I have 2FA on. I'm a Congressional Candidate with a technology background; if I got hacked for not taking basic security countermeasures, I'd drop out of the race.
Now imagine that you can't afford a $5 shirt because only one in one-hundred are employed to babysit a machine to manufacture the shirt.
Exactly! Now people can buy the things they want to buy, because they spend 1/3 as much on the things they need to buy!
Now imagine overall pay drops down to $5 along with the production costs
Actually, the production cost is the cost of labor. Machines are built with labor. Metals are mined with labor. Textiles are grown, refined, woven, dyed, all with labor. We use machines (and just smarter techniques--"technology") to reduce the labor.
Remember: tools don't get paid; humans do. Human work commodity is time.
There simply isn't enough work to keep money circulating to afford the goods being sold
Actually, with the cost going down, the same hours worked at wage means more produced, same paid. That means less time worked, same wage, lower cost per thing. If people can't afford the thing produced, then you can make a profit by making the same thing but selling it at a lower profit margin, filling the gap the next producer left. Really, in a big market with a commodity good (one where the market is basically everyone, instead of a few wealthy, because it's cheap enough to make a profit selling it to everyone), you have competitors who try to steal each others's customers and maximize profits by a race to the bottom in terms of price.
Imagine if one clothing producer figured out how to produce better clothing than every other producer in the world, but at 1/3 the cost. Do you think they'd keep prices the same, or drop them below the price of other producers until the volume of existing sales times the unit price drop per unit exceeded the volume of new sales times the new unit gross profit? Of course they'd drop prices until it was no longer profitable to do so.
Now imagine if the other producers got the same tech and brought their prices in line. That's a lot of gap. Without a price-fixing agreement, producers keep going lower; with a price-fixing agreement, a new producer enters the game and sells those $11.99 shirts for $4.50 because dorkuses keep doing that instead of reaping huge profits at $9; with the FTA, the price fixers get a boot in their ass, and somebody ceases to be a business as a warning to others. The FTA doesn't like hoping someone can get a $40 million loan to start up a cheap t-shirt factory on the theory that they can take over the whole global market and make billions.
A well-regulated free enterprise market works great because of this. An unregulated free market just gets you a megacorporation that owns everything, and then you have a bad time.
They also recognize that we're going to repeal the TCJA in 2021 when the new Democratic president replaces Trump. I've got a damned good idea of what I'd like to replace it with--and the tax program I designed can't be repealed, unless you want to see what France looked like in the early 1800s.
10% income tax for all citizens. (If you really want to wangle, then maybe make a second, higher, bracket for the 1%).
It'd be more like 30%. Direct income taxes are like 19%, then you have a bunch of other revenue.
No corporate income tax (because that's just an inefficient, indirect, individual tax). (There's some wangle room here for me, but you'd have to make your case)
It is a poor revenue source. I tag it with the Dividend tax because that's the only way to keep the benefit tied to productivity; eliminating the general fund part of the corporate income tax isn't unreasonable, but needs to happen in a fiscally- and socially-responsible manner.
Citizens making less than a certain amount (poor people) don't pay taxes. (Much more straight forward than government hand-outs)
You lose out on job-creating impacts. Likewise, there aren't enough jobs to carry all job-seekers, so you have people who are willing to work but can't. You also have things like people living in Baltimore City's poorer neighborhoods with two full-time jobs, pulling $54k, still unable to afford healthcare for their two kids, mortgage, food, car insurance, etc.
Obviously such a simplistic plan would fall apart once it hits reality. But isn't it sort of the right direction? Where am I going wrong here?
The same place the current system is going wrong: no automatic self-healing function. The Dividend is, in part, designed to repair localized and non-localized economic damage: poor families, collapsed industry cities, and recessions.
Baltimore is a good case study: the city was a major trade hub, had corporate headquarters for things like the Tide Detergent Company, and had major industry to build ships and planes and even just make steel and brick. Trade went away, many of those corporate HQs merged with Proctor and Gamble out of state, and the major industry flat out collapsed. A city that supported over a million jobs now can't handle a population of half a million, more than half of whom are children or secondary householders who don't have jobs.
Baltimore creates an enormous draw for housing assistance, food stamps, small business administration loans (another Federal function to drive economic growth by injecting tax-source money into poor economies), State and Federal aid, and so forth. Over a billion in Federal spending goes there, and it's not enough.
With the Dividend, the Federal taxes actually come down. At the same time, $2Bn extra get shoved into Baltimore in the year 2016 model (Maryland gets $30bn--over 8% of its GDP). Two-adult households get $15k if they're unemployed; at the $50k level it's $10k. That money isn't taxed as income, but registers as unearned income for computing welfare eligibility: HUD and SNAP spending are spread out, and even reduced. At the same time, these struggling households now have money to spend, and spend it on needs--and then on wants. Middle-class households get a boost, too, and spend that on additional luxury.
That spending creates a need for local trucking, retail, and other service and supporting jobs. Jobs mean these poor households can work and become less-poor; and their income, representing productive labor, is taxable, and feeds (thus increasing) the Dividend, the Federal revenue ledger, and the State and Local revenue ledgers. With more income from working, these households also spend more. It hits equilibrium eventually, probably around a 5% GDP boost, although I don't have sufficient data to calculate it out fully.
So the burned-out, collapsed industry city that has been unable to recover in over 50 years experiences a sudden renaissance. It recovers in a few months, and is booming in a year or three. Less-poor cities across America won't see such a dramatic effect: if they're at about the national average income-per-capita, they'll see only a relatively-smal
What you are saying is what once put $3,500 into the economy, now only puts $500 into the economy.
Imagine if your food arbitrarily cost 3x as much, a shirt cost $150 instead of $15, and no wages increased.
Technical progress does the opposite of that.
But this ignores the question I asked, which is what are we doing to increase paid labor. Not what are we doing to reduce paid labor to make products more affordable for the few still employed.
People will buy more when they can buy more with the money they have. That's how it's always been. Do you buy everything you want to buy now? How many people would pass up a pay raise doubling their income? Why would they want more money?
Actually, there's a workable alternative, but it's complex. You can actually get the tax burden to go down over time by structuring around a universal dividend. This takes a portion of all income, passes it out to all adults equally, and thus creates an equitable system. The dividend is structured in such a way as to reduce top-tier taxes as well.
Because the buying power of the individual benefit trends with GDP-per-capita, the poor become progressively less-poor over time, reducing their eligibility for welfare benefits. Think about it: at $27,000, a 2-adult, 3-child household in Baltimore passes the HUD income limit. In 2016, a 14% dividend (my target is 10%, but I have to start a bit higher and work down) would have paid $7,500/year per adult. At $23k income, the difference is about $12k: your household income is $35k (earned and unearned), and you get no HUD subsidy.
The first effect is that housing assistance (and SNAP, TANF, etc.) reaches further. HUD puts 75% of all eligible households on a waiting list. With everyone bumped up, the many no longer eligible have their benefits passed down; and those still eligible receive a smaller benefit, passing the difference down. HUD should actually end up with around half of its budget unspent, but I accounted for only reducing the cost by 1/4 initially. As the Dividend becomes stronger, it cuts into this further.
Middle-class tax rates go up based on how I built this; middle-class tax burdens go down because the Dividend pays out. Think about being given $7,500/year, paid $313 on the 1st and 15th of each month, and paying e.g. $5,000 more in taxes because you make a high middle-class salary. You're... ahead by $2,500, not by $7,500. Still ahead. That tax hike (the $5,000) is a big part of the funding source.
Because it grows with GDP-per-capita, the middle-class impact actually shrinks. Eventually, nobody earning under $100k is actually paying taxes. Eventually, the 39.6% top tax rate (I'm repealing the tax cuts and jobs act) falls to about 33%, too, when the dividend is only a 10% dividend. That takes a couple decades: I'm cutting it back less than growth, and stopping at 10%.
The other part of the funding source is Social Security. Instead of paying OASDI from the retirement and disability trust, I also restructured Social Security to pay the Dividend to everyone over age 18 (target is 16), and to pay the same total benefit in retirement and disability. That means if you're getting e.g. $700/year from the Dividend and you retire with Social Security paying you $1,500, your retirement payment is $800. $700 + $800 = $1,500. The Dividend grows faster than Social Security's benefits (it's faster than COLA), so it unloads the trusts, makes Social Security solvent (permanently), and causes the FICA tax (which is all payroll at this point) to come down over time.
That rebasing of FICA to the Dividend provides about a third of the funding stream. The rest is restructured from existing income taxes.
The initial impact is similar to more than half a trillion tax cut. Getting healthcare to all Americans with better affordable care plus a public option to cover those who can't get affordable care would cost $200 billion. You can actually do both and come out ahead.
Incidentally, getting HUD and SNAP to accomplish their missions directly would require several hundred billion PER YEAR of additional government spending. The tax rates would need to come way up. This approach causes the tax burden to come down instead, and creates jobs by more middle- and lower-class spending (about 8%-10% growth), further reducing the number of households in need of benefits and, thus, Federal spending. I want to see if I can achieve an outright trillion-dollar (2016 dollars) tax burden reduction. Note that the amount of dollars received in excess of your taxes are the burden: a middle-classer paying $12k in ta
How is it with a multi-hundred-billion-dollar deficit, people always look at something that costs $6Bn or even like $0.040Bn and say, "Hey, if we got rid of that, that $600Bn deficit would go away!"?
What do we need or want anymore that requires any amount of human labor anymore to drive an economy?
Well I'd like a larger house, an expensive electric motorcycle, this $3,500 stove, an electrical system upgrade that involves $2,000 of components, a greenhouse on my roof, more video games, higher end computer components, an $80,000 electric car, and lots of other really expensive stuff.
Those costs aren't 90% profit margins; there's labor in there--lots of it--and new technology cuts back the labor. That $3,500 stove becomes an exceedingly high-tech stove that requires way more labor, while the thing I'm looking at today only costs $500 thanks to new tech making it easy to manufacture with fewer human hours.
That's where it comes from: that rich-people bullshit only millionaires buy becomes stuff we can all afford.
It also made it much faster to load and unload a container.
That's what I just said.
To ship a truckload of cans, you had to pay for some 240 man-hours of work at each load/unload. Then the pallet came around, and you had to pay for only 20 man-hours of work. It became possible to staff 1 person to do the work of every 12.
When you make things happen faster, you eliminate the need for labor. Labor is just time.
IKEA changing mugs did not cause a global impact in the job force.
The wooden shipping pallet did.
Unfortunately, this will still not be enough to alleviate the pending impact of automation and AI driving the concept of human employment into extinction.
To put this into perspective: Statements about upcoming automation and machine learning eliminating work are scientifically similar to statements about nuclear waste causing humans to develop superpowers like flight and invincibility.
No, we're not moving into a future where jobs go away and never come back. We're going through exactly what we've gone through constantly and continuously through all of human history. This happened in 2000, in 1993, in 2014, in 1971, and every day between and all the way back to when the first human picked up a pointy stick. If we don't shorten the work week, in 20 years, we'll find ourselves sitting on a larger population with the same percentage of the work force working 40 hours per week and churning out things that would take enormous amounts of human labor (and high costs) today for cheap. The same is true 50 years, 100 years, and 500 years out.
Private enterprise is more-efficient when properly regulated, when transparent, and when there is a profit motive for being more-efficient.
Public utility is more-efficient when demand is roughly absolute, complexity is relatively-low, and information is readily-available.
Let's talk healthcare.
Around here, Medicare averages $49 for an office visit. Carefirst pays $32 (with blood draw), and as low as $29. Medicare can pay $65 at a practice where Carefirst pays $32, while Aetna pays $185. The price on the door says $200 or $300.
Why?
Private insurers negotiate prices down. They use their big groups to negotiate lower prices, and of course insurance groups (e.g. in a union contract, spread across many small and large businesses) use their big groups to lean on the insurers.
Private practices hire consultants to push the prices up. These consultants analyze the market and recommend door prices low enough to make them attractive, but high enough to extract the maximum payment from an insurer. When an HMO or PPO contract is up for renewal, consultants target that specific insurer and try to adjust prices to get the best remittance rates and not leave money on the table, while also looking reasonable in the market.
Medicare computes an estimated cost of service, then adjusts for the area's cost of living.
We have an entire industry built around pushing up that cost of service. We have an entire industry around pricing things so that those medicare computations--and everything else--come out high.
Let's have a Federal fund that provides insurance for those without access to affordable care--a public option, no premium, and you get ACA Bronze, Silver, etc. based on your income level. We'll pay providers based on their remittance rates with insurers, using the range at -2 standard deviations: 97.5% of insurers pay this provider more than this price. We're looking at the Carefirst range.
Next, we take each small region (city, neighborhood, etc.) and identify the Tier 1 providers--the ones who have the grouped low price of care. That's going to be practices which provide the service as their primary service; practices which also perform a service when necessary generally charge a lot more for that service.
Average those and you have your regional standard of fairness.
Publish that number.
Now when the insurers come to town, they'll look at the guy trying to get $185 for an office visit and complain that the regional fair market price appears to be $48. Carefirst is still pressing for $32. The Public Option only pays that office $34.
This shows government intervention in the market (published standards of fairness) and an efficient government healthcare service.
It's probably safer and more-effective to make the Internet a government utility than to make healthcare as such. Nevertheless, it may be more-efficient to stick with regulation. It might even be possible to have municipal broadband of the lowest tier, and let private ISPs provide high-end Internet services. I know I'd still be paying Comcast $87/mo for 200Mbit/s if Baltimore gave me 20Mbit/s free; they might find many others will bail out if it's over $60/mo.
In fact, I think I like that idea. Let me think on that.
I know who my contributors are; I just don't care. Then again, I'm also running for D-MD07 so.
Never let money get in the way of integrity. People will literally back you when you tell them what you're trying to do is going to harm them if they think you have integrity. I'm not sure why; I think it has something to do with folks not wanting to be the one against doing the right thing, even if it's personally inconvenient. You can't buy that.
Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs.
Where you might need 5 truckers to ship as many mugs as sold in a fortnight, now you can do it with 2 truckers. Never mind that the wooden pallet eliminated 90% of the labor (jobs) associated with shipping an amount of goods in the first place.
It still takes some labor to produce the pallets--lumbering, milling, assembling, and even shipping--and that's much less labor than what you eliminate from the shipping process.
The jobs aren't going away; things are getting cheaper, we can buy more, and we'll end up with the same number of jobs and more stuff. I favor recycling some of that new productivity into time by lowering the definition of full-time working hours, though.
I'm saying that "driving to pick a passenger up" is not "driving for Uber", but rather "driving to the location where you will begin driving for Uber". You're not yet performing a commerical service with your vehicle.
Some pizza places make drivers use their own vehicles. Imagine if your insurer claimed that the drive between your house and your job was work because, at some point in the future, you would begin using your car to transport commercial cargo. Lawyers would put a brick up your insurer's ass.
So until your customer sits his ass down in your vehicle and you're on a public road, you're just... driving. You're not carrying a commercial passenger, thus you're not doing anything proscribed by your insurer's contract.
This references studies on page 3-4, but many of the interesting studies are the University of Paderborn studies. Those are in German. A few of the referenced studies are in Italian, and... two are in Esperanto, what the hell? Who actually writes scientific papers in Esperanto?
Tricky. At the time, you're not being paid to drive when you're driving to pick up. You also aren't performing a commercial service yet (carrying a passenger). You could argue that you're driving to work, but not yet using the vehicle to perform a commercial service. By contract law, the contract is actually still voidable: if you don't show up and they haven't paid yet, nothing was exchanged, so no contract was actually initiated.
It's like if you're driving your personal vehicle to an autocross track and get struck. Your insurer can't claim you were "racing" because you weren't on the track yet.
Thing is it takes them longer to pick up English than both English and Esperanto. If you want to pick up Russian and English, it takes you longer to pick up those two together than English and Esperanto; and it takes longer to pick up Russian alone than it does to pick up Russian and Esperanto.
It's weird. It's like saying to get to fluency level 5 with Russian, you need to sink in 5 years; or, you can sink in 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of Russian and get to fluency level 5 in Russian. Getting to Fluency Level 5 in both Russian and English is going to be slower than getting to fluency level 5 in Russian, English, and Esperanto, because you don't get to accelerate the first non-Esperanto language.
Right now, NationBuilder forwards to their own domain for SSL. They're in the middle of finally getting SSL on all custom domains so we can move away from HTTP. So if you donate to my campaign, it will shove you to a different domain under https instead of http.
It's at least got a better claim of news for nerds than my attempted Congressional Candidacy announcement via slashdot--which went purple. OTOH I do have a solution for identity theft and the post was right after Equifax got hacked.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay under $15/month with unlimited voice and text, and 2G LTE+ data, with unlimited throttled data after that.
You can use a FIDO U2F device, too.
I have 2FA on. I'm a Congressional Candidate with a technology background; if I got hacked for not taking basic security countermeasures, I'd drop out of the race.
Now imagine that you can't afford a $5 shirt because only one in one-hundred are employed to babysit a machine to manufacture the shirt.
Exactly! Now people can buy the things they want to buy, because they spend 1/3 as much on the things they need to buy!
Now imagine overall pay drops down to $5 along with the production costs
Actually, the production cost is the cost of labor. Machines are built with labor. Metals are mined with labor. Textiles are grown, refined, woven, dyed, all with labor. We use machines (and just smarter techniques--"technology") to reduce the labor.
Remember: tools don't get paid; humans do. Human work commodity is time.
There simply isn't enough work to keep money circulating to afford the goods being sold
Actually, with the cost going down, the same hours worked at wage means more produced, same paid. That means less time worked, same wage, lower cost per thing. If people can't afford the thing produced, then you can make a profit by making the same thing but selling it at a lower profit margin, filling the gap the next producer left. Really, in a big market with a commodity good (one where the market is basically everyone, instead of a few wealthy, because it's cheap enough to make a profit selling it to everyone), you have competitors who try to steal each others's customers and maximize profits by a race to the bottom in terms of price.
Imagine if one clothing producer figured out how to produce better clothing than every other producer in the world, but at 1/3 the cost. Do you think they'd keep prices the same, or drop them below the price of other producers until the volume of existing sales times the unit price drop per unit exceeded the volume of new sales times the new unit gross profit? Of course they'd drop prices until it was no longer profitable to do so.
Now imagine if the other producers got the same tech and brought their prices in line. That's a lot of gap. Without a price-fixing agreement, producers keep going lower; with a price-fixing agreement, a new producer enters the game and sells those $11.99 shirts for $4.50 because dorkuses keep doing that instead of reaping huge profits at $9; with the FTA, the price fixers get a boot in their ass, and somebody ceases to be a business as a warning to others. The FTA doesn't like hoping someone can get a $40 million loan to start up a cheap t-shirt factory on the theory that they can take over the whole global market and make billions.
A well-regulated free enterprise market works great because of this. An unregulated free market just gets you a megacorporation that owns everything, and then you have a bad time.
They also recognize that we're going to repeal the TCJA in 2021 when the new Democratic president replaces Trump. I've got a damned good idea of what I'd like to replace it with--and the tax program I designed can't be repealed, unless you want to see what France looked like in the early 1800s.
10% income tax for all citizens. (If you really want to wangle, then maybe make a second, higher, bracket for the 1%).
It'd be more like 30%. Direct income taxes are like 19%, then you have a bunch of other revenue.
No corporate income tax (because that's just an inefficient, indirect, individual tax). (There's some wangle room here for me, but you'd have to make your case)
It is a poor revenue source. I tag it with the Dividend tax because that's the only way to keep the benefit tied to productivity; eliminating the general fund part of the corporate income tax isn't unreasonable, but needs to happen in a fiscally- and socially-responsible manner.
Citizens making less than a certain amount (poor people) don't pay taxes. (Much more straight forward than government hand-outs)
You lose out on job-creating impacts. Likewise, there aren't enough jobs to carry all job-seekers, so you have people who are willing to work but can't. You also have things like people living in Baltimore City's poorer neighborhoods with two full-time jobs, pulling $54k, still unable to afford healthcare for their two kids, mortgage, food, car insurance, etc.
Obviously such a simplistic plan would fall apart once it hits reality. But isn't it sort of the right direction? Where am I going wrong here?
The same place the current system is going wrong: no automatic self-healing function. The Dividend is, in part, designed to repair localized and non-localized economic damage: poor families, collapsed industry cities, and recessions.
Baltimore is a good case study: the city was a major trade hub, had corporate headquarters for things like the Tide Detergent Company, and had major industry to build ships and planes and even just make steel and brick. Trade went away, many of those corporate HQs merged with Proctor and Gamble out of state, and the major industry flat out collapsed. A city that supported over a million jobs now can't handle a population of half a million, more than half of whom are children or secondary householders who don't have jobs.
Baltimore creates an enormous draw for housing assistance, food stamps, small business administration loans (another Federal function to drive economic growth by injecting tax-source money into poor economies), State and Federal aid, and so forth. Over a billion in Federal spending goes there, and it's not enough.
With the Dividend, the Federal taxes actually come down. At the same time, $2Bn extra get shoved into Baltimore in the year 2016 model (Maryland gets $30bn--over 8% of its GDP). Two-adult households get $15k if they're unemployed; at the $50k level it's $10k. That money isn't taxed as income, but registers as unearned income for computing welfare eligibility: HUD and SNAP spending are spread out, and even reduced. At the same time, these struggling households now have money to spend, and spend it on needs--and then on wants. Middle-class households get a boost, too, and spend that on additional luxury.
That spending creates a need for local trucking, retail, and other service and supporting jobs. Jobs mean these poor households can work and become less-poor; and their income, representing productive labor, is taxable, and feeds (thus increasing) the Dividend, the Federal revenue ledger, and the State and Local revenue ledgers. With more income from working, these households also spend more. It hits equilibrium eventually, probably around a 5% GDP boost, although I don't have sufficient data to calculate it out fully.
So the burned-out, collapsed industry city that has been unable to recover in over 50 years experiences a sudden renaissance. It recovers in a few months, and is booming in a year or three. Less-poor cities across America won't see such a dramatic effect: if they're at about the national average income-per-capita, they'll see only a relatively-smal
I'll just re-post this.
What you are saying is what once put $3,500 into the economy, now only puts $500 into the economy.
Imagine if your food arbitrarily cost 3x as much, a shirt cost $150 instead of $15, and no wages increased.
Technical progress does the opposite of that.
But this ignores the question I asked, which is what are we doing to increase paid labor. Not what are we doing to reduce paid labor to make products more affordable for the few still employed.
People will buy more when they can buy more with the money they have. That's how it's always been. Do you buy everything you want to buy now? How many people would pass up a pay raise doubling their income? Why would they want more money?
Actually, there's a workable alternative, but it's complex. You can actually get the tax burden to go down over time by structuring around a universal dividend. This takes a portion of all income, passes it out to all adults equally, and thus creates an equitable system. The dividend is structured in such a way as to reduce top-tier taxes as well.
Because the buying power of the individual benefit trends with GDP-per-capita, the poor become progressively less-poor over time, reducing their eligibility for welfare benefits. Think about it: at $27,000, a 2-adult, 3-child household in Baltimore passes the HUD income limit. In 2016, a 14% dividend (my target is 10%, but I have to start a bit higher and work down) would have paid $7,500/year per adult. At $23k income, the difference is about $12k: your household income is $35k (earned and unearned), and you get no HUD subsidy.
The first effect is that housing assistance (and SNAP, TANF, etc.) reaches further. HUD puts 75% of all eligible households on a waiting list. With everyone bumped up, the many no longer eligible have their benefits passed down; and those still eligible receive a smaller benefit, passing the difference down. HUD should actually end up with around half of its budget unspent, but I accounted for only reducing the cost by 1/4 initially. As the Dividend becomes stronger, it cuts into this further.
Middle-class tax rates go up based on how I built this; middle-class tax burdens go down because the Dividend pays out. Think about being given $7,500/year, paid $313 on the 1st and 15th of each month, and paying e.g. $5,000 more in taxes because you make a high middle-class salary. You're ... ahead by $2,500, not by $7,500. Still ahead. That tax hike (the $5,000) is a big part of the funding source.
Because it grows with GDP-per-capita, the middle-class impact actually shrinks. Eventually, nobody earning under $100k is actually paying taxes. Eventually, the 39.6% top tax rate (I'm repealing the tax cuts and jobs act) falls to about 33%, too, when the dividend is only a 10% dividend. That takes a couple decades: I'm cutting it back less than growth, and stopping at 10%.
The other part of the funding source is Social Security. Instead of paying OASDI from the retirement and disability trust, I also restructured Social Security to pay the Dividend to everyone over age 18 (target is 16), and to pay the same total benefit in retirement and disability. That means if you're getting e.g. $700/year from the Dividend and you retire with Social Security paying you $1,500, your retirement payment is $800. $700 + $800 = $1,500. The Dividend grows faster than Social Security's benefits (it's faster than COLA), so it unloads the trusts, makes Social Security solvent (permanently), and causes the FICA tax (which is all payroll at this point) to come down over time.
That rebasing of FICA to the Dividend provides about a third of the funding stream. The rest is restructured from existing income taxes.
The initial impact is similar to more than half a trillion tax cut. Getting healthcare to all Americans with better affordable care plus a public option to cover those who can't get affordable care would cost $200 billion. You can actually do both and come out ahead.
Incidentally, getting HUD and SNAP to accomplish their missions directly would require several hundred billion PER YEAR of additional government spending. The tax rates would need to come way up. This approach causes the tax burden to come down instead, and creates jobs by more middle- and lower-class spending (about 8%-10% growth), further reducing the number of households in need of benefits and, thus, Federal spending. I want to see if I can achieve an outright trillion-dollar (2016 dollars) tax burden reduction. Note that the amount of dollars received in excess of your taxes are the burden: a middle-classer paying $12k in ta
How is it with a multi-hundred-billion-dollar deficit, people always look at something that costs $6Bn or even like $0.040Bn and say, "Hey, if we got rid of that, that $600Bn deficit would go away!"?
I like food.
What do we need or want anymore that requires any amount of human labor anymore to drive an economy?
Well I'd like a larger house, an expensive electric motorcycle, this $3,500 stove, an electrical system upgrade that involves $2,000 of components, a greenhouse on my roof, more video games, higher end computer components, an $80,000 electric car, and lots of other really expensive stuff.
Those costs aren't 90% profit margins; there's labor in there--lots of it--and new technology cuts back the labor. That $3,500 stove becomes an exceedingly high-tech stove that requires way more labor, while the thing I'm looking at today only costs $500 thanks to new tech making it easy to manufacture with fewer human hours.
That's where it comes from: that rich-people bullshit only millionaires buy becomes stuff we can all afford.
It also made it much faster to load and unload a container.
That's what I just said.
To ship a truckload of cans, you had to pay for some 240 man-hours of work at each load/unload. Then the pallet came around, and you had to pay for only 20 man-hours of work. It became possible to staff 1 person to do the work of every 12.
When you make things happen faster, you eliminate the need for labor. Labor is just time.
IKEA changing mugs did not cause a global impact in the job force.
The wooden shipping pallet did.
Unfortunately, this will still not be enough to alleviate the pending impact of automation and AI driving the concept of human employment into extinction.
To put this into perspective: Statements about upcoming automation and machine learning eliminating work are scientifically similar to statements about nuclear waste causing humans to develop superpowers like flight and invincibility.
No, we're not moving into a future where jobs go away and never come back. We're going through exactly what we've gone through constantly and continuously through all of human history. This happened in 2000, in 1993, in 2014, in 1971, and every day between and all the way back to when the first human picked up a pointy stick. If we don't shorten the work week, in 20 years, we'll find ourselves sitting on a larger population with the same percentage of the work force working 40 hours per week and churning out things that would take enormous amounts of human labor (and high costs) today for cheap. The same is true 50 years, 100 years, and 500 years out.
Private enterprise is more-efficient when properly regulated, when transparent, and when there is a profit motive for being more-efficient.
Public utility is more-efficient when demand is roughly absolute, complexity is relatively-low, and information is readily-available.
Let's talk healthcare.
Around here, Medicare averages $49 for an office visit. Carefirst pays $32 (with blood draw), and as low as $29. Medicare can pay $65 at a practice where Carefirst pays $32, while Aetna pays $185. The price on the door says $200 or $300.
Why?
Private insurers negotiate prices down. They use their big groups to negotiate lower prices, and of course insurance groups (e.g. in a union contract, spread across many small and large businesses) use their big groups to lean on the insurers.
Private practices hire consultants to push the prices up. These consultants analyze the market and recommend door prices low enough to make them attractive, but high enough to extract the maximum payment from an insurer. When an HMO or PPO contract is up for renewal, consultants target that specific insurer and try to adjust prices to get the best remittance rates and not leave money on the table, while also looking reasonable in the market.
Medicare computes an estimated cost of service, then adjusts for the area's cost of living.
We have an entire industry built around pushing up that cost of service. We have an entire industry around pricing things so that those medicare computations--and everything else--come out high.
Okay, let's play a little game.
Let's have a Federal fund that provides insurance for those without access to affordable care--a public option, no premium, and you get ACA Bronze, Silver, etc. based on your income level. We'll pay providers based on their remittance rates with insurers, using the range at -2 standard deviations: 97.5% of insurers pay this provider more than this price. We're looking at the Carefirst range.
Next, we take each small region (city, neighborhood, etc.) and identify the Tier 1 providers--the ones who have the grouped low price of care. That's going to be practices which provide the service as their primary service; practices which also perform a service when necessary generally charge a lot more for that service.
Average those and you have your regional standard of fairness.
Publish that number.
Now when the insurers come to town, they'll look at the guy trying to get $185 for an office visit and complain that the regional fair market price appears to be $48. Carefirst is still pressing for $32. The Public Option only pays that office $34.
This shows government intervention in the market (published standards of fairness) and an efficient government healthcare service.
It's probably safer and more-effective to make the Internet a government utility than to make healthcare as such. Nevertheless, it may be more-efficient to stick with regulation. It might even be possible to have municipal broadband of the lowest tier, and let private ISPs provide high-end Internet services. I know I'd still be paying Comcast $87/mo for 200Mbit/s if Baltimore gave me 20Mbit/s free; they might find many others will bail out if it's over $60/mo.
In fact, I think I like that idea. Let me think on that.
I know who my contributors are; I just don't care. Then again, I'm also running for D-MD07 so.
Never let money get in the way of integrity. People will literally back you when you tell them what you're trying to do is going to harm them if they think you have integrity. I'm not sure why; I think it has something to do with folks not wanting to be the one against doing the right thing, even if it's personally inconvenient. You can't buy that.
Yes, that's what technology does. Ikea even changed the shape of its mugs:
Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its “Bang” mug, notes Colin White in his book Strategic Management, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer’s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs.
Where you might need 5 truckers to ship as many mugs as sold in a fortnight, now you can do it with 2 truckers. Never mind that the wooden pallet eliminated 90% of the labor (jobs) associated with shipping an amount of goods in the first place.
It still takes some labor to produce the pallets--lumbering, milling, assembling, and even shipping--and that's much less labor than what you eliminate from the shipping process.
The jobs aren't going away; things are getting cheaper, we can buy more, and we'll end up with the same number of jobs and more stuff. I favor recycling some of that new productivity into time by lowering the definition of full-time working hours, though.
It actually depends on a lot of other stuff, like whether the courts say your policy is valid.
You're not an Uber employee, so you're taking on a series of jobs.
You are an Uber employee, so Uber's insurance must cover you for driving for Uber--the entire time you're driving for Uber.
Pick one.
I'm saying that "driving to pick a passenger up" is not "driving for Uber", but rather "driving to the location where you will begin driving for Uber". You're not yet performing a commerical service with your vehicle.
Some pizza places make drivers use their own vehicles. Imagine if your insurer claimed that the drive between your house and your job was work because, at some point in the future, you would begin using your car to transport commercial cargo. Lawyers would put a brick up your insurer's ass.
So until your customer sits his ass down in your vehicle and you're on a public road, you're just... driving. You're not carrying a commercial passenger, thus you're not doing anything proscribed by your insurer's contract.
This references studies on page 3-4, but many of the interesting studies are the University of Paderborn studies. Those are in German. A few of the referenced studies are in Italian, and ... two are in Esperanto, what the hell? Who actually writes scientific papers in Esperanto?
Tricky. At the time, you're not being paid to drive when you're driving to pick up. You also aren't performing a commercial service yet (carrying a passenger). You could argue that you're driving to work, but not yet using the vehicle to perform a commercial service. By contract law, the contract is actually still voidable: if you don't show up and they haven't paid yet, nothing was exchanged, so no contract was actually initiated.
It's like if you're driving your personal vehicle to an autocross track and get struck. Your insurer can't claim you were "racing" because you weren't on the track yet.
Thing is it takes them longer to pick up English than both English and Esperanto. If you want to pick up Russian and English, it takes you longer to pick up those two together than English and Esperanto; and it takes longer to pick up Russian alone than it does to pick up Russian and Esperanto.
It's weird. It's like saying to get to fluency level 5 with Russian, you need to sink in 5 years; or, you can sink in 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of Russian and get to fluency level 5 in Russian. Getting to Fluency Level 5 in both Russian and English is going to be slower than getting to fluency level 5 in Russian, English, and Esperanto, because you don't get to accelerate the first non-Esperanto language.
Actually, don't donate to my campaign; you're not from the US. Missed that part.
Right now, NationBuilder forwards to their own domain for SSL. They're in the middle of finally getting SSL on all custom domains so we can move away from HTTP. So if you donate to my campaign, it will shove you to a different domain under https instead of http.
It's kind of annoying.
It's at least got a better claim of news for nerds than my attempted Congressional Candidacy announcement via slashdot--which went purple. OTOH I do have a solution for identity theft and the post was right after Equifax got hacked.