far less than the $3.2 trillion per year needed to provide every American with $10,000/year stated by an earlier poster. So that's already $2 trillion unaccounted for right there.
Essentially, those numbers are ludicrous. When including a public aid system cut back to give EBT covering children of low-income households (rather than just handing out more cash every time you pop out a baby), the burden to taxpayers (counting money moving downward from rich hands into poor hands as "burden on taxpayers") is a trillion dollars lower.
Is $10,000/year even enough to live on in the US? http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-... [numbeo.com] lists the price of a one bedroom apartment outside the city center as $900/month, i.e. around $11,000/year.
You're thinking in terms of today's market. There's a huge amount of overhead in cost of risk that doesn't scale downward to small income demographics, because those demographics have unstable risk. I talked about this.
There would be no money left over for food, education, medicine, etc.
Medical and education are separate considerations. We have entire budgets and even economic debates over those; I understand both sides of the education economic debate, and I stand on the side that workforce development branded as "education" is an economically-harmful practice that creates a lot of waste in training excessively-large skilled workforces and flooding the labor market (I'm the guy who invented that argument in the first place; it takes several pages to explain).
so anyone who is poor today would still be poor under this new system - and living out on the street. Well, nicely done - you did not eliminate poverty after all
Checking my models.
National average HUD eligibility for extremely-low-income households for 1, 2, and 3 persons are $12,650, $14,200, and $15,800. These households's after-tax incomes would increase by approximately $7,250 for single-adult households and $14,500 for two-adult households. For just low-income households, incomes are $29,450, $33,700, and $37,900. Their incomes increase by just under $7,000 for single-adult households and just under $14,000 for two-adult households. Again: each of these households also gets an EBT-mediated public aid for any children, for any service for which they qualify (WIC food assistance, etc.), currently a state service and likely run as such for the foreseeable future.
The bottom 5%, 10%, and 15% of incomes are $7,100, $12,300, and $17,100. Such single-adult households would increase after-tax income to $13,800, $18,000, and $22,000, each above the Federal poverty lines for 1, 2, and 3 individuals, respectively. Two-adult households at these income levels would increase to $21,000, $26,000, and $30,000, above the Federal poverty lines for 3, 4, and 5 individuals.
The median Single Father household would increase its spendable income by $6,400; the median Single Mother household would increase its spendable income by $6,900.
Two-adult, married-filing households at $600,000 income would have about $30 more spendable money; two-adult, married-filing households at $700,000 income would pay $370 in additional taxes. Your average 1-adult, single-filing household is less-advantaged, with $200,000-income households retaining $1,000 more in spendable income, $300,000-income households paying $1,000 more.
Among the less-advantaged 1-income households, the top 1% income level of $330,000 pays $1,600 more in taxes. The 0.1% level of $1,700,000 pays $8,504 more in taxes. A household with $10,000,000 of income would pay $41,700 more in taxes.
These tax increases represent around $20 billion of a $1,000 billion redu
I pay a little over $30k per year in federal income taxes
I assume that puts you in the $110k-$130k range? My current models compute that you'd take home between $5,300 and $5,000 more income at the same salary level, assuming you're single in a 1-adult household. For a 2-adult household, you must be in the $130k-$140k range, which means your household would take home between $8,900 and $8,600 of additional spendable income per year.
You're *still* paying for someone else. The average per-person is almost $7,000, and you're "getting" $4,300-$5,300 per person under my tax scheme. That other $2,700-$1,700 is coming out of your pocket and going to some other bloke; it just happens to be less than what's coming out of your pocket currently.
The extra medical support is excludable (it's either not feasible *or* you should have a separate medical care system).
As for the rest--food, housing, utilities, clothing, personal care--it's actually doable in (today's money) just under $7,000/year. The big problem is housing, and it's complex to cover; food, clothing, and personal care are easy, although a lot goes into settling out the risk.
My first attempt with this used a 2013 model and a split budget for food, clothing, and personal care of $100, $35, and $35. In 2016 I was able to model day-to-day meals in California, Washington, and Maryland on the order of $25/month for 30 days at 2000kcal/day, including beans, rice, bread, eggs, vegetables, and the infrequent rotisserie chicken (2-3 per month). Nevertheless, I found the $100 budget staggeringly difficult to work with, largely due to bootstrapping (I put pans and utensils under the Food budget, and I was going on bulk buy of beans and flour--because 50 pounds of flour costs $6.82 and 5 pounds of flour costs $3.50). With clothing and personal care being overbudgeted and more flexible (you can skip new clothes this month; you can't wait for the end of the week to get food!), I switched to an integrated $170/month budget for all three. It's $181/month in 2016.
Housing is more complex than that.
The simple analysis is that low-income areas range rents from $0.66/sqft to $1.10/sqft, with about $1.02/sqft as a common median. That gave me a 224sqft unit with a 33% risk reserve at $1.33/sqft, or a $300/month single-person low-income unit. It works, and it covers risk with a shitload of money; but that's not good enough.
I had to first prove the model. New single-bedroom units cost about $58,000 to build, so I used charts of apartment costs supplied by various local governments to remove the cost of fixtures (counters, stoves, sinks, bath tubs, toilets, cabinets) from that figure, and then cut the remaining cost down to a 224sqft unit and added back the fixtures (which aren't per-sqft). That got me $23,000-$26,000 per unit; packing in heavy insulation (R-23) added up to $150 of material and 2 hours of labor (~$100), which was a concern with utilities (I've heated spaces that size in under $30 with less insulation). We may need regulation mandating proper weather-sealing construction for newly-remodeled or constructed units under 600sqft.
The next was a risk evaluation. This is the theoretical basis. Essentially, when you target lower-income demographics, risk increases: low incomes are less-stable, and increase the frequency of costly evictions and empty units. To stay in business, you have to distribute that risk among your tenants; landlords can take alternate routes, such as reducing rent in exchange for a high security deposit on a case-by-case basis, essentially removing that tenant from one risk pool and putting him in a different one. All of this means people whose minimum-wage job may cut hours or vanish entirely and, especially, people on unemployment who may hit the six-month term without finding a job are likely to cost you money, and thus you must charge them higher rent to offset that likelihood; at a point, the minimum-viable rent is higher than the demographic can afford.
A guaranteed basic income (such as a Citizen's Dividend or Universal Social Security) can't go away.
The risk of eviction or vacant units due to tenant non-payment via tenant loss of income goes away. The tenant may still *fail* to pay, but he won't become *incapable* of paying nearly as frequently. That reduces the cost of risk, allowing for smooth scaling of rent prices without a reduction in profit margin. This, the 33% risk reserve ($1.33/sqft projection when median prices are about $1/sqft), and other potential strategies (e.g. a landlord-tenant agreement in which Social Security directly deposits the rent to the landlord, and immediately informs both parties if either cancels the recurring deposit) reduces the risk to the landlord and the risk to
Of course they are! Even servants have servants these days!
People keep telling me folks should all just get better jobs instead of being burger flippers. This comes up a *lot* because I talk a lot about alternatives to minimum wage, because minimum wage increases concentrate wealth at the expense of jobs (no, your hamburger won't be $15; your $8 value meal will cost 13 cents more, multiplied by 31 billion sales per year, which takes enough of the *same* *total* *income* to make wage for 281,000 minimum-wage jobs--that's the maximum number of jobs that go away). One of the common answers is just "they should get better jobs instead." The other is some magical handwaving about money falling out of the sky (some people don't realize that the wages come out of the consumer's spending, and think that raising wage means more money magically appears in the paycheck, and so it can be spent and create even more jobs--a concept that would indicate infinite money and infinite jobs at all wage levels).
My more recent response has been pointing out that these people can bother feeding themselves, since those wage workers are your grocery baggers and burger flippers. People expect a register operator, stocked store shelves, bagged groceries, and a hot meal ready for them for two dollars; then they complain that somebody actually did all the work involved, and demand that guy stop mooching and go get a real job. It's ludicrous.
I'm waiting either for Microsoft to add cgroups to the Linux subsystem or for Docker to add a call to Windows Container Services and create a Linux Services for Windows installation within that, thus allowing Linux Docker containers in Windows.
Seriously? Men have like a 2 hour refactoring period and take 8 minutes to get off. Just line 'em up. There can be color-coded bands for what group you got tested in so we know not to worry if the condom breaks.
Part of the cost of automation being less than labor is you create unemployment. This is fine--it's how progress works--and the displaced labor creates a gap between prior cost and new cost, which eventually leads to lower prices (prices don't keep with inflation, in part because it's impossible to hold all prices at the same buying-power equivalent in an economy where the relative price of everything constantly shifts thanks to population expansion, money supply increase, and productivity gains all interacting, and the buying-power total doesn't go up until the price of something goes down).
If you create 0.1% unemployment, no big deal. That gets washed away as the workforce turns over; give it a few months to a year and there's no evidence of that blip--save that we're all a little richer. Those people got new jobs, because we're buying more stuff thanks to that 0.1% difference, and somebody needs to make and move that stuff.
If you create 40% unemployment, that's a problem. Things got cheaper... okay? Who is buying all these cheaper things? Never mind that the money hasn't moved down into the hands of the unemployed (400 times more excluded than when they were just 0.1%); the people still working just found that nearly half their work isn't needed anymore, and you know what that means: they get laid off, too.
It's economically feasible when the cost of new technology is lower, and when the risk proposition across growth spans that technology in an uptake not significantly faster than re-employment. The economy has to respond to lower costs by offering lower prices, which businesses don't do unless they're pressured (e.g. competition, desire to get 5% on 100,000,000 units instead of 15% on 10,000,000 units, etc.). The universal competition--that consumers have limited money, and that every product bought is taken from that pool, thus all products are in competition with all other products--takes some time to launder the changes and produce a fresh, new economy.
China has labor shortages and might just be in a position where the reduced labor shifts chinese labor around such that the outcome is 2% or 5% or 8% unemployment, rather than 40% or 80% unemployment. If it cuts their production costs by 20%, that's a hell of a draw for import labor--China's financial position becomes that people will trade them something (to be determined at a later date; here's money as an IOU) for something China can produce cheaper than the buyer. In the mean time, places like America suddenly see a 20% drop in the price of all kinds of goods, and can buy more; this means we need more shipping, more retail operators, more people at VISA managing your accounts, and so forth. It means poor people spend a smaller chunk of their income on clothes and cell phones (which they probably need today), and more on food (which puts demands on local refineries, chemical producers, municipal water systems, John Deere, and farmers). It means more jobs here in America.
China would get richer and America would get richer just by China reducing the cost of manufacture, at least in a projection where China doesn't create an unemployment crisis in its own country.
It sounds like FUD because the article describes Spotify selling targeted ad spots, but there's not much value in just dumping the user's data to every customer buying ads. They'd need an expensive data engineer to come up with all kinds of statistical analysis methods to categorize and analyze that data, and then decide what to do.
It seems more likely Spotify is selling ads based on aggregate statistics. "We have 46 million teenage-college students listening to Bieberpop, and 2 hundred listening to Nickelback; it's $150,000 for a Bieberpop spot."
Then Larry Wall avoided the question by giving an answer to something else. The original poster was talking about EXACTLY WHAT I AM DESCRIBING. He linked to videos of presentations by Netanel Rubin, who demonstrated this code is vulnerable:
use strict; use warnings; use CGI;
my $cgi = CGI->new;
if ( $cgi->upload( 'file' ) ) {
my $file = cgi->param( 'file' );
while ( <$file> ) { print $_; }
}
This allows remote code execution. He also showed how to break REST APIs that create hashes from user input, as well as the myriad of options opened up if the Perl script uses Catalyst or Mojolicious instead of CGI.PM, which allows you to fill variables with things like lists of hashes.
To be clear about perl: when you evaluate a list as a variable, perl gives a result essentially idempotent with performing the operation on each element of the list and returning the final state--i.e. the immediate result is whatever the result would be if you passed the last element of the list. When you pass a variable containing a list to a function call, perl interprets this as passing the next several parameters, i.e. foo(a, b, c) if given (b) as a list will pass the first element of (b) as (b) and the SECOND element of (b) as (c). This means a lot of validation code breaks quickly when the user sneaks a list into Perl somewhere.
Hashes do similar things: if you can manage to append a value to a hash, it will overwrite an earlier value. Again, perl processes in serial: {a=1, b=2, c=3, b=4} will do exactly what you'd imagine it doing if you iterated through that list as a step-by-step operation instead of an atomic operation, and you will get {a=1, b=4, c=3}. This effectively allowed people to create admin accounts on Bugzillas for a while by submitting their verification form with a list in the password field: Perl would expand the password {pw=$foo} to include all list elements {pw=(foo, bar, baz)} becoming {pw=foo, bar=baz}, and so, of course, you could stick a new entry for an e-mail address into their hash {email=foo@bar, pw=foo, email=admin@mozilla.org}. Congratulations: you are now a Bugzilla administrator.
THAT is what the OP had asked Larry. Specifically. With examples.
There's always work for people to do; but there's not always someone to pay for it. There's a certain total amount of income. Raising minimum wage transfers more of that income to fewer hands, making some people poorer, putting others out of jobs, and making others richer; minimum wage increases can't increase the number of jobs because there isn't actually more money being spent per year, and if you supplied more money you still wouldn't have more stuff being made until technical progress improved productivity.
That means, no, 5% of people aren't out of a job because they're lazy; 5% of people are out of a job because you, me, and everyone else have enough spending money to employ 95% of all of us. 40% of the population turns over every year--almost half of Americans leave their jobs--so there are *always* jobs available. There are slightly fewer jobs than actual people looking for jobs--hence unemployment.
The rich paid 56% of the collected taxes in 2014. The poor paid 0.15%. The $50,000-$100,000 range paid 19%. That's not marginal rate; that's the proportion of all individual income tax dollars collected by the IRS.
The Universal Social Security plan I designed is four times more effective than existing welfare at under 1/3 the cost. That means literally everyone ends up richer. It stabilizes the economy as well, preventing dips and accelerating growth, meaning the level of total wealth at any point in the future is higher than all modern alternatives.
So do you want yourself, Warren Buffet, me, and EVERY OTHER AMERICAN to all be poorer just so your ideals can be cradled and you can have some vengeance against poor people for their crime of being poor?
One, your rant is interesting because your sole fix for a really bad economy is taxing people more. Can you name a single example where taxing people more, improved things?
Current Federal taxes taken is $2.4 trillion; I modify this to about $1.2 trillion. I guess 1.2 is greater than 2.4 in your world.
Two, you can tax 100 % of the people you think aren't paying enough, and it won't help anyone. The rich can always avoid taxes, where the middle class cannot. The bottom 50% don't pay taxes (because they are poor).
I'm aware of that and accounted for it. You're in "repeat mantra instead of thinking" mode: you haven't engaged your brain in any way except to retrieve tired, old arguments.
Taxing the rich isn't going to fix this problem,
Let me repeat this:
Oh, and the top-tier tax bracket is bounded at 40%. Our flat-tax rate--if we used a flat-income-tax system--would have been 29.97% in 2013; in large part using the top-tier bracket of 39.6% as a sort of risk meter, I conjectured that taxing the richest-of-rich more than 4/3 the effective tax rate was poor tax policy
Let's put this simply: The group of people who end the day with MORE TAKE-HOME PAY in my system is EVERYONE.
As for housing, HUD and Government subsidies PROMOTE being locked into poverty. Because if you earn enough money, you get kicked out and lose your subsidies.
So let's quote myself again:
I wanted a system that would absolutely compensate for inflation, diminish (and survive) recessions, and eliminate welfare traps (i.e. adding employment should *always* add to your income, rather than competing with a welfare service; it's no good getting a $10/hr job and losing $9.75/hr of welfare, because then you get to work for 25 cents an hour and fuck that).
Congratulations: you took the solution I gave and cited the problem I solved.
Repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results is insane.
This is a tired and often-repeated lie. It's the lie that sells real estate books. "I'm rich; if you do what I did, you'll be rich too." No you won't.
The economy today has a much higher productive output per person, which means some things are possible which weren't possible before. If you're out of air in the tank and suffocating, pulling your mask off underwater means you drown; pulling it off when you're on land means you live. Same action, different consequences. You can't explain that.
You're repeating mantras and not thinking. Use the part of your brain that hurts when it's turned on.
Sure, let's spend $1,863 billion upgrading the network to 40 times its capacity. Never mind all the cell phone signal on that limited spectrum; more towers in the same spectrum will fix it, somehow!
Polymath here with accounting, finance, and economics as side-interests. Verizon has a 7% average profit margin across its business. They've historically kept their ridiculously-high prices as low as they are by cheating the government (changing the definition of their operation, taking multi-hundred-billion-dollar grants, rebuilding infrastructure, then changing again to reduce their tax obligation), performing strategic projection of network use (figuring that people will use data of a certain size in bursts of smaller sizes, thus will benefit from speeds higher than their network can support at simultaneous 100% saturation from all users, and offering those speeds based on likely saturation during likely time frames), and dangling fees for random shit off the end.
Verizon's operating costs will increase if they try to upgrade their networks out-of-pocket; as you pointed out, they'd have to cheat and try to con the government into giving them hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Again. Meanwhile, people have found ways to use those high-speed connections to download more and more shit, rather than accessing the same shit faster.
Ultimately, the users want something for free. To put "something" into perspective: I pay T-Mobile $10/month for 2GB of high-speed LTE+; I've banked around 18GB (I use under 500MB/month) in roll-over data, and I stream Spotify high-quality in my 25-minute commute to and from work, as well as for two 20 minute sessions walking around outside to burn a few extra calories. It wasn't until about 8 months ago I bought Spotify Premium and started storing my most-used playlists on the phone, which cut me down to under 200MB/month of usage.
If we look at my $10/month 2GB and multiply it by, oh I don't know, 50? That's $500/month. That's 100GB on a plan that was blind-sided by text messages and cell phone videos giving way to unlimited NETFLIX streaming to your HDTV! That's right: Some people plug their phone into their TV, boot up Netflix, and use those three little copper dots on the side to send 1080p to their 55 inch LCD all god damn night. Maybe they should get on Wifi!
We set an expectation in a world that was fascinated by the Internet being so fast compared to dial-up modems. We set an expectation in a world of 400K 3G, a world where you could download anything you wanted because data was e-mail and cat pictures. Now we're using 26MBit/s connections for video chat with 6 people and Twitch in HD, and we still expect it to be infinite forever.
You give a man an inch and he wants a mile; you give a woman an inch and she wants eight. Nobody considers you just might not have it.
Yes, basically every FBI action ever, combined with potato. The same thing with Freddie Gray here, the guy who got shot in his car in front of his kid, the black dude with the autistic kid, and everyone else the cops basically walked up to and shot (with varying degrees of certainty around events--we have a VIDEO of the last guy lying on the ground with his hands up, then getting shot for no reason; who knows wtf happened with Gray?).
We're between conservative-republican ultra-authoritarian politicians who want to militarize the police and cry loudly about imaginary terrorist bogeymen hiding under every shrub, and liberal-democrat feel-good politicians who think government authoritarianism is terrible and *also* want to militarize police and talk a whole hell of a lot about imaginary terrorist bogeymen hiding under every shrub. The conservatives want small government and are beefing up the government's spending, authority, and visibility into your private affairs; the liberals want big government and are beefing up the government's spending, authority, and visibility into your private affairs.
I'm surrounded by people who are on one side or the other, shouting loudly, and claiming they're liberal-free-thinkers or that they're too smart and free-thinking to be brainwashed by liberal hippies. The liberals have some weird Marxist fantasy; the Conservatives ALSO have some weird Marxist fantasy, but theirs involves imitating the stereotypical wild-west image of Texas.
I keep asking how you can be a free-thinker if you've solidly attached yourself to the correct ideology.
No it wouldn't, it would simply shift the definition of poverty.
"a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information."
Did I say I would end "relative poverty"? Even my parents are relatively-poor compared to me.
Oh, and to put another figure to it: 134 million households, 2/3 of all households are 2-adult. Targeting incomes under $30,000 would be 28% of all households--call it 30%? 5/3 adults * 30% of 134 million * ~$7,000 = $469 billion. Tack on ~$140 billion to cover aid for children of low-income households (it's 1.4% including children and low-income naturalized Americans, who are excluded from receiving the Dividend as a direct benefit--rather it's paid as a non-refundable tax credit) and it's $619 billion. This replaces what should be ~$1.7-$1.9 trillion of government expenses currently.
Using 2013 numbers, I got a more-concrete number of around $1,167 billion less in taxpayer cost. The numbers are resolved essentially by paying every American adult a fixed benefit, but scaling the general fund tax system such that the difference between current total loss to taxes and the new system's loss to taxes is lowered. That is to say: if you're giving every Adult $7,000, the low-income households might see a total spendable income of $7,000 per adult (that's $14,000 for a 2-adult household), while people making ~$50k are getting a net change of $5,000, and at $400,000 it's a net-change of $1,000, etc. You wind up getting handed $14,000 but paying $11,000 more in taxes, you're $3,000 ahead.
It's complicated like that--flowing that particular chunk of money through the Social Security Trust Fund--instead of just flatly taxing less because otherwise you create this insanely-complex tax system that's fragile when economic recessions kick in. I wanted a system that would absolutely compensate for inflation, diminish (and survive) recessions, and eliminate welfare traps (i.e. adding employment should *always* add to your income, rather than competing with a welfare service; it's no good getting a $10/hr job and losing $9.75/hr of welfare, because then you get to work for 25 cents an hour and fuck that). That excluded simply slashing taxes by about a third--the strategy appropriate for a system called a Negative Income Tax.
But yes, the essential outcome is an immediate, 100% remediation of our welfare system (families on food stamps and HUD--notably, the 75% of HUD-qualified households who go on a waiting list and *never* receive benefits--are suddenly in a stronger financial position); a multi-hundred-million-dollar profit market for renting mirco-unit apartments (244sqft) to the current 1.6 million homeless individuals (it's $5.76 billion of revenue, and I built in a 33% risk reserve in the accounting which would, if fully-taken by landlords, represent $1.9 billion in profits; I think the market will end a lot slimmer than that); and, at a resolution of a 2-week or 1-month time span, over $1 trillion of annual taxes immediately returned to the taxpayer, excluding the part that's being moved downward to the 30% lowest-income households.
Oh, and the top-tier tax bracket is bounded at 40%. Our flat-tax rate--if we used a flat-income-tax system--would have been 29.97% in 2013; in large part using the top-tier bracket of 39.6% as a sort of risk meter, I conjectured that taxing the richest-of-rich more than 4/3 the effective tax rate was poor tax policy (and, besides, represents raising income taxes on rich people, which *might* cause undesirable political or economic consequences). That kind of pisses people off, since some Gallup polls and such show most Americans believe the rich aren't paying their fair share and should be shaken down for 65% of their income, since of course they don't need it.
Do you know what the one real problem is?
It's a trillion dollars. The U.S. Federal spending is $3 tr
It's even more basic than that: these reports base on the idea that all products are constantly bought, and ignore durable goods. So a new product comes out, everyone in the freaking world buys one, and then everyone has one; because the product doesn't wear out in a year, 10% as many people buy them next year, and suddenly you have headlines about how it's a dead product nobody buys anymore.
This happens with things like smart phones as the market matures. Across 10 years we went from 516MHz 256MB RAM to quad-core 1.9GHz 2GB RAM; across ten more years, it's been heterogeneous quad-core 2.24GHz 4GB RAM. That slightly-faster smart phone might be a little slower than the shiny new thing, but it's not like the era where you had a 2-year-old phone that couldn't run ANYTHING anymore because Facebook needed 3 times as much RAM as your entire phone provides. Five-year upgrade periods are totally acceptable, and haggling over today's new-model phone and yesterday's old-model phone involves a lot of wondering if the impulse buy and social status is worth the $400. I have a OnePlus One and can't figure out why I would buy a OnePlus Three.
I was more indicating the Bundy Brothers... in Oregon, apparently. They decided too many Liberal lawmakers making laws they don't like, so they took over a Federal building and defended it with firearms.
Slashdot Mirror
far less than the $3.2 trillion per year needed to provide every American with $10,000/year stated by an earlier poster. So that's already $2 trillion unaccounted for right there.
Essentially, those numbers are ludicrous. When including a public aid system cut back to give EBT covering children of low-income households (rather than just handing out more cash every time you pop out a baby), the burden to taxpayers (counting money moving downward from rich hands into poor hands as "burden on taxpayers") is a trillion dollars lower.
Is $10,000/year even enough to live on in the US? http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-... [numbeo.com] lists the price of a one bedroom apartment outside the city center as $900/month, i.e. around $11,000/year.
You're thinking in terms of today's market. There's a huge amount of overhead in cost of risk that doesn't scale downward to small income demographics, because those demographics have unstable risk. I talked about this.
There would be no money left over for food, education, medicine, etc.
Medical and education are separate considerations. We have entire budgets and even economic debates over those; I understand both sides of the education economic debate, and I stand on the side that workforce development branded as "education" is an economically-harmful practice that creates a lot of waste in training excessively-large skilled workforces and flooding the labor market (I'm the guy who invented that argument in the first place; it takes several pages to explain).
so anyone who is poor today would still be poor under this new system - and living out on the street. Well, nicely done - you did not eliminate poverty after all
Checking my models.
National average HUD eligibility for extremely-low-income households for 1, 2, and 3 persons are $12,650, $14,200, and $15,800. These households's after-tax incomes would increase by approximately $7,250 for single-adult households and $14,500 for two-adult households. For just low-income households, incomes are $29,450, $33,700, and $37,900. Their incomes increase by just under $7,000 for single-adult households and just under $14,000 for two-adult households. Again: each of these households also gets an EBT-mediated public aid for any children, for any service for which they qualify (WIC food assistance, etc.), currently a state service and likely run as such for the foreseeable future.
The bottom 5%, 10%, and 15% of incomes are $7,100, $12,300, and $17,100. Such single-adult households would increase after-tax income to $13,800, $18,000, and $22,000, each above the Federal poverty lines for 1, 2, and 3 individuals, respectively. Two-adult households at these income levels would increase to $21,000, $26,000, and $30,000, above the Federal poverty lines for 3, 4, and 5 individuals.
The median Single Father household would increase its spendable income by $6,400; the median Single Mother household would increase its spendable income by $6,900.
Two-adult, married-filing households at $600,000 income would have about $30 more spendable money; two-adult, married-filing households at $700,000 income would pay $370 in additional taxes. Your average 1-adult, single-filing household is less-advantaged, with $200,000-income households retaining $1,000 more in spendable income, $300,000-income households paying $1,000 more.
Among the less-advantaged 1-income households, the top 1% income level of $330,000 pays $1,600 more in taxes. The 0.1% level of $1,700,000 pays $8,504 more in taxes. A household with $10,000,000 of income would pay $41,700 more in taxes.
These tax increases represent around $20 billion of a $1,000 billion redu
So now we are down to $500 billion in extra costs, which is a much more realistic figure.
$1 trillion less in costs to the tax payer.
I pay a little over $30k per year in federal income taxes
I assume that puts you in the $110k-$130k range? My current models compute that you'd take home between $5,300 and $5,000 more income at the same salary level, assuming you're single in a 1-adult household. For a 2-adult household, you must be in the $130k-$140k range, which means your household would take home between $8,900 and $8,600 of additional spendable income per year.
You're *still* paying for someone else. The average per-person is almost $7,000, and you're "getting" $4,300-$5,300 per person under my tax scheme. That other $2,700-$1,700 is coming out of your pocket and going to some other bloke; it just happens to be less than what's coming out of your pocket currently.
The extra medical support is excludable (it's either not feasible *or* you should have a separate medical care system).
As for the rest--food, housing, utilities, clothing, personal care--it's actually doable in (today's money) just under $7,000/year. The big problem is housing, and it's complex to cover; food, clothing, and personal care are easy, although a lot goes into settling out the risk.
My first attempt with this used a 2013 model and a split budget for food, clothing, and personal care of $100, $35, and $35. In 2016 I was able to model day-to-day meals in California, Washington, and Maryland on the order of $25/month for 30 days at 2000kcal/day, including beans, rice, bread, eggs, vegetables, and the infrequent rotisserie chicken (2-3 per month). Nevertheless, I found the $100 budget staggeringly difficult to work with, largely due to bootstrapping (I put pans and utensils under the Food budget, and I was going on bulk buy of beans and flour--because 50 pounds of flour costs $6.82 and 5 pounds of flour costs $3.50). With clothing and personal care being overbudgeted and more flexible (you can skip new clothes this month; you can't wait for the end of the week to get food!), I switched to an integrated $170/month budget for all three. It's $181/month in 2016.
Housing is more complex than that.
The simple analysis is that low-income areas range rents from $0.66/sqft to $1.10/sqft, with about $1.02/sqft as a common median. That gave me a 224sqft unit with a 33% risk reserve at $1.33/sqft, or a $300/month single-person low-income unit. It works, and it covers risk with a shitload of money; but that's not good enough.
I had to first prove the model. New single-bedroom units cost about $58,000 to build, so I used charts of apartment costs supplied by various local governments to remove the cost of fixtures (counters, stoves, sinks, bath tubs, toilets, cabinets) from that figure, and then cut the remaining cost down to a 224sqft unit and added back the fixtures (which aren't per-sqft). That got me $23,000-$26,000 per unit; packing in heavy insulation (R-23) added up to $150 of material and 2 hours of labor (~$100), which was a concern with utilities (I've heated spaces that size in under $30 with less insulation). We may need regulation mandating proper weather-sealing construction for newly-remodeled or constructed units under 600sqft.
The next was a risk evaluation. This is the theoretical basis. Essentially, when you target lower-income demographics, risk increases: low incomes are less-stable, and increase the frequency of costly evictions and empty units. To stay in business, you have to distribute that risk among your tenants; landlords can take alternate routes, such as reducing rent in exchange for a high security deposit on a case-by-case basis, essentially removing that tenant from one risk pool and putting him in a different one. All of this means people whose minimum-wage job may cut hours or vanish entirely and, especially, people on unemployment who may hit the six-month term without finding a job are likely to cost you money, and thus you must charge them higher rent to offset that likelihood; at a point, the minimum-viable rent is higher than the demographic can afford.
A guaranteed basic income (such as a Citizen's Dividend or Universal Social Security) can't go away.
The risk of eviction or vacant units due to tenant non-payment via tenant loss of income goes away. The tenant may still *fail* to pay, but he won't become *incapable* of paying nearly as frequently. That reduces the cost of risk, allowing for smooth scaling of rent prices without a reduction in profit margin. This, the 33% risk reserve ($1.33/sqft projection when median prices are about $1/sqft), and other potential strategies (e.g. a landlord-tenant agreement in which Social Security directly deposits the rent to the landlord, and immediately informs both parties if either cancels the recurring deposit) reduces the risk to the landlord and the risk to
A more robust analysis shows it's over a trillion dollars cheaper than America's current system, but Slashdot doesn't support a basic income and will mark that kind of thinking as spam less than 2 minutes after it's submitted.
Of course they are! Even servants have servants these days!
People keep telling me folks should all just get better jobs instead of being burger flippers. This comes up a *lot* because I talk a lot about alternatives to minimum wage, because minimum wage increases concentrate wealth at the expense of jobs (no, your hamburger won't be $15; your $8 value meal will cost 13 cents more, multiplied by 31 billion sales per year, which takes enough of the *same* *total* *income* to make wage for 281,000 minimum-wage jobs--that's the maximum number of jobs that go away). One of the common answers is just "they should get better jobs instead." The other is some magical handwaving about money falling out of the sky (some people don't realize that the wages come out of the consumer's spending, and think that raising wage means more money magically appears in the paycheck, and so it can be spent and create even more jobs--a concept that would indicate infinite money and infinite jobs at all wage levels).
My more recent response has been pointing out that these people can bother feeding themselves, since those wage workers are your grocery baggers and burger flippers. People expect a register operator, stocked store shelves, bagged groceries, and a hot meal ready for them for two dollars; then they complain that somebody actually did all the work involved, and demand that guy stop mooching and go get a real job. It's ludicrous.
Really, I shouldn't talk about this on Slashdot. Bashing concepts like Basic Income is front-page material, but supporting positions are spam.
Plenty. That, Windows, and Esperanto vs Klingon are all battlegrounds for nerd turf-wars.
I'm waiting either for Microsoft to add cgroups to the Linux subsystem or for Docker to add a call to Windows Container Services and create a Linux Services for Windows installation within that, thus allowing Linux Docker containers in Windows.
It's not as good as Gnome 3, but it's a huge step up from 7 and 8.1. Welcome Microsoft to 2005.
A few tens of thousands of users have been using it for a few months now.
That sounds a lot like the Holy Roman Empire...
Seriously? Men have like a 2 hour refactoring period and take 8 minutes to get off. Just line 'em up. There can be color-coded bands for what group you got tested in so we know not to worry if the condom breaks.
Just have more gangbangs.
That's barely a statistical error in China.
Part of the cost of automation being less than labor is you create unemployment. This is fine--it's how progress works--and the displaced labor creates a gap between prior cost and new cost, which eventually leads to lower prices (prices don't keep with inflation, in part because it's impossible to hold all prices at the same buying-power equivalent in an economy where the relative price of everything constantly shifts thanks to population expansion, money supply increase, and productivity gains all interacting, and the buying-power total doesn't go up until the price of something goes down).
If you create 0.1% unemployment, no big deal. That gets washed away as the workforce turns over; give it a few months to a year and there's no evidence of that blip--save that we're all a little richer. Those people got new jobs, because we're buying more stuff thanks to that 0.1% difference, and somebody needs to make and move that stuff.
If you create 40% unemployment, that's a problem. Things got cheaper... okay? Who is buying all these cheaper things? Never mind that the money hasn't moved down into the hands of the unemployed (400 times more excluded than when they were just 0.1%); the people still working just found that nearly half their work isn't needed anymore, and you know what that means: they get laid off, too.
It's economically feasible when the cost of new technology is lower, and when the risk proposition across growth spans that technology in an uptake not significantly faster than re-employment. The economy has to respond to lower costs by offering lower prices, which businesses don't do unless they're pressured (e.g. competition, desire to get 5% on 100,000,000 units instead of 15% on 10,000,000 units, etc.). The universal competition--that consumers have limited money, and that every product bought is taken from that pool, thus all products are in competition with all other products--takes some time to launder the changes and produce a fresh, new economy.
China has labor shortages and might just be in a position where the reduced labor shifts chinese labor around such that the outcome is 2% or 5% or 8% unemployment, rather than 40% or 80% unemployment. If it cuts their production costs by 20%, that's a hell of a draw for import labor--China's financial position becomes that people will trade them something (to be determined at a later date; here's money as an IOU) for something China can produce cheaper than the buyer. In the mean time, places like America suddenly see a 20% drop in the price of all kinds of goods, and can buy more; this means we need more shipping, more retail operators, more people at VISA managing your accounts, and so forth. It means poor people spend a smaller chunk of their income on clothes and cell phones (which they probably need today), and more on food (which puts demands on local refineries, chemical producers, municipal water systems, John Deere, and farmers). It means more jobs here in America.
China would get richer and America would get richer just by China reducing the cost of manufacture, at least in a projection where China doesn't create an unemployment crisis in its own country.
It sounds like FUD because the article describes Spotify selling targeted ad spots, but there's not much value in just dumping the user's data to every customer buying ads. They'd need an expensive data engineer to come up with all kinds of statistical analysis methods to categorize and analyze that data, and then decide what to do.
It seems more likely Spotify is selling ads based on aggregate statistics. "We have 46 million teenage-college students listening to Bieberpop, and 2 hundred listening to Nickelback; it's $150,000 for a Bieberpop spot."
Yeah everyone is focusing on the tectonic plate thing and missed this gem.
Then Larry Wall avoided the question by giving an answer to something else. The original poster was talking about EXACTLY WHAT I AM DESCRIBING. He linked to videos of presentations by Netanel Rubin, who demonstrated this code is vulnerable:
use strict; use warnings; use CGI;
my $cgi = CGI->new;
if ( $cgi->upload( 'file' ) ) {
my $file = cgi->param( 'file' );
while ( <$file> ) { print $_; }
}
This allows remote code execution. He also showed how to break REST APIs that create hashes from user input, as well as the myriad of options opened up if the Perl script uses Catalyst or Mojolicious instead of CGI.PM, which allows you to fill variables with things like lists of hashes.
To be clear about perl: when you evaluate a list as a variable, perl gives a result essentially idempotent with performing the operation on each element of the list and returning the final state--i.e. the immediate result is whatever the result would be if you passed the last element of the list. When you pass a variable containing a list to a function call, perl interprets this as passing the next several parameters, i.e. foo(a, b, c) if given (b) as a list will pass the first element of (b) as (b) and the SECOND element of (b) as (c). This means a lot of validation code breaks quickly when the user sneaks a list into Perl somewhere.
Hashes do similar things: if you can manage to append a value to a hash, it will overwrite an earlier value. Again, perl processes in serial: {a=1, b=2, c=3, b=4} will do exactly what you'd imagine it doing if you iterated through that list as a step-by-step operation instead of an atomic operation, and you will get {a=1, b=4, c=3}. This effectively allowed people to create admin accounts on Bugzillas for a while by submitting their verification form with a list in the password field: Perl would expand the password {pw=$foo} to include all list elements {pw=(foo, bar, baz)} becoming {pw=foo, bar=baz}, and so, of course, you could stick a new entry for an e-mail address into their hash {email=foo@bar, pw=foo, email=admin@mozilla.org}. Congratulations: you are now a Bugzilla administrator.
THAT is what the OP had asked Larry. Specifically. With examples.
There's always work for people to do; but there's not always someone to pay for it. There's a certain total amount of income. Raising minimum wage transfers more of that income to fewer hands, making some people poorer, putting others out of jobs, and making others richer; minimum wage increases can't increase the number of jobs because there isn't actually more money being spent per year, and if you supplied more money you still wouldn't have more stuff being made until technical progress improved productivity.
That means, no, 5% of people aren't out of a job because they're lazy; 5% of people are out of a job because you, me, and everyone else have enough spending money to employ 95% of all of us. 40% of the population turns over every year--almost half of Americans leave their jobs--so there are *always* jobs available. There are slightly fewer jobs than actual people looking for jobs--hence unemployment.
The rich paid 56% of the collected taxes in 2014. The poor paid 0.15%. The $50,000-$100,000 range paid 19%. That's not marginal rate; that's the proportion of all individual income tax dollars collected by the IRS.
The Universal Social Security plan I designed is four times more effective than existing welfare at under 1/3 the cost. That means literally everyone ends up richer. It stabilizes the economy as well, preventing dips and accelerating growth, meaning the level of total wealth at any point in the future is higher than all modern alternatives.
So do you want yourself, Warren Buffet, me, and EVERY OTHER AMERICAN to all be poorer just so your ideals can be cradled and you can have some vengeance against poor people for their crime of being poor?
One, your rant is interesting because your sole fix for a really bad economy is taxing people more. Can you name a single example where taxing people more, improved things?
Current Federal taxes taken is $2.4 trillion; I modify this to about $1.2 trillion. I guess 1.2 is greater than 2.4 in your world.
Two, you can tax 100 % of the people you think aren't paying enough, and it won't help anyone. The rich can always avoid taxes, where the middle class cannot. The bottom 50% don't pay taxes (because they are poor).
I'm aware of that and accounted for it. You're in "repeat mantra instead of thinking" mode: you haven't engaged your brain in any way except to retrieve tired, old arguments.
Taxing the rich isn't going to fix this problem,
Let me repeat this:
Oh, and the top-tier tax bracket is bounded at 40%. Our flat-tax rate--if we used a flat-income-tax system--would have been 29.97% in 2013; in large part using the top-tier bracket of 39.6% as a sort of risk meter, I conjectured that taxing the richest-of-rich more than 4/3 the effective tax rate was poor tax policy
Let's put this simply: The group of people who end the day with MORE TAKE-HOME PAY in my system is EVERYONE.
As for housing, HUD and Government subsidies PROMOTE being locked into poverty. Because if you earn enough money, you get kicked out and lose your subsidies.
So let's quote myself again:
I wanted a system that would absolutely compensate for inflation, diminish (and survive) recessions, and eliminate welfare traps (i.e. adding employment should *always* add to your income, rather than competing with a welfare service; it's no good getting a $10/hr job and losing $9.75/hr of welfare, because then you get to work for 25 cents an hour and fuck that).
Congratulations: you took the solution I gave and cited the problem I solved.
Repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results is insane.
This is a tired and often-repeated lie. It's the lie that sells real estate books. "I'm rich; if you do what I did, you'll be rich too." No you won't.
The economy today has a much higher productive output per person, which means some things are possible which weren't possible before. If you're out of air in the tank and suffocating, pulling your mask off underwater means you drown; pulling it off when you're on land means you live. Same action, different consequences. You can't explain that.
You're repeating mantras and not thinking. Use the part of your brain that hurts when it's turned on.
Sure, let's spend $1,863 billion upgrading the network to 40 times its capacity. Never mind all the cell phone signal on that limited spectrum; more towers in the same spectrum will fix it, somehow!
Polymath here with accounting, finance, and economics as side-interests. Verizon has a 7% average profit margin across its business. They've historically kept their ridiculously-high prices as low as they are by cheating the government (changing the definition of their operation, taking multi-hundred-billion-dollar grants, rebuilding infrastructure, then changing again to reduce their tax obligation), performing strategic projection of network use (figuring that people will use data of a certain size in bursts of smaller sizes, thus will benefit from speeds higher than their network can support at simultaneous 100% saturation from all users, and offering those speeds based on likely saturation during likely time frames), and dangling fees for random shit off the end.
Verizon's operating costs will increase if they try to upgrade their networks out-of-pocket; as you pointed out, they'd have to cheat and try to con the government into giving them hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Again. Meanwhile, people have found ways to use those high-speed connections to download more and more shit, rather than accessing the same shit faster.
Ultimately, the users want something for free. To put "something" into perspective: I pay T-Mobile $10/month for 2GB of high-speed LTE+; I've banked around 18GB (I use under 500MB/month) in roll-over data, and I stream Spotify high-quality in my 25-minute commute to and from work, as well as for two 20 minute sessions walking around outside to burn a few extra calories. It wasn't until about 8 months ago I bought Spotify Premium and started storing my most-used playlists on the phone, which cut me down to under 200MB/month of usage.
If we look at my $10/month 2GB and multiply it by, oh I don't know, 50? That's $500/month. That's 100GB on a plan that was blind-sided by text messages and cell phone videos giving way to unlimited NETFLIX streaming to your HDTV! That's right: Some people plug their phone into their TV, boot up Netflix, and use those three little copper dots on the side to send 1080p to their 55 inch LCD all god damn night. Maybe they should get on Wifi!
We set an expectation in a world that was fascinated by the Internet being so fast compared to dial-up modems. We set an expectation in a world of 400K 3G, a world where you could download anything you wanted because data was e-mail and cat pictures. Now we're using 26MBit/s connections for video chat with 6 people and Twitch in HD, and we still expect it to be infinite forever.
You give a man an inch and he wants a mile; you give a woman an inch and she wants eight. Nobody considers you just might not have it.
Yes, basically every FBI action ever, combined with potato. The same thing with Freddie Gray here, the guy who got shot in his car in front of his kid, the black dude with the autistic kid, and everyone else the cops basically walked up to and shot (with varying degrees of certainty around events--we have a VIDEO of the last guy lying on the ground with his hands up, then getting shot for no reason; who knows wtf happened with Gray?).
We're between conservative-republican ultra-authoritarian politicians who want to militarize the police and cry loudly about imaginary terrorist bogeymen hiding under every shrub, and liberal-democrat feel-good politicians who think government authoritarianism is terrible and *also* want to militarize police and talk a whole hell of a lot about imaginary terrorist bogeymen hiding under every shrub. The conservatives want small government and are beefing up the government's spending, authority, and visibility into your private affairs; the liberals want big government and are beefing up the government's spending, authority, and visibility into your private affairs.
I'm surrounded by people who are on one side or the other, shouting loudly, and claiming they're liberal-free-thinkers or that they're too smart and free-thinking to be brainwashed by liberal hippies. The liberals have some weird Marxist fantasy; the Conservatives ALSO have some weird Marxist fantasy, but theirs involves imitating the stereotypical wild-west image of Texas.
I keep asking how you can be a free-thinker if you've solidly attached yourself to the correct ideology.
No it wouldn't, it would simply shift the definition of poverty.
"a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information."
Did I say I would end "relative poverty"? Even my parents are relatively-poor compared to me.
Oh, and to put another figure to it: 134 million households, 2/3 of all households are 2-adult. Targeting incomes under $30,000 would be 28% of all households--call it 30%? 5/3 adults * 30% of 134 million * ~$7,000 = $469 billion. Tack on ~$140 billion to cover aid for children of low-income households (it's 1.4% including children and low-income naturalized Americans, who are excluded from receiving the Dividend as a direct benefit--rather it's paid as a non-refundable tax credit) and it's $619 billion. This replaces what should be ~$1.7-$1.9 trillion of government expenses currently.
Using 2013 numbers, I got a more-concrete number of around $1,167 billion less in taxpayer cost. The numbers are resolved essentially by paying every American adult a fixed benefit, but scaling the general fund tax system such that the difference between current total loss to taxes and the new system's loss to taxes is lowered. That is to say: if you're giving every Adult $7,000, the low-income households might see a total spendable income of $7,000 per adult (that's $14,000 for a 2-adult household), while people making ~$50k are getting a net change of $5,000, and at $400,000 it's a net-change of $1,000, etc. You wind up getting handed $14,000 but paying $11,000 more in taxes, you're $3,000 ahead.
It's complicated like that--flowing that particular chunk of money through the Social Security Trust Fund--instead of just flatly taxing less because otherwise you create this insanely-complex tax system that's fragile when economic recessions kick in. I wanted a system that would absolutely compensate for inflation, diminish (and survive) recessions, and eliminate welfare traps (i.e. adding employment should *always* add to your income, rather than competing with a welfare service; it's no good getting a $10/hr job and losing $9.75/hr of welfare, because then you get to work for 25 cents an hour and fuck that). That excluded simply slashing taxes by about a third--the strategy appropriate for a system called a Negative Income Tax.
But yes, the essential outcome is an immediate, 100% remediation of our welfare system (families on food stamps and HUD--notably, the 75% of HUD-qualified households who go on a waiting list and *never* receive benefits--are suddenly in a stronger financial position); a multi-hundred-million-dollar profit market for renting mirco-unit apartments (244sqft) to the current 1.6 million homeless individuals (it's $5.76 billion of revenue, and I built in a 33% risk reserve in the accounting which would, if fully-taken by landlords, represent $1.9 billion in profits; I think the market will end a lot slimmer than that); and, at a resolution of a 2-week or 1-month time span, over $1 trillion of annual taxes immediately returned to the taxpayer, excluding the part that's being moved downward to the 30% lowest-income households.
Oh, and the top-tier tax bracket is bounded at 40%. Our flat-tax rate--if we used a flat-income-tax system--would have been 29.97% in 2013; in large part using the top-tier bracket of 39.6% as a sort of risk meter, I conjectured that taxing the richest-of-rich more than 4/3 the effective tax rate was poor tax policy (and, besides, represents raising income taxes on rich people, which *might* cause undesirable political or economic consequences). That kind of pisses people off, since some Gallup polls and such show most Americans believe the rich aren't paying their fair share and should be shaken down for 65% of their income, since of course they don't need it.
Do you know what the one real problem is?
It's a trillion dollars. The U.S. Federal spending is $3 tr
It's even more basic than that: these reports base on the idea that all products are constantly bought, and ignore durable goods. So a new product comes out, everyone in the freaking world buys one, and then everyone has one; because the product doesn't wear out in a year, 10% as many people buy them next year, and suddenly you have headlines about how it's a dead product nobody buys anymore.
This happens with things like smart phones as the market matures. Across 10 years we went from 516MHz 256MB RAM to quad-core 1.9GHz 2GB RAM; across ten more years, it's been heterogeneous quad-core 2.24GHz 4GB RAM. That slightly-faster smart phone might be a little slower than the shiny new thing, but it's not like the era where you had a 2-year-old phone that couldn't run ANYTHING anymore because Facebook needed 3 times as much RAM as your entire phone provides. Five-year upgrade periods are totally acceptable, and haggling over today's new-model phone and yesterday's old-model phone involves a lot of wondering if the impulse buy and social status is worth the $400. I have a OnePlus One and can't figure out why I would buy a OnePlus Three.
I was more indicating the Bundy Brothers... in Oregon, apparently. They decided too many Liberal lawmakers making laws they don't like, so they took over a Federal building and defended it with firearms.