As George Bernard Shaw famously and pithily put it:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Are you suggesting that we merely resign ourselves to that fact borders are rights-free zones, even if that's not the way the world ought to work? In that case, you're a coward.
Or are you suggesting that our rights ought not to apply at the border for some a priori reason? Can that reason distinguish between rights at borders and rights inside a country? Or better searches and arbitrary detentions? The kind of reasoning that leads someone to believe arbitrary searches are acceptable inevitably leads him down the path to endorsing a nightmare police state.
If that's you, then you're an enemy of modern civilization.
Yes, there's some multiplier effect even for luxury goods. But you get more bang for your buck with ordinary goods, as both experience and honest theorizing.
Oh, they may be staying in the US (for now), but they are fleeing in droves from NY and CA to states like Fl and TX where there is no state income tax. It's good for them and their bank account.
If taxation were the sole criterion for the movement of people, wealthy or not, you'd expect to see a migration to Mississippi and Alabama. Because we don't, and reality disagrees with the predictions made by your theory, it is your theory, reality, that is flawed.
The sun-belt migration is a lot more complex than you're making it out to be. It's not just the rich: everyone is moving. Consider New England, or the rust belt (where I live): these areas have been shedding people for years. And they're moving to the sun belt, because that's where the jobs and money are. And to some extent, the jobs and money are there because the jobs and money are there. It's a positive feedback cycle.
But the cycle had to start for some reason: regions within a country experience the same macroeconomic effects that sovereign nations do. They "import" and "export". The difference is that regions within a country can't compensate to changes in demand for exports by letting their currencies appreciate or depreciate: they all use the same currency.
If currency can't respond to pressure, then jobs must. Regions within a country that specialize in goods that decline in demand lose jobs and people until a new equilibrium is reached. The same dynamic affects the Eurozone: people move from Buffalo to Charlotte for the same reason they move from Madrid to Frankfurt.
You're looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of asking why the government deserves the money, why not ask why the rich do?
What makes any tax morally defensible? Taxation is part of the social contract that lies at the heart of every civilized democracy. It takes from the many for the collective benefit of the many. If you dispute the fundamental justifiability of taxation, than we have no argument.
You don't? Okay, then we agree: taxation is justifiable.
Now, it's only fair that the tax burden be fair. Otherwise, it wouldn't be justifiable for one person to experience all the pain while others didn't have to do anything. Spreading the tax burden approximately equally is important for giving a system legitimacy, and we'd be right to oppose a system that didn't.
The fallacy here is to assume that the "pain" of paying taxes is a linear function of income. That's not true. To someone who's very poor and struggling to eat, paying any amount at all would be a hardship. So we don't ask these people to pay any taxes, because anything at all would be too much pain.
Then we have other, normal people, who go to work. Here, the "pain" is paying taxes has a lot to do with how much they make. But as they make more and more money, they find it easier to pay a strictly proportional tax. That is, as incomes increase, the "pain" of paying taxes diminishes. It hurts less because you have more money in the first place, even after taxes.
But that's not fair. Remember, a legitimate system has to spread the "pain" equally. The solution is to increase the percentage of tax paid as a taxpayer becomes wealthier. We call it "progressive taxation".
Now, I might have lost you here. If you reject the fundamental idea of progressive taxation, there's no reaching you. All I can say is that it's worked very well for a long time, and that it's fundamentally and socially fair.
If you're still reading, you agree with me (and civilization) in that a progressive income tax is a good thing. Now let's talk about the very wealthy. They have so much money that you can increase the tax rate a lot before they feel any pain. They'll laugh at your thousands while looking at their millions.
So the solution is to do exactly that: increase their tax rate enough for their lifestyle to be burdened by taxation to the same degree everyone else's is, that is, to feel the same amount of pain. Thus, at the high end of the income scale, progressive taxation should be very high, and asymptotically approach 100%.
That's why high progressive taxation is fundamentally fair. For the rich to not pay these taxes is shirking their part of the social contract.
You still don't explain why the government would spend the balance of that 6 million better than I would, or indeed why the government would be better run if it had it.
Good question. It's because the rich spend the money on luxury goods that are inferior (from a utilitarian perspective, because they benefit only a few people) to social benefits (which are very useful to everyone). Furthermore, luxury goods have a lower multiplier effect, which means the money spent on them recirculates less, and causes less economic activity.
And that's money that's actually "spent". Most of it isn't, and is instead invested, usually in the kind of bubble we've seen lately. That money is written off when these bubble pop, thus making sure the economic value of that money never made it into the real economy. Yes, investment can be a good thing, but when there are too many dollars chasing too few assets, bubbles result, and bubbles always pop. It's like flaring off otherwise-useful natural gas: it's both wasteful and harmful.
Actual experience of trying out tax rates like that suggests that it is a seriously bad idea - just ask any successful Briton form the 1970s, or any Argentinian farmer today.
We had tax rates that high in the 1960s and 1970s, yet we didn't suffer. Argentina's economic problems had more to do with a flawed industrial policy, an ossified political structure, and punishing tariffs on imports from other first-world nations.
Furthermore, there are plenty of success stories. A whole continent full of them, in fact:
Strange to say, however, what everyone knows isn't true. Europe has its economic troubles; who doesn't? But the story you hear all the time -- of a stagnant economy in which high taxes and generous social benefits have undermined incentives, stalling growth and innovation -- bears little resemblance to the surprisingly positive facts. The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.
Our taxes, while too low, aren't the lowest in the world. Why do so many people still live here, especially in higher-tax states like New York, then? According to your theory, the rich should have already left.
We can enact laws, as other countries have, to restrict cross-border movement of capital.
Even if the wealthy do leave, their capital goods must remain behind, where they can be used by others. That is, in my book, they can go ahead and leave. If Steve Jobs were to move to the island of Jersey, let's say, Apple would still be here.
The Chinese would be wiping out their own assets if they did as you suggest, and therefore they won't do it. True, it's a kind of financial cold war, but one without the radiological fallout if it goes wrong.
But do you think it's beyond them to, say, cause a few food riots here and there just to remind us who holds the reins?
One of the few things we still make here is food. Lots and lots and lots and lots of food that we export all over the world. Food riots will be the least of our problems.
I prepared a response about the follies of corruption and then realized you proposed a 90% (!!!) tax. Holy punishment for success, that's awesome.
You're arguing that a reward of $5 million per year isn't enough? What on earth would someone be motivated to do at $6 million per year that he won't do at $5 million?
Please, punish me with a paltry salary of $5 million per year!
(By the way: I'm talking about people (the natural kind) here. Obviously, corporations and LLCs can have higher revenue.)
People like you voted for Nader and inflicted Bush the Younger on yourselves, our country, and the world. As the first decade of the 21st century has tragically demonstrated, the parties aren't the same.
Voting for a third party does nothing with out simple first-past-the-post voting scheme. Any scenario other than a two party system is unstable, and will eventually decay to that. Every new political party in the United States has been a rebranding of one of the previous two.
I'd love to switch to an alternative scheme. Most other democracies are parliamentary, and we probably made the wrong decision back in the 18th century. But changing isn't very likely, so we're stuck with our current system.
That means that the only way to effect change is to subvert one of the political parties. The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
But you see, that involves work. It's much easier to decry the system than to fix our country.
Half the time people cry out for more regulation, there already is regulation in place. The problem is the very entity you want to enact regulations, is inept, certainly fallible
"Inept" isn't the word I'd use: instead, I'd say the regulators have been captured by powerful industry lobbies. They're certainly fallible too, in the sense that we're all human and all corruptible.
This debacle does not constitute evidence that regulation doesn't work. On the contrary, it's evidence that our regulatory system has been co-opted by the industry it was meant to regulate, and deep down, that's due to our extreme inequity of wealth in this country distorting our political process.
End campaign contributions. Institute reasonable top-end incoming taxes, like 90% above $5 million. Break up huge corporations.
Having done that, our regulatory problems will disappear on their own, because government will again work for the people.
See, to anti-nuclear ideologues, one atom of a radioactive substance is too much. If so much as an irradiated paper clip leaves the clean room, that's a NUCLEAR MELTDOWN and proof that "big nuclear" is dangerous and not be trusted (as if "big" were synonymous with "evil").
No, thanks. I'll take the cheap, clean, endless supply of nuclear power over promises of wind and solar that will fail and leave us choking on coal.
Aside from cost, public opinion is the real factor holding back exactly what you describe. It's a total case of NIMBY. Not in my back yard. "Nobody" wants a nuclear anything anywhere near them. Nuclear bad. Radiation bad. Eeeeevil.
Public opinion is the cost problem: the major difficulty in building a new nuclear plant isn't the actual construction, but fighting the inevitable and endless stream of lawsuits. It's ridiculous.
The trade may be free, but it's sure as hell not fair:
China has no environmental or labor standards. It's not fair to expect our domestic industries to compete against theirs when we have to clean up after ourselves. Here, we have elections. There, if you complain about the local river turning green and your kids' hair falling out, you get disappeared.
China has been manipulating its currency, the renminbi, to subsidize its exports and cost us millions of jobs.
Third, the unmitigated, unregulated, and unabashed greed exhibited by Chinese manufacturers and their American partners has not only poisoned our economy with a cavalcade of cheap crap, but put the lives and well-being of our pets, our children, and ourselves in danger.
It's time to place heavy tariffs on Chinese imports until they play by the same rules as the rest of the civilized world. We shouldn't do business with Dickenonsian nightmare states.
gcc's optimizer is pretty good, actually, and the only compiler that seems to beat it is icc, and then not by much. If anything, gcc should have a more profound effect on OS X than on Linux since Apple uses an older version of the compiler (4.2) to avoid the GPLv3, while Linux distributions can use the latest and greatest.
But since when have facts mattered to a troll like you?
Slashdot Mirror
As George Bernard Shaw famously and pithily put it:
Don't confuse is and ought.
Are you suggesting that we merely resign ourselves to that fact borders are rights-free zones, even if that's not the way the world ought to work? In that case, you're a coward.
Or are you suggesting that our rights ought not to apply at the border for some a priori reason? Can that reason distinguish between rights at borders and rights inside a country? Or better searches and arbitrary detentions? The kind of reasoning that leads someone to believe arbitrary searches are acceptable inevitably leads him down the path to endorsing a nightmare police state.
If that's you, then you're an enemy of modern civilization.
So which is it?
How many other exceptions do you plan to make?
Just as I was saying, just use AES, and never roll your own cryptography.
That link is interesting. Thanks.
Children. :-)
Supply side economics doesn't work.
Yes, there's some multiplier effect even for luxury goods. But you get more bang for your buck with ordinary goods, as both experience and honest theorizing.
Well-said. Thank you.
If taxation were the sole criterion for the movement of people, wealthy or not, you'd expect to see a migration to Mississippi and Alabama. Because we don't, and reality disagrees with the predictions made by your theory, it is your theory, reality, that is flawed.
The sun-belt migration is a lot more complex than you're making it out to be. It's not just the rich: everyone is moving. Consider New England, or the rust belt (where I live): these areas have been shedding people for years. And they're moving to the sun belt, because that's where the jobs and money are. And to some extent, the jobs and money are there because the jobs and money are there. It's a positive feedback cycle.
But the cycle had to start for some reason: regions within a country experience the same macroeconomic effects that sovereign nations do. They "import" and "export". The difference is that regions within a country can't compensate to changes in demand for exports by letting their currencies appreciate or depreciate: they all use the same currency.
If currency can't respond to pressure, then jobs must. Regions within a country that specialize in goods that decline in demand lose jobs and people until a new equilibrium is reached. The same dynamic affects the Eurozone: people move from Buffalo to Charlotte for the same reason they move from Madrid to Frankfurt.
See my comment here.
You're looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of asking why the government deserves the money, why not ask why the rich do?
What makes any tax morally defensible? Taxation is part of the social contract that lies at the heart of every civilized democracy. It takes from the many for the collective benefit of the many. If you dispute the fundamental justifiability of taxation, than we have no argument.
You don't? Okay, then we agree: taxation is justifiable.
Now, it's only fair that the tax burden be fair. Otherwise, it wouldn't be justifiable for one person to experience all the pain while others didn't have to do anything. Spreading the tax burden approximately equally is important for giving a system legitimacy, and we'd be right to oppose a system that didn't.
The fallacy here is to assume that the "pain" of paying taxes is a linear function of income. That's not true. To someone who's very poor and struggling to eat, paying any amount at all would be a hardship. So we don't ask these people to pay any taxes, because anything at all would be too much pain.
Then we have other, normal people, who go to work. Here, the "pain" is paying taxes has a lot to do with how much they make. But as they make more and more money, they find it easier to pay a strictly proportional tax. That is, as incomes increase, the "pain" of paying taxes diminishes. It hurts less because you have more money in the first place, even after taxes.
But that's not fair. Remember, a legitimate system has to spread the "pain" equally. The solution is to increase the percentage of tax paid as a taxpayer becomes wealthier. We call it "progressive taxation".
Now, I might have lost you here. If you reject the fundamental idea of progressive taxation, there's no reaching you. All I can say is that it's worked very well for a long time, and that it's fundamentally and socially fair.
If you're still reading, you agree with me (and civilization) in that a progressive income tax is a good thing. Now let's talk about the very wealthy. They have so much money that you can increase the tax rate a lot before they feel any pain. They'll laugh at your thousands while looking at their millions.
So the solution is to do exactly that: increase their tax rate enough for their lifestyle to be burdened by taxation to the same degree everyone else's is, that is, to feel the same amount of pain. Thus, at the high end of the income scale, progressive taxation should be very high, and asymptotically approach 100%.
That's why high progressive taxation is fundamentally fair. For the rich to not pay these taxes is shirking their part of the social contract.
Good question. It's because the rich spend the money on luxury goods that are inferior (from a utilitarian perspective, because they benefit only a few people) to social benefits (which are very useful to everyone). Furthermore, luxury goods have a lower multiplier effect, which means the money spent on them recirculates less, and causes less economic activity.
And that's money that's actually "spent". Most of it isn't, and is instead invested, usually in the kind of bubble we've seen lately. That money is written off when these bubble pop, thus making sure the economic value of that money never made it into the real economy. Yes, investment can be a good thing, but when there are too many dollars chasing too few assets, bubbles result, and bubbles always pop. It's like flaring off otherwise-useful natural gas: it's both wasteful and harmful.
We had tax rates that high in the 1960s and 1970s, yet we didn't suffer. Argentina's economic problems had more to do with a flawed industrial policy, an ossified political structure, and punishing tariffs on imports from other first-world nations.
Furthermore, there are plenty of success stories. A whole continent full of them, in fact:
Capital flight isn't actually a problem.
No.
You clearly have no idea how a graduated income tax even works. Do you even pay taxes?
Let's suppose we have a three-tier system: 10% on income of $0-$50,000, 40% on income from $50,000 - $5 million, and 90% above $5 million.
Now let's say you're a banker who's paid $6 million per year.
10% on the first $50,000 = $5,000
40% on $50,000 through $5 million = $198,000
90% on $5 million through $6 million = $900,000
Total tax burden: $2,885,000, or 48%
Take-home income: $3,115,000
That's enough for anyone.
Of course, in the real world, we have more taxation tiers (or "brackets") with finer graduations, but you get the point.
The Chinese would be wiping out their own assets if they did as you suggest, and therefore they won't do it. True, it's a kind of financial cold war, but one without the radiological fallout if it goes wrong.
One of the few things we still make here is food. Lots and lots and lots and lots of food that we export all over the world. Food riots will be the least of our problems.
You're arguing that a reward of $5 million per year isn't enough? What on earth would someone be motivated to do at $6 million per year that he won't do at $5 million?
Please, punish me with a paltry salary of $5 million per year!
(By the way: I'm talking about people (the natural kind) here. Obviously, corporations and LLCs can have higher revenue.)
"When you owe the bank $10,000 and can't pay, you have a problem. When you owe the bank $10,000,000,000 and can't pay, the bank has a problem."
People like you voted for Nader and inflicted Bush the Younger on yourselves, our country, and the world. As the first decade of the 21st century has tragically demonstrated, the parties aren't the same.
Voting for a third party does nothing with out simple first-past-the-post voting scheme. Any scenario other than a two party system is unstable, and will eventually decay to that. Every new political party in the United States has been a rebranding of one of the previous two.
I'd love to switch to an alternative scheme. Most other democracies are parliamentary, and we probably made the wrong decision back in the 18th century. But changing isn't very likely, so we're stuck with our current system.
That means that the only way to effect change is to subvert one of the political parties. The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
But you see, that involves work. It's much easier to decry the system than to fix our country.
"Inept" isn't the word I'd use: instead, I'd say the regulators have been captured by powerful industry lobbies. They're certainly fallible too, in the sense that we're all human and all corruptible.
This debacle does not constitute evidence that regulation doesn't work. On the contrary, it's evidence that our regulatory system has been co-opted by the industry it was meant to regulate, and deep down, that's due to our extreme inequity of wealth in this country distorting our political process.
End campaign contributions. Institute reasonable top-end incoming taxes, like 90% above $5 million. Break up huge corporations.
Having done that, our regulatory problems will disappear on their own, because government will again work for the people.
See, to anti-nuclear ideologues, one atom of a radioactive substance is too much. If so much as an irradiated paper clip leaves the clean room, that's a NUCLEAR MELTDOWN and proof that "big nuclear" is dangerous and not be trusted (as if "big" were synonymous with "evil").
No, thanks. I'll take the cheap, clean, endless supply of nuclear power over promises of wind and solar that will fail and leave us choking on coal.
Public opinion is the cost problem: the major difficulty in building a new nuclear plant isn't the actual construction, but fighting the inevitable and endless stream of lawsuits. It's ridiculous.
The trade may be free, but it's sure as hell not fair:
It's time to place heavy tariffs on Chinese imports until they play by the same rules as the rest of the civilized world. We shouldn't do business with Dickenonsian nightmare states.
Ah, the last refuge of ideologues.
More lies out of you, huh?
gcc's optimizer is pretty good, actually, and the only compiler that seems to beat it is icc, and then not by much. If anything, gcc should have a more profound effect on OS X than on Linux since Apple uses an older version of the compiler (4.2) to avoid the GPLv3, while Linux distributions can use the latest and greatest.
But since when have facts mattered to a troll like you?