Thank you for this post, clearing up what I hadn't previously known. Your other two seemed to address crimes committed by anyone other than the illegal immigrant.
Every stock market crash has recovered. I'f you're doing long-term investing, the correct thing to do in a crash is buy. That's partly because stock has actual value loosely connected to the value of the company issuing it. Individual stocks have crashed and burned (including some of mine in my more speculative days), but a halfway decent mutual fund is as safe an investment, in the long run, as you're likely to get.
I am completely sure the bubble will burst sometime. I'm also completely sure that, if I were to do any speculation based on that, I'd miss the right time and wind up losing money.
Those statements are contradictory. In fact, Vegas tends to be squeaky clean (it's heavily regulated) and based firmly on chance. The games favor the house, which pretty much has to be true for a casino to continue to exist, and I haven't heard of a casino pretending otherwise, Individuals can win money, but due to the law of large numbers the casinos are virtually guaranteed a reliable share of the bets.
My dealings with the IRS and letters have been very smooth. The one time the mistake was theirs, I explained it. They sent back a letter saying that I was right, they were going with my figures, and how to appeal that decision.
If you sold bitcoins and made a profit, file that in your income tax return. If not, they've got a legitimate beef, and you need to correct them.
Keep records, like you should for all investments. If you don't try to pull a fast one on the IRS (never recommended), you'll be fine.
Back in the 1700s there were people who blamed the Lisbon earthquake on the Boston lightning rods. Other people thought God's aim had to be better than that. This is nothing new.
You start creating something as an act of creation or love or something. You work hard on it, and risk your health, and go through a lot of inconvenience. You may or may not be able to start all over. Then, depending on the pollution level, someone will generate a random number to see if the pollution proxies come in and smash what you've been working on to pieces.
Since then, we've gotten used to children almost always growing up to become adults. High infant mortality rates are now generally considered bad.
If you'd rather go back to the time when the average family had four kids growing up to get some reasonable assurance of two surviving, well, I wouldn't rather do that.
Again. Why should there be defective children born in a society where abortion on demand until the very last moment is a viciously defended thing?
Let me define "choice" for you. It's when you can decide between more than one thing. Lots of pregnant women don't want to get a late-term abortion.
Nor do I see viciousness on the part of those defending abortion rights, only on the part of those attacking them. Let me know when abortion-rights activist form cordons around places where anti-abortion groups are meeting, and yell and show disgusting pictures at every person entering. Let me know when radical abortion-rights protesters talk about assassinating anti-abortion people.
My own home environment was terribly polluted. So I am not terribly impressed by this narrative. Been there. Done that.
So anybody who gets into a situation you think you came out of OK doesn't have a problem worth mentioning. Right.
So, building a stupid wall that will be a disaster in some ways has a point, but keeping lots and lots of human beings alive and reasonably happy doesn't? I don't know what your idea of a good life is. Apparently, it doesn't include giving a crap about anyone else you don't know, but let's skate over that. What will the wall do that is positive? Illegal immigration is becoming less and less of a problem without spending billions of dollars on a futile attempt to stop it.
Corporate income taxes are on profit. Customer prices are set to maximize profit. The price that maximizes profit will also maximize profit after income taxes. Your Office subscription is $69 (or whatever) right now because that's the price Microsoft thinks will bring in the most net revenue. If Microsoft's taxes go up, raising that rate to $75 will cost them some money.
If Microsoft thought it could make more money by raising the subscription price, they wouldn't just wait until their profits dipped to do it. They'd just do it. So, if their profits go down as a result of taxes, it would be a bad idea to raise prices, because that would hurt profits further.
The Labor Force Participation Rate takes a labor pool, defined as people who are employed or are trying to be, and divides that among the total population. Right now, I count as employed, and therefore I'm part of the population and part of the labor force. In eighteen months, I won't count as either employed or unemployed, since I won't be employed and won't be looking for work. Therefore, I'll lower the LFPR very slightly by retiring. I'd count myself as retired, living off pensions and Social Security and interest from my investments. You'd count me as unemployed, which would be wrong.
The rate is going down largely because boomers are retiring, and so there are more people voluntarily out of work as a percentage of the total population. This has nothing to do with employment vs. unemployment.
A UBI is the same thing, economically, as everyone having at least a low-end job. We're willing to put up with the inflation from full employment, so what's different about the UBI?
The person's monthly income is now $115. (Probably less than that. If you can live on $15, income taxes will start a lot below $100.) A person whose monthly income starts at $500 is probably going to have his or her income go down. This will pull some money out of the luxury apartment market and add some to the low-end housing market. This means people will build more low-end housing, and the cost goes up slightly. Not a lot. Landlords can't just charge whatever they want; they have to charge low enough to get tenants, and there will be more competition. The second person is willing to pay $20 for that apartment, but another landlord notices that there's an increased demand for low-end apartments, and has some built, and rents them out for less than $20 because a tenant at $18/month is better than an empty apartment at $20/month.
Overall, we're redistributing money, not making it from thin air. That means that the total amount of money to spend on stuff is constant. There will be minor price changes, but overall no inflation.
A UBI is a basic living. I don't want to have to live on it, and I can do some pretty valuable things for people.
It doesn't really matter whether you think we should automate or not. We will. Automation is cheaper than humans for a wider and wider range of things. Unless you want to do Communist-style central planning and regulation, it will be adopted. People will find themselves unable to do things cheaper than the machines.
Of course, once the number of economically useless people gets large enough, we're not in poverty, because we can produce immense amounts of stuff without human input that would need to be paid.
We'll get a lot of leisure time, which is pretty much what we evolved doing. People in hunter-gatherer societies are actually pretty darn lazy. They won't work more than a few hours a day. If we could stand it back then, we can stand it now.
We have precisely that problem today. There's nothing to prevent someone on welfare from taking the check and gambling it all away or spending on other compulsive behavior. Direct food benefits can be sold, although not at face value. It happens.
Minimum wage laws exist to make sure that people who are working can make a living (and they're not completely successful at that). Given a UBI, nobody would have to work for a living, so people would be free to reject jobs they thought didn't pay enough. If that happens to be below the current minimum wage, who cares? The worker still gets enough money. Moreover, nobody would be desperate enough for a job as to be forced to accept a low-paying crap job, so the unpleasant jobs would command more pay.
Companies that pay wages below the UBI/current minimum wage would still be reducing the UBI burden, just not as much. Nobody would be compelled to accept a low-wage job, so the employers would have to pay the employees what the employees thought the work was worth.
The very limited information I've seen on some sort of guaranteed income indicates that people earn about as much, but tend not to work low-wage jobs.
There's lots of problems remaining, but some of these are reasonably simple.
No. All corporate income taxes come from shareholders, since they're on profits.
Customers pay prices that are set to maximize corporate profits, as a general rule. The price that maximizes total profit maximizes any monotonically increasing function on profit, such as amount left after taxes. Corporate income taxes can't make a profitable corporation unprofitable. They can reduce return on investment.
As far as slavery goes, Western Europe got rid of it generally before we did. The big result of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was that it made the war about slavery, so it was then politically impossible for Britain or France to intervene on the Confederate side. The US as a whole was considerably more pro-slavery.
Balkanization? Europe consolidated into fairly sizable countries, mostly, and tended to leave fairly large colonies. The three countries that British India fell apart into is a lot less than the number before the Brits took over.
Since WWII, Europeans in general have been working on fixing things. They freed almost all of their colonies, and have been working on ways to improve their societies.
If I don't deal with one of a very short list of corporations, I don't get useful internet access. If I want to go to a park, and find it all polluted, it doesn't really matter if I bought the products of the company that caused the pollution. If a corporation usually produces good stuff, and spends lots of money lobbying for laws that I abhor, I find that voting with my wallet is far too blunt an instrument.
This is the US. The rabble at the gates will have semi-automatic rifles and lots of handguns. It's far easier to find places that sell firearms than places that sell pitchforks.
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Thank you for this post, clearing up what I hadn't previously known. Your other two seemed to address crimes committed by anyone other than the illegal immigrant.
Every stock market crash has recovered. I'f you're doing long-term investing, the correct thing to do in a crash is buy. That's partly because stock has actual value loosely connected to the value of the company issuing it. Individual stocks have crashed and burned (including some of mine in my more speculative days), but a halfway decent mutual fund is as safe an investment, in the long run, as you're likely to get.
I am completely sure the bubble will burst sometime. I'm also completely sure that, if I were to do any speculation based on that, I'd miss the right time and wind up losing money.
Those statements are contradictory. In fact, Vegas tends to be squeaky clean (it's heavily regulated) and based firmly on chance. The games favor the house, which pretty much has to be true for a casino to continue to exist, and I haven't heard of a casino pretending otherwise, Individuals can win money, but due to the law of large numbers the casinos are virtually guaranteed a reliable share of the bets.
You can do that, but the transaction fees are pretty daunting on the scale Steam sells things on.
My dealings with the IRS and letters have been very smooth. The one time the mistake was theirs, I explained it. They sent back a letter saying that I was right, they were going with my figures, and how to appeal that decision.
If you sold bitcoins and made a profit, file that in your income tax return. If not, they've got a legitimate beef, and you need to correct them.
Keep records, like you should for all investments. If you don't try to pull a fast one on the IRS (never recommended), you'll be fine.
People like gold. It's pretty. It's been used as money for as far back as we've had money. People want it.
Numbers on a digital ledger aren't pretty, haven't been used as money for very long, and people don't care about it except for speculation.
Back in the 1700s there were people who blamed the Lisbon earthquake on the Boston lightning rods. Other people thought God's aim had to be better than that. This is nothing new.
You start creating something as an act of creation or love or something. You work hard on it, and risk your health, and go through a lot of inconvenience. You may or may not be able to start all over. Then, depending on the pollution level, someone will generate a random number to see if the pollution proxies come in and smash what you've been working on to pieces.
Too busy thinking of the apostrophe's.
Since then, we've gotten used to children almost always growing up to become adults. High infant mortality rates are now generally considered bad.
If you'd rather go back to the time when the average family had four kids growing up to get some reasonable assurance of two surviving, well, I wouldn't rather do that.
We have a nominal date of conception. It isn't perfect, but it's usable.
Therefore, we can set a specific time after the nominal date of conception as the limit.
I really don't have any respect for people trying to force their frames of reference on me.
Let me define "choice" for you. It's when you can decide between more than one thing. Lots of pregnant women don't want to get a late-term abortion.
Nor do I see viciousness on the part of those defending abortion rights, only on the part of those attacking them. Let me know when abortion-rights activist form cordons around places where anti-abortion groups are meeting, and yell and show disgusting pictures at every person entering. Let me know when radical abortion-rights protesters talk about assassinating anti-abortion people.
So anybody who gets into a situation you think you came out of OK doesn't have a problem worth mentioning. Right.
So, building a stupid wall that will be a disaster in some ways has a point, but keeping lots and lots of human beings alive and reasonably happy doesn't? I don't know what your idea of a good life is. Apparently, it doesn't include giving a crap about anyone else you don't know, but let's skate over that. What will the wall do that is positive? Illegal immigration is becoming less and less of a problem without spending billions of dollars on a futile attempt to stop it.
Corporate income taxes are on profit. Customer prices are set to maximize profit. The price that maximizes profit will also maximize profit after income taxes. Your Office subscription is $69 (or whatever) right now because that's the price Microsoft thinks will bring in the most net revenue. If Microsoft's taxes go up, raising that rate to $75 will cost them some money.
If Microsoft thought it could make more money by raising the subscription price, they wouldn't just wait until their profits dipped to do it. They'd just do it. So, if their profits go down as a result of taxes, it would be a bad idea to raise prices, because that would hurt profits further.
The Labor Force Participation Rate takes a labor pool, defined as people who are employed or are trying to be, and divides that among the total population. Right now, I count as employed, and therefore I'm part of the population and part of the labor force. In eighteen months, I won't count as either employed or unemployed, since I won't be employed and won't be looking for work. Therefore, I'll lower the LFPR very slightly by retiring. I'd count myself as retired, living off pensions and Social Security and interest from my investments. You'd count me as unemployed, which would be wrong.
The rate is going down largely because boomers are retiring, and so there are more people voluntarily out of work as a percentage of the total population. This has nothing to do with employment vs. unemployment.
A UBI is the same thing, economically, as everyone having at least a low-end job. We're willing to put up with the inflation from full employment, so what's different about the UBI?
The person's monthly income is now $115. (Probably less than that. If you can live on $15, income taxes will start a lot below $100.) A person whose monthly income starts at $500 is probably going to have his or her income go down. This will pull some money out of the luxury apartment market and add some to the low-end housing market. This means people will build more low-end housing, and the cost goes up slightly. Not a lot. Landlords can't just charge whatever they want; they have to charge low enough to get tenants, and there will be more competition. The second person is willing to pay $20 for that apartment, but another landlord notices that there's an increased demand for low-end apartments, and has some built, and rents them out for less than $20 because a tenant at $18/month is better than an empty apartment at $20/month.
Overall, we're redistributing money, not making it from thin air. That means that the total amount of money to spend on stuff is constant. There will be minor price changes, but overall no inflation.
A UBI is a basic living. I don't want to have to live on it, and I can do some pretty valuable things for people.
It doesn't really matter whether you think we should automate or not. We will. Automation is cheaper than humans for a wider and wider range of things. Unless you want to do Communist-style central planning and regulation, it will be adopted. People will find themselves unable to do things cheaper than the machines.
Of course, once the number of economically useless people gets large enough, we're not in poverty, because we can produce immense amounts of stuff without human input that would need to be paid.
We'll get a lot of leisure time, which is pretty much what we evolved doing. People in hunter-gatherer societies are actually pretty darn lazy. They won't work more than a few hours a day. If we could stand it back then, we can stand it now.
We have precisely that problem today. There's nothing to prevent someone on welfare from taking the check and gambling it all away or spending on other compulsive behavior. Direct food benefits can be sold, although not at face value. It happens.
Minimum wage laws exist to make sure that people who are working can make a living (and they're not completely successful at that). Given a UBI, nobody would have to work for a living, so people would be free to reject jobs they thought didn't pay enough. If that happens to be below the current minimum wage, who cares? The worker still gets enough money. Moreover, nobody would be desperate enough for a job as to be forced to accept a low-paying crap job, so the unpleasant jobs would command more pay.
Companies that pay wages below the UBI/current minimum wage would still be reducing the UBI burden, just not as much. Nobody would be compelled to accept a low-wage job, so the employers would have to pay the employees what the employees thought the work was worth.
The very limited information I've seen on some sort of guaranteed income indicates that people earn about as much, but tend not to work low-wage jobs.
There's lots of problems remaining, but some of these are reasonably simple.
No. All corporate income taxes come from shareholders, since they're on profits.
Customers pay prices that are set to maximize corporate profits, as a general rule. The price that maximizes total profit maximizes any monotonically increasing function on profit, such as amount left after taxes. Corporate income taxes can't make a profitable corporation unprofitable. They can reduce return on investment.
Paranoid much?
As far as slavery goes, Western Europe got rid of it generally before we did. The big result of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was that it made the war about slavery, so it was then politically impossible for Britain or France to intervene on the Confederate side. The US as a whole was considerably more pro-slavery.
Balkanization? Europe consolidated into fairly sizable countries, mostly, and tended to leave fairly large colonies. The three countries that British India fell apart into is a lot less than the number before the Brits took over.
Since WWII, Europeans in general have been working on fixing things. They freed almost all of their colonies, and have been working on ways to improve their societies.
If I don't deal with one of a very short list of corporations, I don't get useful internet access. If I want to go to a park, and find it all polluted, it doesn't really matter if I bought the products of the company that caused the pollution. If a corporation usually produces good stuff, and spends lots of money lobbying for laws that I abhor, I find that voting with my wallet is far too blunt an instrument.
Obama dramatically reduced the deficit, of course. That's something Republicans would prefer to forget.
This is the US. The rabble at the gates will have semi-automatic rifles and lots of handguns. It's far easier to find places that sell firearms than places that sell pitchforks.