John Pike is, sadly, a frequently-quoted person. In my experience, he is wrong almost as often as he is quoted, primarily because he seems to always take the most pessimistic possible position in any given case.
The way out is inevitable: default. I don't mean default on the debt, but default on the promises made to seniors. Effectively, what happened in that the people who are seniors now or about to become so, promised themselves (back when they were younger) that their children and grandchildren would pay them benefits premised on a rate of growth of both population and wealth that simply did not occur. Since the economic and human foundation does not exist for paying off those promises, they will not be paid off. The rest is simply details. (One of those details is that I am almost certainly in either the last generation that will get anything from Social Security, or the first that will get nothing.) Oh, we could have reformed the program earlier to a 401k like system, maybe even as late as the Bush administration, and double-charged my generation but saved the basic program. It's far from clear that we still have the time to do that. It's absolutely clear that we do not have that time past about 2020. So the likely result is that we will simply fail to sustain the program at all. What cannot be done, won't.
Tax revenue increased when tax rates were lowered under Bush. That's pretty strong evidence that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve. Obviously there are other factors complicating the situation, but fundamentally, if you cut tax rates and revenues increase, that means that you were previously taxing above the rate that generates maximum revenue.
Sure, but I was asking about Grover Norquist, which is a different issue.
Also, I would note that the problem of discrimination against in-state retailers could also be solved by eliminating sales taxes on most goods (those easily bought out of state) and instead using property or other tax rates to fund state/local government. TMTOWTDI.
Perhaps, rather than blathering about what you do not know, you should look into it. First, Texas has a huge technology sector, including quite a bit of online presence. Second, yes, Texas has a huge NASA facility in Houston. As does California in Pasadena: what of it? Third, Texas is probably the most completely integrated state in the US between Anglos and Latinos; in many ways Texas culture is a blend of the best parts of American and Mexican cultures. (Perhaps you were thinking of Arizona's laws, or California's ghettoization of immigrants?) Fourth, I really don't know of any anti-gay laws in Texas that are recent, though Texas did, IIRC, vote down gay marriage rather decisively about a decade ago, along with a lot of other states. Fifth, while Texas does have some rednecks, it's actually a pretty cosmopolitan place. But not progressive in the least, which is a rather a compliment to Texas than a criticism.
Interesting factoid I dug up years ago when trying to solve this problem: did you know that there are (or were at the point I looked into it) more than 50,000 sales tax rate/condition changes per year in the US, taken as a whole? That is not the rates that you have to keep track of, but the velocity of changes. It's not like you program a table in and then walk away. Even if the rates didn't change, that table would have to include a huge amount of logic for no-tax/reduced-tax zones, items and periods, as well as interstate tax agreements and the like. It's more of a mess than you're intimating.
And if raising tax rates reduces revenue, as it generally does on the right side of the Laffer curve? And if raising tax rates reduces economic growth, as it generally does once taxes go beyond a certain point far below ours? I agree we need to freeze or, better yet, dramatically cut spending. But there is no way short of an economic collapse that it's going to happen.
So the fact that the spending of the Federal government and most of the states vastly exceeds their ability is not a problem, but people undertaking voluntary exchanges of money they earned from working for things made by corporations are a problem? Well, Uncle Joe, you sure showed us. Time to go full Communist and shut down these wreckers and looters!
Why so? If the problem is on the spending side (which appears almost beyond reasonable doubt), then raising taxe rates does nothing to fix the problem, instead just impoverishing the nation and, if we're on the right side of the Laffer curve (also almost beyond reasonable doubt), actually reducing the revenue generated by taxation. So where is the problem with Norquist, exactly?
I think you're far off base. Certainly, college is often argued as an investment in becoming educated, trained in critical thinking and becoming broadly knowledgeable about the world. Sadly, that is rarely the case. It can happen, but the exceptions seem to be more rare than the rule. In addition, some of the most educated people I know are the least credentialed. I have a friend, for example, who had no high school diploma and no college. Brilliant understanding of technology, science, economics, history, law, and so on. In his mid-30's he decided to go to law school, got his HS and undergrad diplomas in about six months, then went to law school and got his JD. Other than law school, his education was assuredly not from college, and even law school was something you'd likely deride as job-specific education rather than a broad education.
Most of the "aristocrats" are basically very highly credentialed, and more than a few of them are very uneducated. Listen to the average congresscritter talk sometime and marvel that they can tie their own shoes. Same for journalists. By and large, academics seem to be narrowed by education rather than broadened, with the exception of those who study classical humanities (and not even all of those). Basically, the elite in our society (which is in no way a true aristocracy, though they're certainly trying to push it that way) tend to be uneducated despite, and in some cases I would argue because of, their extensive and prestigious college degrees.
But I would argue that educated human beings have seldom been in demand. Outside of government and academia, that certainly seems to be the case. What the economy needed before the industrial revolution were largely drudges (for farm labor mostly), plus a few clerks (for government and merchants), a few skilled tradesmen, and a very few educated people (for academia, government, running large organizations like plantations, etc). Between the industrial revolution and the completion of the migration from rural- to urban-centered living by about the end of the 1940s, the number of drudges decreased somewhat (largely transferred from farm labor to factory labor), the number of skilled tradesmen increased, the number of clerks increased dramatically with government growth and the growth of large corporations, and still only a very few educated people were needed (for academia and government, with the management of large institutions largely taken over by people educated as clerks). Those trends continued, and still continue, but the types of trades have changed (largely through the growth of IT trades and the diminution of manufacturing and engineering). In other words, the trades that you deride as a reason for going to college have, along with clerking (which really only requires a high school education, even today) essentially been the predominant need in the economy for more than half a century. While I would agree that there should be a difference between trade schools and colleges, that is not how the education system, corporate and governmental hiring practices, and the economy generally work these days. I'm not sure they've worked that way since the rise of industrialization a couple of centuries ago.
Ironically, your last paragraph shows that you have completely missed what is going on in any case. The government's support of education at all levels has, in both absolute and percentage terms, been rising. The student debt overhang is largely a response to increased government support for college loans, which has driven the cost of college up to absorb that additional money, mostly in administrative overhead. Further, the increased cost of operating a college because of the additional administrative infrastructure has itself pushed tuitions up, increasing the demand for loans, and creating the vicious cycle we are in now. (Similar to how government intervention in healthcare and how to pay for it has caused health costs to dramatically overshoot inflation generally, as it happens.) It's only a matter of time un
True, but it's also fair to mention that even with technical skills and people skills, there are a fair number of jobs you will never get the chance to talk to a person about, because the screening bots HR uses will not select your resume if you don't have a degree. And for higher level technical jobs, you will sometimes be turned down even after talking to a real person, on the grounds that the rest of the team wouldn't be as willing to follow someone "less educated" than themselves.
So all the T-bills that the SSA bought were illegal, and paying them off would be illegal too? Either I misunderstood your point, or you are not looking past the end of your nose. These things are really easy to game.
Absolutely. The continual jousting at "comprehensive" immigration reform is basically an excuse to keep doing nothing, from which both major parties benefit politically. A sane policy, not based on partisanship, should start with the realization that legal immigration should be easy, low-cost and low-risk, while illegal immigration should be difficult, high-cost and high-risk. The GOP only focuses on the latter half, while the Dems only focus on making illegal immigration easy, low-cost and low-risk. So for a start, why don't we just make legal immigraion easy, low-cost and low-risk, and then see what problems remain after the adjustments for that? I suspect the remaining issues would be a much easier problem to solve, and in the process we would have both obtained a lot more useful human capital and been more true to our founding principles. Of course, the opportunities for graft, corruption, demagoguery and vote-buying would be less.... Never mind; answered my own question.
Insurance is something you buy to protect against known, but comparatively rare, risks, so that you don't have to constantly maintain a large cash supply (harder than maintaining a cash flow). SS is sold as insurance, but it's not insurance. It's instead a pay-as-you-go retirement plan. It may or may not be a good idea (I suspect not, but that's irrelevant), and may or may not actually prevent destitution among the elderly (also irrelevant to my point), but it is most assuredly not insurance.
You've got it backwards. The Dems generally want Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security kept out of the regular budget, and not means tested. Doing those things would make the programs, in essence, just more welfare programs, and thus more easily cut in hard times. You are also mistaken about the "trust fund." The trust fund currently consists of Federal government bonds, because all the money was used at the time it was raised, to make the deficit appear lower. The net effect is that when it's time to make payments from the trust fund, the government must either inflate the currency to make those bonds less expensive in real terms to buy back (thus hurting people who actually save money), raise taxes to get more revenue to pay off the bonds (thus hurting those who will then be paying in to benefit those who are paying in now), sell other bonds to pay off the earlier bonds (thus increasing the national debt/interest on net, and on the assumption that US government bonds haven't gone off a cliff), or not pay the promised benefits. Some combination of these three is most likely. But the reality is that there is no trust fund in any meaningful sense; there is a set of promises that will have to be redeemed by hurting someone or everyone at some point in the future.
No one is authorized to apologize to the world for votes of Americans. I could apologize to the world for my own vote, but that's about it. But not even the President is given the power (not that that would stop anyone in that office) to apologize for Americans' votes, and it's terribly unseemly to do so. (Actions of the American government, on the other hand, the President absolutely can apologize for. That's unseemly too, when the apology is not deserved, but that power certainly lies with the President.)
Not really interested in rehashing the whole debate. Whether or not CAGW, or just AGW, or even just GW is or is not true is irrelevant to the point I was making. Specifically, h4rr4r said that sometimes there are not two sides. AGW is not, so far as I can tell, one of those times, and yelling that it's FACTS and SHUT UP won't change that.
All sensors are subject to error, of course. Speaking of which, you neglected to mention instrument error from design and manufacturing as possible causes of it. I suspect that there are measures you could take to correct them, but I'd be far more interested in things like being able to detect differences than in absolute values. We're not really going to get a perfect distributed measurement system, and even if we tried, we'd be creating many of the same problems that exist with current measurement systems (where many of the stations are poorly sited or are simply not terribly accurate instruments). But wouldn't it be interesting to be able to do things like having your phone automatically adjust your electronic thermostat while you're on your way home, based on geofencing and the temperature it detects locally? Or wouldn't t be interesting to have your phone act as a night-time fire alarm by sounding at full volume if the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (which wouldn't have to be terribly accurate; within 10 degrees would be fine)? Or what about figuring out the optimal place to site a thermostat based on the current location of the thermostat, its setting, its location, the temperatures at other locations in the building and the desired temperature? Or what about being able to set the phone on a person's body, and get their temperature and (via the motion sensor) heart rate? Or being able to set it at various cracks and such like doors and windows to see if you have voids in your insulation, or other places you could fix your house to be more energy efficient?
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Not even close to being a Democrat, no.
John Pike is, sadly, a frequently-quoted person. In my experience, he is wrong almost as often as he is quoted, primarily because he seems to always take the most pessimistic possible position in any given case.
The way out is inevitable: default. I don't mean default on the debt, but default on the promises made to seniors. Effectively, what happened in that the people who are seniors now or about to become so, promised themselves (back when they were younger) that their children and grandchildren would pay them benefits premised on a rate of growth of both population and wealth that simply did not occur. Since the economic and human foundation does not exist for paying off those promises, they will not be paid off. The rest is simply details. (One of those details is that I am almost certainly in either the last generation that will get anything from Social Security, or the first that will get nothing.) Oh, we could have reformed the program earlier to a 401k like system, maybe even as late as the Bush administration, and double-charged my generation but saved the basic program. It's far from clear that we still have the time to do that. It's absolutely clear that we do not have that time past about 2020. So the likely result is that we will simply fail to sustain the program at all. What cannot be done, won't.
of why I'm not a Republican....
Tax revenue increased when tax rates were lowered under Bush. That's pretty strong evidence that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve. Obviously there are other factors complicating the situation, but fundamentally, if you cut tax rates and revenues increase, that means that you were previously taxing above the rate that generates maximum revenue.
Sorry I was unclear. I mean their ability to raise revenue.
Renters pay property taxes as well, albeit indirectly.
Sure, but I was asking about Grover Norquist, which is a different issue.
Also, I would note that the problem of discrimination against in-state retailers could also be solved by eliminating sales taxes on most goods (those easily bought out of state) and instead using property or other tax rates to fund state/local government. TMTOWTDI.
Perhaps, rather than blathering about what you do not know, you should look into it. First, Texas has a huge technology sector, including quite a bit of online presence. Second, yes, Texas has a huge NASA facility in Houston. As does California in Pasadena: what of it? Third, Texas is probably the most completely integrated state in the US between Anglos and Latinos; in many ways Texas culture is a blend of the best parts of American and Mexican cultures. (Perhaps you were thinking of Arizona's laws, or California's ghettoization of immigrants?) Fourth, I really don't know of any anti-gay laws in Texas that are recent, though Texas did, IIRC, vote down gay marriage rather decisively about a decade ago, along with a lot of other states. Fifth, while Texas does have some rednecks, it's actually a pretty cosmopolitan place. But not progressive in the least, which is a rather a compliment to Texas than a criticism.
Well one thing is certain: you know nothing about Texas.
You are under the illusion still that the Constitution is a limiting factor on the desires of our would-be overlords? How cute!
We have such a rate already. It is 0% on all items in all conditions.
Interesting factoid I dug up years ago when trying to solve this problem: did you know that there are (or were at the point I looked into it) more than 50,000 sales tax rate/condition changes per year in the US, taken as a whole? That is not the rates that you have to keep track of, but the velocity of changes. It's not like you program a table in and then walk away. Even if the rates didn't change, that table would have to include a huge amount of logic for no-tax/reduced-tax zones, items and periods, as well as interstate tax agreements and the like. It's more of a mess than you're intimating.
And if raising tax rates reduces revenue, as it generally does on the right side of the Laffer curve? And if raising tax rates reduces economic growth, as it generally does once taxes go beyond a certain point far below ours? I agree we need to freeze or, better yet, dramatically cut spending. But there is no way short of an economic collapse that it's going to happen.
So the fact that the spending of the Federal government and most of the states vastly exceeds their ability is not a problem, but people undertaking voluntary exchanges of money they earned from working for things made by corporations are a problem? Well, Uncle Joe, you sure showed us. Time to go full Communist and shut down these wreckers and looters!
Why so? If the problem is on the spending side (which appears almost beyond reasonable doubt), then raising taxe rates does nothing to fix the problem, instead just impoverishing the nation and, if we're on the right side of the Laffer curve (also almost beyond reasonable doubt), actually reducing the revenue generated by taxation. So where is the problem with Norquist, exactly?
Most of the "aristocrats" are basically very highly credentialed, and more than a few of them are very uneducated. Listen to the average congresscritter talk sometime and marvel that they can tie their own shoes. Same for journalists. By and large, academics seem to be narrowed by education rather than broadened, with the exception of those who study classical humanities (and not even all of those). Basically, the elite in our society (which is in no way a true aristocracy, though they're certainly trying to push it that way) tend to be uneducated despite, and in some cases I would argue because of, their extensive and prestigious college degrees.
But I would argue that educated human beings have seldom been in demand. Outside of government and academia, that certainly seems to be the case. What the economy needed before the industrial revolution were largely drudges (for farm labor mostly), plus a few clerks (for government and merchants), a few skilled tradesmen, and a very few educated people (for academia, government, running large organizations like plantations, etc). Between the industrial revolution and the completion of the migration from rural- to urban-centered living by about the end of the 1940s, the number of drudges decreased somewhat (largely transferred from farm labor to factory labor), the number of skilled tradesmen increased, the number of clerks increased dramatically with government growth and the growth of large corporations, and still only a very few educated people were needed (for academia and government, with the management of large institutions largely taken over by people educated as clerks). Those trends continued, and still continue, but the types of trades have changed (largely through the growth of IT trades and the diminution of manufacturing and engineering). In other words, the trades that you deride as a reason for going to college have, along with clerking (which really only requires a high school education, even today) essentially been the predominant need in the economy for more than half a century. While I would agree that there should be a difference between trade schools and colleges, that is not how the education system, corporate and governmental hiring practices, and the economy generally work these days. I'm not sure they've worked that way since the rise of industrialization a couple of centuries ago.
Ironically, your last paragraph shows that you have completely missed what is going on in any case. The government's support of education at all levels has, in both absolute and percentage terms, been rising. The student debt overhang is largely a response to increased government support for college loans, which has driven the cost of college up to absorb that additional money, mostly in administrative overhead. Further, the increased cost of operating a college because of the additional administrative infrastructure has itself pushed tuitions up, increasing the demand for loans, and creating the vicious cycle we are in now. (Similar to how government intervention in healthcare and how to pay for it has caused health costs to dramatically overshoot inflation generally, as it happens.) It's only a matter of time un
True, but it's also fair to mention that even with technical skills and people skills, there are a fair number of jobs you will never get the chance to talk to a person about, because the screening bots HR uses will not select your resume if you don't have a degree. And for higher level technical jobs, you will sometimes be turned down even after talking to a real person, on the grounds that the rest of the team wouldn't be as willing to follow someone "less educated" than themselves.
So all the T-bills that the SSA bought were illegal, and paying them off would be illegal too? Either I misunderstood your point, or you are not looking past the end of your nose. These things are really easy to game.
Absolutely. The continual jousting at "comprehensive" immigration reform is basically an excuse to keep doing nothing, from which both major parties benefit politically. A sane policy, not based on partisanship, should start with the realization that legal immigration should be easy, low-cost and low-risk, while illegal immigration should be difficult, high-cost and high-risk. The GOP only focuses on the latter half, while the Dems only focus on making illegal immigration easy, low-cost and low-risk. So for a start, why don't we just make legal immigraion easy, low-cost and low-risk, and then see what problems remain after the adjustments for that? I suspect the remaining issues would be a much easier problem to solve, and in the process we would have both obtained a lot more useful human capital and been more true to our founding principles. Of course, the opportunities for graft, corruption, demagoguery and vote-buying would be less .... Never mind; answered my own question.
Insurance is something you buy to protect against known, but comparatively rare, risks, so that you don't have to constantly maintain a large cash supply (harder than maintaining a cash flow). SS is sold as insurance, but it's not insurance. It's instead a pay-as-you-go retirement plan. It may or may not be a good idea (I suspect not, but that's irrelevant), and may or may not actually prevent destitution among the elderly (also irrelevant to my point), but it is most assuredly not insurance.
You've got it backwards. The Dems generally want Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security kept out of the regular budget, and not means tested. Doing those things would make the programs, in essence, just more welfare programs, and thus more easily cut in hard times. You are also mistaken about the "trust fund." The trust fund currently consists of Federal government bonds, because all the money was used at the time it was raised, to make the deficit appear lower. The net effect is that when it's time to make payments from the trust fund, the government must either inflate the currency to make those bonds less expensive in real terms to buy back (thus hurting people who actually save money), raise taxes to get more revenue to pay off the bonds (thus hurting those who will then be paying in to benefit those who are paying in now), sell other bonds to pay off the earlier bonds (thus increasing the national debt/interest on net, and on the assumption that US government bonds haven't gone off a cliff), or not pay the promised benefits. Some combination of these three is most likely. But the reality is that there is no trust fund in any meaningful sense; there is a set of promises that will have to be redeemed by hurting someone or everyone at some point in the future.
No one is authorized to apologize to the world for votes of Americans. I could apologize to the world for my own vote, but that's about it. But not even the President is given the power (not that that would stop anyone in that office) to apologize for Americans' votes, and it's terribly unseemly to do so. (Actions of the American government, on the other hand, the President absolutely can apologize for. That's unseemly too, when the apology is not deserved, but that power certainly lies with the President.)
Not really interested in rehashing the whole debate. Whether or not CAGW, or just AGW, or even just GW is or is not true is irrelevant to the point I was making. Specifically, h4rr4r said that sometimes there are not two sides. AGW is not, so far as I can tell, one of those times, and yelling that it's FACTS and SHUT UP won't change that.
All sensors are subject to error, of course. Speaking of which, you neglected to mention instrument error from design and manufacturing as possible causes of it. I suspect that there are measures you could take to correct them, but I'd be far more interested in things like being able to detect differences than in absolute values. We're not really going to get a perfect distributed measurement system, and even if we tried, we'd be creating many of the same problems that exist with current measurement systems (where many of the stations are poorly sited or are simply not terribly accurate instruments). But wouldn't it be interesting to be able to do things like having your phone automatically adjust your electronic thermostat while you're on your way home, based on geofencing and the temperature it detects locally? Or wouldn't t be interesting to have your phone act as a night-time fire alarm by sounding at full volume if the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (which wouldn't have to be terribly accurate; within 10 degrees would be fine)? Or what about figuring out the optimal place to site a thermostat based on the current location of the thermostat, its setting, its location, the temperatures at other locations in the building and the desired temperature? Or what about being able to set the phone on a person's body, and get their temperature and (via the motion sensor) heart rate? Or being able to set it at various cracks and such like doors and windows to see if you have voids in your insulation, or other places you could fix your house to be more energy efficient?