It's better than that: U-4 is typically U-3 plus like 0.1%-0.4%. U-5 counts people who can't get jobs even if jobs are available to them due to their own economic conditions. U-6 is a useless number: it counts underemployment as individuals, and leaves us with no real way to measure underemployment (are they working 5 hours? 25? How many full jobs are available, divided between more than that many people? Is there 1/2, 1/3, or 8/9 of a job available to each of these underemployed?).
TFS is an outright lie, and a piece of punditry. Is Sean Hannity writing Slashdot now?
I thought you were going to try to tell me if we cut taxes, all those other things you mentioned would magically happen
Oh, no, there were conditions attached because the explanations are long and irritating. It's kind of a hobby for me, but nobody wants to hear that much noise out of nowhere.
Tax cuts aren't a cause of magical solutions to poverty, recessions, and a lack of social security; they're a consequence I have no reason to reverse. Problem I've been having: people I've encountered have lately been prone to viciously oppose any system that cuts taxes, even when they agree that the proposed system also has a powerful stabilizing effect on the middle-class and a consequence of completely-eliminating homelessness and hunger. It's like they don't want solutions, but vengeance--or, really, like nobody actually gives a shit about the poor.
No, no pony, and no impact either way on the Federal debt. That's kind of a harder problem.
You sure you want to do this?
Okay then.
Producing a universal social security benefit is relatively-easy, sort of a couple hours's weekend diversion. You need a system with stable funding; it needs to provide an economically-stable benefit; it needs to not disrupt the stability of those reliant on welfare services; and it needs to not add additional risks to the welfare system. In large part, this means you have to leave Medicare/medicaid, education benefits, OASDI (retirement, disability), and childcare welfare in place.
So let's take a look at Federal welfare spending. Particularly, let's look at OASDI (retirement, survivors, disability), income stability programs (TANF), food and nutrition programs (WIC, SNAP), Federal unemployment, and HUD housing assistance. We can quantify these programs as a percentage of income taxes taken including taxes collected for OASDI (payroll, income, FICA), individual income taxes, and the 35% income tax on business profits. From 2011 to 2016, these programs represented 67.91%, 63.30%, 56.06%, 52.34%, 49.45% (2015!), and 50.69% of Federal spending.
Generally, these services carry a price tag together equivalent to half of Federal spending, although their cost inflates during high welfare load. 2015 is the only recent year in which that spending level has fallen below 50%, and only by roughly half a percent.
Do note that these services aren't all collected as income tax: OASDI and Unemployment are payroll taxes. We can create a rough model ignoring these logistics as a viability test; the CBO can work out how to resolve the logistics. The most-notable logistics issues are a middle-class tax bracket peak and an orphaned payroll tax (Unemployment stays as a payroll tax, but Unemployment goes away--essentially, we convert Unemployment Insurance to a general-fund tax taken from payroll). A rough model demonstrates that the system still works even if you just ignore these issues; adjustment can produce more-optimal results.
So, first, let's take a look at funding. I propose a funding source via splitting off this Universal Social Security from the general tax brackets and levying a flat-tax exclusive funding source, similar to FICA 12.4% (or the split OASDI 6.2%/6.2%). This tax levies against both business income and personal income.
Note that OASDI levies against unadjusted income: when you make $10,000, you report $10,000 - $6,000 standard deduction, and pay taxes on your AGI of $4,000; OASDI charges 6.2% on your full $10,000 in addition to your IRS income tax brackets on your AGI. OASDI excludes income placed into tax-advantaged IRA or 401(k): if you make $50k, put $10k in 401(k), and take $6,000 standard deduction, you pay IRS taxes on $34,000 and OASDI on $40,000.
This Universal Social Security will levy tax in the same way.
In 2016, the total reported personal income, minus income from welfare services (e.g. we collect income tax from OASDI; I don't factor that into my taxable base), minus personal savings (which can be tax-advantaged IRA or 401(k)), amounts to $12,465.90 billion. The total reported Corporate Profits amounts to $2,085.80 billion. This totals $14,551.70 billion.
OASDI collected on up to the first $118.5k in 2016, taxing the bottom 92%. The top 10% income earners take roughly 48% of the total income, and my proposed Universal Social Security tax is 15% instead of 12.4%. With $810.20 OASDI taxes collected in 2016, my USS should collect roughly $1884 billion, plus 15% of the corporate profits or $2198 billion in total.
My taxable base is $14,551.70 billion. 15% of this is $2,182.755 billion, or 99.3% of the estimate of an uncapped 15% benefit. With a U.S. census population of 323,127,513 and a U.S. census population under age 18 of 73,700,000, we're looking at 249,427,513 adults, each receiving $8,751.06/year or $729.25/month benefit.
Unrelated question: how would you respond to a tax cut on businesses and the wealthy if it also came with a remediation of the welfare system, strengthening of the middle-class, and a complete elimination of homelessness and hunger through a powerful social safety net? Assume the math works out (it does).
No healthcare repeal or other bullshit; there are things you don't solve by fixing the tax system up. You can't just give people flat cash and say, "Here, this will pay for your doctor bills!" You need risk adjustment systems (= insurance).
Why is it corruption? Lobbying your senators is hard.
Look at me. I've written up a policy for a universal social security that cuts taxes on literally every single individual, cuts business income taxes, and cuts payroll taxes. It stabilizes OASDI (because it replaces part of it, and that proportion becomes larger over time). It stabilizes the middle-class through tough economic times, cutting back the severity and duration of recessions. It remediates a large part of the welfare system and, as a result, eliminates homelessness and hunger in the United States.
I can describe the ins and outs of this policy; I can show how to deploy it; I can show how and why it works; I can defend every piece of it. I've drawn up transition plans, I've described how to manage it using the existing Social Security system, I've pointed out the risks in welfare and immigrant concerns and how to control them. I've described how to use this to improve and then replace HUD housing assistance, and I've described how to use the Social Security credit system to phase-in naturalized Americans so as to avoid any threat of economic parasitism.
All the technical end, I can handle.
Now: How do I present it?
Never mind just getting Congress to hear me speak; what do I say? How do I engage in a Congressional dialogue with power and persuasion? Congress will ask for questions, will raise concerns, and will want follow-up if they do find any interest; how do I collect, analyze, and present the economic data?
Do you think Congress will just listen, nod, decide that everything seems well-and-proper, and go with it? Do you think they'll even look? Maybe, with what I can do on my own, I'll be able to get their attention; tell me what you think.
I need people. I need public attention to the issue. I need pictures, prepared speeches, graphs, charts, and videos to speak to the American People and to Congress. I need to be able to think on my feet--or to hire someone who can. I need to pull together enormous amounts of data and work with it.
To engage the American people, I need graphics designers, programmers, video editors, marketers. To engage Congress, I may need analysts and economists, highly-skilled business negotiators, and maybe even multiple suits at once to send individually to meet with Congressmen repeatedly. I need to collect the concerns of the Congressmen, analyze them, find answers, and send my people back to them to deliver what we've found.
Do you know how much that costs?
Even if you can skip the public campaign, what if you have dozens of complex issues to deal with?
Imagine how much the costs scale.
Most of it isn't kickbacks and back-room deals. Some of it is; that's why we have a few Senators and Governors in prison. A lot of the time, the Congressman and his staff will take to reminding you that it's not their job to do weeks of research at your request; if you want their attention, you bring the data.
Besides that, year-after-year costs will always go up with inflation, just like movie tickets. If it's a few percent, it's just inflation; if it's more, it's more lobbying activity.
Prime Video has more titles and lets you keep (and even download) what you buy. For people who rewatch mostly the same stuff, Prime Video is cheaper than Netflix + Prime. If you're getting the 2-day shipping from Amazon Prime anyway and not constantly watching new things, or just an intermittent viewer, it's not worth a Netflix sub.
I bought all of Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, RWBY, and Sherlock over like 6 years. I spent as much as I would on 2 years of Netflix. I also don't watch TV constantly.
Uh, no, it's not illegal in several states; the Federal Trade Commission has an entire publication on shit like that describing it as extremely illegal.
It's still legal to compare to the MSRP. This isn't "happening all over again"; it's a constant, and keeps popping up in fringe publications as quasi-tabloids here and there try to pawn off their supposed major discovery that musical instruments, cars, and major appliances are sold with "fake discounts" off an MSRP that nobody actually charges.
United States is in there because some collapsed local economies have vacated population; United States population is increasing.
Despite ever increasing population in the US, some American municipalities (city limits) have shrunk due to white flight and urban decay.
Japan is in there, due to a recent inflection. 128.1 million in 2010, 127 million in 2016. It's more horizontal than downward.
Russia went from 148.7 million in 1992 (collapse of the USSR) to a decline bottoming at 142.7 in 2008. It's up to 144.3 million now, slowly climbing. A comparison to their unemployment rates is interesting: as Russia's population fell initially, unemployment ramped up; the inflection point where population begun to climb again came at 2007, and population continued to climb even though unemployment spiked again in 2009 and then immediately begun to fall again (it's lower in 2010 and 2011, and has recovered by 2012).
It looks like the sudden difficulty in finding employment after the 1992 collapse of the USSR is directly time-correlated to the sharp collapse in Russian population. That's a trend in the poverty- and conflict-stricken Eastern European Bloc:
Much of Eastern Europe has lost population due to migration to Western Europe. In Eastern Europe and Russia, natality fell abruptly after the end of the Soviet Union, and death rates generally rose.
Ukraine also experienced an unemployment spike in 2009, right after recovery; they have only recovered to 2005 levels, and are still in decline. Between 2003 and 2009, they lost 1.7 million population; between 2009 and 2016, only 1 million. That decline is slowing, but Ukraine is a war-torn country with a poverty-stricken economy. Ukraine's GDP fell 50% between 2013 and 2015; so did its GDP-per-capita. It is currently 20% below 2009 levels of economic production and productivity.
Gerogia and Armenia have declining population. Georgia's unemployment rate is 12.5%; Armenia's unemployment rate remains at 18%. Armenia and others in the region experienced a drop in GDP-per-capita and the beginning of population decline in 1990; the decline slowed around 1996, although it didn't reverse to follow the great growth of GDP and GDP-per-capita. Armenia's low point was 2.876 million in 2011,and is 2.925 million now. Georgia flattened its decline in 2014, but has not begun progressing. Peoples in this country struggle for jobs.
Compare that to Azerbaijan's growing population. Their unemployment rate was 6.3% in 2007, and fell continuously to 4.9% in 2014. It's 5.1% now.
So, nations with high unemployment, falling GDP-per-capita, or both have falling populations; many of these nations began their decline after crippling economic collapse. Nations with stable unemployment and growing GDP-per-capita have stable and growing populations. United States population isn't in decline; Japan's has leveled, but hasn't started a visible trend of negative growth yet.
The data seems to confirm Malthusian growth, unless you want to go day-by-day and claim that population doesn't fluctuate up and down in absolute lockstep with the daily GDP--because of course it doesn't. The fact is a nation's population will expand if the nation grows in wealth--not the same day, but over time, growing toward that goal. Likewise, its population growth will slow when it reaches carry capacity, and shrink if the economy falters over a long enough time scale.
That means, yes, if you manage to make a nation of such wealth that there are more jobs than people, just wait a few years: you'll have more people than jobs again soon. It's not even just fertility rate; folks will flee the crippled Eastern Bloc to come to America for all those jobs, and American corporations will cite t
Best Buy tends to sell above MSRP. This was surreal when the price of a refrigerator I wanted was $1,300 refurbished, $2,200 new Home Depot, $3,000 MSRP, and $3,300 Best Buy.
Web browser - Chromium. Not Chrome; I've been using open-source Chromium, and it logs into Google and acts like Chrome just fine.
Real GNOME, not that Mate/Cinnamon bullshit.
Evolution is no longer the horrible horse shit it used to be. E-mail, calendar, and the lot go fine in Evo. Just make sure you get the latest versions of the plug-ins for things like Google Calendar and any Office 365 integration (Outlook365) available; Google Calendar broke for multiple releases in Ubuntu! Likewise, Evo kept breaking with the Gnome Online Accounts agent, requiring restarts of the goa-daemon and Evolution; there was a patch for that (Fedora got it, Ubuntu didn't until the next release).
If we're going Gnome, do Gnome-terminal, gedit, and the lot. Honestly, though, I'd like to split the desktop installs. Gnome-shell, MATE, XFCE, whatever, bring along their own application suites; this is dumb. Maybe I don't want Gedit, Gnome-terminal, and the lot; maybe I want the minimal functional Gnome-Shell, and then the XFCE suite. I quite like Mousepad over Gedit. There should be a gnome-desktop-environment and a gnome-desktop-suite, and maybe I install gnome-desktop-environment with xfce-desktop-suite.
Don't know what to say about office. LibreOffice is a horrible piece of shit and there's no real alternative.
That's a short and undetailed version, yes. My point was that rapid roll-out of new technology eliminates jobs faster than people can transition, which causes an economic crash. Mature tech doesn't show up overnight (usually), so you want to encourage industry to look at up-and-coming tech so that it gets deployed in pieces. That gets into complex business concepts about risk, competition, ROIs, speculation, and so forth; the short of it is businesses don't agree on when the most-advantageous time is to make a move (even when they all agree on what the state-of-the-art is), or on the rate at which to move (all at once, staged roll-out, pilots, early growth and late replacement, etc.).
One thing, though.
People who drive taxis now can learn to do other jobs later
People who get excessed generally apply the same skills elsewhere. Coal miners become salt miners, various types of engineers, or construction workers and foremen, etc., mostly with the skills they have or with minimal retraining. There's a fantasy of turning coal miners into programmers that exists largely so people can point out that you don't turn coal miners into programmers. Essentially, "retraining" is a myth; the displaced only expand their skill set, like a Java programmer becoming a C# programmer (no, programming isn't about knowing a programming language; I know tons of programming languages on a deep and technical level, and I'm missing foundational skills required to be an effective programmer).
If you transition too many people too fast, you just get unemployment. You drop people out in mid-career with no equivalent career into which to move.
Otherwise, you get things like the older bunch just retiring (many people take a few years of late retirement, but they don't generally seek jobs if they get lain off after retirement age), the younger bunch either staying in college longer or adjusting their career path (fewer entrants into the industry), and less new immigrant labor.
It can be awfully hard on people in transition, or people who didn't want to transition, but we can do things to make it easier for them.
Those "things" that we can do now (but haven't yet implemented) would do hilarious things to our economy, like reduce the severity and duration of recessions, eliminate all homelessness and hunger, slow down technological replacement of jobs by reducing the cost of labor, speed the uptake of replacement jobs by increasing consumer stability, and so forth. That doesn't even get into the other niceties like stabilizing our welfare system and eliminating all current problems in the OASDI system in particular.
It's far from a perfect world, but it's one that we'd be embarrassed to admit we didn't build sooner if we ever saw it.
The problem is we've got the modern class warfare politics. Trump built his support base on the radicalized middle-class, a phenomena that has occurred every 30-50 years throughout history. Basically, convince 80% of the population that either the rich are taking all the fucking money ("Hillary is pro-establishment, Trump is anti-establishment" is about this), the poor are taking all the fucking money (focus on welfare systems as broken and costly instead of on social problems as requiring improvements to our welfare system are this), or both, and you get 80% of the votes.
So why is this important?
Well, let's say we implemented a universal social security (I designed one; it's a favorite topic of mine; you've seen it before). Two-adult, married-filing-jointly households with no income source get $17,502 of untaxed income every year under this system. The entire impact on those looks like this.
Amazon usually shows list price with a strike-through, and then their price. Standard practice in the U.S. For some items, they show a stricken list price, a stricken retail price, and the current low-point price.
You pay the inflated prices even if you're not a Prime member. It's fair game by FTC rules. I've noticed various retailers also will sell the same heavy thing for $20 + $23 shipping, or for $43 + $2.99 shipping. Needless to say, I am not happy about all the shipping I paid on my 50 pound bag of sodium percarbonate.
So yeah, we're aware Amazon charges higher prices to offset shipping costs. They just do it for everyone, regardless of shipping method or membership.
I keep hearing this from crazy people, and it keeps not being true. I've worked in retail, but that doesn't matter; what matters is I've actually looked at prices for things, piled up loads and loads of shit I wanted to buy but didn't want to go $4,000 into credit card debt for, and so have frequently been watching when the prices drop for holiday sales and other bullshit.
The truth is they think a $5 flash drive that actually costs $15 and usually retails for $20 will get you in the store to buy a $500 TV that actually costs $400 and is marked down from its typical price of $529.99. They're still operating on the same NOP margin (in retail, that's often like 5%-8%); they're using seasonal hype and a loss-leader model to induce you to buy more so they can profit by volume.
That's not the point. Google's car can see dogs ffs, and it seems like every dog is a different kind of dog!
The point is companies can say, "Yay! No rules!" and go fuck off somewhere, or they can make a determined effort to make sure their shit works. These cars don't rely on just the magical Cone of Certified Construction Zone Presence; they identify pedestrians, high-visibility jacket construction workers, sink holes, curbs, parked cars with no V2V, passengers inside parked cars, backhoes, trees, debris, and other shit by looking with cameras, LiDAR, and other such stuff. They basically try to do what the human eyes and brain do when it encounters an object: identify first ts physical details, then if it matches a known object. If it doesn't match a known object, it's still shit in the way, and it's still moving or stationary.
It's likely they'll handle those situations because it's reasonably doable, and because negligence will cause large amounts of harm to the business image. Congress is waving a carrot in front of these people, but they've seen the stick before and they know it's there somewhere.
where money, which is a made-up human construct meant to facilitate the trade in real goods and services, has become more important than said real goods and services.
Not even. It just demonstrates that sensationalist news can reach out to people who don't understand monetary systems.
Economies are demand driven. You know where jobs come from? We have people buying 20,000 tables a week, and each 1 person can make 1 tables per week. We have 19,500 people making tables.... we can't do it. Welp, we better hire 500 more people.
To supply those jobs, you pay wages. $10/hr and 40 hours of total human time to make a table? Table costs $400. If you don't charge at least $400 for that table, there's no way you can pay your workers. If the consumers can't pay at least $400 for a table, there's no way we're producing that many tables and providing the jobs unless we find a way to make tables with less total human time (or, really, wage-labor cost, which means just reduce wage x time--hence why replacing 100 hours at $10/hr with 30 hours at $20/hr makes sense, thus computers and machines and such).
So what's money backed by? Well, not gold. Money is backed by production, eventually. All the money spent represents all the stuff produced. If you produce 100 pounds of grain, sell 80, and 20 go to rot, you expended all the labor to make 100 pounds of rice; you just have to charge 25% more per pound to cover the wages, and now all that money represents 80 pounds of rice. Your production methods are wasteful; learn to avoid an undersupply of rice by better-predicting the market or storing rice in ways which allow a longer shelf life.
What's that got to do with hoards of money?
Our central bank--here in the US--tries to achieve a 2% inflation benchmark. We measure a certain basket of goods to benchmark inflation, because "inflation" is a concept and not a real thing: technology, profit margins, and prices vary between not just different goods, but different producers, stores, regions. 10% inflation does not mean that every single price tag on every good everywhere went up by 10% simultaneously because that never happens.
We have a fractional reserve system. The Fed issues $1, the banks can loan $10. That means every $11 out there roughly correlates to $1 of issued currency and $10 of loaned money. With credit cards and business accounts, most of the money is in banks, and buying things moves it from account to account.
So what happens when you stockpile money?
Money stockpiled here sits in banks, where it ceases to participate in the economy. The banks still loan out $10, but that $1 doesn't move from account to account as it's used for purchases. Hoarding $1 billion removes $1 billion from the money supply; the Fed has to issue an additional $0.1 billion when it pushes for that 2% inflation, or else it will fall short of inflation goals.
What if you stockpile it in Ireland?
Money stockpiled in Ireland is theoretically out of the U.S. banking system. All $11 of it--the cash and the fractional loans--are gone. Hide $1Bn in Ireland and the Fed has to issue $1Bn here.
But wait, there's more!
Ireland also has a Fractional Reserve Banking system. Money stockpiled in Ireland participates in the global economy, and so may in part make its way back to the United States via our export market. This is true even if Ireland buys something from Germany and Germany buys from the U.S., because the German economy is spending a portion of its income--of which a part is derived from Irish loans.
The model eventually flattens out to say that money moves all over the world just like it moves all over town, and money stored in any fractional-reserve state in the global economy still boosts the global money supply in roughly the same way. It just starts somewhere else (physically) and spreads out from there as trade occurs. The ability to buy
You're arguing a semantic which redefines what "testing" means. By your semantic, every activity is testing.
Your argument suggests that everything you buy from the super market is a beta-test of this production batch of food to find out if salmonella poisoning shows up in population.
even without that, the entire transportation industry won't be able to transition at once. There won't be enough new vehicle production, the approval process for new models will be slow; any retrofitting kit for existing vehicles will have the same problems
Valid, but there's another--
existing fleets won't have enough capital for the investment of new vehicles. Some companies will have a greater interest in early adoption, others will wait for the technology to mature.
Congress is full of people who are really bad at economics. That said, I do believe they're at least competent. They may be wrong about a lot of stuff, and limited in their scope of knowledge; but they've got long experience and lots of stake, and some general idea of what they're doing.
You don't want savants running your country, anyway. You end up with eugenics.
The problem with the "saving jobs" argument is essentially the reason we need social safety nets: any attempt to do any such thing as people tend to think of it is detrimental and damaging when successful.
We're always going to have more job seekers than jobs, thanks to Malthusian growth: population expands in abundance. The more economic pressure on the population, the more delays you have in starting families, and the less immigrant labor you draw. People are myopic about this and point to the poorest individuals and their higher breeding rate, while failing to account for the middle-class deciding when they're emotionally and financially ready for a family--and the middle-class is a lot bigger. There are far more planned pregnancies than unwanted pregnancies, and those planned pregnancies go on hold when economic security is in question.
Because of this, preventing the turn-over of jobs (practically-impossible: 40% of all jobs turn over every year in the US) would just condemn the unemployed population to unemployment forever. It's not really any different, from a philosophical sense, than deciding to help the unemployed by firing someone who seems like he has better savings so as to give the other guy a chance.
Due to pigeon hole principle, the unemployed don't necessarily share households with the employed. A job-seeker may not be the spouse or roommate of a job-holder, so that makes this even worse.
Worse, though, is the larger economic effect.
Many efforts to retain or (especially) recreate jobs cause widespread poverty. Both trade and technical progress reduce poverty.
Bringing back manufacture jobs from China, for example, would produce identical products for a much-higher price; making higher-quality products domestically would increase the price even further than that, just like high-quality Made-in-China goods cost more than bargain-bin Made-in-China shit. That means the American consumer, given a certain wage, will have to work more hours to afford the same goods (poorer). This means a lower total purchasing power--more of your total wages go to the same goods--and thus fewer total goods purchased.
Fewer of the now-made-in-America goods are purchased, so fewer American jobs are created than Chinese jobs lost (i.e. you can't say "179,000 Chinese do this, so we are creating 179,000 American jobs!" You'll get 58,000). With less stuff being purchased--even less stuff that was made in China--there's less shipping and fewer retail scans. Shipping and retail are directly tied to the specific good being moved, so fewer truck drivers doesn't mean a savings per-good; it just means lower employment. Now you lose retail and logistics employment. Even at minimum wage, this loss can easily exceed the number of jobs created at the factory; and the factory workers--regardless of wage--will still have to work longer to buy the goods they're making than they did to buy the ones they were importing!
Technical progress has a similar impact. A few people lose their jobs when you get new technology (that's what technology is: labor-reducing techniques), and the rest of us get to enjoy lower prices. This takes some time to filter through the market, and often just ends in prices lagging wage inflation (i.e. prices still increase, but not as fast as the median income). Thus there aren't immediately new jobs for those recently-unemployed--who, besides, have to contend with the long-unemployed for any open jobs, and so may not get the new jobs that pop up in a few months's time.
High rates of technical progress, as I said, cause unemployment faster than this replacement rate. That's very, very bad. Safety nets such as a Universal Social Security would slow the technical obsolescence rate to a degree and speed the recovery of the employment market, as well as help maintain the economic stability of the middle-class and lower-class who lose their jobs in the process. It won't fund a middle-class lifestyle, but it'
Slashdot Mirror
It's better than that: U-4 is typically U-3 plus like 0.1%-0.4%. U-5 counts people who can't get jobs even if jobs are available to them due to their own economic conditions. U-6 is a useless number: it counts underemployment as individuals, and leaves us with no real way to measure underemployment (are they working 5 hours? 25? How many full jobs are available, divided between more than that many people? Is there 1/2, 1/3, or 8/9 of a job available to each of these underemployed?).
TFS is an outright lie, and a piece of punditry. Is Sean Hannity writing Slashdot now?
Cue the throngs of people complaining about the constitutionality of removing MS Paint.
I thought you were going to try to tell me if we cut taxes, all those other things you mentioned would magically happen
Oh, no, there were conditions attached because the explanations are long and irritating. It's kind of a hobby for me, but nobody wants to hear that much noise out of nowhere.
Tax cuts aren't a cause of magical solutions to poverty, recessions, and a lack of social security; they're a consequence I have no reason to reverse. Problem I've been having: people I've encountered have lately been prone to viciously oppose any system that cuts taxes, even when they agree that the proposed system also has a powerful stabilizing effect on the middle-class and a consequence of completely-eliminating homelessness and hunger. It's like they don't want solutions, but vengeance--or, really, like nobody actually gives a shit about the poor.
Sigh. Class warfare is real. Here I had hoped it was a republican pundit talking point.
No, no pony, and no impact either way on the Federal debt. That's kind of a harder problem.
You sure you want to do this?
Okay then.
Producing a universal social security benefit is relatively-easy, sort of a couple hours's weekend diversion. You need a system with stable funding; it needs to provide an economically-stable benefit; it needs to not disrupt the stability of those reliant on welfare services; and it needs to not add additional risks to the welfare system. In large part, this means you have to leave Medicare/medicaid, education benefits, OASDI (retirement, disability), and childcare welfare in place.
So let's take a look at Federal welfare spending. Particularly, let's look at OASDI (retirement, survivors, disability), income stability programs (TANF), food and nutrition programs (WIC, SNAP), Federal unemployment, and HUD housing assistance. We can quantify these programs as a percentage of income taxes taken including taxes collected for OASDI (payroll, income, FICA), individual income taxes, and the 35% income tax on business profits. From 2011 to 2016, these programs represented 67.91%, 63.30%, 56.06%, 52.34%, 49.45% (2015!), and 50.69% of Federal spending.
Generally, these services carry a price tag together equivalent to half of Federal spending, although their cost inflates during high welfare load. 2015 is the only recent year in which that spending level has fallen below 50%, and only by roughly half a percent.
Do note that these services aren't all collected as income tax: OASDI and Unemployment are payroll taxes. We can create a rough model ignoring these logistics as a viability test; the CBO can work out how to resolve the logistics. The most-notable logistics issues are a middle-class tax bracket peak and an orphaned payroll tax (Unemployment stays as a payroll tax, but Unemployment goes away--essentially, we convert Unemployment Insurance to a general-fund tax taken from payroll). A rough model demonstrates that the system still works even if you just ignore these issues; adjustment can produce more-optimal results.
So, first, let's take a look at funding. I propose a funding source via splitting off this Universal Social Security from the general tax brackets and levying a flat-tax exclusive funding source, similar to FICA 12.4% (or the split OASDI 6.2%/6.2%). This tax levies against both business income and personal income.
Note that OASDI levies against unadjusted income: when you make $10,000, you report $10,000 - $6,000 standard deduction, and pay taxes on your AGI of $4,000; OASDI charges 6.2% on your full $10,000 in addition to your IRS income tax brackets on your AGI. OASDI excludes income placed into tax-advantaged IRA or 401(k): if you make $50k, put $10k in 401(k), and take $6,000 standard deduction, you pay IRS taxes on $34,000 and OASDI on $40,000. This Universal Social Security will levy tax in the same way.
In 2016, the total reported personal income, minus income from welfare services (e.g. we collect income tax from OASDI; I don't factor that into my taxable base), minus personal savings (which can be tax-advantaged IRA or 401(k)), amounts to $12,465.90 billion. The total reported Corporate Profits amounts to $2,085.80 billion. This totals $14,551.70 billion.
OASDI collected on up to the first $118.5k in 2016, taxing the bottom 92%. The top 10% income earners take roughly 48% of the total income, and my proposed Universal Social Security tax is 15% instead of 12.4%. With $810.20 OASDI taxes collected in 2016, my USS should collect roughly $1884 billion, plus 15% of the corporate profits or $2198 billion in total.
My taxable base is $14,551.70 billion. 15% of this is $2,182.755 billion, or 99.3% of the estimate of an uncapped 15% benefit. With a U.S. census population of 323,127,513 and a U.S. census population under age 18 of 73,700,000, we're looking at 249,427,513 adults, each receiving $8,751.06/year or $729.25/month benefit.
Okay,
Well, what about heavy things that cost a lot to ship then? Let's try Lodge Cast Iron.
It's $45.06 whether I'm on my phone or my computer, logged in or not, private or not, T-Mobile or Wifi.
Still the same.. still the same... the same for laundry detergent...
Can you give an example? I've never been able to find one, and nobody's ever cited one; they just say that Amazon does it.
Unrelated question: how would you respond to a tax cut on businesses and the wealthy if it also came with a remediation of the welfare system, strengthening of the middle-class, and a complete elimination of homelessness and hunger through a powerful social safety net? Assume the math works out (it does).
No healthcare repeal or other bullshit; there are things you don't solve by fixing the tax system up. You can't just give people flat cash and say, "Here, this will pay for your doctor bills!" You need risk adjustment systems (= insurance).
Why is it corruption? Lobbying your senators is hard.
Look at me. I've written up a policy for a universal social security that cuts taxes on literally every single individual, cuts business income taxes, and cuts payroll taxes. It stabilizes OASDI (because it replaces part of it, and that proportion becomes larger over time). It stabilizes the middle-class through tough economic times, cutting back the severity and duration of recessions. It remediates a large part of the welfare system and, as a result, eliminates homelessness and hunger in the United States.
I can describe the ins and outs of this policy; I can show how to deploy it; I can show how and why it works; I can defend every piece of it. I've drawn up transition plans, I've described how to manage it using the existing Social Security system, I've pointed out the risks in welfare and immigrant concerns and how to control them. I've described how to use this to improve and then replace HUD housing assistance, and I've described how to use the Social Security credit system to phase-in naturalized Americans so as to avoid any threat of economic parasitism.
All the technical end, I can handle.
Now: How do I present it?
Never mind just getting Congress to hear me speak; what do I say? How do I engage in a Congressional dialogue with power and persuasion? Congress will ask for questions, will raise concerns, and will want follow-up if they do find any interest; how do I collect, analyze, and present the economic data?
Do you think Congress will just listen, nod, decide that everything seems well-and-proper, and go with it? Do you think they'll even look? Maybe, with what I can do on my own, I'll be able to get their attention; tell me what you think.
I need people. I need public attention to the issue. I need pictures, prepared speeches, graphs, charts, and videos to speak to the American People and to Congress. I need to be able to think on my feet--or to hire someone who can. I need to pull together enormous amounts of data and work with it.
To engage the American people, I need graphics designers, programmers, video editors, marketers. To engage Congress, I may need analysts and economists, highly-skilled business negotiators, and maybe even multiple suits at once to send individually to meet with Congressmen repeatedly. I need to collect the concerns of the Congressmen, analyze them, find answers, and send my people back to them to deliver what we've found.
Do you know how much that costs?
Even if you can skip the public campaign, what if you have dozens of complex issues to deal with?
Imagine how much the costs scale.
Most of it isn't kickbacks and back-room deals. Some of it is; that's why we have a few Senators and Governors in prison. A lot of the time, the Congressman and his staff will take to reminding you that it's not their job to do weeks of research at your request; if you want their attention, you bring the data.
Besides that, year-after-year costs will always go up with inflation, just like movie tickets. If it's a few percent, it's just inflation; if it's more, it's more lobbying activity.
Prime Video has more titles and lets you keep (and even download) what you buy. For people who rewatch mostly the same stuff, Prime Video is cheaper than Netflix + Prime. If you're getting the 2-day shipping from Amazon Prime anyway and not constantly watching new things, or just an intermittent viewer, it's not worth a Netflix sub.
I bought all of Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, RWBY, and Sherlock over like 6 years. I spent as much as I would on 2 years of Netflix. I also don't watch TV constantly.
Uh, no, it's not illegal in several states; the Federal Trade Commission has an entire publication on shit like that describing it as extremely illegal.
It's still legal to compare to the MSRP. This isn't "happening all over again"; it's a constant, and keeps popping up in fringe publications as quasi-tabloids here and there try to pawn off their supposed major discovery that musical instruments, cars, and major appliances are sold with "fake discounts" off an MSRP that nobody actually charges.
United States is in there because some collapsed local economies have vacated population; United States population is increasing.
Despite ever increasing population in the US, some American municipalities (city limits) have shrunk due to white flight and urban decay.
Japan is in there, due to a recent inflection. 128.1 million in 2010, 127 million in 2016. It's more horizontal than downward.
Russia went from 148.7 million in 1992 (collapse of the USSR) to a decline bottoming at 142.7 in 2008. It's up to 144.3 million now, slowly climbing. A comparison to their unemployment rates is interesting: as Russia's population fell initially, unemployment ramped up; the inflection point where population begun to climb again came at 2007, and population continued to climb even though unemployment spiked again in 2009 and then immediately begun to fall again (it's lower in 2010 and 2011, and has recovered by 2012).
It looks like the sudden difficulty in finding employment after the 1992 collapse of the USSR is directly time-correlated to the sharp collapse in Russian population. That's a trend in the poverty- and conflict-stricken Eastern European Bloc:
Much of Eastern Europe has lost population due to migration to Western Europe. In Eastern Europe and Russia, natality fell abruptly after the end of the Soviet Union, and death rates generally rose.
Ukraine also experienced an unemployment spike in 2009, right after recovery; they have only recovered to 2005 levels, and are still in decline. Between 2003 and 2009, they lost 1.7 million population; between 2009 and 2016, only 1 million. That decline is slowing, but Ukraine is a war-torn country with a poverty-stricken economy. Ukraine's GDP fell 50% between 2013 and 2015; so did its GDP-per-capita. It is currently 20% below 2009 levels of economic production and productivity.
Gerogia and Armenia have declining population. Georgia's unemployment rate is 12.5%; Armenia's unemployment rate remains at 18%. Armenia and others in the region experienced a drop in GDP-per-capita and the beginning of population decline in 1990; the decline slowed around 1996, although it didn't reverse to follow the great growth of GDP and GDP-per-capita. Armenia's low point was 2.876 million in 2011,and is 2.925 million now. Georgia flattened its decline in 2014, but has not begun progressing. Peoples in this country struggle for jobs.
Compare that to Azerbaijan's growing population. Their unemployment rate was 6.3% in 2007, and fell continuously to 4.9% in 2014. It's 5.1% now.
So, nations with high unemployment, falling GDP-per-capita, or both have falling populations; many of these nations began their decline after crippling economic collapse. Nations with stable unemployment and growing GDP-per-capita have stable and growing populations. United States population isn't in decline; Japan's has leveled, but hasn't started a visible trend of negative growth yet.
The data seems to confirm Malthusian growth, unless you want to go day-by-day and claim that population doesn't fluctuate up and down in absolute lockstep with the daily GDP--because of course it doesn't. The fact is a nation's population will expand if the nation grows in wealth--not the same day, but over time, growing toward that goal. Likewise, its population growth will slow when it reaches carry capacity, and shrink if the economy falters over a long enough time scale.
That means, yes, if you manage to make a nation of such wealth that there are more jobs than people, just wait a few years: you'll have more people than jobs again soon. It's not even just fertility rate; folks will flee the crippled Eastern Bloc to come to America for all those jobs, and American corporations will cite t
Best Buy tends to sell above MSRP. This was surreal when the price of a refrigerator I wanted was $1,300 refurbished, $2,200 new Home Depot, $3,000 MSRP, and $3,300 Best Buy.
Web browser - Chromium. Not Chrome; I've been using open-source Chromium, and it logs into Google and acts like Chrome just fine.
Real GNOME, not that Mate/Cinnamon bullshit.
Evolution is no longer the horrible horse shit it used to be. E-mail, calendar, and the lot go fine in Evo. Just make sure you get the latest versions of the plug-ins for things like Google Calendar and any Office 365 integration (Outlook365) available; Google Calendar broke for multiple releases in Ubuntu! Likewise, Evo kept breaking with the Gnome Online Accounts agent, requiring restarts of the goa-daemon and Evolution; there was a patch for that (Fedora got it, Ubuntu didn't until the next release).
If we're going Gnome, do Gnome-terminal, gedit, and the lot. Honestly, though, I'd like to split the desktop installs. Gnome-shell, MATE, XFCE, whatever, bring along their own application suites; this is dumb. Maybe I don't want Gedit, Gnome-terminal, and the lot; maybe I want the minimal functional Gnome-Shell, and then the XFCE suite. I quite like Mousepad over Gedit. There should be a gnome-desktop-environment and a gnome-desktop-suite, and maybe I install gnome-desktop-environment with xfce-desktop-suite.
Don't know what to say about office. LibreOffice is a horrible piece of shit and there's no real alternative.
That's a short and undetailed version, yes. My point was that rapid roll-out of new technology eliminates jobs faster than people can transition, which causes an economic crash. Mature tech doesn't show up overnight (usually), so you want to encourage industry to look at up-and-coming tech so that it gets deployed in pieces. That gets into complex business concepts about risk, competition, ROIs, speculation, and so forth; the short of it is businesses don't agree on when the most-advantageous time is to make a move (even when they all agree on what the state-of-the-art is), or on the rate at which to move (all at once, staged roll-out, pilots, early growth and late replacement, etc.).
One thing, though.
People who drive taxis now can learn to do other jobs later
People who get excessed generally apply the same skills elsewhere. Coal miners become salt miners, various types of engineers, or construction workers and foremen, etc., mostly with the skills they have or with minimal retraining. There's a fantasy of turning coal miners into programmers that exists largely so people can point out that you don't turn coal miners into programmers. Essentially, "retraining" is a myth; the displaced only expand their skill set, like a Java programmer becoming a C# programmer (no, programming isn't about knowing a programming language; I know tons of programming languages on a deep and technical level, and I'm missing foundational skills required to be an effective programmer).
If you transition too many people too fast, you just get unemployment. You drop people out in mid-career with no equivalent career into which to move.
Otherwise, you get things like the older bunch just retiring (many people take a few years of late retirement, but they don't generally seek jobs if they get lain off after retirement age), the younger bunch either staying in college longer or adjusting their career path (fewer entrants into the industry), and less new immigrant labor.
It can be awfully hard on people in transition, or people who didn't want to transition, but we can do things to make it easier for them.
Those "things" that we can do now (but haven't yet implemented) would do hilarious things to our economy, like reduce the severity and duration of recessions, eliminate all homelessness and hunger, slow down technological replacement of jobs by reducing the cost of labor, speed the uptake of replacement jobs by increasing consumer stability, and so forth. That doesn't even get into the other niceties like stabilizing our welfare system and eliminating all current problems in the OASDI system in particular.
It's far from a perfect world, but it's one that we'd be embarrassed to admit we didn't build sooner if we ever saw it.
The problem is we've got the modern class warfare politics. Trump built his support base on the radicalized middle-class, a phenomena that has occurred every 30-50 years throughout history. Basically, convince 80% of the population that either the rich are taking all the fucking money ("Hillary is pro-establishment, Trump is anti-establishment" is about this), the poor are taking all the fucking money (focus on welfare systems as broken and costly instead of on social problems as requiring improvements to our welfare system are this), or both, and you get 80% of the votes.
So why is this important?
Well, let's say we implemented a universal social security (I designed one; it's a favorite topic of mine; you've seen it before). Two-adult, married-filing-jointly households with no income source get $17,502 of untaxed income every year under this system. The entire impact on those looks like this.
See the problem?
Hint: it's all the way to the right.
That red line is current take-home inco
Are they getting richer or poorer? Which nations?
Amazon usually shows list price with a strike-through, and then their price. Standard practice in the U.S. For some items, they show a stricken list price, a stricken retail price, and the current low-point price.
You pay the inflated prices even if you're not a Prime member. It's fair game by FTC rules. I've noticed various retailers also will sell the same heavy thing for $20 + $23 shipping, or for $43 + $2.99 shipping. Needless to say, I am not happy about all the shipping I paid on my 50 pound bag of sodium percarbonate.
So yeah, we're aware Amazon charges higher prices to offset shipping costs. They just do it for everyone, regardless of shipping method or membership.
I keep hearing this from crazy people, and it keeps not being true. I've worked in retail, but that doesn't matter; what matters is I've actually looked at prices for things, piled up loads and loads of shit I wanted to buy but didn't want to go $4,000 into credit card debt for, and so have frequently been watching when the prices drop for holiday sales and other bullshit.
The truth is they think a $5 flash drive that actually costs $15 and usually retails for $20 will get you in the store to buy a $500 TV that actually costs $400 and is marked down from its typical price of $529.99. They're still operating on the same NOP margin (in retail, that's often like 5%-8%); they're using seasonal hype and a loss-leader model to induce you to buy more so they can profit by volume.
That's not the point. Google's car can see dogs ffs, and it seems like every dog is a different kind of dog!
The point is companies can say, "Yay! No rules!" and go fuck off somewhere, or they can make a determined effort to make sure their shit works. These cars don't rely on just the magical Cone of Certified Construction Zone Presence; they identify pedestrians, high-visibility jacket construction workers, sink holes, curbs, parked cars with no V2V, passengers inside parked cars, backhoes, trees, debris, and other shit by looking with cameras, LiDAR, and other such stuff. They basically try to do what the human eyes and brain do when it encounters an object: identify first ts physical details, then if it matches a known object. If it doesn't match a known object, it's still shit in the way, and it's still moving or stationary.
It's likely they'll handle those situations because it's reasonably doable, and because negligence will cause large amounts of harm to the business image. Congress is waving a carrot in front of these people, but they've seen the stick before and they know it's there somewhere.
where money, which is a made-up human construct meant to facilitate the trade in real goods and services, has become more important than said real goods and services.
Not even. It just demonstrates that sensationalist news can reach out to people who don't understand monetary systems.
Economies are demand driven. You know where jobs come from? We have people buying 20,000 tables a week, and each 1 person can make 1 tables per week. We have 19,500 people making tables. ... we can't do it. Welp, we better hire 500 more people.
To supply those jobs, you pay wages. $10/hr and 40 hours of total human time to make a table? Table costs $400. If you don't charge at least $400 for that table, there's no way you can pay your workers. If the consumers can't pay at least $400 for a table, there's no way we're producing that many tables and providing the jobs unless we find a way to make tables with less total human time (or, really, wage-labor cost, which means just reduce wage x time--hence why replacing 100 hours at $10/hr with 30 hours at $20/hr makes sense, thus computers and machines and such).
So what's money backed by? Well, not gold. Money is backed by production, eventually. All the money spent represents all the stuff produced. If you produce 100 pounds of grain, sell 80, and 20 go to rot, you expended all the labor to make 100 pounds of rice; you just have to charge 25% more per pound to cover the wages, and now all that money represents 80 pounds of rice. Your production methods are wasteful; learn to avoid an undersupply of rice by better-predicting the market or storing rice in ways which allow a longer shelf life.
What's that got to do with hoards of money?
Our central bank--here in the US--tries to achieve a 2% inflation benchmark. We measure a certain basket of goods to benchmark inflation, because "inflation" is a concept and not a real thing: technology, profit margins, and prices vary between not just different goods, but different producers, stores, regions. 10% inflation does not mean that every single price tag on every good everywhere went up by 10% simultaneously because that never happens.
We have a fractional reserve system. The Fed issues $1, the banks can loan $10. That means every $11 out there roughly correlates to $1 of issued currency and $10 of loaned money. With credit cards and business accounts, most of the money is in banks, and buying things moves it from account to account.
So what happens when you stockpile money?
Money stockpiled here sits in banks, where it ceases to participate in the economy. The banks still loan out $10, but that $1 doesn't move from account to account as it's used for purchases. Hoarding $1 billion removes $1 billion from the money supply; the Fed has to issue an additional $0.1 billion when it pushes for that 2% inflation, or else it will fall short of inflation goals.
What if you stockpile it in Ireland?
Money stockpiled in Ireland is theoretically out of the U.S. banking system. All $11 of it--the cash and the fractional loans--are gone. Hide $1Bn in Ireland and the Fed has to issue $1Bn here.
But wait, there's more!
Ireland also has a Fractional Reserve Banking system. Money stockpiled in Ireland participates in the global economy, and so may in part make its way back to the United States via our export market. This is true even if Ireland buys something from Germany and Germany buys from the U.S., because the German economy is spending a portion of its income--of which a part is derived from Irish loans.
The model eventually flattens out to say that money moves all over the world just like it moves all over town, and money stored in any fractional-reserve state in the global economy still boosts the global money supply in roughly the same way. It just starts somewhere else (physically) and spreads out from there as trade occurs. The ability to buy
This congress is psychotic. They genuinely believe they serve the good and the will of the people; they're just delusional.
You're arguing a semantic which redefines what "testing" means. By your semantic, every activity is testing.
Your argument suggests that everything you buy from the super market is a beta-test of this production batch of food to find out if salmonella poisoning shows up in population.
even without that, the entire transportation industry won't be able to transition at once. There won't be enough new vehicle production, the approval process for new models will be slow; any retrofitting kit for existing vehicles will have the same problems
Valid, but there's another--
existing fleets won't have enough capital for the investment of new vehicles. Some companies will have a greater interest in early adoption, others will wait for the technology to mature.
Never mind, you got it.
Congress is full of people who are really bad at economics. That said, I do believe they're at least competent. They may be wrong about a lot of stuff, and limited in their scope of knowledge; but they've got long experience and lots of stake, and some general idea of what they're doing.
You don't want savants running your country, anyway. You end up with eugenics.
The problem with the "saving jobs" argument is essentially the reason we need social safety nets: any attempt to do any such thing as people tend to think of it is detrimental and damaging when successful.
We're always going to have more job seekers than jobs, thanks to Malthusian growth: population expands in abundance. The more economic pressure on the population, the more delays you have in starting families, and the less immigrant labor you draw. People are myopic about this and point to the poorest individuals and their higher breeding rate, while failing to account for the middle-class deciding when they're emotionally and financially ready for a family--and the middle-class is a lot bigger. There are far more planned pregnancies than unwanted pregnancies, and those planned pregnancies go on hold when economic security is in question.
Because of this, preventing the turn-over of jobs (practically-impossible: 40% of all jobs turn over every year in the US) would just condemn the unemployed population to unemployment forever. It's not really any different, from a philosophical sense, than deciding to help the unemployed by firing someone who seems like he has better savings so as to give the other guy a chance.
Due to pigeon hole principle, the unemployed don't necessarily share households with the employed. A job-seeker may not be the spouse or roommate of a job-holder, so that makes this even worse.
Worse, though, is the larger economic effect.
Many efforts to retain or (especially) recreate jobs cause widespread poverty. Both trade and technical progress reduce poverty.
Bringing back manufacture jobs from China, for example, would produce identical products for a much-higher price; making higher-quality products domestically would increase the price even further than that, just like high-quality Made-in-China goods cost more than bargain-bin Made-in-China shit. That means the American consumer, given a certain wage, will have to work more hours to afford the same goods (poorer). This means a lower total purchasing power--more of your total wages go to the same goods--and thus fewer total goods purchased.
Fewer of the now-made-in-America goods are purchased, so fewer American jobs are created than Chinese jobs lost (i.e. you can't say "179,000 Chinese do this, so we are creating 179,000 American jobs!" You'll get 58,000). With less stuff being purchased--even less stuff that was made in China--there's less shipping and fewer retail scans. Shipping and retail are directly tied to the specific good being moved, so fewer truck drivers doesn't mean a savings per-good; it just means lower employment. Now you lose retail and logistics employment. Even at minimum wage, this loss can easily exceed the number of jobs created at the factory; and the factory workers--regardless of wage--will still have to work longer to buy the goods they're making than they did to buy the ones they were importing!
Technical progress has a similar impact. A few people lose their jobs when you get new technology (that's what technology is: labor-reducing techniques), and the rest of us get to enjoy lower prices. This takes some time to filter through the market, and often just ends in prices lagging wage inflation (i.e. prices still increase, but not as fast as the median income). Thus there aren't immediately new jobs for those recently-unemployed--who, besides, have to contend with the long-unemployed for any open jobs, and so may not get the new jobs that pop up in a few months's time.
High rates of technical progress, as I said, cause unemployment faster than this replacement rate. That's very, very bad. Safety nets such as a Universal Social Security would slow the technical obsolescence rate to a degree and speed the recovery of the employment market, as well as help maintain the economic stability of the middle-class and lower-class who lose their jobs in the process. It won't fund a middle-class lifestyle, but it'