Why does TFA not mention we should maybe consider a little personal responsibility, eh? What is this, you let hackers take your identity? Maybe you should have refused to provide Sony with any information that would allow them to take out loans in your name!
Oh, you have an address, and a credit card number? No social security number? Well, I guess you can spend credit card money; and the owner can chargeback the money, freeze the card, and get a new one.
Sony wants your SSN, bank account details, and DOB? Dude fuck them. Go get Wii.
The banks gave people a loan without your Driver's ID, SSN, etc? Just with your name and address? Dude, I can put an address into city services and get the names of the residents and their property tax payment dates and amounts, and any bill due. Tell the judge the bank is retarded for not getting actual ID.
A true agile process has an incremental delivery schedule. Rather than building the full deliverable and delivering, it identifies milestones as deliverable product. For example: a waterfall process for building a car would intake requirements and output a car; an agile process would produce the platform for inspection by the customer, followed by the suspension system, the engine, the drive train, interior, and so on, in some useful order.
For a software product, this involves delivering partial functionality to the customer, who then examines it or even integrates it with his workflow. If there are issues, the functionality can be cheaply reworked; building on top of broken functionality could incur major rework when an issue is encountered, so this process actually reduces work.
Agile is not Rapid Application Development. RAD has consistently been shown to be a large joke. Agile software project management accomplishes what RAD could not.
You assume that meetings are the only way to convey requirements instead of working closely with the subject matter experts in a more collaborative manner.
If you can handle two afternoons' worth of reading, I will direct you here (technical) and here (soft skills). These cover stakeholder management, which is "working with people". Part of that is working with SMEs.
If you want to argue from an actual competent stance, you'll need to bother reading the (horrifically dry) PMBOK, fifth edition, particularly chapters 5 (scope management) and 10 (communications management). I found chapter 9 (human resource management) fascinating as well; chapter 11 (risk management) is a favorite of mine. Much of the content may sound like gibberish out of full context; reading the book from start to finish is like that, too, because they forward-reference things in the beginning (integration management immediately starts talking about the requirements traceability matrix, IIRC, which is 4 chapters later).
The short of it is: there are many ways to get information out of people. Meetings are a good method, and arranging good meetings is a skill. Meetings have three isolate purposes: to share information, to develop alternatives, and to make decisions. Never perform more than one in the same meeting; you will make horrific decisions.
To put this into perspective: We've worked closely with SMEs here, and done things wrong. Sometimes, meetings occur without the SMEs, and decisions are made contrary to what the SME recommended; others, the tech workers (network engineers, programmers, etc.) were consulted separately, and then excluded from decisionary meetings. The result is often people making decision and dropping impossible, poorly defined, or useless shit on you. Then you implement it, and they tell you it's wrong.
By the by, one of the most important features of a good meeting is it's short.
Each claim increases your insurance premium. If I can get all your neighbors in on it, your area becomes a "high-risk area" and you get to pay $1000 extra for insurance. A difference of 2 miles for me made my car insurance jump from $90/mo to $324/mo once.
Consultants extract money from the "job creators" and return it to the economy. Even if they did no work at all, that extraction justifies their existence.
I'm coming to your house and breaking your windows. Then you can return some money to the economy. The glazier will be happy.
I never hire independent consultants. They don't understand the use of project management, and just hack things together as quickly as possible. This is, of course, compounded by management wanting to not give proper budget to work with consultants properly so that they have time to write not-shit-code.
Getting the programming consultant into meetings is the only way to get good quality work out of them. Throwing a requirements list at people doesn't help as much as folks think; you discuss that with the consultant, but you also bring them into the meetings with the primary stakeholders. That way they get to see what's going on, hear about the features needed, the use cases, and, in agile models, get feedback on each incremental deliverable. This allows the programmer to raise questions about what exactly is being asked of him, instead of just getting shoved in a room with a spec and then told him he didn't do it right--when there's 100 ways to implement what's on the spec and only 2 are apparently acceptable.
William Strunk covered this in 1914. You're never supposed to put quotes around words like that, as it puts on airs to show the audience that you're using some vulgar slang, but we're all better than that.
Quotes are used when referencing a term. We call this "using quotes". If you otherwise "use quotes" around "things" in your "sen-tance", you look like a "huge jackass" like Dr. Evil.
When doing something not done ever before in history, you cannot rely on the plain events of the past; you can only use them as a guide to shape your attempts in the future.
Oh, you're connecting the need to work with the ability. Yeah, that's a bad assumption.
If you don't work, you live in a 244sqft apartment with 144sqft living space, the rest kitchen and bathroom. You can't buy anything good, and have to live on extremely strict finances. Luxury doesn't exist, and you probably won't have very good dating prospects; you don't have any money to go out to the bars, either.
In our current system, getting a job is a bad deal. If you have Social Security Disability Income, you can string that out forever at $676/mo. Once you get a job, that vanishes immediately; your wages are less $676/mo, because that's what you pay *every* *month* to have a job. If you get fired, you can't go back to SSDI. Same with unemployment (you lose it upon employment, and, If you're fired because you're a dickhead, you don't collect unemployment again).
Getting a job on welfare is risky, and discounts your monthly pay by the amount you were gaining on welfare. Rather than working 0 hours and getting $676, you are working 160 hours and getting $1,160. That makes a minimum wage job $3/hr, with the risk of getting no unemployment or SSDI if you get fired (you haven't worked in 8 months--do you still know how to not fuck off?).
With a UBI, you don't need to work. We don't need a minimum wage; if they don't pay you well, don't work. On the other hand, if you do work, you will always gain the full benefit of employment, and will never have your UBI taken away from you. Working is always a good deal, and gainful employment carries no risk. If you so decide, you could even live with just UBI, and provide volunteer time for the community--it won't gain you anything, but you won't be stuck inside, and you won't have to worry about your expenses because you don't necessarily need a job per se--but you have to be pretty hard core to take that deal.
Except the stock has movement, and there is some probability that it will move up or down. Savvy investors have more information: they know general trends in stock movement, and can predict more accurately which way it will move. Non-savvy investors don't: they work on the principles of stability, that being that a nice, safe stock that's been climbing will continue climbing, and so they buy in as the stock gains value.
The second group tends to believe the stock is undervalued more when its spot price has climbed longer. They think it will go up forever. The first group has target prices and technical analysis, and starts to sell out at a certain point; this creates a visible stock movement that tips off more risk-tolerant investors who also do technical analysis, who sell out later. Eventually, the small-time traders who want to buy have "enough", or are out of money; the big-time traders who think the stock is overvalued aren't buying; liquidity decreases; and sale price becomes lower.
This difference in evaluation means different groups of people will think the stock is overvalued or undervalued. Even though their methods are different and their valuation of the stock is different, they're both purchasing "stock should increase in price from here". My point was that they're not investing in companies.
Investing in Microsoft, Virgin, or Symantic is a diversified investment strategy. The companies operate in many market sectors, produce products across diversified markets, and supply services to everyone from miners to financials, home users to governments. Your risk is thusly spread across more than 500 companies.
You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable.
Where are you getting this from? I detect a very basic failure to either apply critical thinking or reading comprehension.
In A.I., they showed a human-like robot with personality and sensitivity to pain. It was rather complaint. To demonstrate its human A.I. features and pain response, the salesman drove a nail straight through her hand and made her scream.
We produce Mo-99 isotopes of Molybdenum for medical use by nuclear fusion. Certain other medical isotopes of Cadmium are also produced by fusion. Doing so is simple: You produce a high electrical charge on two coils, and pump ionized gas between them. Each ion will gain 11,000 kelvin per volt of acceleration; you can readily reach 200 million kelvin or so in this way. There is a small probability of particle collision, as all ions are accelerating toward a rough center; these collisions release X-rays, neutrons, heat, and light; although x-rays, heat, and light are redundant. Collisions in this way initiate nuclear fusion.
Anti-corrosion plating for sewer pipes is not valuable? There would be less work maintaining sewer pipes! For that matter, platinum is awesome and allows a large increase in hardness of metal; tungsten also allows hardness and heat resistance; not to forget Iridium and Rubidium, both of which are exceedingly rare and highly useful. Titanium and Nickel are somewhat common, but nowhere near as common as iron.
Without energy scarcity, most can be automated. The most scarce resource is not energy--that's the second most scarce, and it's distanced greatly from the third. The most scarce resource is people who want to work for the common good, our philosophers and our philanthropists.
When we have enough energy that we only need their labor to direct largely-automated processes, we will have zero scarcity.
To summarize: by dividing up all direct welfare costs (not including medicare/medicaid), it's possible to dole out enough money that even the unemployed have--just barely--enough money each month to obtain livable housing, food, and other basic needs above the cost of supplying these things. That makes them a target for businesses to pump them for every dollar they have, which is easiest by supplying them with the things they need.
I've worked out that it's feasible. I've largely worked out where the money comes from. I've avoided risks in calculations by deliberately tilting the error out of my favor, so any uncertainty is opportunity rather than threat. I'm now working on implementation and transition details, and playing with the numbers to generate charts and graphs and interesting points.
Eventually, this will become presentations, speeches, and campaigns. I have time: the basic welfare concept is an unconditional basic income, which is gaining mind share; I've begun the refinement of a welfare plan that exchanges our system with a UBI-based system, designing both the transition and the final state to maximize stability and success.
If it works--and it's almost certain to work, if only I can get it implemented without tinkering (lowering/raising the benefit, feeding it from a graduated tax, etc.)--it will provide a stable welfare system with no welfare traps, immunity to income inequality (it simply doesn't affect the amount of tax collected and the benefit paid out), robust against economic damage (such as the mid-2000s financial market collapse), and resistant to consequential effects of free money (if UBI is too high, you start encouraging inflation--far too high and you get hyperinflation; the system collapses before the benefit is high enough to reduce work incentive).
The obvious result is nobody needs a job. Life is not pleasant unemployed, but you're not going to starve to death sleeping in a puddle of your own piss in an alley. Scarcity won't threaten *living* day-to-day, because you can always eat and always go home out of the rain.
By the by, I've learned that *knowing* the solution and *implementing* the solution are two different things. This ranges from knowing that it's possible, knowing how it's possible, but not knowing the details; to knowing everything but not knowing how to make people do it; to knowing it all, having the opportunity, but being unmotivated to make the time or take the effort. This is most hard when trying to change the world: everyone wants to just tax the shit out of the rich, but, when you're working for the greater good, the first person you should ask something of is yourself.
Well you're wrong. I can turn any material into any other material. I can make plutonium from rocks, or air, or tree leaves. It just takes a fucking lot of power.
Think of all the things we could do with infinite power. That's scarcity.
It's been done that way, but that's far different. The mincome experiment was small scale, finite, and not set up the same way. It's like calling out unemployment or social security: there are a thousand ways to do this, and most of them are wrong; in this case, you've found a way that was temporary, and possibly non-optimal for a long term solution.
To make a car analogy: It's like someone said they could build a horseless carriage, and you're like, "You mean with an engine, right?" Yes. Coal, steam, liquid fuel? Gasoline, diesel? What topology of engine? What kind of drive train? Have you ever tried driving without power steering and power brakes? What about emissions control?
It's just barely possible to solve poverty. Nobody goes homeless, nobody goes hungry.
The numbers are irritating me for the moment. Transitions are possible, and inexpensive; I actually have the change-over working now. What gets me is the new tax structure doesn't increase or reduce government spending or deficit, but it makes anyone earning under about $100k slightly richer; up around $400k, they're just below 3% poorer (about $8000/year); then it rebounds, until you hit $19,467,000 income, at which point taxes break even. Above that, taxes are actually lower.
The wonky dip right at the upper-upper-middle-class is a result of converting all welfare taxes to a separate flat tax, but keeping the remaining graduated income tax system and subtracting out welfare tax proportionally. I think I have data enough for an 87% pitch rate--higher, because those people can demand a salary boost (they're in power positions) from businesses that are getting taxed a hell of a lot less than the salary dip (i.e. the market can make it up and still come out richer than they started).
Numbers without context. Check the 2013 tab. Note that there is error: Anywhere with risk (i.e. risk of incorrect math, risk of states eliminating welfare but not turning down taxes, etc.) I tend to work on more conservative numbers (i.e. I'm working on federal numbers, but not considering that states will eliminate some expenses, because they may not decrease taxes as a result--and thus not).
I'm also working entirely by federal numbers, not calculating in the state/local taxes at all. I've also ignored the standard deduction entirely, so you can imagine that people are getting that straight +$7125 right up to some $5800 of income(!), and then everyone has $5800 more than listed (because I didn't factor it into their income at all, so the amount of taxes I'm calculating are based on income that's actually $5800 higher than listed).
Yes, that's pretty much taking all the direct welfare money, chopping it up, and paying it out to everyone over age 18 equally. What's not listed is transition strategies or full final state--which includes a full and immediate repeal of minimum wage. I also don't dive into any of the impact of the system (market force impacts, ability to resist economic downturns better, improvements in economic activity, etc.). I've thought of damn near everything.
The scarcity that prevents us from manufacturing gold by dumping excessive amounts of energy into a fusor, the way we manufacture molybdenum and cadmium.
Do you honestly think I couldn't make use of, say, 50 times the entire energy output of the earth's generation facilities if you gave it to me?
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We're getting spam here because someone, somehow, got our Active Directory mailing list out of Outlook Web Access. I know all of your admin accounts.
Why does TFA not mention we should maybe consider a little personal responsibility, eh? What is this, you let hackers take your identity? Maybe you should have refused to provide Sony with any information that would allow them to take out loans in your name!
Oh, you have an address, and a credit card number? No social security number? Well, I guess you can spend credit card money; and the owner can chargeback the money, freeze the card, and get a new one.
Sony wants your SSN, bank account details, and DOB? Dude fuck them. Go get Wii.
The banks gave people a loan without your Driver's ID, SSN, etc? Just with your name and address? Dude, I can put an address into city services and get the names of the residents and their property tax payment dates and amounts, and any bill due. Tell the judge the bank is retarded for not getting actual ID.
A true agile process has an incremental delivery schedule. Rather than building the full deliverable and delivering, it identifies milestones as deliverable product. For example: a waterfall process for building a car would intake requirements and output a car; an agile process would produce the platform for inspection by the customer, followed by the suspension system, the engine, the drive train, interior, and so on, in some useful order.
For a software product, this involves delivering partial functionality to the customer, who then examines it or even integrates it with his workflow. If there are issues, the functionality can be cheaply reworked; building on top of broken functionality could incur major rework when an issue is encountered, so this process actually reduces work.
Agile is not Rapid Application Development. RAD has consistently been shown to be a large joke. Agile software project management accomplishes what RAD could not.
You assume that meetings are the only way to convey requirements instead of working closely with the subject matter experts in a more collaborative manner.
If you can handle two afternoons' worth of reading, I will direct you here (technical) and here (soft skills). These cover stakeholder management, which is "working with people". Part of that is working with SMEs.
If you want to argue from an actual competent stance, you'll need to bother reading the (horrifically dry) PMBOK, fifth edition, particularly chapters 5 (scope management) and 10 (communications management). I found chapter 9 (human resource management) fascinating as well; chapter 11 (risk management) is a favorite of mine. Much of the content may sound like gibberish out of full context; reading the book from start to finish is like that, too, because they forward-reference things in the beginning (integration management immediately starts talking about the requirements traceability matrix, IIRC, which is 4 chapters later).
The short of it is: there are many ways to get information out of people. Meetings are a good method, and arranging good meetings is a skill. Meetings have three isolate purposes: to share information, to develop alternatives, and to make decisions. Never perform more than one in the same meeting; you will make horrific decisions.
To put this into perspective: We've worked closely with SMEs here, and done things wrong. Sometimes, meetings occur without the SMEs, and decisions are made contrary to what the SME recommended; others, the tech workers (network engineers, programmers, etc.) were consulted separately, and then excluded from decisionary meetings. The result is often people making decision and dropping impossible, poorly defined, or useless shit on you. Then you implement it, and they tell you it's wrong.
By the by, one of the most important features of a good meeting is it's short.
Each claim increases your insurance premium. If I can get all your neighbors in on it, your area becomes a "high-risk area" and you get to pay $1000 extra for insurance. A difference of 2 miles for me made my car insurance jump from $90/mo to $324/mo once.
Consultants extract money from the "job creators" and return it to the economy. Even if they did no work at all, that extraction justifies their existence.
I'm coming to your house and breaking your windows. Then you can return some money to the economy. The glazier will be happy.
I never hire independent consultants. They don't understand the use of project management, and just hack things together as quickly as possible. This is, of course, compounded by management wanting to not give proper budget to work with consultants properly so that they have time to write not-shit-code.
Getting the programming consultant into meetings is the only way to get good quality work out of them. Throwing a requirements list at people doesn't help as much as folks think; you discuss that with the consultant, but you also bring them into the meetings with the primary stakeholders. That way they get to see what's going on, hear about the features needed, the use cases, and, in agile models, get feedback on each incremental deliverable. This allows the programmer to raise questions about what exactly is being asked of him, instead of just getting shoved in a room with a spec and then told him he didn't do it right--when there's 100 ways to implement what's on the spec and only 2 are apparently acceptable.
William Strunk covered this in 1914. You're never supposed to put quotes around words like that, as it puts on airs to show the audience that you're using some vulgar slang, but we're all better than that.
Quotes are used when referencing a term. We call this "using quotes". If you otherwise "use quotes" around "things" in your "sen-tance", you look like a "huge jackass" like Dr. Evil.
When doing something not done ever before in history, you cannot rely on the plain events of the past; you can only use them as a guide to shape your attempts in the future.
Oh, you're connecting the need to work with the ability. Yeah, that's a bad assumption.
If you don't work, you live in a 244sqft apartment with 144sqft living space, the rest kitchen and bathroom. You can't buy anything good, and have to live on extremely strict finances. Luxury doesn't exist, and you probably won't have very good dating prospects; you don't have any money to go out to the bars, either.
In our current system, getting a job is a bad deal. If you have Social Security Disability Income, you can string that out forever at $676/mo. Once you get a job, that vanishes immediately; your wages are less $676/mo, because that's what you pay *every* *month* to have a job. If you get fired, you can't go back to SSDI. Same with unemployment (you lose it upon employment, and, If you're fired because you're a dickhead, you don't collect unemployment again).
Getting a job on welfare is risky, and discounts your monthly pay by the amount you were gaining on welfare. Rather than working 0 hours and getting $676, you are working 160 hours and getting $1,160. That makes a minimum wage job $3/hr, with the risk of getting no unemployment or SSDI if you get fired (you haven't worked in 8 months--do you still know how to not fuck off?).
With a UBI, you don't need to work. We don't need a minimum wage; if they don't pay you well, don't work. On the other hand, if you do work, you will always gain the full benefit of employment, and will never have your UBI taken away from you. Working is always a good deal, and gainful employment carries no risk. If you so decide, you could even live with just UBI, and provide volunteer time for the community--it won't gain you anything, but you won't be stuck inside, and you won't have to worry about your expenses because you don't necessarily need a job per se--but you have to be pretty hard core to take that deal.
Except the stock has movement, and there is some probability that it will move up or down. Savvy investors have more information: they know general trends in stock movement, and can predict more accurately which way it will move. Non-savvy investors don't: they work on the principles of stability, that being that a nice, safe stock that's been climbing will continue climbing, and so they buy in as the stock gains value.
The second group tends to believe the stock is undervalued more when its spot price has climbed longer. They think it will go up forever. The first group has target prices and technical analysis, and starts to sell out at a certain point; this creates a visible stock movement that tips off more risk-tolerant investors who also do technical analysis, who sell out later. Eventually, the small-time traders who want to buy have "enough", or are out of money; the big-time traders who think the stock is overvalued aren't buying; liquidity decreases; and sale price becomes lower.
This difference in evaluation means different groups of people will think the stock is overvalued or undervalued. Even though their methods are different and their valuation of the stock is different, they're both purchasing "stock should increase in price from here". My point was that they're not investing in companies.
Investing in Microsoft, Virgin, or Symantic is a diversified investment strategy. The companies operate in many market sectors, produce products across diversified markets, and supply services to everyone from miners to financials, home users to governments. Your risk is thusly spread across more than 500 companies.
They're investing money in the idea that the stock is undervalued.
Revenues up, profits down. Odd. Revenues up all the time because inflation.
Stocks don't reflect real business performance.
You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable.
Where are you getting this from? I detect a very basic failure to either apply critical thinking or reading comprehension.
In A.I., they showed a human-like robot with personality and sensitivity to pain. It was rather complaint. To demonstrate its human A.I. features and pain response, the salesman drove a nail straight through her hand and made her scream.
In hind-sight, you probably meant foresight.
We produce Mo-99 isotopes of Molybdenum for medical use by nuclear fusion. Certain other medical isotopes of Cadmium are also produced by fusion. Doing so is simple: You produce a high electrical charge on two coils, and pump ionized gas between them. Each ion will gain 11,000 kelvin per volt of acceleration; you can readily reach 200 million kelvin or so in this way. There is a small probability of particle collision, as all ions are accelerating toward a rough center; these collisions release X-rays, neutrons, heat, and light; although x-rays, heat, and light are redundant. Collisions in this way initiate nuclear fusion.
Anti-corrosion plating for sewer pipes is not valuable? There would be less work maintaining sewer pipes! For that matter, platinum is awesome and allows a large increase in hardness of metal; tungsten also allows hardness and heat resistance; not to forget Iridium and Rubidium, both of which are exceedingly rare and highly useful. Titanium and Nickel are somewhat common, but nowhere near as common as iron.
Without energy scarcity, most can be automated. The most scarce resource is not energy--that's the second most scarce, and it's distanced greatly from the third. The most scarce resource is people who want to work for the common good, our philosophers and our philanthropists.
When we have enough energy that we only need their labor to direct largely-automated processes, we will have zero scarcity.
Above is a bunch of words.
To summarize: by dividing up all direct welfare costs (not including medicare/medicaid), it's possible to dole out enough money that even the unemployed have--just barely--enough money each month to obtain livable housing, food, and other basic needs above the cost of supplying these things. That makes them a target for businesses to pump them for every dollar they have, which is easiest by supplying them with the things they need.
I've worked out that it's feasible. I've largely worked out where the money comes from. I've avoided risks in calculations by deliberately tilting the error out of my favor, so any uncertainty is opportunity rather than threat. I'm now working on implementation and transition details, and playing with the numbers to generate charts and graphs and interesting points.
Eventually, this will become presentations, speeches, and campaigns. I have time: the basic welfare concept is an unconditional basic income, which is gaining mind share; I've begun the refinement of a welfare plan that exchanges our system with a UBI-based system, designing both the transition and the final state to maximize stability and success.
If it works--and it's almost certain to work, if only I can get it implemented without tinkering (lowering/raising the benefit, feeding it from a graduated tax, etc.)--it will provide a stable welfare system with no welfare traps, immunity to income inequality (it simply doesn't affect the amount of tax collected and the benefit paid out), robust against economic damage (such as the mid-2000s financial market collapse), and resistant to consequential effects of free money (if UBI is too high, you start encouraging inflation--far too high and you get hyperinflation; the system collapses before the benefit is high enough to reduce work incentive).
The obvious result is nobody needs a job. Life is not pleasant unemployed, but you're not going to starve to death sleeping in a puddle of your own piss in an alley. Scarcity won't threaten *living* day-to-day, because you can always eat and always go home out of the rain.
By the by, I've learned that *knowing* the solution and *implementing* the solution are two different things. This ranges from knowing that it's possible, knowing how it's possible, but not knowing the details; to knowing everything but not knowing how to make people do it; to knowing it all, having the opportunity, but being unmotivated to make the time or take the effort. This is most hard when trying to change the world: everyone wants to just tax the shit out of the rich, but, when you're working for the greater good, the first person you should ask something of is yourself.
Well you're wrong. I can turn any material into any other material. I can make plutonium from rocks, or air, or tree leaves. It just takes a fucking lot of power.
Think of all the things we could do with infinite power. That's scarcity.
It's been done that way, but that's far different. The mincome experiment was small scale, finite, and not set up the same way. It's like calling out unemployment or social security: there are a thousand ways to do this, and most of them are wrong; in this case, you've found a way that was temporary, and possibly non-optimal for a long term solution.
To make a car analogy: It's like someone said they could build a horseless carriage, and you're like, "You mean with an engine, right?" Yes. Coal, steam, liquid fuel? Gasoline, diesel? What topology of engine? What kind of drive train? Have you ever tried driving without power steering and power brakes? What about emissions control?
It's just barely possible to solve poverty. Nobody goes homeless, nobody goes hungry.
The numbers are irritating me for the moment. Transitions are possible, and inexpensive; I actually have the change-over working now. What gets me is the new tax structure doesn't increase or reduce government spending or deficit, but it makes anyone earning under about $100k slightly richer; up around $400k, they're just below 3% poorer (about $8000/year); then it rebounds, until you hit $19,467,000 income, at which point taxes break even. Above that, taxes are actually lower.
The wonky dip right at the upper-upper-middle-class is a result of converting all welfare taxes to a separate flat tax, but keeping the remaining graduated income tax system and subtracting out welfare tax proportionally. I think I have data enough for an 87% pitch rate--higher, because those people can demand a salary boost (they're in power positions) from businesses that are getting taxed a hell of a lot less than the salary dip (i.e. the market can make it up and still come out richer than they started).
Numbers without context. Check the 2013 tab. Note that there is error: Anywhere with risk (i.e. risk of incorrect math, risk of states eliminating welfare but not turning down taxes, etc.) I tend to work on more conservative numbers (i.e. I'm working on federal numbers, but not considering that states will eliminate some expenses, because they may not decrease taxes as a result--and thus not).
I'm also working entirely by federal numbers, not calculating in the state/local taxes at all. I've also ignored the standard deduction entirely, so you can imagine that people are getting that straight +$7125 right up to some $5800 of income(!), and then everyone has $5800 more than listed (because I didn't factor it into their income at all, so the amount of taxes I'm calculating are based on income that's actually $5800 higher than listed).
Yes, that's pretty much taking all the direct welfare money, chopping it up, and paying it out to everyone over age 18 equally. What's not listed is transition strategies or full final state--which includes a full and immediate repeal of minimum wage. I also don't dive into any of the impact of the system (market force impacts, ability to resist economic downturns better, improvements in economic activity, etc.). I've thought of damn near everything.
The scarcity that prevents us from manufacturing gold by dumping excessive amounts of energy into a fusor, the way we manufacture molybdenum and cadmium.
Do you honestly think I couldn't make use of, say, 50 times the entire energy output of the earth's generation facilities if you gave it to me?
And that's something I'm working to eliminate in America.
Energy scarcity.