Fixed. The thing is broken on my end and I'll look at it later today; I'm using a third party now, but still forwarding using my own server for reasons.
I still consider mandatory minimum sentencing a legislative overreach, yet it's apparently not unconstitutional near as I can see. I wonder what would happen if a judge ignored the mandatory minimum provisions. You can't appeal as a prosecutor.
It's not just that. Copyright terms are long. This might make sense in a world where copying is hard and distribution is slow; but in a world with rapid communication, copyrighted material gets consumed quickly. It ceases to be unique and new in a short time, and becomes common; then, it remains owned.
It seems the whole monetization process happens a lot faster now, and so terms should be shorter.
I did eventually buy, when buying became cheaper. It can get obscene in some areas.
It's more-expensive to live in cities, generally; it's less-expensive to live in the broken-down shithole parts of the city than anywhere else. My main policy goals in Congress are to make sure people can fall that far and still retain the economic capacity to move up and out, instead of being forever trapped in poverty. Because it's affordable now, it will remain affordable: people receiving assistance are a source of profit, and somebody will want that profit.
At one point around 2006, my house was listed for $300k. I bought it in 2012 for $50k. I was renting back in 2006 for $725/month, about $1/sqft, and a slightly-bigger apartment could get down to 60 cents.
it's fundamentally flawed. How? It ignores human nature.
The plan I designed is based on human nature to economize--to seek the most ends by the least means. It's based on the idea that people will inherently try to do as little as possible to get as much as they can.
So single payer health care will not be cheaper
A public option isn't a single-payer system.
Your economic theories don't work, despite your belief they do.
These economic theories are historically-proven, and are Keynesian in nature. They're based in the ideal that jobs won't exist if nobody is there to buy--that is: you can't just "create a job" if you can't make a profit selling something.
The solution is individual responsibility and equal opportunity (not outcome) and LESS assistance which builds dependence.
In areas with more need for jobs than spendable income to create all of those jobs, it is impossible to create equal opportunity. People will be left behind, because there are five barrels of apples and sufficient people that you need six barrels.
We MUST address human nature and use it to enable people to be successful on their own
That's the whole point: people have enough such that they aren't dropped out of the system, and they seek to improve their lot to end the struggling and improve their luxury. Because they can pay, landlords can profit, so they can get housing. Because they aren't troublesome to employ, employers will hire them. Because they want life to be better and easier, they seek employment. Because there is spending, employment opportunities exist.
It's all driven by human nature to seek to maximize the profit of oneself, rather than the feel-good ideals the Republicans push about how businesses will create a non-profitable job out of the goodness of their hearts to help their downtrodden comrades in the community.
You just make EVERYBODY equally poor
Actually, this program doesn't remove the social hierarchy. You can only get somewhere around the midpoint by working; you can get to the top by getting lucky enough to have a rare opportunity and being capable enough to exploit it. People at the top tend to have something like $100 or so per year for each of thousands of folks in the hierarchy below them, which is why hierarchical systems produce so few rich (they have to: it's mathematically-impossible for everyone to be the rich 1%).
Venezuela did all the things you suggest in principle
Actually, I'm the first person in history to ever suggest these things.
Government is the least efficient way to do ANYTHING you can name.
Not really. It's shocking how inefficient Social Security is; then, you realize that private business is even worse. Social Security has staffing issues--too much staffing doing nothing much of the time--yet they're insanely-capable of getting things done when they have a new initiative. When I moved to private business, I immediately noticed they over-utilized staff, and yet they're also overstaffed: much of the work being done was waste, hardly organized in an efficient manner and with a lot of rework, resulting in nearly 80% of the expense in IT being stuff that didn't need to be bought or didn't need to be done. It's still like that, but much less bad today.
Implementing universal healthcare involves a stronger ACA mandate and a public healthcare option run by a highly-efficient Federal fund. Negotiation is bounded by pulling data from the private market (remittance rates between each insurer and each provider, using the statistical low rates as the rate per-provider in which the government will negotiate), and standards of fairness in each market are published so that the overpaying private insurers (most of them, oddly enough) have a better time negotiating closer to the mean.
Don't forget that the Federal government's own Medicaid system pioneered the use of bundled service negotiation to cut costs dramatically. Private insurers implemented that later, following Medicaid's example. Rather than handle billing for a thousand line-items, a particular medical operation such as a gall bladder surgery is analyzed for mean cost and statistical risk of complications and thus deviations, giving a properly-adjusted price basis which includes cost-of-risk. The insurers and providers negotiate over that price, and the whole thing is billed as one line-item, dramatically cutting down BIR overhead.
Operating the public healthcare option would cost less than $200 billion additional spending in 2016; and we can reduce those costs by a few other efforts, including the matter of driving private market costs down via published market standards. In the end, the public option becomes the foundation of medicaid, medicare, VA, and CHIP, spreading those savings across over a trillion dollars of current spending. There's a small chance the combined effort could result in net-lower total government cash outflow for public healthcare.
Sure such programs treat the symptoms, but it doesn't cure the illness that created poverty in the first place. So I ask you, what IS the solution? Because what you are suggesting has historically NOT helped.
Actually, paying out a cash benefit as the Dividend would create a dramatic increase in effective demand, so long as you're not doing it by deficit spending or other money creation schemes. This creates jobs directly in impoverished areas, increasing production, production-per-capita, and income-per-capita. It also reduces the number of households poor enough to receive benefits, and reduces the amount of benefits for which the remainder are eligible, reducing the cost of welfare.
The solution is moving money into impoverished local economies. You can't create jobs by supply side--by going out and working, or cutting taxes on business incomes. Workers are only profitable when they cost less than the revenue stream they produce, and that means consumers around those workers must be capable of purchasing at prices which create such a revenue stream. Stabilizing that is the only way to achieve such goals; elevating the impoverished directly moves them from non-employable (unwashed, smelly, no-fixed-address homeless folks) to employable, while also putting the spending power into their hands which creates jobs allowing them to be employed.
Running electricity through a wire doesn't produce light, unless you use a tungsten wire in a vacuum, which involves finding a way to make a glass-metal seal. Sometimes you find a thousand wrong ways to reach the right result, and nothing works until you find a right way.
Figuring out how many cars are passing, collecting the fees (taxes), and disbursing them isn't administrative management? There's nothing else to do except rebuild the road when it needs resurfacing.
I-66 has lanes on and an off-ramp. If you don't want to pay I-66 tolls, you get off I-66 and bypass it via I-50. You don't know the fee until you're within viewing distance of the tolls; you probably can't get off the highway if you're in the left lane. The fee updates every six minutes.
I'd hope the MIT chip could do math better. 3-7 times faster, 5%-6% as much power draw? That's 0.7%-2% as much power consumption per computational operation.
Fixing poverty in third-world countries is hard. You have to bring their technical progress up to a level at which they're reasonably-wealthy before you can even attempt it. Things like Fair Trade try to accelerate this (I see Fair Trade as a step to Free Trade: once the other trading partner is above a certain level of economic development, all of the provisions of Fair Trade set minimum standards which are below anything which would be freely negotiated), although even blunt free trade creates an opportunity for a poor nation to produce (apply labor) beyond their carry capacity by selling to a wealthy nation. People talk about the US exploiting China for wage-slave labor or some such while ignoring that Chinese wages, social insurances, working conditions, and levels of poverty have improved dramatically and rapidly since they started selling for cheap to the rest of the world.
Honestly, if you're trying to rebuild nations, it takes more than free trade or fair trade. You want direct intervention. Such policies are vilified today because, out of $2,700 billion spent by our Federal government and over $6,800 billion spent by governments in total in the US today, we spend around $0.6 billion on other countries instead of thinking about our own problems. If we would just help bring Mexico more in line with our own economy, we could have an open border policy without much inflow of immigrants looking for work (because Mexico would be wealthy enough that coming to America isn't insanely attractive). Saves us on lots of inefficient border security spending (tens of billions per year if you actually want it to barely work).
The most ridiculous part is you can put an end to poverty in the US without even raising taxes on anyone. It's weird. Mainly, that's an artifact of poor structuring of the Social Security retirement and disability pensions programs: you can fix those so they're solvent without cutting benefits and end up with an additional, separate benefit that pays out when you turn 18 (retirement and disability top this up, so those particular programs pay less, while the total pay-out to people receiving those benefits is the same as the unmodified programs--i.e. if you were going to get $1,200 retirement, you instead get $700 dividend and $500 retirement, totaling $1,200). The dividend essentially makes people less-poor and thus allows other anti-poverty programs (housing assistance, SNAP, etc.) to actually lift everyone out of poverty, while the extra consumer spending drives job creation (increases effective demand) around the poorest especially and thus further alleviates poverty.
This only works if your level of technical progress allows production of the basic means of economic equity for some reasonably-small fraction of your GDP. In total, that's pretty close to 15% in the US, so you can imagine how quickly this fails in e.g. Mexico; on the other hand, that 15% number is an overstatement (I'm thinking this might work around 8% or 6%), and is really derived from an economic fairness measure (that being that a full-time working individual is 3/8 of the way to our per-capita income, and a two-adult household with one worker as such is halfway there, at the very least). It's probably not as difficult to pull off as I frequently portray.
Bonus points: you can fit universal healthcare in there and still barely avoid raising taxes, if you do it right.
It's not always cheaper to buy. It's not even always cheaper to rent. I've lived in both markets, one where renting was clearly a 30%+ discount with all maintenance covered, and one where buying got me a $500 15-year mortgage while the next house over rented for $1,200/month. I switched to homeownership when an apartment cost me less than a house twice as big; I rented when the mortgage on a modest house was hundreds of dollars more than the rent on an apartment the same size.
Calling a house an investment as a general tenant is a sign of poor financial reasoning. It's one of two red flags you look for when talking to a financial advisor--the other being if they suggest Roth retirement accounts are better than tax-deferred accounts.
They only go up faster than inflation in a bull real estate market. That happens when the fed lowers rates. With rates going up this year, enjoy being underwater--not that I disagree with rate hikes at this point (I don't like prime rates below 7%), but we got ourselves in a bad position with this monetary policy.
The math never worked out for me, except during that housing run-up prior to 2008. I bought a house when the mortgage was less than renting an apartment; I rented when I wanted to pay $725/month (700sqft apartment) and a house with less than twice the square-footage of the apartment cost $1,800/month. To rent a 1,300 sqft apartment would have cost me $1,100 at the time, whereas the mortgage on the 1,300sqft house was $1,800.
I got a 1,300sqft house for under $500/month with a 15-year mortgage. I stopped renting. Granted, I'll put half the sale price of the house into insulation and roof repair, but I'm happy with that (just not happy having a $400 gas and electric bill last month even after spending $10,000 on insulating already; I'm half-way there financially, but the big win is going to be a $4,000 project on the side wall).
I take the standard deduction for a single-filer. I have always taken the standard deduction for a single-filer. When I paid $3,300 in mortgage interest for the year back in 2012, my total itemized deductions came to $4,500; the standard deduction was bigger.
What's obscene about the tax write-off is people believe they get all that interest back and make a lot of money off the government. In reality, you might get 25% of the interest back (you can't deduct from FICA liability, except for deferred-tax accounts like IRAs--yes, that means you're paying 6.2% on your standard deduction), and only the portion of the interest that emerges over your standard deduction. If you itemize $8k of deductions and you're married with a $12k standard deduction (it's $24k now), $10,000 of mortgage interest pushes your deductions up to $18k, and your tax liability falls by $1.5k: you pay $8,500 of that interest, and the government covers the other $1,500.
As a banker, be sure to tell your clients the interest is okay because they'll "get it back on their taxes". That line has worked on uneducated fools across the Nation for decades.
You just put a giant target on your head. Every scammer in the world now knows you're an easy mark.
Real estate isn't an investment unless you're a high-dollar real estate investor. If you're living in it, it's an expense, and a liability. It takes time to pay that loan off, during which you lose money to interest. You have maintenance, which costs money. You pay taxes and insurances. By the time you sell that house you've lived in, you've lost more or less about the cost of renting.
I always assume a house is a total loss. My realtor acquaintances assume a house can be negotiated under-value, rehabbed into something worth more than the cost of rehab, and turned over quickly for a profit. We're doing different things with these houses.
How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Californians don't screw in light bulbs; they screw in hot tubs.
Long-distance view from Maryland. Some artistic license applied.
Got to love living in poverty making $100+K/year
Eh, there are plenty of places you can live in California for less; they're just not places you'd want to live. From what I've been able to determine, all slums across the continental United States reflect about the same standard-of-living at the same income level. I've lived in the lowest income areas around Baltimore for nearly a decade now, and I've prodded at data around the country to see if I could live on the same minimum budget. I found several neighborhoods outside Seattle and down in California with comparable rent (about $1/sqft in 2014 for an apartment) and food prices (pretty much identical, sometimes a few pennies off).
I imagine such places are drug- and crime-ridden ganglands filled with rats and broken-down housing. That's okay: the majority of people in this rotting ghetto are good people, and the high crime rate is perpetrated by a few individuals who of course are constantly active and so cause a lot of trouble. It's probably the same out there.
I should get out more and see the city for what it is. These may very well be the last few years we get to see classic American poverty. I wonder what the next generation will think when we try to explain it to them...
There's a financial guideline about only paying a third of your income for rent or mortgage. That's based on HUD's guidelines about how much of your income should be rent or mortgage when on assistance, not on any sort of sound financial advice.
Mind you, higher liabilities means bigger risk. My mortgage is about 12% of my after-tax income, so I don't have to worry about money ever getting too tight. A Congressional salary would be $100k more than I make now, which is cool, but I'm not about to argue that Congressmen maybe need to get paid more--not on the east coast, anyway. On the other hand, the legislators in my state make less than some struggling families I've met; I would argue they should be paid better, despite legislature being in session only 4 months of the year, because they shouldn't be distracted seeking some kind of supplemental income for those other 8 months when they should be speaking with us about what we want done in Annapolis.
Poor drivers will pay a lot less in absolute dollars than rich drivers
Right, plus everyone else who doesn't drive that road.
You could also fund the private road company by counting cars and giving them a cut of the general fund. That's simply a policy decision: how do you want the incentives to work for the road company?
You could, but who does that? You could also rent a house but be responsible for all the maintenance and taxes.
Poor example, but you get the point. One-Click was novel and non-obvious (ignoring the prior art), but was it an invention? If, in a world where you went to a bakery and bought bread, a baker partnered with a milk carrier in a small town to use the excess space on his cart so as to deliver bread, would that be patentable? "Invention: using a milk cart to also deliver bread!"
If you invent a method for producing a result--a method for computing protein folding, for modeling pigment mixing, or whatever, something people have wanted to do "on a computer" for a long time but could never figure out how--that's an invention. It's annoying that MP3 and H.265 got patents, but those patents aren't for a file format or something trivially-obvious; we only care about H.265's patents because the invention in a method for improving compression at a given quality level, and we don't know how to achieve that by another method, and have wanted to achieve that for decades (and want to achieve better, and are still searching for new methods by which to do so).
You're still missing the point: if they fund it with EZ-Pass and license plate readers, the people driving on that road pay more. They fund it with general funds (income tax) so the typical driver pays less--and the lower-income households hardly pay for the roads at all.
Private ownership and toll roads means a poor worker passing that road twice daily on his commute to work pays the same as the rich guy passing that road just as often, while paying more than anyone who doesn't pass the tolls. Public ownership means we all pay, and so we pay less. One thousand people pass the tolls paying $5, that's $5,000; but if we tax all 1.9 million people in the state, that's a quarter penny for those thousand passing the tolls--a quarter penny paid by everyone, whether they pass the tolls or not. With progressive taxes, it's less paid by the poorer and more by the richer.
Oh I know. I think I can push back against that well enough, though. The real trouble is this shoves like $7,500/year down the pipe, not something like $300 per person. People might accept something small, but something so large will freak them out.
Here's the thing: the Dividend also provides the minimum wage measure--yes, I'm fighting a war on multiple fronts here. Whenever the Dividend goes up such that full-time minimum wage is less than 2x the annual Dividend, I push minimum wage up to match. That means minimum wage in 2024 is like $9.75/hr, with a take-home income for a single full-time worker slightly higher than the 2016 take-home income of a $15/hr full-time worker. It also grows faster than cost-of-living, sharing productivity gains.
That policy means that single worker is getting more take-home than FightFor$15 is trying to get them, and businesses are paying less in wages anyway. So working is rewarded (heavily), which is great; but a lot of the progressives want higher minimum wages "to make the businesses pay" (never mind that the consumer pays). It's an ideal for them, and they won't like the low wage number because they perceive minimum wages as hitting employers in the pocket (erroneous), as "fairness", and as an anti-poverty measure (also erroneous).
Of course, I want shorter working hours and stronger worker protections. I'm the only one pushing for that, so far.
We need social programs for the transitional unemployment. It will go away, but we need to carry these people who are caught in the path of progress. It's a complex economic topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed. The thing is broken on my end and I'll look at it later today; I'm using a third party now, but still forwarding using my own server for reasons.
Boring. Get a Zero SR; it only costs $15,000.
Something made by Germans is a lot better than the original broken thing was supposed to be in the first place? Who would've thought.
I still consider mandatory minimum sentencing a legislative overreach, yet it's apparently not unconstitutional near as I can see. I wonder what would happen if a judge ignored the mandatory minimum provisions. You can't appeal as a prosecutor.
It's not just that. Copyright terms are long. This might make sense in a world where copying is hard and distribution is slow; but in a world with rapid communication, copyrighted material gets consumed quickly. It ceases to be unique and new in a short time, and becomes common; then, it remains owned.
It seems the whole monetization process happens a lot faster now, and so terms should be shorter.
I did eventually buy, when buying became cheaper. It can get obscene in some areas.
It's more-expensive to live in cities, generally; it's less-expensive to live in the broken-down shithole parts of the city than anywhere else. My main policy goals in Congress are to make sure people can fall that far and still retain the economic capacity to move up and out, instead of being forever trapped in poverty. Because it's affordable now, it will remain affordable: people receiving assistance are a source of profit, and somebody will want that profit.
At one point around 2006, my house was listed for $300k. I bought it in 2012 for $50k. I was renting back in 2006 for $725/month, about $1/sqft, and a slightly-bigger apartment could get down to 60 cents.
Look, socialism doesn't work.
This is capitalism.
it's fundamentally flawed. How? It ignores human nature.
The plan I designed is based on human nature to economize--to seek the most ends by the least means. It's based on the idea that people will inherently try to do as little as possible to get as much as they can.
So single payer health care will not be cheaper
A public option isn't a single-payer system.
Your economic theories don't work, despite your belief they do.
These economic theories are historically-proven, and are Keynesian in nature. They're based in the ideal that jobs won't exist if nobody is there to buy--that is: you can't just "create a job" if you can't make a profit selling something.
The solution is individual responsibility and equal opportunity (not outcome) and LESS assistance which builds dependence.
In areas with more need for jobs than spendable income to create all of those jobs, it is impossible to create equal opportunity. People will be left behind, because there are five barrels of apples and sufficient people that you need six barrels.
We MUST address human nature and use it to enable people to be successful on their own
That's the whole point: people have enough such that they aren't dropped out of the system, and they seek to improve their lot to end the struggling and improve their luxury. Because they can pay, landlords can profit, so they can get housing. Because they aren't troublesome to employ, employers will hire them. Because they want life to be better and easier, they seek employment. Because there is spending, employment opportunities exist.
It's all driven by human nature to seek to maximize the profit of oneself, rather than the feel-good ideals the Republicans push about how businesses will create a non-profitable job out of the goodness of their hearts to help their downtrodden comrades in the community.
You just make EVERYBODY equally poor
Actually, this program doesn't remove the social hierarchy. You can only get somewhere around the midpoint by working; you can get to the top by getting lucky enough to have a rare opportunity and being capable enough to exploit it. People at the top tend to have something like $100 or so per year for each of thousands of folks in the hierarchy below them, which is why hierarchical systems produce so few rich (they have to: it's mathematically-impossible for everyone to be the rich 1%).
Venezuela did all the things you suggest in principle
Actually, I'm the first person in history to ever suggest these things.
Government is the least efficient way to do ANYTHING you can name.
Not really. It's shocking how inefficient Social Security is; then, you realize that private business is even worse. Social Security has staffing issues--too much staffing doing nothing much of the time--yet they're insanely-capable of getting things done when they have a new initiative. When I moved to private business, I immediately noticed they over-utilized staff, and yet they're also overstaffed: much of the work being done was waste, hardly organized in an efficient manner and with a lot of rework, resulting in nearly 80% of the expense in IT being stuff that didn't need to be bought or didn't need to be done. It's still like that, but much less bad today.
Implementing universal healthcare involves a stronger ACA mandate and a public healthcare option run by a highly-efficient Federal fund. Negotiation is bounded by pulling data from the private market (remittance rates between each insurer and each provider, using the statistical low rates as the rate per-provider in which the government will negotiate), and standards of fairness in each market are published so that the overpaying private insurers (most of them, oddly enough) have a better time negotiating closer to the mean.
Don't forget that the Federal government's own Medicaid system pioneered the use of bundled service negotiation to cut costs dramatically. Private insurers implemented that later, following Medicaid's example. Rather than handle billing for a thousand line-items, a particular medical operation such as a gall bladder surgery is analyzed for mean cost and statistical risk of complications and thus deviations, giving a properly-adjusted price basis which includes cost-of-risk. The insurers and providers negotiate over that price, and the whole thing is billed as one line-item, dramatically cutting down BIR overhead.
Operating the public healthcare option would cost less than $200 billion additional spending in 2016; and we can reduce those costs by a few other efforts, including the matter of driving private market costs down via published market standards. In the end, the public option becomes the foundation of medicaid, medicare, VA, and CHIP, spreading those savings across over a trillion dollars of current spending. There's a small chance the combined effort could result in net-lower total government cash outflow for public healthcare.
Sure such programs treat the symptoms, but it doesn't cure the illness that created poverty in the first place. So I ask you, what IS the solution? Because what you are suggesting has historically NOT helped.
Actually, paying out a cash benefit as the Dividend would create a dramatic increase in effective demand, so long as you're not doing it by deficit spending or other money creation schemes. This creates jobs directly in impoverished areas, increasing production, production-per-capita, and income-per-capita. It also reduces the number of households poor enough to receive benefits, and reduces the amount of benefits for which the remainder are eligible, reducing the cost of welfare.
The solution is moving money into impoverished local economies. You can't create jobs by supply side--by going out and working, or cutting taxes on business incomes. Workers are only profitable when they cost less than the revenue stream they produce, and that means consumers around those workers must be capable of purchasing at prices which create such a revenue stream. Stabilizing that is the only way to achieve such goals; elevating the impoverished directly moves them from non-employable (unwashed, smelly, no-fixed-address homeless folks) to employable, while also putting the spending power into their hands which creates jobs allowing them to be employed.
Running electricity through a wire doesn't produce light, unless you use a tungsten wire in a vacuum, which involves finding a way to make a glass-metal seal. Sometimes you find a thousand wrong ways to reach the right result, and nothing works until you find a right way.
Figuring out how many cars are passing, collecting the fees (taxes), and disbursing them isn't administrative management? There's nothing else to do except rebuild the road when it needs resurfacing.
I-66 has lanes on and an off-ramp. If you don't want to pay I-66 tolls, you get off I-66 and bypass it via I-50. You don't know the fee until you're within viewing distance of the tolls; you probably can't get off the highway if you're in the left lane. The fee updates every six minutes.
I'd hope the MIT chip could do math better. 3-7 times faster, 5%-6% as much power draw? That's 0.7%-2% as much power consumption per computational operation.
Fixing poverty in third-world countries is hard. You have to bring their technical progress up to a level at which they're reasonably-wealthy before you can even attempt it. Things like Fair Trade try to accelerate this (I see Fair Trade as a step to Free Trade: once the other trading partner is above a certain level of economic development, all of the provisions of Fair Trade set minimum standards which are below anything which would be freely negotiated), although even blunt free trade creates an opportunity for a poor nation to produce (apply labor) beyond their carry capacity by selling to a wealthy nation. People talk about the US exploiting China for wage-slave labor or some such while ignoring that Chinese wages, social insurances, working conditions, and levels of poverty have improved dramatically and rapidly since they started selling for cheap to the rest of the world.
Honestly, if you're trying to rebuild nations, it takes more than free trade or fair trade. You want direct intervention. Such policies are vilified today because, out of $2,700 billion spent by our Federal government and over $6,800 billion spent by governments in total in the US today, we spend around $0.6 billion on other countries instead of thinking about our own problems. If we would just help bring Mexico more in line with our own economy, we could have an open border policy without much inflow of immigrants looking for work (because Mexico would be wealthy enough that coming to America isn't insanely attractive). Saves us on lots of inefficient border security spending (tens of billions per year if you actually want it to barely work).
The most ridiculous part is you can put an end to poverty in the US without even raising taxes on anyone. It's weird. Mainly, that's an artifact of poor structuring of the Social Security retirement and disability pensions programs: you can fix those so they're solvent without cutting benefits and end up with an additional, separate benefit that pays out when you turn 18 (retirement and disability top this up, so those particular programs pay less, while the total pay-out to people receiving those benefits is the same as the unmodified programs--i.e. if you were going to get $1,200 retirement, you instead get $700 dividend and $500 retirement, totaling $1,200). The dividend essentially makes people less-poor and thus allows other anti-poverty programs (housing assistance, SNAP, etc.) to actually lift everyone out of poverty, while the extra consumer spending drives job creation (increases effective demand) around the poorest especially and thus further alleviates poverty.
This only works if your level of technical progress allows production of the basic means of economic equity for some reasonably-small fraction of your GDP. In total, that's pretty close to 15% in the US, so you can imagine how quickly this fails in e.g. Mexico; on the other hand, that 15% number is an overstatement (I'm thinking this might work around 8% or 6%), and is really derived from an economic fairness measure (that being that a full-time working individual is 3/8 of the way to our per-capita income, and a two-adult household with one worker as such is halfway there, at the very least). It's probably not as difficult to pull off as I frequently portray.
Bonus points: you can fit universal healthcare in there and still barely avoid raising taxes, if you do it right.
It's not always cheaper to buy. It's not even always cheaper to rent. I've lived in both markets, one where renting was clearly a 30%+ discount with all maintenance covered, and one where buying got me a $500 15-year mortgage while the next house over rented for $1,200/month. I switched to homeownership when an apartment cost me less than a house twice as big; I rented when the mortgage on a modest house was hundreds of dollars more than the rent on an apartment the same size.
Calling a house an investment as a general tenant is a sign of poor financial reasoning. It's one of two red flags you look for when talking to a financial advisor--the other being if they suggest Roth retirement accounts are better than tax-deferred accounts.
They only go up faster than inflation in a bull real estate market. That happens when the fed lowers rates. With rates going up this year, enjoy being underwater--not that I disagree with rate hikes at this point (I don't like prime rates below 7%), but we got ourselves in a bad position with this monetary policy.
The math never worked out for me, except during that housing run-up prior to 2008. I bought a house when the mortgage was less than renting an apartment; I rented when I wanted to pay $725/month (700sqft apartment) and a house with less than twice the square-footage of the apartment cost $1,800/month. To rent a 1,300 sqft apartment would have cost me $1,100 at the time, whereas the mortgage on the 1,300sqft house was $1,800.
I got a 1,300sqft house for under $500/month with a 15-year mortgage. I stopped renting. Granted, I'll put half the sale price of the house into insulation and roof repair, but I'm happy with that (just not happy having a $400 gas and electric bill last month even after spending $10,000 on insulating already; I'm half-way there financially, but the big win is going to be a $4,000 project on the side wall).
I take the standard deduction for a single-filer. I have always taken the standard deduction for a single-filer. When I paid $3,300 in mortgage interest for the year back in 2012, my total itemized deductions came to $4,500; the standard deduction was bigger.
What's obscene about the tax write-off is people believe they get all that interest back and make a lot of money off the government. In reality, you might get 25% of the interest back (you can't deduct from FICA liability, except for deferred-tax accounts like IRAs--yes, that means you're paying 6.2% on your standard deduction), and only the portion of the interest that emerges over your standard deduction. If you itemize $8k of deductions and you're married with a $12k standard deduction (it's $24k now), $10,000 of mortgage interest pushes your deductions up to $18k, and your tax liability falls by $1.5k: you pay $8,500 of that interest, and the government covers the other $1,500.
As a banker, be sure to tell your clients the interest is okay because they'll "get it back on their taxes". That line has worked on uneducated fools across the Nation for decades.
real estate is an investment
You just put a giant target on your head. Every scammer in the world now knows you're an easy mark.
Real estate isn't an investment unless you're a high-dollar real estate investor. If you're living in it, it's an expense, and a liability. It takes time to pay that loan off, during which you lose money to interest. You have maintenance, which costs money. You pay taxes and insurances. By the time you sell that house you've lived in, you've lost more or less about the cost of renting.
I always assume a house is a total loss. My realtor acquaintances assume a house can be negotiated under-value, rehabbed into something worth more than the cost of rehab, and turned over quickly for a profit. We're doing different things with these houses.
What is this CA lifestyle thing?
How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Californians don't screw in light bulbs; they screw in hot tubs.
Long-distance view from Maryland. Some artistic license applied.
Got to love living in poverty making $100+K/year
Eh, there are plenty of places you can live in California for less; they're just not places you'd want to live. From what I've been able to determine, all slums across the continental United States reflect about the same standard-of-living at the same income level. I've lived in the lowest income areas around Baltimore for nearly a decade now, and I've prodded at data around the country to see if I could live on the same minimum budget. I found several neighborhoods outside Seattle and down in California with comparable rent (about $1/sqft in 2014 for an apartment) and food prices (pretty much identical, sometimes a few pennies off).
I imagine such places are drug- and crime-ridden ganglands filled with rats and broken-down housing. That's okay: the majority of people in this rotting ghetto are good people, and the high crime rate is perpetrated by a few individuals who of course are constantly active and so cause a lot of trouble. It's probably the same out there.
I should get out more and see the city for what it is. These may very well be the last few years we get to see classic American poverty. I wonder what the next generation will think when we try to explain it to them...
There's a financial guideline about only paying a third of your income for rent or mortgage. That's based on HUD's guidelines about how much of your income should be rent or mortgage when on assistance, not on any sort of sound financial advice.
Mind you, higher liabilities means bigger risk. My mortgage is about 12% of my after-tax income, so I don't have to worry about money ever getting too tight. A Congressional salary would be $100k more than I make now, which is cool, but I'm not about to argue that Congressmen maybe need to get paid more--not on the east coast, anyway. On the other hand, the legislators in my state make less than some struggling families I've met; I would argue they should be paid better, despite legislature being in session only 4 months of the year, because they shouldn't be distracted seeking some kind of supplemental income for those other 8 months when they should be speaking with us about what we want done in Annapolis.
I mean who sells a road, then continues doing all the administrative management of the road as if they own it?
I-66 is priced based on traffic. It hit $46.50 for a single passenger vehicle.
Poor drivers will pay a lot less in absolute dollars than rich drivers
Right, plus everyone else who doesn't drive that road.
You could also fund the private road company by counting cars and giving them a cut of the general fund. That's simply a policy decision: how do you want the incentives to work for the road company?
You could, but who does that? You could also rent a house but be responsible for all the maintenance and taxes.
Poor example, but you get the point. One-Click was novel and non-obvious (ignoring the prior art), but was it an invention? If, in a world where you went to a bakery and bought bread, a baker partnered with a milk carrier in a small town to use the excess space on his cart so as to deliver bread, would that be patentable? "Invention: using a milk cart to also deliver bread!"
If you invent a method for producing a result--a method for computing protein folding, for modeling pigment mixing, or whatever, something people have wanted to do "on a computer" for a long time but could never figure out how--that's an invention. It's annoying that MP3 and H.265 got patents, but those patents aren't for a file format or something trivially-obvious; we only care about H.265's patents because the invention in a method for improving compression at a given quality level, and we don't know how to achieve that by another method, and have wanted to achieve that for decades (and want to achieve better, and are still searching for new methods by which to do so).
Across the nation it's about 1/3.
You're still missing the point: if they fund it with EZ-Pass and license plate readers, the people driving on that road pay more. They fund it with general funds (income tax) so the typical driver pays less--and the lower-income households hardly pay for the roads at all.
Private ownership and toll roads means a poor worker passing that road twice daily on his commute to work pays the same as the rich guy passing that road just as often, while paying more than anyone who doesn't pass the tolls. Public ownership means we all pay, and so we pay less. One thousand people pass the tolls paying $5, that's $5,000; but if we tax all 1.9 million people in the state, that's a quarter penny for those thousand passing the tolls--a quarter penny paid by everyone, whether they pass the tolls or not. With progressive taxes, it's less paid by the poorer and more by the richer.
Oh I know. I think I can push back against that well enough, though. The real trouble is this shoves like $7,500/year down the pipe, not something like $300 per person. People might accept something small, but something so large will freak them out.
Here's the thing: the Dividend also provides the minimum wage measure--yes, I'm fighting a war on multiple fronts here. Whenever the Dividend goes up such that full-time minimum wage is less than 2x the annual Dividend, I push minimum wage up to match. That means minimum wage in 2024 is like $9.75/hr, with a take-home income for a single full-time worker slightly higher than the 2016 take-home income of a $15/hr full-time worker. It also grows faster than cost-of-living, sharing productivity gains.
That policy means that single worker is getting more take-home than FightFor$15 is trying to get them, and businesses are paying less in wages anyway. So working is rewarded (heavily), which is great; but a lot of the progressives want higher minimum wages "to make the businesses pay" (never mind that the consumer pays). It's an ideal for them, and they won't like the low wage number because they perceive minimum wages as hitting employers in the pocket (erroneous), as "fairness", and as an anti-poverty measure (also erroneous).
Of course, I want shorter working hours and stronger worker protections. I'm the only one pushing for that, so far.
We need social programs for the transitional unemployment. It will go away, but we need to carry these people who are caught in the path of progress. It's a complex economic topic.
Do you remember the wooden shipping pallet?