That's a book cipher. Book ciphers use widely-available books or else are prone to discovery by the fact that people involved own an obscure book. The use of a widely-available book makes it easy to get a hold of the source material; however, it also means you have a small number of books from which to select, making computerized brute forcing feasible.
Periodicals are even worse: magazines have limited distribution area, and outside that area are specialty items. In applications requiring high-security encryption, you have a strong adversary who can collect such data and potentially identify that one or both actors receive certain periodicals. These go first into the list of scanned texts to use in cryptanalysis.
Algorithms to vary the data create visible skew, and the skew gets removed. Book ciphers tend to expose themselves by exploding data, so the anoalysis techniques to crack them are played first by the adversary.
I have an IT Security background and intend to end identity theft and get Internet voting going in a sane manner. I also disagree with the reauthorization of FISA 702 (I generally disagree with domestic surveillance, even though things like outside cameras are public space and not technically a privacy violation. We have a sense of autonomy and secrecy when we are alone, and don't need a sense of paranoia about cameras and microphones prying into our every movement).
Long term planning for the public interest, or anything other than the next quarterly report, is not their concern
Just tracing the problem back. People like to portray Chinese imports as Chinese brands, not as the result of American business engineering.
In theory, that is the job of elected representatives and appointed regulators to provide necessary oversight and forcibly drag the Job Creators kicking and screaming to where they give even the slightest shit about the welfare of the country
Testing, approval, import restrictions, quality standards, and the like. It's actually the job of the administration, once the elected officials let them do it: Congress passes laws authorizing things like the FDA, and the President orders them into existence and appoints oversight. The FDA and others are then responsible for using that granted authority to regulate the markets. When they don't... we make new laws to clarify what specifically they're supposed to achieve. It's kind of irritating, really: the administration is more-agile than Congress, and yet sometimes doesn't care to do its damned job.
And the Waltons and Bezos of the world are all better off for it.
Along with middle-class and minimum-wage workers who can buy more quality goods and live at a higher standard of living.
Instead of having used tariffs and access to our markets to incentivize democratic reform and environmental regulation early on, now we'll gladly sell them the tools they need to suppress and censor their population in a digital age.
They're becoming less-authoritarian and more democratic as they become a stronger economic superpower. It's one of those things that generally leads from one to the next, albeit we can influence the process.
$313 every paycheck (313 * 26) is about $8k, not $7,500.
How did you get "The Universal Dividend is structured as a Social Security benefit with a twice-monthly payment and its own FICA on all income. It pays on, say, the 1st and 15th of every month" to equate to $8k, when $313 * 24 = $7,512? (I'd seriously consider disbursing weekly, but that creates month-to-month variations where a month has 5 Fridays. Accounting sucks unless you use a 13-month year.)
So yeah, taxes will be cut. Along with whatever my $4,000 in taxes is actually paying for, like roads and schools.
Nope, it's revenue-neutral: the Federal government actually ends up with the same balance at the end of it all. The Dividend's funding source, in 2016, would have brought in and paid out $1.8 trillion, restructuring about $1.07 trillion. (I only have preliminary data for 2017.)
As I said: the basis of that includes restructuring Social Security's existing benefits (retirement, disability) to meet the same total benefit when paid in addition to the Dividend (a retiree getting $1,500 gets $1,500), rather than paying the Dividend in addition to those benefits (a retiree getting $1,500 instead gets $2,100). That restructure is revenue-neutral because Social Security is self-funded.
The payment in total is revenue-neutral because it's fed by an income tax from which it pays out: it's a new FICA benefit which is self-funded.
The whole mucking about with the tax system happens because I restructured FICA in its entirety. I rolled FICA into the general income tax, then rebuilt it out of there. I also reclaimed the EITC as a Social Security service (the Dividend is effectively an unearned income, and pays more than the maximum EITC), along with SSI (nobody's really poor enough to be eligible for SSI with the Dividend in place--it would have zero program participation). Those are just small dollars, though, around a hundred billion and some change.
In the end, that means all receiving non-income-determinant benefits (retirement, disability) are receiving the same or more benefits than they started; those receiving income-determinant benefits (EITC, HUD, SNAP, SSI, etc.) have an increase in income, and thus a decrease in eligibility, so receive less from those systems. Nothing gets cut, although some welfare gets less participation.
$7,500 is a crappy dividend. Welfare is about $12,000 per year.
It's more like $9,000, until you start counting things like Pell grants and healthcare; and that's at the absolute maximum. There might be a few thousand families in the entire country receiving that--and likely not much more than 10,000, if that many.
The Dividend doesn't actually cut welfare. It simply pays out. Food stamps, HUD, and TANF don't pay you all-or-nothing, but rather scale with your distance from the poverty guideline. If you're closer, they pay less. More income puts you closer--or over, in which case they pay you nothing.
In other words: making people less-poor in any way (by jobs or by handing them a cash benefit) reduces the dollar amount of legally-claimable welfare.
The 2017 preliminary analysis looks like $324/month or $7,790/year, by the way. From 2013 out, that's $6,839, $7,138, $7,361, $7,517, and $7,790. It's $7,537 in 2017 if we begin paying the Dividend at age 16 (my eventual target)--I won't have a more-accurate number for that for a while yet, though, so I may be $5 or $10 off.
I wouldn't actually be recieving a $7,500 dividend, I would be recieving a $4,000 or 100% tax cut.
Right. That's why I said it's the other side of the funding structure: the point wasn't to make everyone $7,500 richer than they are today, and the scaling by inc
That does explain why pet food made in China keeps killing dogs and cats and noone can understand why
Actually, that's because there was a point several years back when some Chinese manufacturers adulterated foods with melamine to raise protein measurements by nitrogen decomposition. It was a huge problem, and the Chinese government quickly cracked down on it when it became known. Two executives from the main offending producer were actually executed for this.
China has been refactoring itself for a couple decades. The Chinese government isn't as experienced with regulation as the EU and the US; they are, however, highly intolerant of things which tarnish the international image of China--a problem which, as you can imagine, they are quite sensitive to since it just won't go away.
Cheap goods that are less durable and less capable of being repaired only tacks on to the externalized costs
We know that. The problem is American companies demand lower cost, and press down on the quality. That lets them get low, low prices. The Chinese are capable of--and frequently do--producing some of the highest-quality manufactured goods on the planet at surprisingly low costs; practically nobody wants that. All of their clients want them to produce it cheaper. Even mid-range producers want that mid-range cheaper than the same quality coming out of Germany or America.
That chinese peasants are finally choking to death on smog and they are having to deal with it now rather than a decade later, is no argument for having such unfair and unconscionable trade practices from the onset.
With natural growth, it wouldn't be that they would do what they're doing today later; it's that they'd be pumping out old-tech, dirty-coal and dirty-oil emissions longer, unable to sustain their economy if they go expending their resources on smokestack emissions scrubbers which produce nothing of value. They can't sell clean air; it's an immediate cost. Clean air only buys you long-term stability: your healthcare and environmental resources don't fall apart and create extreme costs sometime down the road. When poor, developing nations just shrug and let that be a problem for later.
China has been forcing new environmental controls and getting this stuff retrofitted, catching up to countries like the United States. That's been going on for a few short years now. Imagine if they were rolling coal and talking about maybe getting some environmental controls in 2080, instead of working on becoming the world leader in solar energy and electric cars (China's behavior suggests they want to go in this direction, which is self-reinforcing: cleaner air means better solar generation).
Because China is such a global manufacturing superpower, they have the economic basis to do all of this stuff now, instead of generations down the line.
Some people are still sensitive about this thing called the "rule of law." You know, where laws are made and people are expected to follow them?
Congress has no enforcement power over immigration; it has authority over that, but isn't the executive.
Congress has authorized the executive limited enforcement powers over immigration. This authorization does not prohibit enforcement in certain situations; it also does not require the executive to carry out enforcement in any specific time frame.
That means there isn't a law saying the executive must remove illegal immigrant ASAP; there is a law authorizing the executive to remove illegal immigrants. There's actually a law authorizing the President to deport hostile and dangerous immigrants, and laws restricting legal immigrant residency.
It's interesting, because the Attorney General has the authorization and duty(!) to protect the borders by many means (prevent illegal entry), particularly if he believes a mass influx is imminent; little is actually said about removal. What's actually hilarious, though, is that an illegal alien who has been deported and shows up illegally again can be... fined or imprisoned. Yes, that's right: fined or imprisoned, if they were thrown out and came back.
We have a giant chapter in title 8 about preventing, managing, and enforcing immigration, and it's filled with three things: border protection authority; matters of issuing authorization for immigrants; and fines and imprisonment mainly for people who transport, harbor, or employ unauthorized immigrants. There's a line somewhere else in the code that says the President can have them thrown out of the country if he wants.
We have a method to easily change law in this country. It's called a "ballot box."
You need a representative who will change the law accordingly, though; and you need a majority of representatives (not just Americans) who will go along with it. It's the "will" part that's hard.
The "will" part has been going on for DACA since GW Bush. Congress never got around to it, and the President had largely let ICE be somewhat lax (by way of focusing on border control); then Obama gave instruction to essentially implement the DREAM Act on which Congress couldn't agree on the fiddly bits, and everybody forgot about it for a while. Civil disobedience is actually sometimes part of the legislative process, although that's not exactly the case this time--that's more a thing with sanctuary cities.
Speaking of sanctuary cities, I intend to push legislation allowing local sanctuary governments to keep their immigrants if they properly detain them (same as anyone else: if you routinely let rowdy kids back out after they cool off, fine; but don't dump immigrants on the street just for being immigrants) and they house them in the new form of restorative prisons designed to humanely rehabilitate prisoners.
This will help push criminal justice reform, as well as improve relationships between ICE, Homeland Security, and these local governments. I expect they will prefer to house "suspected terrorists" under investigation themselves when detained (because of a fear of human rights violations by DHS), and that's okay, as long as they keep them detained; and with this new type of prison, they should end up deradicalizing them if they're more at-risk than actively radicalized.
My constituency happens to support sanctuary cities and DACA--well, most of them. The concerns of the detractors are valid, of course; these proposals address that, albeit not to their liking. It will have the secondary effect of cutting back crime in our state (and America as a whole), however, which is immense--and everybody agrees on that one. I look forward to this election so I can actually stand up and drive the change America needs, instead of sitting on the sidelines talking about it as our current representative.
While I cannot stand Trump in general, he is sometimes right about trade and visa workers.
I computed in 2016 that, if we manufactured pants in America and bought zero from China, we would see a net loss of 58,000 American jobs, and would work 3x as long to buy a pair of pants. Of course, it's qualitative, and only shows that trade is not a simple matter: I was using the 2008 $3.20/hr Chinese payroll cost versus a $26/hr American payroll cost, and the Chinese today are paid more than $3/hr while the American factory worker generally averages $71/hr in wages, benefits, and payroll taxes.
Based on the two payroll costs, the change in domestic jobs can be positive, zero, or negative. The zero point isn't wage parity, either; you get parity with somewhat-lower foreign payroll costs. In any case where the domestic payroll cost is higher, however, you get poverty: the thing being made domestically costs more domestic working-hours at any given wage level. The proportion is the same across all wage levels (e.g. a minimum-wage worker works 3 hours instead of 1, while a median-wage worker works 1 hour instead of 1/3), but varies with the difference in payrolls between countries.
It costs 6.5 cents to get a pair of pants here from China. Domestic shipping (the trucking from the port to the retail store--and all the movements between) is roughly half the retail price.
we will now pay in the form of only being able to afford cheap imports.
It's not so much that as we would have always paid more for more-expensive things. A made-in-America set of pants costs about 3 hours of minimum-wage pay to purchase, based on adjusting the same labor-hours investment from 2006 Chinese wages and social insurances to 2006 American minimum wages and social insurances, versus 1.86 minimum-wage labor hours to buy the Chinese-made pants. That's not even a full analysis: the Chinese are not only more-skilled at manufacturing, but they're extremely skilled at scaling quality requirements downward: a decent pair of pants has less of an American-made premium than a Wal-Mart pair of pants, because Americans can't efficiently reduce to Wal-Mart quality.
If you want to manufacture efficiently for a given lifecycle, durability, or other metric, the Chinese can tune that perfectly, sacrificing the least to save the most. American manufacturers struggle to find corners to cut in an attempt to save small costs.
It's not that we can now only afford cheap imports; it's that we can now afford things we couldn't buy before--like Netflix, high-speed Internet, and better medical care--and we became capable of affording those not by cutting our manufacturing cost by 5%, but by cutting 40% off by having someone even better at it do it for us. Comparative advantage.
As noted: China has been stepping up its wages and labor laws as its access to technology grows, and is now making major inroads in environmental policies and reform. Without the vast wealth of being the global power in manufacturing, China would have sat at an economic level at which environmental and labor reforms were its lesser concerns for decades longer, while being quite huge a population to be pumping out unfiltered coal smoke.
I'm not a fan of Hillary because she doesn't take personal responsibility.
I don't like Bill's TANF program. Besides general administrative flaws, it's a program built to end welfare by putting people to work. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and welfare. We need our burger flippers, our grocery baggers, and the tens of millions of other low-paid, low-skilled workers--and we'll still need them after the dust settles from the upcoming new technology wave we're naming "automation". They're going to be poor, struggling, and otherwise facing economic difficulty; and minimum wage won't fix that. We need stronger policies to carry people.
Even that ignores the economic reality of unemployment due to demand-side markets.
Welfare, in part, protects people from these problems. It helps people who are just in a situation where yes, you're going to be poorer. It changes the situation so that no, you're not going to be deep in the bowels of poverty; you're going to be okay, you're going to get by easy enough, but that guy who got a slightly-nicer job and is "middle class" by the barest definition has way more luxury than you.
Systems I want to build help to produce both welfare and equity, making it easier to move up into the middle-class while also creating that strong basis of support. That's the point. Mine also reduce taxes, which is... interesting... okay I'm a giant fiscal nerd.
Beyond all that, however, I'm generally more of a Bill Clinton or Tony Blair type--even on these very issues--yet more-progressive than the OurRevolution and Fight For $15 folks. I'm operating on a different political dimension here--or at least with future tech. Who is fighting for a growth-based minimum wage or a universal dividend today? Hell, who is trying to rewrite 29 USC 164(b) to prohibit right-to-work laws? Someone finally decided to suggest that last one (I'm late to the party), but the rest is more keeping the poor as poor as ever, avoiding strong welfare, and complaining about the economy.
GP is something, but not a moron. It was a snide remark, maybe in jest, maybe to try to discredit OP's sarcastic remark by suggesting solar can't power some places and so we need to bring in the coal and oil.
The obvious answer is high-voltage DC transmission lines. HVDC can transmit nearly a thousand kilometers with under 3% loss, whereas AC overhead lines transmit so far with over 10% loss. The US is 2.5 times that in height, and we can potentially get solar power into Alaska from areas just south of Calgary with that kind of ratio. We can get it to Canada and Alaska with maybe 10% loss--the same as classical AC lines.
That assumes an optimal economic of transmitting the power at 10% loss. Much of Canada has 15% to 20% lower solar generation potential, so might be better off buying transmitted power.
At the same time, solar panels are cheap: it's reasonable (not most-efficient) for Canada to generate its own solar power by building panels over wide open parking lots, where trees and buildings don't shade at least 70% of the lot. That scale of installation is large enough to be near as efficient as utility-scale, and is on ground so is easier to manage than rooftop solar (if your roof has a problem, you have a MASSIVE labor cost). It's even feasible for a third-party utility to manage your parking lot solar roof. Convenient, directly-generated 600VDC power can drive a Stage 3 DC fast charger, or convert to on-site AC to power electric vehicles, reducing grid load and loss.
This all ignores any sort of wind or geothermal power. Wind must be away from urban areas, so the same HVDC argument applies; wind is also less-predictable than solar, but we'll need advance adiabatic compressed air energy storage to really take advantage of mostly-solar energy, so the infrastructure requirements are the same. Geothermal depends heavily on location and may have unexpected consequences, such as being most-efficient if sunk into the ground or water... right up until people realize the localized change in ground and water temperature is destroying the environment.
There are a lot of viable all-solar approaches here, as well as mixed-clean-air approaches.
I mean, I'm feeling a little shrinkage here. I'm running for Congress to do a lot of things, one being to end identity theft. Identity theft cost Americans $16 billion in 2017, down from $24.7 billion in 2012. We can fix this easily; it's actually trivial.
All electronic theft is not the same thing.
... I can't fix this. I can fix one particular type of theft because it happens to be easy to fix. I can't end ransomware or bank arbitrage scams where someone asks you to wire them $6,000 and you legitimately send them $6,000.
I can guarantee an end to less than ten percent of all this.
The thought of filibustering a budget just to protect illegal migrants would be so insane it would never happen.
Yeah, it's kind of an artifact of the evolution of morality. Basically, people have become more-sensitive to moral issues such as breaking up families and uprooting lives, or sending people off to a place in which they'll likely face poverty, destitution, suffering, and death. Because most unauthorized immigrants are generally-harmless, well-integrated into our economy, and at extreme risk of humanitarian crisis if deported, people who have evolved higher morals tend to demand humane approaches to the situation instead of adherence to traditional values and nationalist xenophobia.
It's basically the same thing as accepting gay marriage, or rejecting arranged (forced) marriage as a valid social construct.
What you're talking about is "fair trade". It has its benefits and it has its detractors. Being me, I'm quick to point out the flaws in a system, and suggest improvement rather than abandonment.
Fair trade basically says the workers must be paid so much for their work, and the cost of a product must be so high. Coffee is often used as an example of why fair trade should be dumped for free trade: coffee growers mix shit-quality beans into decent beans because buyers are legally-required to pay a minimum rate, so there's no arbitration by selling high-quality beans and low-quality beans (the minimum rate is higher than the normal high-quality rate). I think we can do something to create the incentive of separation; I don't know what, but I'm willing to work on that problem before deciding.
I prefer free trade, and I see fair trade as a way to bridge. It's okay to protect your workers from a market collapse by sudden shifts in trade: lose those jobs slowly so people get carried by welfare, shifted around to jobs that use their skill, and obsoleted as folks retire and new workers decide to do anything else but that obsolete job. It's also okay to not profit quite as much from a poor but effective producer of a good so that you can help build a strong economy on their end. We should work toward removing the potential difference in the system so as to avoid risks of sudden shifts and economic shock.
Most fair-trade advocates--even unions--avoid suggesting fair trade as a way to blockade progress, because they don't believe in protectionism, and because they'd need to differentiate from protectionism anyway when making the fair trade argument. The above is kind of a wordy explanation of the natural conclusion of such a stance.
Yes, but is local production necessarily a good thing? American consumers have limited dollars, and the employment market adjusts to job availability--just graph the absolute labor force from 2000 to 2017 and look at what happened around 2008's huge unemployment spike.
There's a well-debated theory of population growth called Mathusian Theory. Simply put: population grows in abundance, and shrinks in scarcity. Modern economists don't know what to do with this, because it seems about right, but they've never been able to pin down what exactly we're talking about being "abundant" or "scarce".
As a corollary, I've suggested with the above data that the labor force exhibits this behavior based on perception of job scarcity and the need for jobs. The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of the means to survive. It's not "food", "housing", or anything else; it's whether your economy is currently able to carry people. The labor force responds in ways Malthus would find reasonable.
So what?
More-expensive solar panels means people work, get paid, and spend their money on more-expensive electricity and other infrastructure. It doesn't necessarily mean more jobs, and could even mean fewer jobs.
Less-expensive solar panels means we can pick something else we're better at and do that. Maybe we can sell it as export (although too much export is a threat to national security; it does bring wealth). Maybe we can just enjoy a thing we would otherwise be unable to afford (thus for which we wouldn't create the demand, thus jobs). These are real, likely outcomes.
Finally, China's wages, social insurances, and labor laws have been rapidly improving, in part to their dominance in global manufacture. We've been feeding them the economic power to improve their infrastructure and their technology, thus leverage labor better. They can pay labor better, provide better social services, and still come out cheaper. Trade benefits both parties--especially when one party can't afford the GDP-breaking cost of the machines and infrastructure necessary to build their economy up (see: some, but not all, nations in Africa).
Your walls of text are getting longer and longer, and harder and harder to follow
Yeah, I'm a politician; we talk a lot. Sorry. I would be much more effective if I learned the fine art of brevity.
The profit difference between a robot and a human worker does not typically get reinvested into human workers
Cost difference. A "robot" is the same thing as a wooden shipping pallet, and yes falling costs lead to falling prices in a competitive market.
A tax doesn't protect the working class, but it does slow down that shift to automation to allow the market to catch up, which is what the tax is intended to do.
This assertion requires my assertion that the costs lead to lower prices to be true, otherwise there's nothing to which the market is to "catch up". My point is levying a tax eliminates the cost difference, thus preventing a market catch-up.
Now if you're suggesting levying a tax to slow the market when it moves too fast, and diminish that tax as the market catches up, that makes sense. Stronger consumer buying accelerates the pace of recovery by increasing the potential profits by competing (i.e. lowering your prices to undercut your competitors pays bigger gains when there are more sales in play); and getting out of the way of the market so that the early adopters get in early and the stuff is expensive and immature in its early roll-out naturally slows down deployment. If you fail both of those things, you can artificially create the second progression by levying, then slowly reducing and removing, a tax to slow growth of the new market. If that's what you're suggesting, then yes.
A lot of people have suggested a permanent tax on automation of 100% the difference between an employee and a machine. That's just making the technical unemployment permanent. wherever you actually collect the tax.
$29k becomes $29k take home? The first two digits of my take home has never been the same as the first two digits of gross.
Yeah. I restructured the entire tax system.
have never paid $6.5k, much less $7.5k in taxes in any year, so where would that $6.5k to $7.5k dividend come from? What am I going to be paying in taxes on each pay stub to get that kind of "refund"?
Welp so much for brevity.
A non-refundable tax credit stops at your liability: if you owe $3,000 and get a $5,000 credit, the Government gives you $3,000; you lose the other $2,000.
A refundable credit, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, pays you beyond your liability: if you owe $3,000 and hit max EITC (about $6,250), the government sends you a $3,250 check (or $6,250, returning what you've paid plus the remainder of the credit) in February.
The Universal Dividend is structured as a Social Security benefit with a twice-monthly payment and its own FICA on all income. It pays on, say, the 1st and 15th of every month. In 2016, that would have been about $313 per payment. It's sort of like a tax refund, and sort of like a plain economic stimulus; if you're very poor, it's sort of like an aid package (welfare). That's why I say "tax burden" a lot instead of "taxes": you should end up ahead week-to-week, but you'll still pay more taxes--we just hand them right back, immediately, or as close to immediately as feasible.
At $29k, a single filer pays $4,750 in 2016. With the Dividend the way I modeled it (which could use some adjustment), you end up paying about $2,750 more, and receiving $7,500 in roughly the same frequency as your paychecks. $7,500 - $2,750 = $4,750. You should see $313 coming out of each paycheck, and $313 coming from Social Security no more than 7 days later (if you happen to get paid on the 8th of that month, for example).
It's done that way to tie the whole thing to income and, thus, ensure it trends with productivity gain
but the mention of having observed something previously unrecognized by others despite your effort, and yet when you join the answer just pops out.
You mean like trivially ending poverty, guaranteeing Social Security's solvency, causing taxes to go down over time, putting a permanent end to the phenomena of poor inner cities and collapsed rural towns, preventing and rapidly-recovering recession, and working out how to bring the payroll tax down, all in one relatively-simple move with low risks and good risk controls, without raising taxes in the first place, and creating enough of a reduction in tax burden to fund healthcare-for-all more than twice, due to an unusual approach to reorganizing the Federal tax and spending strategy and a couple hours one weekend with a spreadsheet?
That's not being smart; it's a lucky guess, followed by obsession.
A tax wouldn't reduce an employee's earnings ratio. A tax would weaken the employer's position at the bargaining table. The employer can't simply say, take less or I will replace you with a machine, which would reduce the economic hit.
Nope. Unless you intend to effectively ban the machines by making them more-expensive--and thus halt progress at the cost of, you know, human lives--they'll eventually displace people. Once that's done, replacing the human with a machine will hold the cost of goods high, reducing the amount of goods humans can buy with their money.
Machines are made and operated by humans. Machine operation translates to human jobs--just fewer jobs than just human labor. If you replace human labor with machine operation and also make the machine cost closer to the job cost by a tax, you replace human workers with... a tax. You destroy jobs.
You claim that a Universal Dividend would reduce taxes across the board. To be reasonable in size to be effective, it would have to eliminate taxes for all but the upper classes, the top 3%. $10k to $15k annually. Otherwise it is a welfare system which is given to those who earn less than the dividend.
Not really. In 2016 model at 14% Dividend, it's a 1.9% tax cut on the 39.6% tax bracket, and it pays $7,500/year to each adult. In a one-adult houselhold, a $29,000 income translates to $29,015 take-home after Federal taxes. In a two-adult household, a $58,000 income translates to $58,031 take-home.
Then comes the question of how to pay for this "Universal Dividend". To pay for it you would have to institute a "Universal Dividend" tax to redistribute the GDP evenly.
The model restructures retirement and disability benefits and (under)accounts for a reduction in poverty impacting TANF, SNAP, and HUD. Those costs are taken entirely out of the Federal tax brackets (by merging the 12.4% FICA into them, then cutting off 40.2%), and a 14% Dividend tax is levied as a FICA tax (ignores deductions). That includes cutting and re-taxing corporate income tax (35%). Retirement and disability benefits pay the difference between this new benefit (which starts at age 18) and the total retirement or disability benefit (which start at retirement or when eligible for disability).
Raising people out of or nearly out of poverty lets our welfare systems go farther on the same money. Because literally half of the households eligible for HUD assistance would be pushed above the income limits for a 2-adult, 3-child household, and the rest would be closer such that they'd get half or less a subsidy, HUD should cost about 27% as much to run and reach every eligible household; however, I accounted for it costing 75% as much because I'm like that.
The same can be said of other services, although I've only considered SNAP and TANF.
Now I suppose what you could do is tack on a capitalist system on top of a socialist one.
A socialist system is one where the government owns the means to production. If the government taxes, regulates, and pays a benefit for private healthcare (e.g. medicaid, medicare), you have what's essentially a capitalist (or mixed-capitalist) system. To have a socialist system, the government needs to own and operate the healthcare system (hospitals, doctors, etc.).
A tax-and-redistribute cash system like a Dividend aims to drive market demand and enable capitalism. For example: with stable incomes, people become profitable to landlords, thus housing becomes available.
then tax the payout to give the government its cut
Production is done and paid $100,000. $100,000 represents that useful, productive work.
That $100,000 is taxed. That collects a portion of the wealth of the nation--its productive output. 14% of that ($14,000) is taken as the "Dividend".
The Dividend is then paid out. Note that no productive
For, one, I'm not convinced America as a whole is wealthier and better off
GDP-per-capita goes up. How it's distributed is another matter. We are definitely making more per person (and per labor-hour) each year. More per person is interesting: it's affected by raw GDP, so high unemployment or a falling labor participation rate can cut back your GDP-per-capita even as productivity rises. GDP-per-capita is considered equivalent to income-per-capita.
America may be better off than it was during the recession, but that doesn't mean it is better off than it was before the last bubble and recession.
$48,401 per capita, 2008. $47,001 per capita at low point, 2009. $57,466 last measurement, 2016. We nearly recovered to the peak of the bubble by the end of 2010, but not quite.
Yes, 2.8% loss in per-capita income and a 5% spike in unemployment caused that massive amount of damage.
a Universal Dividend doesn't slow down the advance of progress,
The Dividend speeds the response to progress by reducing the damage done to individuals and local economies in the path of progress--those whose employment is taken from them in trade for greater efficiency.
nor does it guarantee the long term value or sustainability of that dividend
It actually grows with GDP-per-capita, so is guaranteed to grow long-term faster than cost of living.
Thus a Universal Dividend is what, a welfare state transitioning to a socialist state?
A new financial maneuver to strengthen a capitalist society against disruption, ultimately reducing poverty directly and thus lowering the cost of anti-poverty systems. The immediate impact is a reduction of taxes and tax burdens across the board; that impact increases over time, without raising taxes at any point, thus providing sustained economic equity (not equality).
Perhaps a tax on automation would be better.
A tax on automation increases the cost of production, thus preventing prices from falling (they can't fall below cost). That means the ratio of an individual's wages earned from employment to the cost of goods produced by employment-displacing technology decreases, reducing the final capacity for the market to recover. This guarantees sustained high unemployment.
In other words: an automation tax would make recessions come on faster, cause more unemployment, and linger longer, with increases in unemployment made permanent.
A capitalist economy requires work for human labor which has a return on investment.
Well I figured out how to solve poverty one boring weekend, but I guarantee you the drunk redneck the next slum over would have a hell of an easier time figuring out wtf this check engine light is doing on my car, and how to make it stop.
People generally have the same facilities; they just put them to different uses. I make a habit of using subject matter experts around me, instead of just trying to be the ultimate genius. Polymath knowledge is necessarily shallow.
MintSim, on T-Mobile's network. It's currently an upfront $180/month plus 3% taxes and regulatory fees, so about $5.4 of fees for the year. T-Mobile and Ting were charging me like $7-$11 each month for taxes and fees! I'm down from as $828/year bill with 2G of LTE.
They have a 3 month promotion for $45 to lure in new customers. It's $300/year for 10GB of LTE data per month, but who needs it?
The concern is that automation is unregulated, and thus advancing more rapidly than the human workforce can adapt.
Right: the important factor is time. My Universal Dividend is designed to, among other things, strengthen the consumer base when faced with increased transient unemployment growth rates, such that you get a push back and slow that growth in unemployment. It also magnifies the recovery effect by distributing part of the new productivity to the consumer base. Makes it easier to handle rapid cycles of technical progress.
It has a stronger localized effect than nationalized. Think about displaced industry: Baltimore lost its industry 60 years ago, and is still a collapsed industry city; the new types of growth appeared elsewhere, and America as a whole is wealthier and better-off. If the Universal Dividend had taken effect in January, 2016, then by March we would have seen Baltimore recovering, and by the end of 2017 it would have been a booming local economy. That contributes to the national economy; it doesn't represent the effect spanning America at all times.
So it seems we're both in agreement that automation isn't the technical end to jobs, but rather a threat of rapid progress leaving so many people behind before anyone can catch their balance that our economy collapses from extreme temporary unemployment. Is that right?
Generally, Google lets you log in and remember the machine logging in for 30 days before re-authenticating. TOTP uses a shared secret, so you already have the data on your device and can enter it in without them sending you anything.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a book cipher. Book ciphers use widely-available books or else are prone to discovery by the fact that people involved own an obscure book. The use of a widely-available book makes it easy to get a hold of the source material; however, it also means you have a small number of books from which to select, making computerized brute forcing feasible.
Periodicals are even worse: magazines have limited distribution area, and outside that area are specialty items. In applications requiring high-security encryption, you have a strong adversary who can collect such data and potentially identify that one or both actors receive certain periodicals. These go first into the list of scanned texts to use in cryptanalysis.
Algorithms to vary the data create visible skew, and the skew gets removed. Book ciphers tend to expose themselves by exploding data, so the anoalysis techniques to crack them are played first by the adversary.
I have an IT Security background and intend to end identity theft and get Internet voting going in a sane manner. I also disagree with the reauthorization of FISA 702 (I generally disagree with domestic surveillance, even though things like outside cameras are public space and not technically a privacy violation. We have a sense of autonomy and secrecy when we are alone, and don't need a sense of paranoia about cameras and microphones prying into our every movement).
Long term planning for the public interest, or anything other than the next quarterly report, is not their concern
Just tracing the problem back. People like to portray Chinese imports as Chinese brands, not as the result of American business engineering.
In theory, that is the job of elected representatives and appointed regulators to provide necessary oversight and forcibly drag the Job Creators kicking and screaming to where they give even the slightest shit about the welfare of the country
Testing, approval, import restrictions, quality standards, and the like. It's actually the job of the administration, once the elected officials let them do it: Congress passes laws authorizing things like the FDA, and the President orders them into existence and appoints oversight. The FDA and others are then responsible for using that granted authority to regulate the markets. When they don't... we make new laws to clarify what specifically they're supposed to achieve. It's kind of irritating, really: the administration is more-agile than Congress, and yet sometimes doesn't care to do its damned job.
And the Waltons and Bezos of the world are all better off for it.
Along with middle-class and minimum-wage workers who can buy more quality goods and live at a higher standard of living.
Instead of having used tariffs and access to our markets to incentivize democratic reform and environmental regulation early on, now we'll gladly sell them the tools they need to suppress and censor their population in a digital age.
They're becoming less-authoritarian and more democratic as they become a stronger economic superpower. It's one of those things that generally leads from one to the next, albeit we can influence the process.
This is the killer feature that will give Microsoft a foothold over its greatest competitor, Linus Torvalds.
Well, that and FISA Section 702.
$313 every paycheck (313 * 26) is about $8k, not $7,500.
How did you get "The Universal Dividend is structured as a Social Security benefit with a twice-monthly payment and its own FICA on all income. It pays on, say, the 1st and 15th of every month" to equate to $8k, when $313 * 24 = $7,512? (I'd seriously consider disbursing weekly, but that creates month-to-month variations where a month has 5 Fridays. Accounting sucks unless you use a 13-month year.)
So yeah, taxes will be cut. Along with whatever my $4,000 in taxes is actually paying for, like roads and schools.
Nope, it's revenue-neutral: the Federal government actually ends up with the same balance at the end of it all. The Dividend's funding source, in 2016, would have brought in and paid out $1.8 trillion, restructuring about $1.07 trillion. (I only have preliminary data for 2017.)
As I said: the basis of that includes restructuring Social Security's existing benefits (retirement, disability) to meet the same total benefit when paid in addition to the Dividend (a retiree getting $1,500 gets $1,500), rather than paying the Dividend in addition to those benefits (a retiree getting $1,500 instead gets $2,100). That restructure is revenue-neutral because Social Security is self-funded.
The payment in total is revenue-neutral because it's fed by an income tax from which it pays out: it's a new FICA benefit which is self-funded.
The whole mucking about with the tax system happens because I restructured FICA in its entirety. I rolled FICA into the general income tax, then rebuilt it out of there. I also reclaimed the EITC as a Social Security service (the Dividend is effectively an unearned income, and pays more than the maximum EITC), along with SSI (nobody's really poor enough to be eligible for SSI with the Dividend in place--it would have zero program participation). Those are just small dollars, though, around a hundred billion and some change.
In the end, that means all receiving non-income-determinant benefits (retirement, disability) are receiving the same or more benefits than they started; those receiving income-determinant benefits (EITC, HUD, SNAP, SSI, etc.) have an increase in income, and thus a decrease in eligibility, so receive less from those systems. Nothing gets cut, although some welfare gets less participation.
$7,500 is a crappy dividend. Welfare is about $12,000 per year.
It's more like $9,000, until you start counting things like Pell grants and healthcare; and that's at the absolute maximum. There might be a few thousand families in the entire country receiving that--and likely not much more than 10,000, if that many.
The Dividend doesn't actually cut welfare. It simply pays out. Food stamps, HUD, and TANF don't pay you all-or-nothing, but rather scale with your distance from the poverty guideline. If you're closer, they pay less. More income puts you closer--or over, in which case they pay you nothing.
In other words: making people less-poor in any way (by jobs or by handing them a cash benefit) reduces the dollar amount of legally-claimable welfare.
The 2017 preliminary analysis looks like $324/month or $7,790/year, by the way. From 2013 out, that's $6,839, $7,138, $7,361, $7,517, and $7,790. It's $7,537 in 2017 if we begin paying the Dividend at age 16 (my eventual target)--I won't have a more-accurate number for that for a while yet, though, so I may be $5 or $10 off.
I wouldn't actually be recieving a $7,500 dividend, I would be recieving a $4,000 or 100% tax cut.
Right. That's why I said it's the other side of the funding structure: the point wasn't to make everyone $7,500 richer than they are today, and the scaling by inc
That does explain why pet food made in China keeps killing dogs and cats and noone can understand why
Actually, that's because there was a point several years back when some Chinese manufacturers adulterated foods with melamine to raise protein measurements by nitrogen decomposition. It was a huge problem, and the Chinese government quickly cracked down on it when it became known. Two executives from the main offending producer were actually executed for this.
China has been refactoring itself for a couple decades. The Chinese government isn't as experienced with regulation as the EU and the US; they are, however, highly intolerant of things which tarnish the international image of China--a problem which, as you can imagine, they are quite sensitive to since it just won't go away.
Cheap goods that are less durable and less capable of being repaired only tacks on to the externalized costs
We know that. The problem is American companies demand lower cost, and press down on the quality. That lets them get low, low prices. The Chinese are capable of--and frequently do--producing some of the highest-quality manufactured goods on the planet at surprisingly low costs; practically nobody wants that. All of their clients want them to produce it cheaper. Even mid-range producers want that mid-range cheaper than the same quality coming out of Germany or America.
That chinese peasants are finally choking to death on smog and they are having to deal with it now rather than a decade later, is no argument for having such unfair and unconscionable trade practices from the onset.
With natural growth, it wouldn't be that they would do what they're doing today later; it's that they'd be pumping out old-tech, dirty-coal and dirty-oil emissions longer, unable to sustain their economy if they go expending their resources on smokestack emissions scrubbers which produce nothing of value. They can't sell clean air; it's an immediate cost. Clean air only buys you long-term stability: your healthcare and environmental resources don't fall apart and create extreme costs sometime down the road. When poor, developing nations just shrug and let that be a problem for later.
China has been forcing new environmental controls and getting this stuff retrofitted, catching up to countries like the United States. That's been going on for a few short years now. Imagine if they were rolling coal and talking about maybe getting some environmental controls in 2080, instead of working on becoming the world leader in solar energy and electric cars (China's behavior suggests they want to go in this direction, which is self-reinforcing: cleaner air means better solar generation).
Because China is such a global manufacturing superpower, they have the economic basis to do all of this stuff now, instead of generations down the line.
Some people are still sensitive about this thing called the "rule of law." You know, where laws are made and people are expected to follow them?
Congress has no enforcement power over immigration; it has authority over that, but isn't the executive.
Congress has authorized the executive limited enforcement powers over immigration. This authorization does not prohibit enforcement in certain situations; it also does not require the executive to carry out enforcement in any specific time frame.
That means there isn't a law saying the executive must remove illegal immigrant ASAP; there is a law authorizing the executive to remove illegal immigrants. There's actually a law authorizing the President to deport hostile and dangerous immigrants, and laws restricting legal immigrant residency.
It's interesting, because the Attorney General has the authorization and duty(!) to protect the borders by many means (prevent illegal entry), particularly if he believes a mass influx is imminent; little is actually said about removal. What's actually hilarious, though, is that an illegal alien who has been deported and shows up illegally again can be... fined or imprisoned. Yes, that's right: fined or imprisoned, if they were thrown out and came back.
We have a giant chapter in title 8 about preventing, managing, and enforcing immigration, and it's filled with three things: border protection authority; matters of issuing authorization for immigrants; and fines and imprisonment mainly for people who transport, harbor, or employ unauthorized immigrants. There's a line somewhere else in the code that says the President can have them thrown out of the country if he wants.
We have a method to easily change law in this country. It's called a "ballot box."
You need a representative who will change the law accordingly, though; and you need a majority of representatives (not just Americans) who will go along with it. It's the "will" part that's hard.
The "will" part has been going on for DACA since GW Bush. Congress never got around to it, and the President had largely let ICE be somewhat lax (by way of focusing on border control); then Obama gave instruction to essentially implement the DREAM Act on which Congress couldn't agree on the fiddly bits, and everybody forgot about it for a while. Civil disobedience is actually sometimes part of the legislative process, although that's not exactly the case this time--that's more a thing with sanctuary cities.
Speaking of sanctuary cities, I intend to push legislation allowing local sanctuary governments to keep their immigrants if they properly detain them (same as anyone else: if you routinely let rowdy kids back out after they cool off, fine; but don't dump immigrants on the street just for being immigrants) and they house them in the new form of restorative prisons designed to humanely rehabilitate prisoners.
This will help push criminal justice reform, as well as improve relationships between ICE, Homeland Security, and these local governments. I expect they will prefer to house "suspected terrorists" under investigation themselves when detained (because of a fear of human rights violations by DHS), and that's okay, as long as they keep them detained; and with this new type of prison, they should end up deradicalizing them if they're more at-risk than actively radicalized.
My constituency happens to support sanctuary cities and DACA--well, most of them. The concerns of the detractors are valid, of course; these proposals address that, albeit not to their liking. It will have the secondary effect of cutting back crime in our state (and America as a whole), however, which is immense--and everybody agrees on that one. I look forward to this election so I can actually stand up and drive the change America needs, instead of sitting on the sidelines talking about it as our current representative.
While I cannot stand Trump in general, he is sometimes right about trade and visa workers.
I computed in 2016 that, if we manufactured pants in America and bought zero from China, we would see a net loss of 58,000 American jobs, and would work 3x as long to buy a pair of pants. Of course, it's qualitative, and only shows that trade is not a simple matter: I was using the 2008 $3.20/hr Chinese payroll cost versus a $26/hr American payroll cost, and the Chinese today are paid more than $3/hr while the American factory worker generally averages $71/hr in wages, benefits, and payroll taxes.
Based on the two payroll costs, the change in domestic jobs can be positive, zero, or negative. The zero point isn't wage parity, either; you get parity with somewhat-lower foreign payroll costs. In any case where the domestic payroll cost is higher, however, you get poverty: the thing being made domestically costs more domestic working-hours at any given wage level. The proportion is the same across all wage levels (e.g. a minimum-wage worker works 3 hours instead of 1, while a median-wage worker works 1 hour instead of 1/3), but varies with the difference in payrolls between countries.
It costs 6.5 cents to get a pair of pants here from China. Domestic shipping (the trucking from the port to the retail store--and all the movements between) is roughly half the retail price.
we will now pay in the form of only being able to afford cheap imports.
It's not so much that as we would have always paid more for more-expensive things. A made-in-America set of pants costs about 3 hours of minimum-wage pay to purchase, based on adjusting the same labor-hours investment from 2006 Chinese wages and social insurances to 2006 American minimum wages and social insurances, versus 1.86 minimum-wage labor hours to buy the Chinese-made pants. That's not even a full analysis: the Chinese are not only more-skilled at manufacturing, but they're extremely skilled at scaling quality requirements downward: a decent pair of pants has less of an American-made premium than a Wal-Mart pair of pants, because Americans can't efficiently reduce to Wal-Mart quality.
If you want to manufacture efficiently for a given lifecycle, durability, or other metric, the Chinese can tune that perfectly, sacrificing the least to save the most. American manufacturers struggle to find corners to cut in an attempt to save small costs.
It's not that we can now only afford cheap imports; it's that we can now afford things we couldn't buy before--like Netflix, high-speed Internet, and better medical care--and we became capable of affording those not by cutting our manufacturing cost by 5%, but by cutting 40% off by having someone even better at it do it for us. Comparative advantage.
As noted: China has been stepping up its wages and labor laws as its access to technology grows, and is now making major inroads in environmental policies and reform. Without the vast wealth of being the global power in manufacturing, China would have sat at an economic level at which environmental and labor reforms were its lesser concerns for decades longer, while being quite huge a population to be pumping out unfiltered coal smoke.
I'm not a fan of Hillary because she doesn't take personal responsibility.
I don't like Bill's TANF program. Besides general administrative flaws, it's a program built to end welfare by putting people to work. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of economics and welfare. We need our burger flippers, our grocery baggers, and the tens of millions of other low-paid, low-skilled workers--and we'll still need them after the dust settles from the upcoming new technology wave we're naming "automation". They're going to be poor, struggling, and otherwise facing economic difficulty; and minimum wage won't fix that. We need stronger policies to carry people.
Even that ignores the economic reality of unemployment due to demand-side markets.
Welfare, in part, protects people from these problems. It helps people who are just in a situation where yes, you're going to be poorer. It changes the situation so that no, you're not going to be deep in the bowels of poverty; you're going to be okay, you're going to get by easy enough, but that guy who got a slightly-nicer job and is "middle class" by the barest definition has way more luxury than you.
Systems I want to build help to produce both welfare and equity, making it easier to move up into the middle-class while also creating that strong basis of support. That's the point. Mine also reduce taxes, which is ... interesting... okay I'm a giant fiscal nerd.
Beyond all that, however, I'm generally more of a Bill Clinton or Tony Blair type--even on these very issues--yet more-progressive than the OurRevolution and Fight For $15 folks. I'm operating on a different political dimension here--or at least with future tech. Who is fighting for a growth-based minimum wage or a universal dividend today? Hell, who is trying to rewrite 29 USC 164(b) to prohibit right-to-work laws? Someone finally decided to suggest that last one (I'm late to the party), but the rest is more keeping the poor as poor as ever, avoiding strong welfare, and complaining about the economy.
AC has little retort.
GP is something, but not a moron. It was a snide remark, maybe in jest, maybe to try to discredit OP's sarcastic remark by suggesting solar can't power some places and so we need to bring in the coal and oil.
The obvious answer is high-voltage DC transmission lines. HVDC can transmit nearly a thousand kilometers with under 3% loss, whereas AC overhead lines transmit so far with over 10% loss. The US is 2.5 times that in height, and we can potentially get solar power into Alaska from areas just south of Calgary with that kind of ratio. We can get it to Canada and Alaska with maybe 10% loss--the same as classical AC lines.
That assumes an optimal economic of transmitting the power at 10% loss. Much of Canada has 15% to 20% lower solar generation potential, so might be better off buying transmitted power.
At the same time, solar panels are cheap: it's reasonable (not most-efficient) for Canada to generate its own solar power by building panels over wide open parking lots, where trees and buildings don't shade at least 70% of the lot. That scale of installation is large enough to be near as efficient as utility-scale, and is on ground so is easier to manage than rooftop solar (if your roof has a problem, you have a MASSIVE labor cost). It's even feasible for a third-party utility to manage your parking lot solar roof. Convenient, directly-generated 600VDC power can drive a Stage 3 DC fast charger, or convert to on-site AC to power electric vehicles, reducing grid load and loss.
This all ignores any sort of wind or geothermal power. Wind must be away from urban areas, so the same HVDC argument applies; wind is also less-predictable than solar, but we'll need advance adiabatic compressed air energy storage to really take advantage of mostly-solar energy, so the infrastructure requirements are the same. Geothermal depends heavily on location and may have unexpected consequences, such as being most-efficient if sunk into the ground or water... right up until people realize the localized change in ground and water temperature is destroying the environment.
There are a lot of viable all-solar approaches here, as well as mixed-clean-air approaches.
I mean, I'm feeling a little shrinkage here. I'm running for Congress to do a lot of things, one being to end identity theft. Identity theft cost Americans $16 billion in 2017, down from $24.7 billion in 2012. We can fix this easily; it's actually trivial.
All electronic theft is not the same thing.
I can guarantee an end to less than ten percent of all this.
The thought of filibustering a budget just to protect illegal migrants would be so insane it would never happen.
Yeah, it's kind of an artifact of the evolution of morality. Basically, people have become more-sensitive to moral issues such as breaking up families and uprooting lives, or sending people off to a place in which they'll likely face poverty, destitution, suffering, and death. Because most unauthorized immigrants are generally-harmless, well-integrated into our economy, and at extreme risk of humanitarian crisis if deported, people who have evolved higher morals tend to demand humane approaches to the situation instead of adherence to traditional values and nationalist xenophobia.
It's basically the same thing as accepting gay marriage, or rejecting arranged (forced) marriage as a valid social construct.
What you're talking about is "fair trade". It has its benefits and it has its detractors. Being me, I'm quick to point out the flaws in a system, and suggest improvement rather than abandonment.
Fair trade basically says the workers must be paid so much for their work, and the cost of a product must be so high. Coffee is often used as an example of why fair trade should be dumped for free trade: coffee growers mix shit-quality beans into decent beans because buyers are legally-required to pay a minimum rate, so there's no arbitration by selling high-quality beans and low-quality beans (the minimum rate is higher than the normal high-quality rate). I think we can do something to create the incentive of separation; I don't know what, but I'm willing to work on that problem before deciding.
I prefer free trade, and I see fair trade as a way to bridge. It's okay to protect your workers from a market collapse by sudden shifts in trade: lose those jobs slowly so people get carried by welfare, shifted around to jobs that use their skill, and obsoleted as folks retire and new workers decide to do anything else but that obsolete job. It's also okay to not profit quite as much from a poor but effective producer of a good so that you can help build a strong economy on their end. We should work toward removing the potential difference in the system so as to avoid risks of sudden shifts and economic shock.
Most fair-trade advocates--even unions--avoid suggesting fair trade as a way to blockade progress, because they don't believe in protectionism, and because they'd need to differentiate from protectionism anyway when making the fair trade argument. The above is kind of a wordy explanation of the natural conclusion of such a stance.
Yes, but is local production necessarily a good thing? American consumers have limited dollars, and the employment market adjusts to job availability--just graph the absolute labor force from 2000 to 2017 and look at what happened around 2008's huge unemployment spike.
You can see a drop in H1-B approvals in 2009 and 2010, with some of that drop lingering in 2011. We also had students going to grad school to avoid the job market, and people retiring earlier (fewer late retirements). These are spot reductions in the labor force.
There's a well-debated theory of population growth called Mathusian Theory. Simply put: population grows in abundance, and shrinks in scarcity. Modern economists don't know what to do with this, because it seems about right, but they've never been able to pin down what exactly we're talking about being "abundant" or "scarce".
As a corollary, I've suggested with the above data that the labor force exhibits this behavior based on perception of job scarcity and the need for jobs. The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of the means to survive. It's not "food", "housing", or anything else; it's whether your economy is currently able to carry people. The labor force responds in ways Malthus would find reasonable.
So what?
More-expensive solar panels means people work, get paid, and spend their money on more-expensive electricity and other infrastructure. It doesn't necessarily mean more jobs, and could even mean fewer jobs.
Less-expensive solar panels means we can pick something else we're better at and do that. Maybe we can sell it as export (although too much export is a threat to national security; it does bring wealth). Maybe we can just enjoy a thing we would otherwise be unable to afford (thus for which we wouldn't create the demand, thus jobs). These are real, likely outcomes.
Finally, China's wages, social insurances, and labor laws have been rapidly improving, in part to their dominance in global manufacture. We've been feeding them the economic power to improve their infrastructure and their technology, thus leverage labor better. They can pay labor better, provide better social services, and still come out cheaper. Trade benefits both parties--especially when one party can't afford the GDP-breaking cost of the machines and infrastructure necessary to build their economy up (see: some, but not all, nations in Africa).
Your walls of text are getting longer and longer, and harder and harder to follow
Yeah, I'm a politician; we talk a lot. Sorry. I would be much more effective if I learned the fine art of brevity.
The profit difference between a robot and a human worker does not typically get reinvested into human workers
Cost difference. A "robot" is the same thing as a wooden shipping pallet, and yes falling costs lead to falling prices in a competitive market.
A tax doesn't protect the working class, but it does slow down that shift to automation to allow the market to catch up, which is what the tax is intended to do.
This assertion requires my assertion that the costs lead to lower prices to be true, otherwise there's nothing to which the market is to "catch up". My point is levying a tax eliminates the cost difference, thus preventing a market catch-up.
Now if you're suggesting levying a tax to slow the market when it moves too fast, and diminish that tax as the market catches up, that makes sense. Stronger consumer buying accelerates the pace of recovery by increasing the potential profits by competing (i.e. lowering your prices to undercut your competitors pays bigger gains when there are more sales in play); and getting out of the way of the market so that the early adopters get in early and the stuff is expensive and immature in its early roll-out naturally slows down deployment. If you fail both of those things, you can artificially create the second progression by levying, then slowly reducing and removing, a tax to slow growth of the new market. If that's what you're suggesting, then yes.
A lot of people have suggested a permanent tax on automation of 100% the difference between an employee and a machine. That's just making the technical unemployment permanent. wherever you actually collect the tax.
$29k becomes $29k take home? The first two digits of my take home has never been the same as the first two digits of gross.
Yeah. I restructured the entire tax system.
have never paid $6.5k, much less $7.5k in taxes in any year, so where would that $6.5k to $7.5k dividend come from? What am I going to be paying in taxes on each pay stub to get that kind of "refund"?
Welp so much for brevity.
A non-refundable tax credit stops at your liability: if you owe $3,000 and get a $5,000 credit, the Government gives you $3,000; you lose the other $2,000.
A refundable credit, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, pays you beyond your liability: if you owe $3,000 and hit max EITC (about $6,250), the government sends you a $3,250 check (or $6,250, returning what you've paid plus the remainder of the credit) in February.
The Universal Dividend is structured as a Social Security benefit with a twice-monthly payment and its own FICA on all income. It pays on, say, the 1st and 15th of every month. In 2016, that would have been about $313 per payment. It's sort of like a tax refund, and sort of like a plain economic stimulus; if you're very poor, it's sort of like an aid package (welfare). That's why I say "tax burden" a lot instead of "taxes": you should end up ahead week-to-week, but you'll still pay more taxes--we just hand them right back, immediately, or as close to immediately as feasible.
At $29k, a single filer pays $4,750 in 2016. With the Dividend the way I modeled it (which could use some adjustment), you end up paying about $2,750 more, and receiving $7,500 in roughly the same frequency as your paychecks. $7,500 - $2,750 = $4,750. You should see $313 coming out of each paycheck, and $313 coming from Social Security no more than 7 days later (if you happen to get paid on the 8th of that month, for example).
It's done that way to tie the whole thing to income and, thus, ensure it trends with productivity gain
but the mention of having observed something previously unrecognized by others despite your effort, and yet when you join the answer just pops out.
You mean like trivially ending poverty, guaranteeing Social Security's solvency, causing taxes to go down over time, putting a permanent end to the phenomena of poor inner cities and collapsed rural towns, preventing and rapidly-recovering recession, and working out how to bring the payroll tax down, all in one relatively-simple move with low risks and good risk controls, without raising taxes in the first place, and creating enough of a reduction in tax burden to fund healthcare-for-all more than twice, due to an unusual approach to reorganizing the Federal tax and spending strategy and a couple hours one weekend with a spreadsheet?
That's not being smart; it's a lucky guess, followed by obsession.
A tax wouldn't reduce an employee's earnings ratio. A tax would weaken the employer's position at the bargaining table. The employer can't simply say, take less or I will replace you with a machine, which would reduce the economic hit.
Nope. Unless you intend to effectively ban the machines by making them more-expensive--and thus halt progress at the cost of, you know, human lives--they'll eventually displace people. Once that's done, replacing the human with a machine will hold the cost of goods high, reducing the amount of goods humans can buy with their money.
Machines are made and operated by humans. Machine operation translates to human jobs--just fewer jobs than just human labor. If you replace human labor with machine operation and also make the machine cost closer to the job cost by a tax, you replace human workers with... a tax. You destroy jobs.
You claim that a Universal Dividend would reduce taxes across the board. To be reasonable in size to be effective, it would have to eliminate taxes for all but the upper classes, the top 3%. $10k to $15k annually. Otherwise it is a welfare system which is given to those who earn less than the dividend.
Not really. In 2016 model at 14% Dividend, it's a 1.9% tax cut on the 39.6% tax bracket, and it pays $7,500/year to each adult. In a one-adult houselhold, a $29,000 income translates to $29,015 take-home after Federal taxes. In a two-adult household, a $58,000 income translates to $58,031 take-home.
Then comes the question of how to pay for this "Universal Dividend". To pay for it you would have to institute a "Universal Dividend" tax to redistribute the GDP evenly.
The model restructures retirement and disability benefits and (under)accounts for a reduction in poverty impacting TANF, SNAP, and HUD. Those costs are taken entirely out of the Federal tax brackets (by merging the 12.4% FICA into them, then cutting off 40.2%), and a 14% Dividend tax is levied as a FICA tax (ignores deductions). That includes cutting and re-taxing corporate income tax (35%). Retirement and disability benefits pay the difference between this new benefit (which starts at age 18) and the total retirement or disability benefit (which start at retirement or when eligible for disability).
Raising people out of or nearly out of poverty lets our welfare systems go farther on the same money. Because literally half of the households eligible for HUD assistance would be pushed above the income limits for a 2-adult, 3-child household, and the rest would be closer such that they'd get half or less a subsidy, HUD should cost about 27% as much to run and reach every eligible household; however, I accounted for it costing 75% as much because I'm like that.
The same can be said of other services, although I've only considered SNAP and TANF.
Now I suppose what you could do is tack on a capitalist system on top of a socialist one.
A socialist system is one where the government owns the means to production. If the government taxes, regulates, and pays a benefit for private healthcare (e.g. medicaid, medicare), you have what's essentially a capitalist (or mixed-capitalist) system. To have a socialist system, the government needs to own and operate the healthcare system (hospitals, doctors, etc.).
A tax-and-redistribute cash system like a Dividend aims to drive market demand and enable capitalism. For example: with stable incomes, people become profitable to landlords, thus housing becomes available.
then tax the payout to give the government its cut
Production is done and paid $100,000. $100,000 represents that useful, productive work.
That $100,000 is taxed. That collects a portion of the wealth of the nation--its productive output. 14% of that ($14,000) is taken as the "Dividend".
The Dividend is then paid out. Note that no productive
The Pentaconn connector is basically five-pin stereo XLR for a five-foot run.
For, one, I'm not convinced America as a whole is wealthier and better off
GDP-per-capita goes up. How it's distributed is another matter. We are definitely making more per person (and per labor-hour) each year. More per person is interesting: it's affected by raw GDP, so high unemployment or a falling labor participation rate can cut back your GDP-per-capita even as productivity rises. GDP-per-capita is considered equivalent to income-per-capita.
America may be better off than it was during the recession, but that doesn't mean it is better off than it was before the last bubble and recession.
$48,401 per capita, 2008. $47,001 per capita at low point, 2009. $57,466 last measurement, 2016. We nearly recovered to the peak of the bubble by the end of 2010, but not quite.
Yes, 2.8% loss in per-capita income and a 5% spike in unemployment caused that massive amount of damage.
a Universal Dividend doesn't slow down the advance of progress,
The Dividend speeds the response to progress by reducing the damage done to individuals and local economies in the path of progress--those whose employment is taken from them in trade for greater efficiency.
nor does it guarantee the long term value or sustainability of that dividend
It actually grows with GDP-per-capita, so is guaranteed to grow long-term faster than cost of living.
Thus a Universal Dividend is what, a welfare state transitioning to a socialist state?
A new financial maneuver to strengthen a capitalist society against disruption, ultimately reducing poverty directly and thus lowering the cost of anti-poverty systems. The immediate impact is a reduction of taxes and tax burdens across the board; that impact increases over time, without raising taxes at any point, thus providing sustained economic equity (not equality).
Perhaps a tax on automation would be better.
A tax on automation increases the cost of production, thus preventing prices from falling (they can't fall below cost). That means the ratio of an individual's wages earned from employment to the cost of goods produced by employment-displacing technology decreases, reducing the final capacity for the market to recover. This guarantees sustained high unemployment.
In other words: an automation tax would make recessions come on faster, cause more unemployment, and linger longer, with increases in unemployment made permanent.
A capitalist economy requires work for human labor which has a return on investment.
Jobs are produced by consumer buying power.
Well I figured out how to solve poverty one boring weekend, but I guarantee you the drunk redneck the next slum over would have a hell of an easier time figuring out wtf this check engine light is doing on my car, and how to make it stop.
People generally have the same facilities; they just put them to different uses. I make a habit of using subject matter experts around me, instead of just trying to be the ultimate genius. Polymath knowledge is necessarily shallow.
Why would it telegraph? I'm just a politician, so I don't know much about these things.
MintSim, on T-Mobile's network. It's currently an upfront $180/month plus 3% taxes and regulatory fees, so about $5.4 of fees for the year. T-Mobile and Ting were charging me like $7-$11 each month for taxes and fees! I'm down from as $828/year bill with 2G of LTE.
They have a 3 month promotion for $45 to lure in new customers. It's $300/year for 10GB of LTE data per month, but who needs it?
The concern is that automation is unregulated, and thus advancing more rapidly than the human workforce can adapt.
Right: the important factor is time. My Universal Dividend is designed to, among other things, strengthen the consumer base when faced with increased transient unemployment growth rates, such that you get a push back and slow that growth in unemployment. It also magnifies the recovery effect by distributing part of the new productivity to the consumer base. Makes it easier to handle rapid cycles of technical progress.
It has a stronger localized effect than nationalized. Think about displaced industry: Baltimore lost its industry 60 years ago, and is still a collapsed industry city; the new types of growth appeared elsewhere, and America as a whole is wealthier and better-off. If the Universal Dividend had taken effect in January, 2016, then by March we would have seen Baltimore recovering, and by the end of 2017 it would have been a booming local economy. That contributes to the national economy; it doesn't represent the effect spanning America at all times.
So it seems we're both in agreement that automation isn't the technical end to jobs, but rather a threat of rapid progress leaving so many people behind before anyone can catch their balance that our economy collapses from extreme temporary unemployment. Is that right?
Generally, Google lets you log in and remember the machine logging in for 30 days before re-authenticating. TOTP uses a shared secret, so you already have the data on your device and can enter it in without them sending you anything.