It depends on distance. The larger the screen and resolution, the further the optimal viewing distance. Thus increasing the screen size and keeping your couch as close to the TV requires more pixel density. At the same time, your frame of vision cannot include the full TV, so you need a further viewing distance for a larger screen.
SD was optimal for screens smaller than the viewing frame. HD and 4K takes us into screens the size of or larger than the viewing frame--it's higher resolution than the real world.
A lot of people mistakenly think supply and demand creates prices by way of a lower demand driving prices down, thus making more X or making a better thing and having X less-interesting pushes its prices down. They're the sort who reason that electric cars are expensive because we don't make lots of them, and so spinning up an electric car factory and making lots of them would make the cars cheaper.
The truth is the supply-and-demand curve is a curve, and the capacity to produce at a lower price lets you sell to more people--there's more demand at lower prices--so you move the supply point and reach the demand. As you observed: the capacity to make 8K displays economically requires technology capable of making 4K displays at a lower cost, thus enabling a lower price point.
Honestly, if ten hours of work at $10/hr makes a table, you can't continue supplying tables for less than $100 each--regardless of competition. Find a way to make a table in five hours of work and now it's a $50 table.
Rich people, really. What do you think I'm going to do when that $175k Congressional salary starts rolling in? Buy a $1,500 bespoke suit at my local tailor, of course. There's no way I need a $175k salary, so it may as well go into the local poverty-stricken district of my city where some entrepreneur has attracted wealthy clients to create local jobs.
Of course I'm going to eliminate my mortgage and car loan, too. That'll take uh. Two months. I'll also have a nicer yard, seeing as so many people in my neighborhood are desperate for jobs and are willing to clean up the trash and do the gardening for pretty cheap. Even at $15/hr, that's only $150/week for a ten-hour weekly maintenance schedule. I'd like to rebuild my rear deck with some composite but maybe I'll just pay somebody else to strip it down and redo that for me, too; along with doing some electrical work and finally installing that 40-amp ChargePoint I've been meaning to get.
I'm still not buying a $5,000 TV; screw that. 4K UHD OLED TVs will be under $1,000 by the time I'm ready to buy.
What? You didn't think I'd already planned for how to deal with this unnecessarily-large compensation package? I plan for everything.
It's not invisible; the general argument is that modern proportional fonts have a space so wide [-] for a normal space, but magically make it even wider [--] when the space follows a period. In practice, that doesn't really happen.
If you visually glance over a block of unpunctuated text, it should look like a wall of text. If you have punctuation and one space, that looks the same. If you have punctuation with two spaces after the full-stop, those big chunks of white space stand out like a beacon: it's difficult to not see the structure of the paragraph.
Thus the counter-argument to the "computers automatically make the space wider" argument is... no they don't.
Some op-eds take the time to rant about this for six or eight pages now and then; and I'm pretty sure it's gotten people banned from Reddit for nuclear flamewar.
Yeah, the only one that's solved so far is the thing where some people argue--on text medium, no less--that two spaces need not follow a period ending a sentence because the space is automatically bigger anyway. Meanwhile, two spaces after a period ending a sentence is actually larger than a single space after an abbreviation like "Mr."; and the space after a period is, in fact, not proportionally wide compared to spaces in other places on the very screens in which these debates take place.
Even in the summary of this very Slashdot article, you can see the narrow space between "text. And" and, unsurprisingly, you can do a quick scan 2-3 times to find a period at the end of a sentence--but you have to deliberately read through the summary to identify the end of each sentence, whereas placing two spaces after periods and colons creates a visual break.
The only valid argument against two spaces is the argument that the visual break serves no purpose in the textual structure; this of course would devolve into a debate over the readability of small paragraphs versus giant walls of unbroken text, should anybody actually have the debate. The people arguing for small paragraphs would have science on their side, and the single-space advocates would be reduced to gibbering about intra-paragraph white space structure not having an impact on reading comprehension.
Then: some nerd would point out that HTML collapses all spans of white space into single spaces anyway during rendering, as if the fact that something impedes progress suddenly makes progress wrong.
Simply put, I do not believe that your mechanism for failure will work as you imply. A Trust for one.
A Trust is simply a fund which holds money for a trusted purpose. Basically a bank account. The Social Security Trust works fine; it's just going to hit a balance of $0 eventually because Social Security is actually spending the full of every dime to which it should rightly have access.
The only purpose of the Trust for the Dividend is to deal with small fluctuations, and I expect it to run high: it will retain a small portion of the intake to build, and will exceed a reasonable holding, and so will have to pay the computed Dividend plus the liquidation of its excess balance. When population increases unexpectedly, or the economy slows, or whatnot, then it will run Deficit until the next calendar year (or even the next quarter), at which point the benefit is reduced to match the economic conditions.
In short: it only ever has to work under stress for a few months.
Assuming no one will change it to buy votes or expand it (illegals?)
Illegal immigrants can't receive Social Security benefits or Federal welfare. Why would this expand if those do not? It might actually be unconstitutional for them to receive Federal welfare; I'd have to look, and I suspect it isn't.
No resident immigrant can vote in any Federal election. You must be a US Citizen to do that, as per the Constitution. States have the power to decide if their residents--legal immigrants--can vote in local elections.
There's also the defense of economic carry capacity: any Naturalized American will receive this if age 18; and the naturalization of Americans comes with their capacity to work--we generally don't allow you to apply for citizenship until you've come and worked for a number of years. That means these new Citizens are producing, and thus are not straining the Dividend (or our economy in general).
That same defense allows the extension of the Dividend to legal immigrants through a non-refundable tax credit without collapsing the system as well: if they come and work and are paid, and the Dividend is removed from their tax liability only as far as to reach zero, then any further balance of the Dividend is essentially redistributed to the American People rather than to them, thus increasing the proportion of productivity American Citizens receive at the expense of working legal immigrants. From an economic sense, this one isn't a threat unless we start paying straight cash to non-working resident foreign nationals (a policy I oppose).
Assuming that the economy will behave as you expect.
I've covered two of the three possible ways in which the economy may behave.
The first is that people economize, and so capitalism and rational progress are followed: in the pursuit of profit, there is an effort to reduce the labor--the hours of wages paid--to produce any given thing, and this is successful enough that the economy continues to operate even if it experiences occasional strain and fluctuation. This is how economies have operated for over ten thousand years.
The other is a temporary situation, in that the above leads to an economic disruption causing recession. The Dividend survives this, scaling back its benefits to within the means of the Nation's economy. It does, however, act as a continuing stimilus--which is the tool we've used to halt and reverse every such economic disruption.
The third is permanent failure: an economic collapse so complete occurs that the Nation ceases to exist. The United States of America, the Nation, is no more. This situation, my Dividend cannot survive.
You are giving people money. You must assume that people will be happy with a pittance and won't demand more. "how can anyone live off these bread crumbs?". This whole thing started with your claim: "tax rate is permanently-
You make a lot of assumptions with your plan and expect everyone to buy into those assumptions. I don't. How many generations will it take for your plan to fail and you have multiple generations buying into a ponzi scheme?
Suggest a mechanism for failure. What assumptions do you see which you believe are invalid? That Congress might change the parameters is not one: obviously, if somebody unbolts your car's wheels and put on square ones, it will fail. We could say the same of Government in general: it will just violate the rules and the President will be a dictator in 20 years.
Sure sure. It's all perfect and you have the best solution ever conceived by man that will never fail. It's just that "those" people messed it up.
You said Social Security shenanigans by Clinton--an argument that keeps coming up by people who don't understand that Social Security's trust fund has been operated the same way since 1938, and want to assert that some president "stole" all the money or did other things. Al Gore liked to ramble about a "Lock Box" for Social Security which is exactly what the Trust has been since 1938.
Which your plan won't have that problem. Because your assumptions are correct and no one will ever be able to expand on your assumptions which would never in any way break or bankrupt the system.
The Social Security plan goes, "In retirement, each retiree will get $1,000 multiplied by however much average income they had during their working life, adjusted for inflation. We'll fund this somehow by people who are currently working."
The Dividend plan goes, "We'll tax income at 12.5%. We'll then distribute an absolutely equal share of that to each adult. No promises on how much you'll get; it grows with our productivity growth because it's a chunk of our nation's productivity, and there's no magic formula for what comes out except to divide up what comes in." It's a bit more complex than that--you have to hold a small portion of the income to keep a Trust that accounts for fluctuations in population and the economy throughout the year, and disburse the excess when the Trust balance is above a certain limit--but the gist is it's made to simply float on the economy instead of magic up an ideal of how much we're paying.
Social security was advertised as you advertise. How are you any different than the congressmen that sold social security?
Not really. Social Security was advertised to pay a retirement benefit based on how much you paid when you worked. It made promises about exactly how much would be there, with the thought that the current working class would fund it. That's a giant handwave about where the money's coming from: the output will split up 1,000 ways, and each of those will be somewhere between 1 and 2 miles wide, and we will find the input somehow.
I've described a system which directly takes the input and pays its output: if your feed is 1,000 miles wide and split up 1,000 ways, then each of those is 1 mile wide and that's what each of the thousand gets. If there are 2,000 to collect, then each is 0.5 miles wide; and if the input is 5,000 miles wide and is split 2,000 ways, then each gets 2.5 miles.
You cannot split something into smaller pieces amounting to more than the thing with which you began.
Until someone messes it all up. On paper social security was similarly advertised. Yet here we are.
Social Security wasn't advertised in any way remotely-similar. Nobody has ever developed a plan as I describe.
Here's a thought, instead of pushing your plan at the federal level do it at the state level and I will take it more seriously.
At the Federal level, my plan requires adjustment of the Income taxes or else it will reduce the Corporate Income Tax by 1.5%, the highest individual tax bracket by 3.4%, and in general reduce the effective tax rate at every income level: everyone will retain more income to spend, and they will retain this month-to-month--unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit which returns a bigger tax return once per year to some families.
At the State level, you can't restructure the tax system in the same way because there isn't an enormous, shambling, broken benefits system (Social Security) which can be restored to operation by building it on top of a new benefit with a better funding source.
At the State level, then, you can do this only by levying enormous additional taxes; and it is unconstitut
something about Bill Clinton accounting shenanigans with social security
Not a real thing. Everyone tries that with Clinton/Bush/Obama. The Trust fund has bought Treasury bills since it was created in 1938, and calls them when it runs a deficit. That's how it works. That cash goes into the General fund for spending; and Social Security is insolvent when it runs out of Treasury bills to call. People try to use the narrative that the government IOU'd the money and now it's gone, but that's not how that works--it's like saying your 401(k) IOU'd the money by buying bonds.
My underlying point that entitlements only go up which is the case for social security.
My point is that Social Security has a varying revenue base and recipient base, which are related in such a way that the proportion of income among the basis from which we draw revenue is not directly related to the size of the recipient base. Likewise, the basis from which we draw revenue is not necessarily a fixed proportion of all of the taxable income, and failure to adjust for this is like lowering the tax rate used to fund Social Security.
That's why it broke.
As for the entitlement "going up", it's cost-of-living adjusted (not going up); the number of recipients is fluctuating (cost is going up, but cost per recipient isn't), and the amount of taxable income exposed to taxation to fund it is essentially going down in proportion.
You do see how my Dividend solves this problem, though, I'm sure.
Everyone is able to afford it because everyone can take out a loan
Which they can't afford to pay back.
"If there are skills needed for the next century for the average citizen to participate in the economy then it should done through high school."
Different types of jobs need different skills. Do you have an engineering degree? An accounting degree? A programming degree? A technical writing degree? Are you an economist? Do you have a Masters in Corporate Finance? How about in Personal Finance? Medicine? Pharmacology? Nuclear Engineering? Are you a Master Plumber and Master Electrician? Do you have a Doctorate in Building Science?
If so, congratulations! You're qualified for a significant number of jobs that are out there!
We can't teach you all of that to rigor in high school.
If something simple like Social Security will fail
Social Security actually has a funding source that needs a lot of babysitting. It takes a percentage tax from income (and payroll, which is just income from a different, less-visible vector) up to a certain cap. That income cap needs adjustment when the income distribution changes: the area under the Lorenz curve up to the income cap must be proportionally-related to the number of retirees and the cost of living.
That's a lot of variables. You're looking at the area under the Lorenz curve up to a certain position (an interval) multiplied by the FICA rate against cost-of-living adjustments to the area under the Lorenz curve for a prior generation, which then gets into population changes and other things as well.
Over time, we have to keep tweaking the FICA rate and the payroll tax to keep up. Again: only the portion of the Lorenz curve from 0 to the FICA cap is exposed to this FICA tax, so changes in the shape of the Lorenz curve have an extreme impact on the funding source.
Did you get all that?
Good. That causes an odd problem:
there are many alive today that are paying into a ponzi scheme that will lose because of what I am saying
Not quite, but close enough: the system is founded on a really poorly designed funding source. The Trust itself is well-designed; the way FICA operates, however, is crap.
how would your plan not fail when people ask for more?
Social Security isn't failing because people are asking for more (although they are, for a different reason: the bottom end of Social Security leaves 10% of recipients in poverty). It's failing because of its funding source, as described above.
My Dividend's funding source is a flat FICA on all personal and corporate income. That gets you something directly-correlated with the GNI-per-Capita in Local Currency Units. The Dividend should be roughly 1/8 of the GNI-per-Adult (GNI-per-Capita excluding those under age 18--I'm considering making it age 16), although because of things like tax-deferred accounts (IRA, 401(k)) and such it will be a bit less than that.
The Dividend, as such, increases its benefit faster than cost-of-living. That is to say: if there's 10% inflation and zero productivity increase (on a per-capita basis), the Dividend will pay 10% more because there was 10% more income. Simple enough.
However, if there's a 10% productivity increase, then products are being made for roughly 9% cheaper blahblahblah let's approximate this by just saying there's 10% more income per person (adult) and 0% inflation: with the absolute average (per-adult) income, you can physically purchase 10% more. That's simple enough, right?
The Dividend is bluntly pulling in a fixed proportion of the income and paying it out flat.
That means those productivity increases--the increase in general wealth--are also taxed by that same, unadjusted FICA tax.
If you had $10,000 in 1985, then you would have $16,000 in 2000 based on blunt inflation.
If you received $10,000 in 1985 from a Dividend structured this way (you wouldn't: it would have been $6,700 in 2016), then the Dividend would pay--without changing the tax rate or the way the tax is applied--$20,337 in the year 2000.
That's 27% more than inflation, and without raising taxes to fund that increase.
That's guaranteed to happen in that manner, and it's not affected by population or income distribution. The Dividend doesn't promise to adjust by some amount each year; only to distribute based on what comes in and enrollment (which is basically everyone).
If the Minimum Wage were adjusted this way from the $3.80/hr wage in 1990, it would be $9.40/hr today. It would have been $8.12 in 2011 (or $6.57 by cost-of-living adjustment).
Uhhh, so you put a blood in jail and he stops being a blood?
No. It's been shown that taking nearly anyone--gang criminals, rapists, drug dealers, the lot--and putting them into a humane environment which focuses on their individual needs to maintain their sense of security and their human dignity quickly and effectively rehabilitates them. Yes, even hardened gang criminals.
By contrast, prison gangs actually rally around neglect and inhumane treatment. They use it to form a bond among their kin, reassuring themselves that The Man doesn't care about them, and thus demonstrating that they are fully-justified in being what they are. They do this because they need it. They believe that society owes them and that they're entitled to making the rest of us suffer and fear them. Think about the whole image of a violent gang member threatening you if you don't "respect" them and you'll see it.
I don't like the pure flat tax, even with a negative income tax. VAT and sales taxes are strictly-horrible and are regressive as all hell. I've actually seen that kind of proposal before; it's made with no consideration for the fiscals of the government or the tax burdens created on the middle- and lower-income households.
All personal taxes taken out before you get the money, no tax forms to fill out at all unless you're self-employed.
The Government can't know about your personal situations well enough to do this.
Eliminate all deductions, replace with other incentives, e.g. instead of motgage interest deduction, simply reduce the interest rate directly by providing support from the government.
I've tried to do that, but it didn't work. Causes an enormous amount of inequity in the middle class.
The mortgage interest rate is basically controlled by the Fed, in a sense. High interest rates in general are actually better than low for this purpose, because paying your loan down ahead of schedule when you have a low interest rate requires you to make nearly full payments for each you're skipping. With high rates, those early payments are bypassed with a fraction of the cost, saving enormous amounts on the total purchase price.
In lower-rate markets, house prices increase: people generally pay the same monthly mortgage rate for the same house, whether the payment is more or less interest-heavy.
There are other concerns with raising the rates: they're generally impacted by the rate the Federal government pays on its debt, so raising those interest rates through the usual mechanism causes the Federal government to struggle with its debts.
Tax rate automatically adjusted based on spending, with the flat tax and VAT set to each provide 50% of the required revenue
People will make it fail but the plan still works?
Yes. Think like Social Security has a trust fund that increases in balance on surplus years, and decreases on deficit years. That's stable, right? Oh, but someone is proposing a Balanced Budget Amendment. Under that amendment, the balance Social Security stores up is revenue, and is spent; then, when Social Security tries to pay benefits in a deficit year, it can't call the balance of treasuries, because that would incur deficit spending. Social Security then becomes immediately-insolvent.
Social Security's financial structure works, but oh look... people (Congress) are trying to break it. They've tried by not raising the payroll cap with inflation, by trying to reduce the Social Security budget in other ways, and now by trying to create a poisonpill amendment.
One could say that Social Security would work in theory, but some politicians will make sure it fails, so something like that will never work because it goes against powerful interests.
works for Bernie Sanders and other Democrats
I see Bernie had a great victory over Hillary.
Sanders wants to raise taxes to pay for the entitlements he promises.
Sure, and he's quite bad at his financial structuring, among other things.
Warren backed him down from Free College for All to just Free College for All Making Under $125k. Think about it as if we could tax the rich at 5% and force them to buy college for themselves--that "free college" they get, paid for by their taxes--or we could tax the rich at 0.5% and provide equitable access to college education for those who are financially less-able to afford it, leaving the rich to decide what college they want to buy into, or even if they want to buy college at all.
It's the same with his enormous, tax-hungry Medicare-for-All ideal where the Government is the only insurer. I've suggested a Public Option to cover anyone who can't get affordable care, with an expanded ACA and some regulations that ensure people who take the Public Option despite having affordable care from their employer end up paying the same as if they'd bought from their employer (doesn't save you or your employer anything to get you on the Government's system). Without any of that muckery, the Public Option is a 1.6% tax increase; I'm fairly certain I can get that lower, and possibly near zero income tax hike, although that's by way of charging your employer a payroll tax if they fail to supply affordable care (which is a tax, yes, even if it can be described as a cost of employment by reasoning that they should be paying for healthcare but are not).
Isn't that the basis of "more money" that we are talking about? isn't an issue of tax havens and off shore holdings?
Rich folks are already hiding as much income from taxation as they possibly can. They've got the resources required to do that at maximum--once you've hit ROI for the strongest tax avoidance arbitration it scales with no further effort--and the argument that raising taxes will result in more avoidance assumes that these people have decided to be good actors and not shelter their money, while they clearly are sheltering their money.
The New Deal helped some but it wasn't the quick fix that saved the nation. Part of it was war.
War strains and damages an economy, and creates poverty.
Simplifying it down to one policy decision is revisionism.
True. The New Deal legislation involved multiple waves each of multiple policies, implemented over a span of several years.
Nordic states, as I mentioned before, subsidize their welfare on oil and other natural resources that are also a homogeneous population a fraction of the size.
They actually tend to have a more-flat tax rate and a near 50% general tax rate, so even th
Additionally, what is pessimistic about people voting themselves more money? What rational person would not give themselves a raise if they could?
The pessimistic argument against government action is "if we do X it will fail because people will make it fail even if the plan works". I've faced this argument against any sort of welfare ("people will vote themselves more, and politicians will sell it to get votes"), taxes ("the government will keep raising taxes" and "rich people will just not pay taxes"), and even criminal justice reform ("they'd just put the rules in place and then not do it even though they said they would").
Even Benjamin Franklin warned; "When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.". Why was Franklin wrong and you're right?
Because brilliant minds like Franklin D. Roosevelt tried that and succeeded; and Nordic states like Norway and Finland have abandoned Democratic Socialism in favor of a Capitalist state with welfare, i.e. Social Democracy, and generated enormous amounts of wealth thereby. These are nations which focus on a powerful welfare state aimed at maximizing individual social mobility; strong labor negotiation with government mediation (the same model as labor unions and employers with the National Labor Relations Board working as a mediator); and a strong system of private ownership, wherein the economic system is a well-regulated free enterprise market with private business owners and free trade.
Notably, I am claiming to be smarter than them: I'm looking at accomplishing greater goals without getting anywhere near the tax burdens those nations impose, and the tax burdens will decrease over time while the economy becomes ever more powerful.
the lofty dreams of your utopia
Remember when the Constitution claimed to make a "More Perfect Union"? Interesting words, "More Perfect". You might go look at Norway and think you've found that perfect utopia, but it still has its defects--besides being more tax-heavy than necessary.
My point was your argument is basic pessimism: we can't have a Government because it's evil; legislatures represent themselves and not people; and it's not worth voting because it doesn't matter anyway. Hell, why do we even have police when there's still crime?
You know, other societies and various areas in our society have somehow accomplished all kinds of things at large that directly-rebuke your ideal that the whole world is a backwater of Alabama where these aren't problems, but simply unfixable reality.
So, who will decide what is moderate and unmanageable? Let people decide how much they work and how much they want to make.
You mean like how the 40-hour work week let people decide how much to work and make, except that if you work more than 40 hours your employer starts paying a huge amount of extra salary and so hires someone else to take up that slack? That's how the government shortens working hours: we declare what is "Full Time" in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
For nearly a century, people struck, protested, and even rioted to get shorter working hours. People died over this--there were bloody conflicts between American workers and American enforcement officers. Why didn't they just work less themselves?
As for what's unmanageable, it's simple: if your society is suddenly much more efficient and people are capable of spending twice as much, what happens? You don't have people working twice as much, or twice as many people willing to work. You might get 5% or so additional labor. To attract labor and get at all this consumer spending--consumers want to buy things with all this wealth--a business (microeconomics) will raise wage, but not productivity. That means prices go up to get revenue for that wage, but people have the money anyway.
You see it, right? Inflation.
This settles down after a while: it starts as a sharp rise, then slows. Basically, hyperinflation for a while. This is disruptive and damaging to the economy, and needs a tempering; shorter working hours prevent that shock.
Shorter working hours have been shown to increase mental and physical health as well. Workers are much more productive with 6 hour work days than 8, for example. They take fewer sick days and report much more energy and a greater sense of well-being.
So we could let people decide how much they want to work in one of two ways: let them elect a government that will adjust the working hours as defined in law, or let them riot and murder for it. Unfortunately, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Until enough people decide they want more and vote in politicians promising them what they want.
That's ALWAYS a concern. We have government processes that prevent that, but it's still a thing. I mean honestly, we can amend the Constitution; have you tried?
That concern is why we have a representative democracy of elites: we vote in people we think are very smart, complain about our needs, and they figure out how to deal with it. Do you have time to be a criminal justice expert, economist, military expert, and the like, all at once, on top of your day job? Calming the temporary passions of an excited majority is part of the reason we built this government as-is.
It's actually a fascinating thing to learn about; you should try it.
I'm working on other systems that address this, anyway. The FICA tax is universal and flat: the bigger it is, the harder it is for you to go from poor to wealthy--so much for the American dream. I also have designed a tax system based on shaping an inverse curve to fit our progressive tax structure, then fitting your income as a proportion of the GNI-per-capita into that to determine your effective tax rate: if we raise the tax rate from 40% to 50%, then those very-rich might pay nearly 10% more (1/4 increase), and those poorer will also pay nearly 2.5% more (also 1/4 increase). We're all in this together, folks. Of course you can adjust the shape of the curve, which is a bigger, more-complex, and dangerous topic--one people should distrust.
Other nations have achieved social democracy (the Nordic model) without that problem in practice. Fortunately, they haven't devolved into democratic socialism. I have confidence we can protect ourselves.
Just stay the heck away from my and everyone else's wallet.
As amusing as that would be, it would be shot down by the supreme court if I did that. The way I structured the dividend, it's a significant reduction in taxes at every level; most people who argue against it would end up with some several thousand dollars more under the Dividend (comparing the pre-2017 tax system).
By the by, not everybody can easily get a job, due to localized unemployment: plenty of people want to work, yet are unable to find employment. Both trade and technical progress reduce the amount of money we spend on goods--technical progress, in particular, reduces the labor invested in total to make a product--and we get wealthier by thrusting someone into transitional unemployment. Frequently, this causes industry movement: cities like Detroit and Baltimore lose industry, while high-tech services spring up in New York and San Francisco, thus the "transitional unemployment" is an economic metric and not a person metric (i.e. those guys there? They're relegated to Hell, where there shall be only scraps and a severe dearth of employment opportunity; the rest of us pay 10% less for goods and get awesome new toys).
what really should happen is that everyone has the opportuntiy to benefit equally from all things that are created, but it is up to each individual to take that opportunity and do something with it
That won't happen. The Dividend ensures you have the capacity to take the opportunities which come and increases the likelihood of some kind of opportunity, however meager, for you to take to improve your situation; it doesn't equalize people, not even to the point that any person can take any opportunity at any time wherever it may appear.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on distance. The larger the screen and resolution, the further the optimal viewing distance. Thus increasing the screen size and keeping your couch as close to the TV requires more pixel density. At the same time, your frame of vision cannot include the full TV, so you need a further viewing distance for a larger screen.
SD was optimal for screens smaller than the viewing frame. HD and 4K takes us into screens the size of or larger than the viewing frame--it's higher resolution than the real world.
at 8K, you're no longer gaming full-screen. You now have a window on the side of your 75-inch desktop space. This is the future of Twitch.
Republican thinking: competition causes prices.
A lot of people mistakenly think supply and demand creates prices by way of a lower demand driving prices down, thus making more X or making a better thing and having X less-interesting pushes its prices down. They're the sort who reason that electric cars are expensive because we don't make lots of them, and so spinning up an electric car factory and making lots of them would make the cars cheaper.
The truth is the supply-and-demand curve is a curve, and the capacity to produce at a lower price lets you sell to more people--there's more demand at lower prices--so you move the supply point and reach the demand. As you observed: the capacity to make 8K displays economically requires technology capable of making 4K displays at a lower cost, thus enabling a lower price point.
Honestly, if ten hours of work at $10/hr makes a table, you can't continue supplying tables for less than $100 each--regardless of competition. Find a way to make a table in five hours of work and now it's a $50 table.
Rich people, really. What do you think I'm going to do when that $175k Congressional salary starts rolling in? Buy a $1,500 bespoke suit at my local tailor, of course. There's no way I need a $175k salary, so it may as well go into the local poverty-stricken district of my city where some entrepreneur has attracted wealthy clients to create local jobs.
Of course I'm going to eliminate my mortgage and car loan, too. That'll take uh. Two months. I'll also have a nicer yard, seeing as so many people in my neighborhood are desperate for jobs and are willing to clean up the trash and do the gardening for pretty cheap. Even at $15/hr, that's only $150/week for a ten-hour weekly maintenance schedule. I'd like to rebuild my rear deck with some composite but maybe I'll just pay somebody else to strip it down and redo that for me, too; along with doing some electrical work and finally installing that 40-amp ChargePoint I've been meaning to get.
I'm still not buying a $5,000 TV; screw that. 4K UHD OLED TVs will be under $1,000 by the time I'm ready to buy.
What? You didn't think I'd already planned for how to deal with this unnecessarily-large compensation package? I plan for everything.
It's not invisible; the general argument is that modern proportional fonts have a space so wide [-] for a normal space, but magically make it even wider [--] when the space follows a period. In practice, that doesn't really happen.
If you visually glance over a block of unpunctuated text, it should look like a wall of text. If you have punctuation and one space, that looks the same. If you have punctuation with two spaces after the full-stop, those big chunks of white space stand out like a beacon: it's difficult to not see the structure of the paragraph.
Thus the counter-argument to the "computers automatically make the space wider" argument is... no they don't.
Some op-eds take the time to rant about this for six or eight pages now and then; and I'm pretty sure it's gotten people banned from Reddit for nuclear flamewar.
Yeah, the only one that's solved so far is the thing where some people argue--on text medium, no less--that two spaces need not follow a period ending a sentence because the space is automatically bigger anyway. Meanwhile, two spaces after a period ending a sentence is actually larger than a single space after an abbreviation like "Mr."; and the space after a period is, in fact, not proportionally wide compared to spaces in other places on the very screens in which these debates take place.
Even in the summary of this very Slashdot article, you can see the narrow space between "text. And" and, unsurprisingly, you can do a quick scan 2-3 times to find a period at the end of a sentence--but you have to deliberately read through the summary to identify the end of each sentence, whereas placing two spaces after periods and colons creates a visual break.
The only valid argument against two spaces is the argument that the visual break serves no purpose in the textual structure; this of course would devolve into a debate over the readability of small paragraphs versus giant walls of unbroken text, should anybody actually have the debate. The people arguing for small paragraphs would have science on their side, and the single-space advocates would be reduced to gibbering about intra-paragraph white space structure not having an impact on reading comprehension.
Then: some nerd would point out that HTML collapses all spans of white space into single spaces anyway during rendering, as if the fact that something impedes progress suddenly makes progress wrong.
Russia has their own in the works.
It's also notable sabertooth cats keep popping up, then going extinct. Bad example.
Fun fact to know when you rub under a housecat's chin and you get poked by teeth.
Over 20% of all biomass is ants.
Nice, crisp lines become wonky, bubbly things. Great.
Simply put, I do not believe that your mechanism for failure will work as you imply. A Trust for one.
A Trust is simply a fund which holds money for a trusted purpose. Basically a bank account. The Social Security Trust works fine; it's just going to hit a balance of $0 eventually because Social Security is actually spending the full of every dime to which it should rightly have access.
The only purpose of the Trust for the Dividend is to deal with small fluctuations, and I expect it to run high: it will retain a small portion of the intake to build, and will exceed a reasonable holding, and so will have to pay the computed Dividend plus the liquidation of its excess balance. When population increases unexpectedly, or the economy slows, or whatnot, then it will run Deficit until the next calendar year (or even the next quarter), at which point the benefit is reduced to match the economic conditions.
In short: it only ever has to work under stress for a few months.
Assuming no one will change it to buy votes or expand it (illegals?)
Illegal immigrants can't receive Social Security benefits or Federal welfare. Why would this expand if those do not? It might actually be unconstitutional for them to receive Federal welfare; I'd have to look, and I suspect it isn't.
No resident immigrant can vote in any Federal election. You must be a US Citizen to do that, as per the Constitution. States have the power to decide if their residents--legal immigrants--can vote in local elections.
There's also the defense of economic carry capacity: any Naturalized American will receive this if age 18; and the naturalization of Americans comes with their capacity to work--we generally don't allow you to apply for citizenship until you've come and worked for a number of years. That means these new Citizens are producing, and thus are not straining the Dividend (or our economy in general).
That same defense allows the extension of the Dividend to legal immigrants through a non-refundable tax credit without collapsing the system as well: if they come and work and are paid, and the Dividend is removed from their tax liability only as far as to reach zero, then any further balance of the Dividend is essentially redistributed to the American People rather than to them, thus increasing the proportion of productivity American Citizens receive at the expense of working legal immigrants. From an economic sense, this one isn't a threat unless we start paying straight cash to non-working resident foreign nationals (a policy I oppose).
Assuming that the economy will behave as you expect.
I've covered two of the three possible ways in which the economy may behave.
The first is that people economize, and so capitalism and rational progress are followed: in the pursuit of profit, there is an effort to reduce the labor--the hours of wages paid--to produce any given thing, and this is successful enough that the economy continues to operate even if it experiences occasional strain and fluctuation. This is how economies have operated for over ten thousand years.
The other is a temporary situation, in that the above leads to an economic disruption causing recession. The Dividend survives this, scaling back its benefits to within the means of the Nation's economy. It does, however, act as a continuing stimilus--which is the tool we've used to halt and reverse every such economic disruption.
The third is permanent failure: an economic collapse so complete occurs that the Nation ceases to exist. The United States of America, the Nation, is no more. This situation, my Dividend cannot survive.
You are giving people money. You must assume that people will be happy with a pittance and won't demand more. "how can anyone live off these bread crumbs?". This whole thing started with your claim: "tax rate is permanently-
You make a lot of assumptions with your plan and expect everyone to buy into those assumptions. I don't. How many generations will it take for your plan to fail and you have multiple generations buying into a ponzi scheme?
Suggest a mechanism for failure. What assumptions do you see which you believe are invalid? That Congress might change the parameters is not one: obviously, if somebody unbolts your car's wheels and put on square ones, it will fail. We could say the same of Government in general: it will just violate the rules and the President will be a dictator in 20 years.
Sure sure. It's all perfect and you have the best solution ever conceived by man that will never fail. It's just that "those" people messed it up.
You said Social Security shenanigans by Clinton--an argument that keeps coming up by people who don't understand that Social Security's trust fund has been operated the same way since 1938, and want to assert that some president "stole" all the money or did other things. Al Gore liked to ramble about a "Lock Box" for Social Security which is exactly what the Trust has been since 1938.
Which your plan won't have that problem. Because your assumptions are correct and no one will ever be able to expand on your assumptions which would never in any way break or bankrupt the system.
The Social Security plan goes, "In retirement, each retiree will get $1,000 multiplied by however much average income they had during their working life, adjusted for inflation. We'll fund this somehow by people who are currently working."
The Dividend plan goes, "We'll tax income at 12.5%. We'll then distribute an absolutely equal share of that to each adult. No promises on how much you'll get; it grows with our productivity growth because it's a chunk of our nation's productivity, and there's no magic formula for what comes out except to divide up what comes in." It's a bit more complex than that--you have to hold a small portion of the income to keep a Trust that accounts for fluctuations in population and the economy throughout the year, and disburse the excess when the Trust balance is above a certain limit--but the gist is it's made to simply float on the economy instead of magic up an ideal of how much we're paying.
Social security was advertised as you advertise. How are you any different than the congressmen that sold social security?
Not really. Social Security was advertised to pay a retirement benefit based on how much you paid when you worked. It made promises about exactly how much would be there, with the thought that the current working class would fund it. That's a giant handwave about where the money's coming from: the output will split up 1,000 ways, and each of those will be somewhere between 1 and 2 miles wide, and we will find the input somehow.
I've described a system which directly takes the input and pays its output: if your feed is 1,000 miles wide and split up 1,000 ways, then each of those is 1 mile wide and that's what each of the thousand gets. If there are 2,000 to collect, then each is 0.5 miles wide; and if the input is 5,000 miles wide and is split 2,000 ways, then each gets 2.5 miles.
You cannot split something into smaller pieces amounting to more than the thing with which you began.
Until someone messes it all up. On paper social security was similarly advertised. Yet here we are.
Social Security wasn't advertised in any way remotely-similar. Nobody has ever developed a plan as I describe.
Here's a thought, instead of pushing your plan at the federal level do it at the state level and I will take it more seriously.
At the Federal level, my plan requires adjustment of the Income taxes or else it will reduce the Corporate Income Tax by 1.5%, the highest individual tax bracket by 3.4%, and in general reduce the effective tax rate at every income level: everyone will retain more income to spend, and they will retain this month-to-month--unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit which returns a bigger tax return once per year to some families.
At the State level, you can't restructure the tax system in the same way because there isn't an enormous, shambling, broken benefits system (Social Security) which can be restored to operation by building it on top of a new benefit with a better funding source.
At the State level, then, you can do this only by levying enormous additional taxes; and it is unconstitut
something about Bill Clinton accounting shenanigans with social security
Not a real thing. Everyone tries that with Clinton/Bush/Obama. The Trust fund has bought Treasury bills since it was created in 1938, and calls them when it runs a deficit. That's how it works. That cash goes into the General fund for spending; and Social Security is insolvent when it runs out of Treasury bills to call. People try to use the narrative that the government IOU'd the money and now it's gone, but that's not how that works--it's like saying your 401(k) IOU'd the money by buying bonds.
My underlying point that entitlements only go up which is the case for social security.
My point is that Social Security has a varying revenue base and recipient base, which are related in such a way that the proportion of income among the basis from which we draw revenue is not directly related to the size of the recipient base. Likewise, the basis from which we draw revenue is not necessarily a fixed proportion of all of the taxable income, and failure to adjust for this is like lowering the tax rate used to fund Social Security.
That's why it broke.
As for the entitlement "going up", it's cost-of-living adjusted (not going up); the number of recipients is fluctuating (cost is going up, but cost per recipient isn't), and the amount of taxable income exposed to taxation to fund it is essentially going down in proportion.
You do see how my Dividend solves this problem, though, I'm sure.
Everyone is able to afford it because everyone can take out a loan
Which they can't afford to pay back.
"If there are skills needed for the next century for the average citizen to participate in the economy then it should done through high school."
Different types of jobs need different skills. Do you have an engineering degree? An accounting degree? A programming degree? A technical writing degree? Are you an economist? Do you have a Masters in Corporate Finance? How about in Personal Finance? Medicine? Pharmacology? Nuclear Engineering? Are you a Master Plumber and Master Electrician? Do you have a Doctorate in Building Science?
If so, congratulations! You're qualified for a significant number of jobs that are out there!
We can't teach you all of that to rigor in high school.
If something simple like Social Security will fail
Social Security actually has a funding source that needs a lot of babysitting. It takes a percentage tax from income (and payroll, which is just income from a different, less-visible vector) up to a certain cap. That income cap needs adjustment when the income distribution changes: the area under the Lorenz curve up to the income cap must be proportionally-related to the number of retirees and the cost of living.
That's a lot of variables. You're looking at the area under the Lorenz curve up to a certain position (an interval) multiplied by the FICA rate against cost-of-living adjustments to the area under the Lorenz curve for a prior generation, which then gets into population changes and other things as well.
Over time, we have to keep tweaking the FICA rate and the payroll tax to keep up. Again: only the portion of the Lorenz curve from 0 to the FICA cap is exposed to this FICA tax, so changes in the shape of the Lorenz curve have an extreme impact on the funding source.
Did you get all that?
Good. That causes an odd problem:
there are many alive today that are paying into a ponzi scheme that will lose because of what I am saying
Not quite, but close enough: the system is founded on a really poorly designed funding source. The Trust itself is well-designed; the way FICA operates, however, is crap.
how would your plan not fail when people ask for more?
Social Security isn't failing because people are asking for more (although they are, for a different reason: the bottom end of Social Security leaves 10% of recipients in poverty). It's failing because of its funding source, as described above.
My Dividend's funding source is a flat FICA on all personal and corporate income. That gets you something directly-correlated with the GNI-per-Capita in Local Currency Units. The Dividend should be roughly 1/8 of the GNI-per-Adult (GNI-per-Capita excluding those under age 18--I'm considering making it age 16), although because of things like tax-deferred accounts (IRA, 401(k)) and such it will be a bit less than that.
The Dividend, as such, increases its benefit faster than cost-of-living. That is to say: if there's 10% inflation and zero productivity increase (on a per-capita basis), the Dividend will pay 10% more because there was 10% more income. Simple enough.
However, if there's a 10% productivity increase, then products are being made for roughly 9% cheaper blahblahblah let's approximate this by just saying there's 10% more income per person (adult) and 0% inflation: with the absolute average (per-adult) income, you can physically purchase 10% more. That's simple enough, right?
The Dividend is bluntly pulling in a fixed proportion of the income and paying it out flat.
That means those productivity increases--the increase in general wealth--are also taxed by that same, unadjusted FICA tax.
If you had $10,000 in 1985, then you would have $16,000 in 2000 based on blunt inflation.
If you received $10,000 in 1985 from a Dividend structured this way (you wouldn't: it would have been $6,700 in 2016), then the Dividend would pay--without changing the tax rate or the way the tax is applied--$20,337 in the year 2000.
That's 27% more than inflation, and without raising taxes to fund that increase.
That's guaranteed to happen in that manner, and it's not affected by population or income distribution. The Dividend doesn't promise to adjust by some amount each year; only to distribute based on what comes in and enrollment (which is basically everyone).
If the Minimum Wage were adjusted this way from the $3.80/hr wage in 1990, it would be $9.40/hr today. It would have been $8.12 in 2011 (or $6.57 by cost-of-living adjustment).
Do
Ron Wyden is amazing. Warren too, but she voted for this travesty.
Uhhh, so you put a blood in jail and he stops being a blood?
No. It's been shown that taking nearly anyone--gang criminals, rapists, drug dealers, the lot--and putting them into a humane environment which focuses on their individual needs to maintain their sense of security and their human dignity quickly and effectively rehabilitates them. Yes, even hardened gang criminals.
By contrast, prison gangs actually rally around neglect and inhumane treatment. They use it to form a bond among their kin, reassuring themselves that The Man doesn't care about them, and thus demonstrating that they are fully-justified in being what they are. They do this because they need it. They believe that society owes them and that they're entitled to making the rest of us suffer and fear them. Think about the whole image of a violent gang member threatening you if you don't "respect" them and you'll see it.
Not because jailhouse food sucks.
It's not the food.
Read this in full. You can skip to the 4th page, the one that says "Rules of General Application".
I don't like the pure flat tax, even with a negative income tax. VAT and sales taxes are strictly-horrible and are regressive as all hell. I've actually seen that kind of proposal before; it's made with no consideration for the fiscals of the government or the tax burdens created on the middle- and lower-income households.
All personal taxes taken out before you get the money, no tax forms to fill out at all unless you're self-employed.
The Government can't know about your personal situations well enough to do this.
Eliminate all deductions, replace with other incentives, e.g. instead of motgage interest deduction, simply reduce the interest rate directly by providing support from the government.
I've tried to do that, but it didn't work. Causes an enormous amount of inequity in the middle class.
The mortgage interest rate is basically controlled by the Fed, in a sense. High interest rates in general are actually better than low for this purpose, because paying your loan down ahead of schedule when you have a low interest rate requires you to make nearly full payments for each you're skipping. With high rates, those early payments are bypassed with a fraction of the cost, saving enormous amounts on the total purchase price.
In lower-rate markets, house prices increase: people generally pay the same monthly mortgage rate for the same house, whether the payment is more or less interest-heavy.
There are other concerns with raising the rates: they're generally impacted by the rate the Federal government pays on its debt, so raising those interest rates through the usual mechanism causes the Federal government to struggle with its debts.
Tax rate automatically adjusted based on spending, with the flat tax and VAT set to each provide 50% of the required revenue
This is a recipe for an unstable economy.
People will make it fail but the plan still works?
Yes. Think like Social Security has a trust fund that increases in balance on surplus years, and decreases on deficit years. That's stable, right? Oh, but someone is proposing a Balanced Budget Amendment. Under that amendment, the balance Social Security stores up is revenue, and is spent; then, when Social Security tries to pay benefits in a deficit year, it can't call the balance of treasuries, because that would incur deficit spending. Social Security then becomes immediately-insolvent.
Social Security's financial structure works, but oh look... people (Congress) are trying to break it. They've tried by not raising the payroll cap with inflation, by trying to reduce the Social Security budget in other ways, and now by trying to create a poisonpill amendment.
One could say that Social Security would work in theory, but some politicians will make sure it fails, so something like that will never work because it goes against powerful interests.
works for Bernie Sanders and other Democrats
I see Bernie had a great victory over Hillary.
Sanders wants to raise taxes to pay for the entitlements he promises.
Sure, and he's quite bad at his financial structuring, among other things.
Warren backed him down from Free College for All to just Free College for All Making Under $125k. Think about it as if we could tax the rich at 5% and force them to buy college for themselves--that "free college" they get, paid for by their taxes--or we could tax the rich at 0.5% and provide equitable access to college education for those who are financially less-able to afford it, leaving the rich to decide what college they want to buy into, or even if they want to buy college at all.
It's the same with his enormous, tax-hungry Medicare-for-All ideal where the Government is the only insurer. I've suggested a Public Option to cover anyone who can't get affordable care, with an expanded ACA and some regulations that ensure people who take the Public Option despite having affordable care from their employer end up paying the same as if they'd bought from their employer (doesn't save you or your employer anything to get you on the Government's system). Without any of that muckery, the Public Option is a 1.6% tax increase; I'm fairly certain I can get that lower, and possibly near zero income tax hike, although that's by way of charging your employer a payroll tax if they fail to supply affordable care (which is a tax, yes, even if it can be described as a cost of employment by reasoning that they should be paying for healthcare but are not).
Isn't that the basis of "more money" that we are talking about? isn't an issue of tax havens and off shore holdings?
Rich folks are already hiding as much income from taxation as they possibly can. They've got the resources required to do that at maximum--once you've hit ROI for the strongest tax avoidance arbitration it scales with no further effort--and the argument that raising taxes will result in more avoidance assumes that these people have decided to be good actors and not shelter their money, while they clearly are sheltering their money.
The New Deal helped some but it wasn't the quick fix that saved the nation. Part of it was war.
War strains and damages an economy, and creates poverty.
Simplifying it down to one policy decision is revisionism.
True. The New Deal legislation involved multiple waves each of multiple policies, implemented over a span of several years.
Nordic states, as I mentioned before, subsidize their welfare on oil and other natural resources that are also a homogeneous population a fraction of the size.
They actually tend to have a more-flat tax rate and a near 50% general tax rate, so even th
Additionally, what is pessimistic about people voting themselves more money? What rational person would not give themselves a raise if they could?
The pessimistic argument against government action is "if we do X it will fail because people will make it fail even if the plan works". I've faced this argument against any sort of welfare ("people will vote themselves more, and politicians will sell it to get votes"), taxes ("the government will keep raising taxes" and "rich people will just not pay taxes"), and even criminal justice reform ("they'd just put the rules in place and then not do it even though they said they would").
Even Benjamin Franklin warned; "When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.". Why was Franklin wrong and you're right?
Because brilliant minds like Franklin D. Roosevelt tried that and succeeded; and Nordic states like Norway and Finland have abandoned Democratic Socialism in favor of a Capitalist state with welfare, i.e. Social Democracy, and generated enormous amounts of wealth thereby. These are nations which focus on a powerful welfare state aimed at maximizing individual social mobility; strong labor negotiation with government mediation (the same model as labor unions and employers with the National Labor Relations Board working as a mediator); and a strong system of private ownership, wherein the economic system is a well-regulated free enterprise market with private business owners and free trade.
Notably, I am claiming to be smarter than them: I'm looking at accomplishing greater goals without getting anywhere near the tax burdens those nations impose, and the tax burdens will decrease over time while the economy becomes ever more powerful.
the lofty dreams of your utopia
Remember when the Constitution claimed to make a "More Perfect Union"? Interesting words, "More Perfect". You might go look at Norway and think you've found that perfect utopia, but it still has its defects--besides being more tax-heavy than necessary.
My point was your argument is basic pessimism: we can't have a Government because it's evil; legislatures represent themselves and not people; and it's not worth voting because it doesn't matter anyway. Hell, why do we even have police when there's still crime?
For what reason?
You know, other societies and various areas in our society have somehow accomplished all kinds of things at large that directly-rebuke your ideal that the whole world is a backwater of Alabama where these aren't problems, but simply unfixable reality.
So, who will decide what is moderate and unmanageable? Let people decide how much they work and how much they want to make.
You mean like how the 40-hour work week let people decide how much to work and make, except that if you work more than 40 hours your employer starts paying a huge amount of extra salary and so hires someone else to take up that slack? That's how the government shortens working hours: we declare what is "Full Time" in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
For nearly a century, people struck, protested, and even rioted to get shorter working hours. People died over this--there were bloody conflicts between American workers and American enforcement officers. Why didn't they just work less themselves?
As for what's unmanageable, it's simple: if your society is suddenly much more efficient and people are capable of spending twice as much, what happens? You don't have people working twice as much, or twice as many people willing to work. You might get 5% or so additional labor. To attract labor and get at all this consumer spending--consumers want to buy things with all this wealth--a business (microeconomics) will raise wage, but not productivity. That means prices go up to get revenue for that wage, but people have the money anyway.
You see it, right? Inflation.
This settles down after a while: it starts as a sharp rise, then slows. Basically, hyperinflation for a while. This is disruptive and damaging to the economy, and needs a tempering; shorter working hours prevent that shock.
Shorter working hours have been shown to increase mental and physical health as well. Workers are much more productive with 6 hour work days than 8, for example. They take fewer sick days and report much more energy and a greater sense of well-being.
So we could let people decide how much they want to work in one of two ways: let them elect a government that will adjust the working hours as defined in law, or let them riot and murder for it. Unfortunately, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Until enough people decide they want more and vote in politicians promising them what they want.
That's ALWAYS a concern. We have government processes that prevent that, but it's still a thing. I mean honestly, we can amend the Constitution; have you tried?
That concern is why we have a representative democracy of elites: we vote in people we think are very smart, complain about our needs, and they figure out how to deal with it. Do you have time to be a criminal justice expert, economist, military expert, and the like, all at once, on top of your day job? Calming the temporary passions of an excited majority is part of the reason we built this government as-is.
It's actually a fascinating thing to learn about; you should try it.
I'm working on other systems that address this, anyway. The FICA tax is universal and flat: the bigger it is, the harder it is for you to go from poor to wealthy--so much for the American dream. I also have designed a tax system based on shaping an inverse curve to fit our progressive tax structure, then fitting your income as a proportion of the GNI-per-capita into that to determine your effective tax rate: if we raise the tax rate from 40% to 50%, then those very-rich might pay nearly 10% more (1/4 increase), and those poorer will also pay nearly 2.5% more (also 1/4 increase). We're all in this together, folks. Of course you can adjust the shape of the curve, which is a bigger, more-complex, and dangerous topic--one people should distrust.
Other nations have achieved social democracy (the Nordic model) without that problem in practice. Fortunately, they haven't devolved into democratic socialism. I have confidence we can protect ourselves.
Just stay the heck away from my and everyone else's wallet.
As amusing as that would be, it would be shot down by the supreme court if I did that. The way I structured the dividend, it's a significant reduction in taxes at every level; most people who argue against it would end up with some several thousand dollars more under the Dividend (comparing the pre-2017 tax system).
By the by, not everybody can easily get a job, due to localized unemployment: plenty of people want to work, yet are unable to find employment. Both trade and technical progress reduce the amount of money we spend on goods--technical progress, in particular, reduces the labor invested in total to make a product--and we get wealthier by thrusting someone into transitional unemployment. Frequently, this causes industry movement: cities like Detroit and Baltimore lose industry, while high-tech services spring up in New York and San Francisco, thus the "transitional unemployment" is an economic metric and not a person metric (i.e. those guys there? They're relegated to Hell, where there shall be only scraps and a severe dearth of employment opportunity; the rest of us pay 10% less for goods and get awesome new toys).
what really should happen is that everyone has the opportuntiy to benefit equally from all things that are created, but it is up to each individual to take that opportunity and do something with it
That won't happen. The Dividend ensures you have the capacity to take the opportunities which come and increases the likelihood of some kind of opportunity, however meager, for you to take to improve your situation; it doesn't equalize people, not even to the point that any person can take any opportunity at any time wherever it may appear.
New tech.