me even harder to keep doing that semester after semester until I finished... that associate degree I was doing en route to my bachelor's degree. Once I got to a real university and did the upper division stuff, and also had a lot more adult life problems to juggle at the same time, my grades dropped back down to a 3.9 again, but still better than high school.
GPA of 7.5+
Is this hyperbole or have they changed the way they calculate GPAs again? In my day 100% = 4.0 and that was it (in colleges at least; apparently high schools by then had decided it is possible to give up to 125% so as to earn a 5.0).
I mentioned that point, and how it completely ignored the point I was discussing, and how I was going to ignore it in turn. Two people starting out life with different amount of wealth, and the consequences of that on who can lend at interest and who has to borrow at interest even given the otherwise exact same preferences and abilities, has nothing whatsoever to do with "the choice to defer consumption". You're assuming that that is always the cause of differences in wealth, and so justifies the consequences of such differences, when it very obviously is not always or even usually the cause, so arguing whether or not it would justify the consequences if it was the sole cause of them is a moot point. It simply isn't, and there's no sense arguing about what if it were.
Try addressing the actual argument next time.
Tu quoque.
You can tell a true idiot by someone who spend all their time spouting that one is clearly superior to the other
You can acknowledge that two sandwiches are both literally full of shit, and preferably neither should be eaten, without also denying that the HIV-infested steaming fresh human shit sandwich is clearly even worse than the dry cow pie sandwich, as bad as the latter may also be. In fact you could "tell a true idiot by someone" who'll vehemently swear that they're both equally bad.
On the tracking issue, I like the idea of having an income tax system self-verifying by having expenses on things that count as other people's income be tax-deductible. That is, if Alice makes taxable income from Bob of $X, then Bob has a corresponding tax-deductible expense of $X; what we end up taxing is the sum of everyone's taxable incomes minus expenses, their net rather than their gross, like we already do with corporations. On to the point though, this means that every time someone has taxable income they might not want to report, someone else has a corresponding tax-deductible expense that they do want to report, and if there are gross mismatches — if Bob claims he paid $LARGE_SUM in taxable income to Alice but Alice doesn't report that she received it — then we know where to investigate and find out who is lying.
Easy: we're fucked.
It's a simple syllogism:
- To survive we must work (because we can't afford to retire).
- We can't work (because automation destroyed the jobs).
- Therefore, we can't survive.
No, but I've got no problem shooting a fucking robber-baron in the face so as to give his victims back the money with which to pay the kind doctors for their services.
Here's a brief log of my expectations over my adult(ish) life, as someone just barely young enough to count as a millennial (I turn 35 this year):
20 years ago, I thought that I was going to easily be rich and famous when I grew up, because I was consistently and effortlessly outperforming all of my peers at school, and the world of course is intrinsically just so that kind of ability will surely be rewarded as I avail myself of the opportunities equally available to all, right?
15 years ago, after falling flat on my face into poverty immediately upon adulthood and taking two years with almost zero guidance or support to figure out what the fuck I had to do to get my life back on track, I thought that maybe I could still salvage that dream after like, maybe a decade-ish of hard work? By my thirties maybe?
10 years ago, after disappointingly little progress in that regard despite my best efforts (and continued astounding academic success meanwhile), I thought that maybe I would "settle" for a "normal" life in an "ordinary" house in the suburbs working some "boring" career my whole life and doing some kind of interesting life's work that was a mere shadow of my true potential in my spare time beside that.
5 years ago, I thought that I would be lucky not to die in the street when I was old like it increasingly seemed my parents were going to do, it seeming just barely possibly to avoid that with a ridiculously enormous amount of effort and sacrifice and basically neglecting everything I ever dreamt of actually doing with my life just to, maybe, hopefully, reach the point I thought I would "settle" for, and previously thought was the normal condition of all moderately functional adults, in time to have a few years' breather before I died in which to maybe write some kind of memoirs about the things I once thought I was going to do with my life? please?
Today, even after my life has turned around dramatically from that point, thanks to that enormous effort and ridiculous sacrifice and a heaping pile of the good fortune sorely missing from most of the decades prior, I'm still not sure if that's ever going to be possible. Have since learned that my current income is twice the median American's, and I've never really made much less than the median, which only makes the difficulties endured despite that seem even more depressing. Currently living in a tiny trailer on rented land so as to be able to save enough money that someday I can put enough of a down payment down that the interest on a mortgage won't be so high as to push the date I can start saving for something besides housing back past the time I'll probably die. Long-term girlfriend patiently waiting for me to be able to afford a larger trailer with enough room for the two of us to live together and so be able to get married, currently aiming for maybe some time around when we're 40? Then probably another decade of saving after that before we can put a big enough down payment on a real house, what amounts to about half the purchase price. We don't want kids anyway, but we basically don't have the option of them at this point, not without sacrificing all hope.
That's all assuming that the past five years' miracle progress continues unabated, which is far, far from assured and I constantly expect any moment to lose absolutely everything and go back to zero again. But then, running the numbers sometimes, somehow, it seems like if all the trends over my lifetime continue at their average rates... somehow I might be able to retire in my mid-late 50s and live off investment income for the rest of my life after that? What the fuck? I don't believe it. But the math keeps telling me that. That most of life is hopeless and shit, and then around now it starts getting gradually better, and then suddenly in the moderately-near future everything is miraculously perfect forever. But I'll fucking believe it when I see it. I'm still assuming I'm going to die in the streets like my parents still look to be doing, and life can fucking prove me wrong if it can. Please. Please prove me wrong.
I think that's what he was saying. I read him as implying that the Tiny House fad robs "naive millennials" of the appreciation of land that "generates America's greatest wealth", condemning them (at their own fault, I guess?) to work until death to service rent on the land they park on.
Ignoring that stuff becoming harder to buy does not actually mean there is more value to be had (i.e. land price going up does not "generate wealth", it transfers it to whoever already has land from whoever doesn't), and that the Tiny House thing is a reaction to the difficulty of buying into the ridiculously overprices real estate market. Everyone would love to own land, but we can't, so owning a shelter that we have to park on someone else's rented land is the best alternative we can get. It's a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Your example is just criticizing Alice and Bob's time preferences for consumption. If Alice's excess is as "useless" as you claim, why does Bob constantly want it?
You seem to have reading comprehension difficulties so I may not respond beyond this.
Alice's excess is useless to her inasmuch as she is not using it, which is what makes it excess to begin with. If she were using it, she would not be able to lend it out, and it would not be excess.
In other hands, like Bob's, it would be useful, to him, because he has a use he needs to put it to.
In a truly free market, Alice would sell her excess to Bob, who has more use for it than her, in exchange for something that she has more use for than him. That's what free trade is all about: sorting things around to where they are most useful. If things were not more or less useful in different hands, all trades would be zero sum and there would be no point to them. But with rent an option, it is more in Alice's interests -- and Alice, controlling the wealth, gets to dictate the terms -- not to trade it, but to charge a permanent fee for for the temporary use of it. That distorts the market.
Also, the rest of your commentary on that hypothetical scenario assumes that Alice ended up with more than Bob because of choices she made, ignoring that we start the scenario out with them having different amounts at hand, just like different people in real life start out with different amounts of wealth available to them. In a truly free market, we would expect those differences to level out over time, as those with more sell it to those with less so as to buy the labor of those with less and live better and easier lives for a time, while those with less work the other side of that equation to accumulate more for themselves, and in time the amount of wealth had by and the amount of labor required from both parties equalizes. Rent and interest distort that, and instead cause wealth to accumulate further into the hands of those who already have it.
Which is the fundamental flaw of those articles you link. They conflate genuine wealth creation with wealth concentration. Yes, a consumption tax sure does interfere the least with the rich getting richer. But that is not a good thing, and from a genuine productivity standpoint, of actually generating the most value, that is to say alleviating the most suffering and producing the most flourishing, it's a positively bad thing. From a genuine productivity standpoint, you want to encourage the wealthy to trade their wealth for the labor of the poor; both for the raw value produced by that labor; but also so that that value produced accrues to where it is most valued, in the hands of those who need it most, the poor who are getting paid to produce it; and so that the wealthy then fall into the ranks of those who have to labor themselves, further increasing the raw amount of value generated. An economy of more-equal people all working and all accumulating the product of that labor more-equally both generates more value on the whole (since there are fewer parasites living as dead weight on the backs of others) and allocates that value to where it is valued more (those who need it most, instead of to those who already have more than they can even use themselves already) than a less-equal society where some people do all the work and some people reap all the benefits of that.
That's why market economies are more productive than feudalism or slavery, and why the last vestiges thereof -- landlords are literal vestiges of feudalism, and lending money at interest is an expansion of the same rental concept to other capital besides land -- need to go if we are going to move forward.
Not to detract from the overall quality of your post, but a business owner's customers are his bosses too, in much the same way that the electorate are the President's bosses: they're the people who ultimately pay him, and he only gets to keep the job so long as he makes them happy. A business owner who pisses off all his customers soon finds himself unemployed, as a business with no customers is no business.
Unless the interest on the requisite mortgage, which amounts to paying rent on borrowed money instead of borrowed housing, were even greater than the rent on the housing, which it easily can be. Then you're better off saving for a big enough down payment that the money you have to borrow for the cheapest available house doesn't exceed the cost of the lowest available rents. And even then, unless you can somehow buy a house with 100% down in cash, you're still paying rent on money (interest) one way or another, just hopefully less than the alternative rent on housing, eventually.
Following your line of thought, an ideal world would be one in which nobody ever actually uses ("consumes") anything, and so nobody ever gets any real direct value (use value) from anything, and humans only exist for the purpose of generating some kind of abstract "wealth" that nobody will ever enjoy. That is completely backward.
The ultimate thing of value is happiness, enjoyment, human flourishing. That requires that humans have their material needs met, that they be spared from hunger and pain and other kinds of suffering. Everything we produce is toward that end, and its usefulness toward that end is what makes it valuable. Wealth is nothing but an accumulation of things of value, which again are valuable because someone can eventually enjoy the use of them, or as you would call it, "consume" them. Wealth is potential consumption, stored future use value. The point is, as you say, to make people wealthier; but only because that enables greater consumption.
Delayed gratification so as to increase total gratification over time is an important practical strategy to employ, which is what real investment boils down to: spending some resources not directly on enjoyable things but on producing even more things to enjoy in the future. But that is still ultimately SPENDING, just on something other than a finished good or service. Wealth just sitting around not being spent is no wealth at all, until it gets spent; the only point in having accrued wealth is to ensure that your spending of it, and thus you enjoyment of it, which again is what gives it value to begin with, can continue uninterrupted despite irregularities of income; like having stores of food so you can continue eating despite a bad season, in an agrarian society.
But more to the point at hand, wealth that is being not only horded unused but employed as leverage just to accumulate more wealth from others who already have less wealth is actually of NEGATIVE real value, and that is what rent (including interest) is. Alice has more stuff than she herself is using; so she is getting no value from the excess stuff. Bob doesn't have enough stuff for his use; he would get value from it if he could have it. But rather than trade her useless excess stuff to Bob in exchange for something that is of use to her, like his labor, she lets Bob use it only temporarily, in exchange for a permant fee. At the end of the transaction, Alice who started off with more wealth now has even more wealth, and Bob who started off with less now has even less. So Bob still needs to borrow and Alice still has excess to lend and the process repeats and Alice gets even more wealth that is useless and of no real value to her, while Bob continues to lose real value to her. Of course Bob needs income to fund this process so he ends up trading his labor to Alice anyway, which she pays for out of the money she makes off Bob in exchange for nothing, with the net result that Alice get perpetual free labor from Bob, just because she started with more wealth than him.
Of course in the real world there are more than two people involved, but as classes the Bobs of the world still end up working for the Alices so as to get money with which to pay the Alices to temporarily borrow their useless excess and so on the whole the real useful wealth still gets sucked out of the Bobs into the black hole of useless excess for the Alices, destroying real wealth in the process. This is not at all investment along the lines of Alice paying Bob and Charles (money which they will spend on necessary consumption) to jointly produce something more valuable than what she had to pay them both and keeping that difference for her efforts, i.e. investing in a business venture. This is just pure parasitism that breaks all the expected positive results of a free market, which oughtn't occur at all, and if taxing it discourages it then all the better.
That is another reason why my tax on rent and interest is good: it discourages accumulating wealth beyond the point that it's directly useful to you (i.e. buying stuff for its use value, not as an investment), so if you still have income and nothing more you need to save up for, instead of hanging onto that money so that it will make you even more money for nothing, there's no point but to spend it, on paying people to do things you want since you've got all of the stuff that you want already, which increases other peoples' employment and thus income, naturally redistributing wealth from those who have it to those who lack it as a naive free market theory would expect. It's the mechanism of rent and interest that breaks that expected behavior, so until we can get rid of that mechanism entirely, counteracting by making it bear all the tax burden helps a little at least.
What we need to do is somewhere in between: tax income from wealth, minus expenses on lack of wealth. That is to say, tax based on your borrower/lender (including renter/landlord) status. If you're getting free money just from already having money, you get taxed for that; meanwhile if you're paying money just because you lack money (like because you don't own a home, and you can't exist nowhere, and wherever you do exist someone is going to charge you for that privilege), that counts against your taxable income. You're free to make whatever money you can make from your own labor and to save as much of that as is personally useful to you but as soon as you start turning your accrued wealth toward generating an unearned income they you get hit with taxes.
good advice for the millions of people born and raised in expensive places. just uproot your entire life and move to what may as well be a different country.
Or you know, people were born and raised and schooled and have all their family and friends and careers in a place and just would like to not be forced out of it. Like the 30 million or so people, 10% of Americans, who were born in California where the average income may be 20% higher but the average home price is 200% higher. Those tens of millions of people should all just move so far away it may as well be another country -- just like all the poor in the UK should all move to Russia where they can afford to live, right? Population sizes, areas, and distances there are all comparable to California vs midwest.
If people have to give up basic amenities to pay for video games, then they cannot really afford the video games. And if they don't have to give up the basic amenities to pay for video games, then it isn't a BASIC income.
The point is that the cost of a video game is noise lost in the cost of something like rent. Basic amenities don't cost a strict fixed amount that's exactly the same for every person at all times that a basic income can pay out exactly. It needs to pay out something in the ballpark of around what basic amenities cost with enough margin for error that people aren't constantly finding themselves one of today's unlucky fraction who end up not eating or out on the street, and the cost of a video game is a mere blade of grass on the edge of that ballpark, easily covered within the other end of that margin. You're doing the equivalent of complaining that they can afford to put salt on their food, the luxury! when the cost of salt is absolutely trivial next to the cost of the food.
Not to people living on UBI, and not to a very large number of people today. You find it useful, I find it useful, but like is not need.
Unless you want people living on UBI to be trapped forever living on UBI, they need to be able to apply for jobs and otherwise avail themselves of various forms of communication that are increasingly done over the internet. The point of an UBI is not to have a terrafoam box that you stuff all the world's poor into and wait for them to die off, it's a safety net to keep anyone from falling completely through the cracks, and for it to function as such, people caught in the net need the means to start climbing out of it if they try. If you only pay enough for burlap sacks of dry rice and beans and the sacks also have to double as their clothes, you're going to have a perpetual underclass with no hope of ever making something of their lives, completely opposite the point of an UBI.
Video games and the internet are way cheaper than a lot of basic amenities that an UBI would have to provide enough to cover. (Also, internet is basically a necessary utility in the modern age).
The median personal income for the united states is approximately $25k. The mean personal income is closer to $50k but that's not the kind of average people usually use in statistics like this because it is skewed way upward by the concentration of income at the top. The median american household income is also around $50k but the median household also has about two people in it so of course that is twice the personal income, there are twice the persons. And I'm not saying making $50k makes you upper class, just that that is far from a low income statistically. Owning multiple homes (somehow, despite the income you deride as low) is what makes you upper class. Raw income is irrelevant to class; borrower/lender or renter/rentier status is what matters. Do you have so much wealth that you can make money letting others use it, or do you have so little that you have to pay to use others'? That is what matters.
If you are mortgaging then you have lower class borrower status partly cancelling out your upper class rentier status. Your renter status pulls your overall class down too. But if on the whole you are making more from people paying to borrow your capital than you are paying to borrow others', that puts you on the upper side of the class line. Raw income does not define class because it may be coming at the expense of great sacrifice (of time and energy and opportunity, or of goods already owned) and it may largely go to providing other people free income that spares them such sacrifice, that is, in paying rents or interest. Class is determined more by wealth than income, by the capital that you own or not, and consequently what you have to borrow or rent or can afford to lend or rent out. You personally have a complex mix or borrowing, renting, and renting out going on, but if on the whole you are making more from renting out than you pay in interest and rent then you are upper class. And it sound like you at least are aiming for that status if you don't have it already.
$50k is twice the average American's income. I make around that much, and it's going to be a lifelong struggle to ever own a FIRST home before I die. That you've apparently bought at least four homes (your own, the rental, the one you flipped, and the one that burned down) makes you spectacularly rich beyond my wildest dreams, and I'M already spectacularly rich by most Americans' standards. Like someone else in this thread already said, I can easily afford anything I want -- except a house. If you've got several, you are rich, period.
Rent in general does this same thing already. People buy up properties just to rent them out which forces home prices up which makes it harder for people to buy and forces them to rent from the people who started that cycle by buying up the housing to rent it out.
That exact mechanism, generalized to all capital besides just real estate, is exactly what causes the runaway concentration of wealth that breaks a truly free market and turns it into capitalism.
If you own property and make money from renting that property out to others you are not middle class, you are upper class, by any measure.
The proper middle class barely own property enough to not have to borrow it from others.
The statistical middle class can only dream of such luxury as not borrowing housing, never mind lending it.