Um, actually, the value of Bitcoin is determined by a small group of "wealthy" oligarchs
Incorrect. You're comparing the market fluctuations caused by those that own significant percentages of a commodity to the ability of a handful of appointed individuals to determine how much of the commodity actually exists in the market. It's not even close to the same thing. There is no one at all that can expand or shrink the total number of Bitcoins - it's a fixed number. So its value is completely determined by the market, even if there are some greater market influence than others.
Ah, but it's in the terms of service. And those have been upheld by the courts.
Which means people who lost money in this are out of luck, because all they really claim is they'll do their best effort but otherwise make no guarantees about their ability to do anything.
To be fair, you'll see similar language when you sign up for a US bank account with any bank that stores Federal Reserve Notes and their electronic versions for you. The only difference is the FRN banks pay for "insurance" with the FDIC. If anything happens to your deposits (up to a certain limit), then the FDIC insurance pays out to cover it.
The Bitcoin exchanges could set up the same kind of system themselves, and there is not need for it to be a government-run insurance system. The FDIC is a corporation funded entirely by private banks.
Dependable banks pretty much require somebody large enough backing them. That is generally governments who can print money.
What good is it to have "dependable banks" when the only thing they have is wholly undependable fiat currency? Petro-dollars are not sustainable. Maybe Bitcoin isn't, either, but at least its value isn't determined by a small group of wealthy oligarchs.
What I'd like to know is, why does PETA hate chickens so much? You don't have to be a genius to foresee what will happen to the chicken species if we abandon them as a food source.
That said, being able to grow slabs of chicken breast in a nutrient bath at home would be pretty sweet, if it could be done.
If you're not vegan, chickens are one of the most efficient ways of producing your own food. They don't need a lot of food, they can eat whatever they find in a pasture. They'll start producing eggs and do so for years (you don't even need a rooster), it's an excellent source of protein. You can keep two or three in a pretty small space as long as you can supplement their diet, and they'll still help keep the insect population down, and you'll have eggs every day.
So there is really no need for artificial chicken meat. When the chicken is too old to produce eggs, you eat it.
Typically liberal fallacy. You claim, because I want lower taxes, that I want NO taxes. Wrong. I want necessary taxes, minimum waste, minimum government intrusion where it should not intrude.
Excellent, so you agree then we should pull all our troops out of Afghanistan, ASAP, as well as getting our mitts out of Somalia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, etc? We shouldn't be intruding in other people's business, should we? We could easily close 500+ military bases and just, well... stop intruding in other people's business around the world, let them figure it out for themselves.
Sounds like a good start to me. But that's not what the elitist pricks in Washington typically do. Defense contractors are their wealthy friends, while soldiers and sailors are powerless fodder. So they would just shift the money around, cut the VA first, military pensions and salaries next (oh, wait.. they've already started that), make sure that Lockeed and Boeing keep making jets and Northrop Grumman keeps making ships, and continue racking up as much debt as they do now.
Given that, why is the POTUS parroting these myths? Is he planning to mandate higher wages for women and quotas when employers are unwilling to hire these more expensive employees or what?
No, it's pure politics. He's part of the Dem team, and they are currently having a lot of successes using social issues to divide the electorate. As long as they can keep the people thinking the other team is conducting a "war on women" and would support policies to oppress the female gender, they can get people to vote for them. Just because he doesn't have another election, doesn't mean he can't see the benefits in having more of his own "team members" in congress.
Where the hell are you working/hanging out where it's ok for *men* to be physically attacked?
Are you seriously going to pretend that punching a woman in anger is no more taboo in modern Western society than punching another man? Seriously?
Maybe not, but in our culture it is typically portrayed as perfectly acceptable for a woman to slap a man, or physically attack him in other ways (throwing drinks, etc.). There are really good, legitimate reasons for this double-standard, based on average strength / power differences, so I'm not necessarily against this. It is never considered acceptable for a man that feels insulted to respond with a physical attack, so to be fair it should not be considered acceptable for a woman to do so, either.
This has bad, terrible, horrible idea written all over it.
Gee, thanks Mr. Buffett. All the objections you have raised are addressed pretty clearly in this paper. It's fair, workable, can be revenue neutral, provides the right incentives instead of the wrong ones, and would clear out a lot of complexity and reduce cheating.
Teaching jobs have been round for longer than virtually any other type of job besides soldiering and entertaining soldiers while prone. So you might want to reconsider your half witted comment.
Sure they have, but how long have teachers been paid such a proportion from deficit spending? How long have experienced people with Masters and PhD degrees been able to earn MORE teaching than working in their field?
As for your "peer reviewed" links... the first is to a blog called "Hockey Schtick" -- 'nuff said.
Typical warmist ad hominem BS. The article has references to the peer-reviewed papers it quotes.
Next up is a link to a paper about something vaguely climate-related, but which has no direct bearing on the rather nebulous "point" you claim it debunks:
Reading comprehension, maybe? The paper points out that while annual variations in the jet stream make it seem stable, multi-decadal variations are significant, and historically occur with regularity. The paper PREDICTED the dips in the arctic vortex we've seen this winter, while climate change models did NOT.
Your third link leads to a PDF that I can't even open
It's a 2010 paper that does the same thing as the previous paper, showing the variations in the polar vortices like we experienced this year, as a phenomenon that has occured all through the Holocene and even before.
I've just spent 20 minutes perusing the links you've provided. Thus far, I'm not terribly impressed. Tell you what... I'll spend an hour reading/viewing whatever source(s) you want, and in exchange, you spend an hour with the video series in my post above.
Deal?
I post links to peer-reviewed scientific research papers and excerpts of peer-reviewed science (with links to the original papers), and you want me to watch a bunch of propaganda videos headlined by the discredited hypocrite Al Gore?
Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand?
Probably just as much as the global warming alarmists do, seeing as they predicted the opposite result before it happened, but of course are now claiming that they knew all along that this was a possibility. That assertion has been thoroughly debunked, by many actual scientists, but that doesn't stop anti-science people like you from making your specious claims to support your ideological agenda.
Prepare to get roundly vilified for your reasonable approach to climate change. The Priests of AGW don't take kindly to heretical thinking such as reason and logic.
All of those rates are lower than they were last year, suggesting that demand is picking up.
It may be suggested, but a closer look tells a different story. Those numbers are based on unemployment rolls. Congress ended the EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) on December 31, so that took about 5 million people off the list. Many other long-term unemployed people either gave up looking or exhausted regular benefits (which is all that's left). So the real story is not that there are more jobs, but less people looking.
STEM jobs aren't just engineering jobs. Anectodal evidence (my wife has a graduate degree in microbiology) suggests that there aren't many open positions for those with considerable education in other science fields. My wife was, at one point, offered $13.50 an hour to be a lab tech and she was in a PhD program at a prestigious university. The higher paying jobs that were available? Teaching. She's now a contract adjunct professor at several local colleges and works about 3 days out of the week. She makes more teaching than she would actually practicing in her field (despite years of experience).
Yep, that's because those jobs are supported by deficit spending. It comes either from government support of education or tuition paid by student loans. It's not in any way sustainable in the long term.
So then you found why your wealth tax doesn't work. Either your wealth tax becomes an income tax because in order to keep that farm they need to keep earning income to cover the cost of paying the tax, or the farm is sold off.
Bzzzt! A wealth tax would replace the byzantine income tax. And it wouldn't be the outrageous rates of inheritance tax, it would be like.5 - 1%. If you're earning less than a 1% on your farm, you're going to lose it before long, anyway. Besides, most farms have plenty of loans against them, which for a wealth tax would offset the value of the property. We would want to eliminate the Jon Bon Jovi farmer tax loophole, and others like it, but real farmers will be fine.
I'm not sure why so many people are against this idea. Unless they've simply been convinced by the Buffets and Rothschilds that it's somehow a bad thing.
Also, I'm not sure you understand how tax rates work. If the tax rate is 10% on $0 - $45, and 20% on $45 - infinity, and my wage is $46/hour, do you realize that my effective tax rate is still less than 10.22% ($4.70), and not 20%?
Well this is hopeless, you can't even do taxes. That's not how it works. Apparently you don't, either.
Why would an inheritance tax, which tends to be a lighter tax burden then a wealth tax, be more destructive?
Inheritance tax is not a lighter burden - it's between 18% and 40% for the federal tax, and several states add additional tax amounts on top of that.
Take a look at California, Prop 13, and its urban sprawl. Here higher property tax does reduce property development and rational land use.
That's because it's designed to do that, as part of the Agenda 21 movement to move human habitation into smaller, more dense areas.
Wealth taxes discourage people from investing in business.
False. There is no basis for this assertion whatsoever.
Inherence and property tax tend to be less distortive because there are fewer dodges that one can do - In my opinion. If you have any information on why it is harder to dodge wealth taxes I would like to hear about them
Inheritance and property tax are, in fact, a form of wealth tax. People dodge income taxes all the time, especially people at the high end that can afford tax attorneys. It's an extremely complicated code with so many loopholes not even IRS agents can come up with consistent answers to many questions (this has been demonstrated many times). So part of the benefit is a cleaner, fairer, and less complex tax code. So, yes, more difficult to "dodge". Most people have investments managed by banks, insurance companies, and investment houses. The asset values are very clear and consistently maintained. You could even eliminate arbitrary items like "household goods" - it wouldn't make a significant difference in revenue.
If a farm or "small business" is worth more than $2M after liabilities, I'm not crying for the family.
Then you can cry for the people that used to buy food from the sustainable, organic family farm down the road, now that it's owned by a big corporate Monsanto customer.
I just can't begin to understand the logic that leads to this line of thinking. Yes, earn more money, pay more taxes, that's how percentages work. But you also keep more money.
Actually, you keep less. The CBO has already calculated that about 2 million people will choose to not work or work less due to Obamacare credits for health care subsidies. Food stamp and other entitlement programs do the same thing. On the other end, because the income tax is progressive, if you earn over a certain amount then your tax rate goes up. Sometimes people will forego earning overtime that would put them into the next tax bracket - it's not worth it to them because of diminishing returns.
If you earn $45 / hour, it means you really only earn $45 / hour for a little over 3 weeks. Then you earn $40.50 for the next four months. After that, you'll only be making $33.75 / hour. If your state or local government charges an income tax too, then your rate is even less, and most take more as you earn more. And if you want to work more than 8 hours a day 5 days a week, your rate will start dropping even faster. At some point, you decide it's not worth it.
There's no surprise about this feature of the income tax. It's pretty basic economics.
How do you figure that? It's a great idea, it would completely change the dynamic. Many countries already have a wealth tax that works, and property taxes (a form of wealth tax) doesn't cause a "tax drag" that prevents people from buying homes and commercial property.
An inheritance tax would be much better if you wanted to go down this road.
Inheritance taxes are unnecessarily punitive, they are so high they often cause farms and family businesses to be sold off to generate money for the tax payments, and even at that they don't generate enough revenue to be significant. Because you're waiting for somebody to die to take their stuff, and smart (and very wealthy) people find ways to avoid them entirely.
explain to me why taxing ONLY somebody's 'wealth' would eliminate the incentive to hoard it.
Right now, since you have a significant tax liability for income, but not for idle money, people leave their money idle, or they store it somewhere considered "safe" like treasury bonds, which earn low rates (less than 1% for under 5 year notes). If income is not being taxed, but all idle money will be, a rational actor would prefer to take a higher risk with their money, and hope for a better return.
I don't think you've thought this through.
I have, as have many other folks. You should give it a try, rather than just hammering out the first snarky response you can come up with.
It may just be paper, but I've been successfully using it to purchase goods and services since I was five.
Well I don't know how old you are, but it will only buy about 15% of what it did would before it went full fiat in 1971. And that's based on the government's CPI, which really understates inflation by ignoring food and energy. But that's actually a good record for fiat money, which historically does not have a good record and is usually used for less time. The Weimar Mark is the most famous example of these epic failures, but there was also the Chinese Flying Money, the French Assignats, and Rome's Denarius (which lasted only because it was initially minted with mostly silver). So compared to the spectacular failures and economic devastation that fiat money has caused in the past, the US Federal Reserve Note's 15% value isn't as bad.
But, of course, it's really a Petro-dollar, provided value with treaties that require the vast majority of oil on the world market to trade in US Federal Reserve Notes. Some countries have made efforts to get around that by trading gold instead. When that gains momentum, the US currency will likely implode rather quickly.
There is no need for a cap. Instead, convert from the current system of taxing income to taxing wealth. It could be done with a very small rate, say around 1%, and still fund everything that the income tax does. It would solve a lot of problems, including Warren Buffet's supposed complaint about not being taxed at as high a rate as his secretary. It also eliminates the income tax incentives for people to be LESS productive, because the more income they earn, the more taxes they owe. Instead, it would eliminate much of the incentive for the very wealthy to hoard wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, actually, the value of Bitcoin is determined by a small group of "wealthy" oligarchs
Incorrect. You're comparing the market fluctuations caused by those that own significant percentages of a commodity to the ability of a handful of appointed individuals to determine how much of the commodity actually exists in the market. It's not even close to the same thing. There is no one at all that can expand or shrink the total number of Bitcoins - it's a fixed number. So its value is completely determined by the market, even if there are some greater market influence than others.
Ah, but it's in the terms of service. And those have been upheld by the courts.
Which means people who lost money in this are out of luck, because all they really claim is they'll do their best effort but otherwise make no guarantees about their ability to do anything.
To be fair, you'll see similar language when you sign up for a US bank account with any bank that stores Federal Reserve Notes and their electronic versions for you. The only difference is the FRN banks pay for "insurance" with the FDIC. If anything happens to your deposits (up to a certain limit), then the FDIC insurance pays out to cover it.
The Bitcoin exchanges could set up the same kind of system themselves, and there is not need for it to be a government-run insurance system. The FDIC is a corporation funded entirely by private banks.
Dependable banks pretty much require somebody large enough backing them. That is generally governments who can print money.
What good is it to have "dependable banks" when the only thing they have is wholly undependable fiat currency? Petro-dollars are not sustainable. Maybe Bitcoin isn't, either, but at least its value isn't determined by a small group of wealthy oligarchs.
What I'd like to know is, why does PETA hate chickens so much? You don't have to be a genius to foresee what will happen to the chicken species if we abandon them as a food source.
That said, being able to grow slabs of chicken breast in a nutrient bath at home would be pretty sweet, if it could be done.
If you're not vegan, chickens are one of the most efficient ways of producing your own food. They don't need a lot of food, they can eat whatever they find in a pasture. They'll start producing eggs and do so for years (you don't even need a rooster), it's an excellent source of protein. You can keep two or three in a pretty small space as long as you can supplement their diet, and they'll still help keep the insect population down, and you'll have eggs every day.
So there is really no need for artificial chicken meat. When the chicken is too old to produce eggs, you eat it.
Typically liberal fallacy. You claim, because I want lower taxes, that I want NO taxes. Wrong. I want necessary taxes, minimum waste, minimum government intrusion where it should not intrude.
Excellent, so you agree then we should pull all our troops out of Afghanistan, ASAP, as well as getting our mitts out of Somalia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, etc? We shouldn't be intruding in other people's business, should we? We could easily close 500+ military bases and just, well... stop intruding in other people's business around the world, let them figure it out for themselves.
Sounds like a good start to me. But that's not what the elitist pricks in Washington typically do. Defense contractors are their wealthy friends, while soldiers and sailors are powerless fodder. So they would just shift the money around, cut the VA first, military pensions and salaries next (oh, wait .. they've already started that), make sure that Lockeed and Boeing keep making jets and Northrop Grumman keeps making ships, and continue racking up as much debt as they do now.
Given that, why is the POTUS parroting these myths? Is he planning to mandate higher wages for women and quotas when employers are unwilling to hire these more expensive employees or what?
No, it's pure politics. He's part of the Dem team, and they are currently having a lot of successes using social issues to divide the electorate. As long as they can keep the people thinking the other team is conducting a "war on women" and would support policies to oppress the female gender, they can get people to vote for them. Just because he doesn't have another election, doesn't mean he can't see the benefits in having more of his own "team members" in congress.
Where the hell are you working/hanging out where it's ok for *men* to be physically attacked?
Are you seriously going to pretend that punching a woman in anger is no more taboo in modern Western society than punching another man? Seriously?
Maybe not, but in our culture it is typically portrayed as perfectly acceptable for a woman to slap a man, or physically attack him in other ways (throwing drinks, etc.). There are really good, legitimate reasons for this double-standard, based on average strength / power differences, so I'm not necessarily against this. It is never considered acceptable for a man that feels insulted to respond with a physical attack, so to be fair it should not be considered acceptable for a woman to do so, either.
So you tax the farm based on its value... Hmm, so what is that farm really worth?
Farms are taxed as property all the time. It's based on something called an "assessment". You might want to look it up. It's not complicated.
Income is a number, you can tax the number, the number is really not in dispute, you earn what you earn.
You haven't done taxes, have you? Most filings are riddled with inaccuracies due to all the complexities.
This has bad, terrible, horrible idea written all over it.
Gee, thanks Mr. Buffett. All the objections you have raised are addressed pretty clearly in this paper. It's fair, workable, can be revenue neutral, provides the right incentives instead of the wrong ones, and would clear out a lot of complexity and reduce cheating.
Teaching jobs have been round for longer than virtually any other type of job besides soldiering and entertaining soldiers while prone. So you might want to reconsider your half witted comment.
Sure they have, but how long have teachers been paid such a proportion from deficit spending? How long have experienced people with Masters and PhD degrees been able to earn MORE teaching than working in their field?
As for your "peer reviewed" links... the first is to a blog called "Hockey Schtick" -- 'nuff said.
Typical warmist ad hominem BS. The article has references to the peer-reviewed papers it quotes.
Next up is a link to a paper about something vaguely climate-related, but which has no direct bearing on the rather nebulous "point" you claim it debunks:
Reading comprehension, maybe? The paper points out that while annual variations in the jet stream make it seem stable, multi-decadal variations are significant, and historically occur with regularity. The paper PREDICTED the dips in the arctic vortex we've seen this winter, while climate change models did NOT.
Your third link leads to a PDF that I can't even open
It's a 2010 paper that does the same thing as the previous paper, showing the variations in the polar vortices like we experienced this year, as a phenomenon that has occured all through the Holocene and even before.
I've just spent 20 minutes perusing the links you've provided. Thus far, I'm not terribly impressed. Tell you what... I'll spend an hour reading/viewing whatever source(s) you want, and in exchange, you spend an hour with the video series in my post above.
Deal?
I post links to peer-reviewed scientific research papers and excerpts of peer-reviewed science (with links to the original papers), and you want me to watch a bunch of propaganda videos headlined by the discredited hypocrite Al Gore?
No deal
Seriously, what about the polar vortex don't you understand?
Probably just as much as the global warming alarmists do, seeing as they predicted the opposite result before it happened, but of course are now claiming that they knew all along that this was a possibility. That assertion has been thoroughly debunked, by many actual scientists, but that doesn't stop anti-science people like you from making your specious claims to support your ideological agenda.
Prepare to get roundly vilified for your reasonable approach to climate change. The Priests of AGW don't take kindly to heretical thinking such as reason and logic.
All of those rates are lower than they were last year, suggesting that demand is picking up.
It may be suggested, but a closer look tells a different story. Those numbers are based on unemployment rolls. Congress ended the EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) on December 31, so that took about 5 million people off the list. Many other long-term unemployed people either gave up looking or exhausted regular benefits (which is all that's left). So the real story is not that there are more jobs, but less people looking.
STEM jobs aren't just engineering jobs. Anectodal evidence (my wife has a graduate degree in microbiology) suggests that there aren't many open positions for those with considerable education in other science fields. My wife was, at one point, offered $13.50 an hour to be a lab tech and she was in a PhD program at a prestigious university. The higher paying jobs that were available? Teaching. She's now a contract adjunct professor at several local colleges and works about 3 days out of the week. She makes more teaching than she would actually practicing in her field (despite years of experience).
Yep, that's because those jobs are supported by deficit spending. It comes either from government support of education or tuition paid by student loans. It's not in any way sustainable in the long term.
So then you found why your wealth tax doesn't work. Either your wealth tax becomes an income tax because in order to keep that farm they need to keep earning income to cover the cost of paying the tax, or the farm is sold off.
Bzzzt! A wealth tax would replace the byzantine income tax. And it wouldn't be the outrageous rates of inheritance tax, it would be like .5 - 1%. If you're earning less than a 1% on your farm, you're going to lose it before long, anyway. Besides, most farms have plenty of loans against them, which for a wealth tax would offset the value of the property. We would want to eliminate the Jon Bon Jovi farmer tax loophole, and others like it, but real farmers will be fine.
I'm not sure why so many people are against this idea. Unless they've simply been convinced by the Buffets and Rothschilds that it's somehow a bad thing.
Also, I'm not sure you understand how tax rates work. If the tax rate is 10% on $0 - $45, and 20% on $45 - infinity, and my wage is $46/hour, do you realize that my effective tax rate is still less than 10.22% ($4.70), and not 20%?
Well this is hopeless, you can't even do taxes. That's not how it works. Apparently you don't, either.
Why would an inheritance tax, which tends to be a lighter tax burden then a wealth tax, be more destructive?
Inheritance tax is not a lighter burden - it's between 18% and 40% for the federal tax, and several states add additional tax amounts on top of that.
Take a look at California, Prop 13, and its urban sprawl. Here higher property tax does reduce property development and rational land use.
That's because it's designed to do that, as part of the Agenda 21 movement to move human habitation into smaller, more dense areas.
Wealth taxes discourage people from investing in business.
False. There is no basis for this assertion whatsoever.
Inherence and property tax tend to be less distortive because there are fewer dodges that one can do - In my opinion. If you have any information on why it is harder to dodge wealth taxes I would like to hear about them
Inheritance and property tax are, in fact, a form of wealth tax. People dodge income taxes all the time, especially people at the high end that can afford tax attorneys. It's an extremely complicated code with so many loopholes not even IRS agents can come up with consistent answers to many questions (this has been demonstrated many times). So part of the benefit is a cleaner, fairer, and less complex tax code. So, yes, more difficult to "dodge". Most people have investments managed by banks, insurance companies, and investment houses. The asset values are very clear and consistently maintained. You could even eliminate arbitrary items like "household goods" - it wouldn't make a significant difference in revenue.
Huh. Apparently that "anti-government rhetoric" has been building for a really long time...
If a farm or "small business" is worth more than $2M after liabilities, I'm not crying for the family.
Then you can cry for the people that used to buy food from the sustainable, organic family farm down the road, now that it's owned by a big corporate Monsanto customer.
I just can't begin to understand the logic that leads to this line of thinking. Yes, earn more money, pay more taxes, that's how percentages work. But you also keep more money.
Actually, you keep less. The CBO has already calculated that about 2 million people will choose to not work or work less due to Obamacare credits for health care subsidies. Food stamp and other entitlement programs do the same thing. On the other end, because the income tax is progressive, if you earn over a certain amount then your tax rate goes up. Sometimes people will forego earning overtime that would put them into the next tax bracket - it's not worth it to them because of diminishing returns.
If you earn $45 / hour, it means you really only earn $45 / hour for a little over 3 weeks. Then you earn $40.50 for the next four months. After that, you'll only be making $33.75 / hour. If your state or local government charges an income tax too, then your rate is even less, and most take more as you earn more. And if you want to work more than 8 hours a day 5 days a week, your rate will start dropping even faster. At some point, you decide it's not worth it.
There's no surprise about this feature of the income tax. It's pretty basic economics.
How do you figure that? It's a great idea, it would completely change the dynamic. Many countries already have a wealth tax that works, and property taxes (a form of wealth tax) doesn't cause a "tax drag" that prevents people from buying homes and commercial property.
An inheritance tax would be much better if you wanted to go down this road.
Inheritance taxes are unnecessarily punitive, they are so high they often cause farms and family businesses to be sold off to generate money for the tax payments, and even at that they don't generate enough revenue to be significant. Because you're waiting for somebody to die to take their stuff, and smart (and very wealthy) people find ways to avoid them entirely.
Huh? First of all - define 'wealth'
It's [assets] - [liabilities] = wealth. The IRS already has a form for calculating it.
then define what it means to: "hoard wealth"
Well define it how you want. This is something the progressives have been complaining about when they excoriate the wealthy for causing income inequality.
explain to me why taxing ONLY somebody's 'wealth' would eliminate the incentive to hoard it.
Right now, since you have a significant tax liability for income, but not for idle money, people leave their money idle, or they store it somewhere considered "safe" like treasury bonds, which earn low rates (less than 1% for under 5 year notes). If income is not being taxed, but all idle money will be, a rational actor would prefer to take a higher risk with their money, and hope for a better return.
I don't think you've thought this through.
I have, as have many other folks. You should give it a try, rather than just hammering out the first snarky response you can come up with.
It may just be paper, but I've been successfully using it to purchase goods and services since I was five.
Well I don't know how old you are, but it will only buy about 15% of what it did would before it went full fiat in 1971. And that's based on the government's CPI, which really understates inflation by ignoring food and energy. But that's actually a good record for fiat money, which historically does not have a good record and is usually used for less time. The Weimar Mark is the most famous example of these epic failures, but there was also the Chinese Flying Money, the French Assignats, and Rome's Denarius (which lasted only because it was initially minted with mostly silver). So compared to the spectacular failures and economic devastation that fiat money has caused in the past, the US Federal Reserve Note's 15% value isn't as bad.
But, of course, it's really a Petro-dollar, provided value with treaties that require the vast majority of oil on the world market to trade in US Federal Reserve Notes. Some countries have made efforts to get around that by trading gold instead. When that gains momentum, the US currency will likely implode rather quickly.
There is no need for a cap. Instead, convert from the current system of taxing income to taxing wealth. It could be done with a very small rate, say around 1%, and still fund everything that the income tax does. It would solve a lot of problems, including Warren Buffet's supposed complaint about not being taxed at as high a rate as his secretary. It also eliminates the income tax incentives for people to be LESS productive, because the more income they earn, the more taxes they owe. Instead, it would eliminate much of the incentive for the very wealthy to hoard wealth.