If there's a better argument for anti-trust investigations against Google than this, then I can't think of it.
That's because Google hasn't done anything to warrant any sort of anti-trust investigations.
Google's search results are returning worse data (robots.txt respected) because the end result has decided not to rely on ad-supported (meaning: Google AdSense supported since they have a lion's share on the industry) content rather than the website doing whatever makes sense for itself
Google serves the end user articles about the Chevy Bolt's new deals getting the batteries cheaper, and what that means for the cost of electric vehicles.
BusinessInsider, Slate, and Jalopnik have 6-page articles going into deep exploration of the recent changes in EV costs, adoption, environmental impacts, changes to manufacturing, and the resulting lower-prices, as well as what that means for the future. That's about what the end user is searching for.
WSJ only provides a link to a headline that says, "GM To Buy Chevy Bolt Batteries For $137/Cell", has a tag line, and has a single paragraph saying that GM has recently negotiated a deal to buy batteries cheaper. Then, "Click here to log into the Wall Street Journal and read this article."
On the one hand, the result a non-WSJ-subscriber gets doesn't provide the information he's looking for, and supplies less than BusinessInsider, Slate, and Jalopnik. On the other, WSJ gives the Google spider this page, so Google has no idea what WSJ's full article says. It could be a single additional paragraph that says the Bolt was originally going to cost $2,000 more but is cheaper, end of story. It could be a 9-page economic analysis of the history and future of EVs. Google doesn't know.
Clearly, Google can identify the non-WSJ sites as higher-quality information. WSJ is at best ambiguous.
I've been shuffling soda back into my diet. This weekend, when I drank only water, I came 1,800kcal short each day. Imagine losing 5 pounds every week.
If Neanderthal man had access to 44oz Pepsi products, they wouldn't have died out.
No idea if the content contains the information that the other article I read on the topic was lacking.
I could buy a subscription to this no-name "Wall" "Street" "Journal" and hope it has the information I want, or I could keep looking. If it doesn't have the information I want and I spend $105 on it, then what am I to do? Go pay NYT $40, and the Tribune $70, and so forth, just to peek at the same article on all of them hoping one has more details?
Paywalled information is less-relevant. LWN.net gives me everything 1 week behind, and I can pay them $10/month to see this week's publications; I actually had subscriptions when I was reading their site continuously.
Then, why would you be able to pay a janitor $2.40/hr? It wouldn't make any sense. It'd be a lot of work for nothing, and nobody would likely take the job. If they did take the job, they wouldn't likely stay very long at all. You'd have enormous staffing gaps and need to somehow get the janitorial work done, meaning you'd have to pay high wages to get a quick replacement or temporary contractor until you can find the next low-wage guy who will also quit in a week.
Not that you can't try, but you'll utterly fail. I'd argue that you wouldn't be able to pay a janitor $2.40/hr because nobody would take the job. Note that the AC is also being silly:
I can believe that people won't necessarily work less, but will we see a mass exodus out of low paying jobs? Is the extra $5K a year you'll make working as a janitor be worth it now?
Obviously, they'll have to get a viable paycheck.
Though, on both points, my own Universal Social Security takes a tax strategy that doesn't increase current taxes on anyone, and aims for viability by covering the retail prices of current goods plus risk (overbudgeting). The stable income reduces landlord costs (cost-of-risk: evictions and empty units are expensive, and landlords must divide the periodic cost across everyone's rent, raising rental prices) at low-income rent levels, thus allowing a rental market that today's economy simply cannot support. My model uses 224sqft single-individual apartments and a wide (25%-33%) risk margin.
The wage to provide a take-home pay matching the Social Security benefit in that scenario is about $4/hr. Doubling your income is kind of attractive; the $8.25/hr current minimum wage provides a pretty good standard-of-living bump over that. My plan also requires (initially) 5.3% OASDI on the payroll side (the paycheck OASDI withholding is replaced by the Universal Social Security withholding) to uphold Social Security retirement payments during the transition period; this is smaller than the 6.2% taken today, so any given wage costs the employer less.
It's more likely wages can come down without a minimum wage under the Universal Social Security I describe, as such a wage is substantial compared to not having it, and thus the Social Security benefit doesn't supply sufficient upwards pressure to raise wages. Wages wouldn't come down far, however, due to the Social Security benefit being substantial in itself. The impact of wage is also less because the payroll taxes are lower, so purchasing power would increase slightly.
Therefor both the mass-exodus from low-income jobs and the enormous reduction of low-income wages are unlikely, at best; pressures on both ends exist.
Your entire opening rebuttal was that location matters so very, very much.
speaking as someone who's run a business for 12 years, location, sadly, is quite important. He might be on to something here.
It's been an argument back and forth about location not being important if your office location isn't your major interaction point with, you know, damned near everyone. Moving the goalposts now that you lost?
Took you all weekend for this shitnugget?
No, I studied German, wrote a (very poorly-written) speech, and fed kittens during the weekend. Slashdot is a 9-5 site; nobody checks this shit from home.
You might find people who will janitor for a hobby, sure. I doubt you'd find a stable and sufficient base of labor that wants to work all the low-income jobs as hobby, though--and even then, not without perceived-fair pay.
You suggested that you'd be able to pay people an unfairly-low wage (so low it doesn't give them any advantage) because there's no minimum wage and no need for one, and supported this by suggesting that minimum wage is there because people are lacking negotiating power and now they have power because they can just walk and so can negotiate a fair wage. These are conflicting positions. The term for that is "cognitive dissonance".
Fair enough. You're still wrong and you still haven't demonstrated how you're not wrong other than going "DUHRR NUH UH U DUM". You seem to be blowing hot air out your ass.
transitionary stopgaps aren't really terribly relevant to a discussion of the systems that will replace them
So, to replace Social Security, let's pay less than what the average recipient receives, but to everyone. Oh, and for the millions who rely on that income as-is today, or in retirement in the next 5 years... well, fuck 'em.
No?
You see, son, if you want to fix a damaged valve in a person's heart, the first thing you have to talk about is how you're going to get into their heart without them dying on the table. Great that they have a working heart afterwards--too bad they're long-dead.
And even as a stopgap that defeats much of the purpose of a UBI, as you still have all the bureaucratic overhead of verifying need-based aid.
I actually expect the public aid for dependents of low-income households to be permanent, or at least semi-permanent.
It's not a way to hold the system in a stable state during transition; it's the best long-term plan I have.
As for bureaucratic overhead and such, that's not actually a thing--at least, not a substantial thing. Welfare is generally cheap to administrate. The problems are largely in terms of delays and false-negatives: you have to apply for welfare, and they have to approve you.
With a functional UBI, the size of the public aid system shrinks dramatically. That removes a large amount of risk and cost, allowing the system to focus on delivering on its mission more-effectively. That's a big step up.
As for expanding the system to provide said aid for everyone? It'd multiply the cost of such aid by an order of magnitude. That means people in the middle- and upper-classes would lose the advantage of a UBI unless they had children of their own to claim some of the cost they're paying for everyone else's children. We're talking about 1.4% of your income versus some 8%-10%, and in both cases not paying that money back to everyone evenly, as a UBI would.
Functionally, this means single individuals and couples without children are second-class citizens. Really, it means single-individuals are fourth- or fifth-class citizens, after married couples with lots of kids, single parents with kids, married couples without kids, and unmarried couple households. I suppose it's an interesting way to make the gays pay back the tax benefit they get from legalized gay marriage, if that's your angle: a hefty fine on non-reproducing households.
So you've defined a qualifying aid system with a qualifier of how many children you have, rather than of how much income you have. It takes from some people and gives only to certain other people; rather than all sharing the cost, some bear the cost.
Under a UBI, you get a check from the government. If you get $50,000 today and then, next year, you get $40,000 + $10,000, you're still receiving the same income.
Employers have to pay wages. I generally count "wages" as including benefits, payroll taxes, and other per-worker-hour costs when modeling economics, although any discussion that's going that deep is too complex to simplify with imprecise terminology. In this case, every reasonable definition--correct or not--works: if the employer is paying you less per hour in your pay check, then your cost to the employer is lower.
Note that lowering the cost of labor by lowering payroll taxes also has interesting effects. It slows the job replacement that comes with technical progress without slowing technical progress. That is to say: if you make $50,000 and your employer pays 10% payroll taxes, you cost $55,000 (a difference of $2.5/hr). If the TCO of a new machine that does the work of 4 employees is $210,000/year, then it's cheaper to replace the employees (not necessarily strategic at this time); if you cut the payroll tax to below 5%, then it's cheaper to keep the employees. This lengthens strategic delays and, thus, increases the span of time between layoffs due to this new machine.
The same is true of wages. A minimum-wage policy without frequent updates to correct for inflation et al will experience drift such that minimum-wage workers become poorer, and the number of minimum-wage jobs (and total jobs, if you swap two minimum-wage earners for one person making twice that) supportable by the economy increases. When updates are then made, a lot of jobs are lost--primarily minimum-wage and low-wage jobs. Frequent updates to minimum wage reduce the magnitude of oscillation: minimum-wage workers don't have their buying-power compensation decreased quite so much before adjustment, and adjustments don't reduce the carry capacity of jobs nearly as much.
The minimum-wage thing is interesting for a few reasons. For one, it suggests that a UBI's adjustment period is similarly-important for similar reasons. More-importantly, the spike in unemployment slows growth, and notably slows labor market growth--more early retirement, less late retirement, fewer people exiting college early to enter the workforce, etc. The opposite is similarly true. A long span between updates to a minimum wage (or a UBI) can, thus, have adverse effects on the unemployment market, and the stability of the economy at large.
So a lot of things go into these kinds of economic policies. Nobody ever thinks about any of it. Cost of labor versus income is one such consideration.
PHEVs have a double-digit range (e.g. the Volt has 58 miles, 420-ish total). All-electric cars have multi-hunded-mile ranges. Tesla's early vehicles were 180-ish miles; Chevrolet has the 238-mile Bolt.
Charge times on a home charger (220V) at 30A put on about 20-25 range-miles per hour (3-4 miles per kWh; I get 3.3 in the winter and as high as 4.2 in the summer). 220V at 40A gets you 25-35 miles; the popular 9.6kW all-electric on-board for 240V at 40A is 29-36 range-miles per hour. The Bolt can take an 80kW charger; at 40kW, it pulls 120-160 range-miles per hour.
ChargePoint supplies chargers that can easily spit out 130kW (390-520 range-miles per hour) or even up to 700kW, but no cars support that; even using an off-board charge circuit, the TMS generally can't dissipate that much heat. Future EVs capable of accepting high-rate charging will need a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and off-board TMS, such that the charging station will couple and begin pumping coolant through a second coolant loop in your TMS radiator, and follow up with an air flush (to push the coolant out).
This would allow a larger radiator or a heat pump to chill the coolant, while your TMS can conduct directly to a liquid cooling loop instead of an air-cooled radiator. The amount of load this can handle is immense: a small counterflow exchanger can easily take in coolant at 140C and bring it to 10C, so the limit is generally based on if you can cycle coolant fast enough to get it to the exchanger before it boils.
Batteries don't degrade as quickly as expected. There are Chevrolet Volts with 300,000 miles and no range loss; Teslas fare less-well due to heavier duty cycles, losing some 4% in 100,000 miles (20% was predicted).
The difference is largely headroom and the BMS, especially TMS. That last 5% on a Lithium battery pushes you from the near-flat voltage curve to a steep voltage curve (e.g. 3.29-3.31V 5%-95%, then when you pass 95% charge you suddenly shoot up until 3.7V at full charge). Unbalanced cell charges cause more strain even within low-stress operating ranges; a BMS will balance the state-of-charge. Likewise, without a TMS, the battery gets really hot and generally experiences severe temperature swings, which is why the Nissan Leaf practically destroys its battery, sometimes losing as much as 40% of its range in 3 years or ~50,000 miles.
I bought my Volt second-hand for $12k and have driven it pretty much only on electricity. These cars will be attractive to the masses when you can get a $21k all-electric Cobalt or Focus instead of having to spend $35k. They'll likely ship 6.6kW chargers, which will give the capacity to come home from most commutes (~30 miles each way, though ~18 miles covers 70% of all commutes) and have the car topped up in an hour or so; high-power onboard chargers will be an option, as it adds a thousand or three to the cost of the car. Long-range drivers will need to go with offboard charging as described, as that's a hell of a lot of heat to dissipate and you don't want to pay an extra $10k to have an enormous charge and cooling circuit you only need on long trips.
It's actually happening faster and more-reliably than I predicted. The pieces are all falling into place.
Your country can produce cars for $40k. The next country can produce and import equivalent cars for $30k. Let's assume that you have wage-equivalence (not US vs China), so the next country over just has a better infrastructure (e.g. they have water, ore, and other resources close enough to expend less effort getting the same result; given the same technology, you're always going to spend 1/3 more to make the same cars).
People in your country buy those cars for $30k. You have like 5% unemployment (the U.S. constantly trends toward that; it's 2% for Japan; more on that in a minute). That's cool.
Now you slap a 100% tariff on those cars. The import cars now cost $60k, your domestic cars cost $40k. People begin spending $10k more on new cars; however, they can't spend that $10k on much else. Jobs are lost; fortunately, because you're working on wage-equivalent labor in both countries, the extra $10k spent on cars supports the additional jobs required in your auto industry to meet demand. Your country makes fewer things; people buy less stuff; and you're overall a poorer nation.
The nation on the other side, meanwhile, has lost your population as an auto market. They're also somewhat poorer: they don't have the market, thus no revenue stream, thus employment bumps up a bit. That's a problem.
Fortunately, in a few short years (it's like 1-3), the rate of early entry to the workforce (dropping out of college) goes down; the rate of early retirement increases and the rate of late retirement decreases (average retirement age falls); and, as a final saving throw, immigrant labor slows. Long-term, the birth rate falls a bit. Unemployment goes back to its normal (which was also 5% in that country). That's Malthusian growth.
The people selling you cars are no poorer nor richer; you're poorer, and you can't resolve that without restoring trade.
Should the people who were selling you cheap cars then retaliate with their own foolishness, cutting their own noses to spite their faces, making themselves poorer by restricting imports from your nation? It will make them poorer as well, and give you the temporary ache of a swift kick (same as you gave them), but ultimately not harm your economy in the long run.
Of course not. How ridiculous. They should just complain about the temporary economic situation, continue to lavish in the wealth obtained by importing from your country, and let you enjoy the bitter fruits of your own self-destruction.
Note: in the event that you were trading on a wage differential, cutting off imports will diminish your job market. Importing from a country with cheap wages supports domestic infrastructure markets such as shipping and retail; blocking that trade and increasing the prices of those goods by tariff or by shifting to expensive domestic production means a dramatic reduction in purchaseable goods, and no reduction in the amount of goods shipped and retailed by the same number of labor-hours. In other words: you lose tons of jobs in moving goods around, and create fewer jobs in making goods (if you're making them domestically at all).
Imports give you a trade advantage in efficiency (reduced cost of goods, increased amount purchaseable per labor-hour worked). Exports give you a trade advantage in size (population growth). Losing either of these hurts; losing imports hurts more and hurts everybody in your country, while losing exports hurts specific industries and thus specific people.
You missed the part where the money gets shuffled off to a tax haven.
That's done by businesses purchasing their goods and services from a subsidiary off-shore. The CEO, however, still gets his executive compensation in the United States.
We're talking about, for example, 18.5 trillion dollars [blogspot.ca] hidden away in tax havens by wealthy individuals (not corporations hiding profits). We're talking about even Buffet, for whom we can I suppose presume that he is doing all things legally (i.e. not illegally hiding his wealth in Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands), saying that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. [cnn.com]
These are people who take their money, pay taxes on it as I described, put it in a foreign bank, and make foreign investments in a foreign land. Then, they don't pay taxes in their home country (e.g. United States) because their income-generating activities are occurring completely outside the tax jurisdiction of their home country.
I've known people who took jobs in Korea for 6 months at $120,000 USD/year and weren't required to pay U.S. taxes. It does seem to make some sort of sense that you can make a lot of money on activities done offshore and not pay taxes on it in the same way.
Not to mention that you just pulled some numbers out of a hat in your response, simply to make the numbers line up.
Ford Motor Company. Mark Fields, CEO. Total cash: $4,523,500. Equity (stocks): $14,298,356. Other: $435,639. Total: $19,257,495. Taxes paid on this would be (roughly) $7,625,968 million, requiring the sale of $3,102,468 of stocks. This leaves $6,672,388 of equity. If sold at a 10% gain on 15% capital gains tax, that's an additional $100,085. Total approximate tax rate: 38.776%.
You might notice the rate I came up with with the hypothetical CEO was 38.68%, a tad lower than Mark Fields. I purposely used an inflated equity compensation to allow the hypothetical CEO to reduce his tax burden by a larger margin, thus overestimating how much taxation an executive can avoid. In other words: my made-up numbers were designed to disadvantage my own argument.
Try it. Any business, any executive. I happen to be in the United States and this exact argument keeps coming up about the United States and it's provably wrong.
what happens in one case in the United States
Every case.
You're trying desperately to show no mechanism nor any understanding of how what you're babbling about might be true while just screaming that it must be because you heard it on Reddit a lot. You even pulled up a study you don't even understand, which essentially says people are playing foreign stock markets in foreign brokerages in the same way and with the same tax implications as locals doing it, but using imported money.
So in the United States, those people aren't selling a thing to someone and then not being taxed on their profits; they're not producing a thing which isn't being accounted for by our taxation; they're not smuggling their income unreported to a foreign shore and stuffing it in a nameless bank account. No, the rich people are getting huge executive compensations and paying taxes on them; then they're taking what's left of their money after taxes and sending it off to another country, where they play the securities markets. That doesn't have an impact on the United States economy.
Your explanation of what's happening (rich people moving their income away from the US without paying taxes on it) is wrong. Your basic understanding of the economics of what's actually happening is wrong. You're pretty mad about things you don't understand; perhaps you could try thinking for yourself now and then?
Would you be completely unproductive with your extra free time though? If you worked on some open source hobby project instead it's not like the world is worse off
This line of thinking is constant, and is also complete bullshit. The economy would be more-stable and more-efficient. People would consume more, and thus there would be an increase in demand for jobs. The only way we're getting more free time is if we respond to productivity increases by shortening working hours so we have a 28-32-hour work week (3.5-4 day full time) via an amendment of the Free Labor Standards Act.
The U.S. already spends huge sums of money on myriad social programs. Simplify the government side and do away with the bureaucracy for additional savings.
This is also a bad argument. I've actually designed a UBI framework for the United States. It's a Universal Social Security, and it's an expansion of OASDI. The Social Security Administration is so damned efficient that this works.
On the other side, we have shit like HUD and SNAP, which are efficient-ish but underperforming. HUD puts 75% of everyone on a waiting list and never pays benefits; SNAP isn't quite sufficient. Unemployment, as well, goes away when you get a job--meaning an equivalent $10.25/hr unemployment income (I got that) makes that $10.50/hr FedEx job really a $0.25 FedEx job.
The Government side of things is mainly fine in terms of overhead, and even faces surprisingly little loss to fraud and abuse; its major malfunction is not reaching enough people. The big efficiency savings is in the market economy around low-income households: there's too much financial risk in dealing with someone who works a low-wage, part-time job and occasionally goes on welfare.
Landlords are the easiest argument here, and also form the root. Landlords mean housing, and housing means residence; residence means you have a population, ergo a consumer base; and a consumer base means a stable market to which to sell. Opening a supermarket in a low-income area? How's that 5-year and 25-year population estimate look? Will a fluctuation in the job market destroy your business by taking away a chunk of the population capable of affording food?
Landlords have risks. A landlord has to pay for maintenance, taxes, and so forth. Empty units need to be cleaned, painted, exterminated, and the like; they increase common-area heating load; they contribute to building size, but not to income, and so can cost you in property taxes. Renter protection laws disallow landlords from raising rents more than 5% per year or executing an eviction for three months; and evictions entail legal filings, documentation, and physical labor (moving men) to throw all your shit out on the sidewalk. Then the city fines the landlord, so he has to pay for junk removal to avoid that.
In some cases, a unit empty for a single month can cost the entire year's profits. In small buildings, the risk of an empty unit is enormous, because it can eat your entire operating profit in just a few short months. Evictions are even worse. To offset this, the probability of these adverse events is multiplied by the cost, divided out by the number of units in a given group, and then added to the rent.
How does that impact our economy?
People with part-time, low-income jobs don't have much savings. They can have their hours cut. They can be fired or lain off. Welfare goes away after a little while; unemployment is less than your wage to begin with. Renter protection laws multiply these risks, thanks to that whole eviction thing.
Housing a low-income worker is riskier than housing a middle-classer. A larger, more-expensive apartment thus has a lower price per square foot than a small studio in the same area. The cost of risk demands it. At a point, your income is too low to afford the rent the landlord must charge to stay in business.
Then, stability of financial position--a lower probability of losing your livelihood, becoming homeless, and starving in the streets--would reduce stress, thus reducing the risk of addiction. Your shitty, low-income job would still be shitty, and you would only be able to go home to a greater guarantee of stability and fewer worries about where your next meal is coming from.
That seems like an improvement. It's not a panacea--the problem isn't going to go away entirely, and nothing's going to do that--only an operational improvement in efficiency.
So, increasing the price of goods such that demand is reduced and fewer long-term jobs exist is somehow solved by giving spikes of frantic purchasing at the end of the year?
Income taxes are bad because they make labour more expensive
Payroll taxes do that. Income taxes do a similar thing, but on the other end.
Income taxes don't drive prices up like sales and payroll taxes. They also have the great virtue of capturing a proportion of productivity by a direct representation, instead of dancing around the issue and pretending money is wealth.
Back in the 1950s, when automation was not as much of a thing and when it used mainly to get humans to work faster (not replace them), it didn't matter.
Wages are pay per time. Getting people to work faster is replacing people.
The only reason they exist is so the company can hire less people.
And, thus, can compete with every other company in its field and area by attracting more customers. How? Well, costs have gone down; with the same profit margins, our prices can be lower, and so more people will shop smart and shop S-Mart. That means more profits for us, less profits for G-Mart.
...until G-Mart, after rounds of lay-offs as S-Mart expands, starts installing self checkouts.
Also, income taxes disproportionately burden the middle class. Rich people find ways of avoiding it (they are rich enough to hire expert accountants and lawyers)
That is consistently not backed up by facts. I make $75k and I pay roughly $15k in taxes or roughly 30%. That's 12.6% in Federal taxes, 6.2% OASDI, 0.2% medicaid, and 7.6% state taxes, with $18,000 of deductions off Federal and State for my 401(k).
High-income earners are allowed to bank more into 401(k) if they are sole-proprieters--up to $120,000, just about. Other than that, you can negotiate a 100% 401(k) match from your employer if you're rich enough, so up to $18,000 or $120,000 if you're a sole-prorieter. Upon spending from the 401(k), you'll pay taxes on it, albeit less; if you're banking that much, it won't be much less, or you'll never spend it.
High-income executives receive income from many sources, including cash (salary, bonuses), options, stocks, and dividends. Cash and dividends are always taxed at the individual income tax rate--for people in that multi-million-dollar bracket, that's 39.6%. Dividends are even taxed if they're directly re-invested. Stocks are taxed at the market closing price on the day they're issued, if not sold in the same tax year. Options are taxed when exercised to issue stocks (that is: options aren't taxed; stocks are taxed).
When stocks are sold within a year, the difference in purchase and sale is considered individual income. That means stock issued as executive compensation sold in the same tax year is taxed at its sale price (easy). Stock sold later is taxed on the difference between its basis (market closing price at issue) and its sale price (a loss is deducted from taxes, but washing out a loss is not taxed and instead counted as continuous holding until you finally sell the stock for real). Stock held for less than one year is taxed at the individual rate when sold; stock held longer is taxed at 15% capital gains.
What does all this mean?
High-income executives pay full individual income taxes on cash salary, cash bonuses, issued stock when received (including stock issued via exercising options), any dividends for any stock they hold. They pay a lower tax (15% capital gains) on any profits from stocks held long-term, when sold, unless it's a wash sale (sold, then bought back soon after).
That's the most-complex tax structure the rich get.
Such a high-income executive must have some sort of cash income (even from stock sales) to cover these taxes.
many people propose a "wealth tax" as a way to fix most of those issues, but then you run into situations where the "wealth" is virtual and not liquid.
"Wealth Tax" just means people want to grab a chunk of some idle money. That's essentially printing money: money in banks unspent doesn't purchase goods, which means it doesn't provide the revenue stream that supports jobs, which means spending it creates inflation in the same way that removing money creates deflation.
A lot of people fail to understand this because banks loan money on hand (and fractional reserve). Thing is, money is generally moved between bank accounts: you get paid, it goes into your checking account; you pay your credit card, it moves from your checking account to your bank's holdings; you pay your landlord, you move money from your account to his; and so forth. That money's being spent, and it's providing a revenue stream. If you remove it, that spending vanishes; reasoning that some other spending doesn't vanish is just a serious deficit of attention span.
This is further complicated by monetary policy maintaining inflation (1.02% target in the U.S..), so the Treasury issues additional money to replace what's idle in the bank. If you pull $1Bn out and burn it, technically the 10:1 fractioning means the Treasury has to get $10Bn more into circulation by issuing $1Bn; whereas if you just let it sit in your bank account, the Treasury only has to issue $0.1Bn and the banks will provide loans to bring that up to $1Bn. Now you have an extra billion circulating because someone's got a billion in a bank account just sitting around.
My parents went from paying tax on a £45,000 house in 2000 to paying tax on a £210,000 house in 2015 - but my parents income hadn't changed in that time, and infact due to inflation it had devalued in real terms.
Yeah, that's a major problem with property taxes. They're basically a way to implement a progressive income tax without the politics of raising the tax rate, and of course you see a few of the flaws.
We have sales taxes on houses in some states, too, as well as capital gains taxes. That's also ridiculous. When a homeowner sells a house, he produces nothing; neither does the buyer. The realtor provides a service and takes a fee--a productive activity on which he pays income tax; likewise, the bank provides a service (loan) and takes a fee (origination, interest), and also pays income tax. When a builder builds a new house, they turn raw materials into a property, and sell it for a profit, and pay income tax on that. An old house isn't produced and doesn't count toward GDP, so what sense does taxation on the sale make?
Likewise, you go from having a house to not having a house, but having money. That's not quite income. I don't pay income tax on my car trade-in. If you're outside capital gains, you don't pay the first $250,000 of capital gains; everything above that is taxed as income. That means buying a house for $200,000 and selling it for $500,000 three years later nets you a tax bill for 15% of $50,000. What is that even taxing? "We saw money, so we want some of it."
Compare, for example, a farm.
Let's say you own a farm. You produce food for 1,000,000 people, with $100,000,000 of revenue--out of the eventual retail of food, you get $100 per person per year. You hire farm workers, pay their wages, deduct that. You buy fertilizer and pesticide, deduct that. You deduct your tractor and your irrigation costs. At the end of the year, you're operating on a 9% profit margin: $91,743,119 of costs, $8,256,881 of profit.
If all of your supply chain is domestic (e.g. American) and we tax you, all of them, and all of your workers (whose wages you deduct from your profits, thus you don't pay taxes on that) a net average of 15%, what do we have? We have enough tax revenue to buy 15% of the food you produce.
If nobody has income, how will you take their income through any other form of taxation?
You can represent every tax as an income tax. A sales tax at 6%, for a household which sends 40% of its income to purchases subject to a sales tax, is a 2.4% income tax. A sales tax at 45%, for the same household, is an 18% income tax. For an upper-class household which directs 80% of its income mutual funds, CDs, 401(k)s, and non-taxable purchases, those numbers are 1.2% and 9%.
That's why sales tax is cited as a regressive tax: it tends to tax poor people a bigger chunk of their income. That analysis is only possible by translating it to an income tax.
So here's the fun part: money represents production. You can't take things away that aren't made. Business profits plus wages equate to 100% of all productive activity in the tax domain (e.g. America) because consumers are taxed (wages) and stuff up the supply chain is expensed (including import labor or supply), meaning the total profits plus wages models out to the proportion of everything consumed by Americans which was actually supplied by American labor.
Your nation can only tax itself that much, full stop. It'll kill itself doing it, but that's what your taxes are cutting into.
If there's no income to tax, there's no production, and your economy has halted.
I'm a business nerd and an economics nerd. They're two vastly-different things.
You're trying to scream "LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION!!" as if you don't actually understand business. Maybe if you were a business nerd you would understand anything I said; instead you're just going, "Lulz, I put a shop where people walk, and they walk in! LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!"
Self-employed people with toy companies who think they're "a business" are the worst.
Sales tax is great. It'll keep those poors where they belong.
Seriously, income tax is the best form of tax. Anyone who proposes a sales tax and corporate taxes as a solution to anything has neither an understanding of how any part of economics works at all nor an ability to reason critically about anything.
It's not an increase in revenue; it's a decrease in costs.
Because of all sorts of economic factors that boil down to competition, businesses make a certain amount of profit. To profit, they must draw revenue in excess of costs. In the most-basic sense, revenue must exceed the wage costs, or else you can't pay your workers; each business in the supply chain has some profit margin which sets prices, and the entire stack can be squashed by major deals (e.g. a steelmaker buying hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal per year pays a lower mark-up than a guy on the street buying 40 pounds from the direct outlet), with the hard-stop at wages.
When costs come down, it becomes easier to compete. For luxury goods, costs come into range of what can target a consumer market, and so a competitor can target the 100,000,000 people you're not selling to and also offer a lower price to the 1,000,000 people you consider customers. For consumer goods, there's less cost invested in start-up and thus less risk; there's a greater market of which you must only capture a smaller proportion to profit, thus less risk; and existing competitors can capture broader markets and increase their profits by reducing their prices, but only to a certain point, and so a lower cost means the most-profitable price point in the competitive market is lower.
Generally, governments try to avoid deflation. Inflation isn't a tangible concept, because goods experience technical progress and thus cost and price changes at different rates; governments measure certain sets of consumer goods as an inflation index. Governments then issue money in such a way as to target some baseline inflation--it's 2% per year in the U.S..
As a result, 65-inch flat-panel OLED TVs get cheaper, hard drives get cheaper per gigabyte, and so forth; while food and clothing go up in price more-slowly than wages. Cars just keep folding in more features (more cost) as costs come down, and consumers keep spending the same proportion of their income on cars, so the prices tend to climb relative to wages anyway--just the feature set gets bigger.
So consumers end up with more spending power. They buy more goods, and thus cause new employment and new production.
In other words: the whole robot tax thing would, generally, lead to permanent unemployment and a welfare state, if not an outright economic collapse. It's just stupid.
First flaw: Ignoring how money gets into the system to pay out a UBI for 330 Million people. Print more like the Weimark Republic which ends up with collapse due to inflation (takes more than the current GDP of the USA to pay a basic living wage to the populace) or tax the producers
Income represents production. You make, you sell, people buy, that's income. Businesses deduct wages and supply from income, so eventually income represents profits plus wages. That means income represents everything produced and sold.
Printing money won't work. You have to use money as an abstraction to redistribute wealth--that is, products and services. Wealth only exists if it's produced, so you have to redistribute existing money. That's why we have taxes instead of just a printing press to make new dollars for every Government expense.
The latter already happens at a staggeringly high rate
The United States can deploy a Universal Social Security at a trillion dollars less burden on the taxpayer. That counts pay-outs in excess of taxes taken as "taxpayer burden". If you pay $20,000 in taxes and, under the USS, pay a total of $15,000 including the benefit (i.e. removing the money you receive from the taxes you pay), that's $5,000 less of burden. If you pay $500 in taxes and you end up with $7,000 from the Government, someone had to pony up that $6,500 difference--you put down the first $500 and we just gave it back.
No need to raise anyone's taxes.
The idea of UBI has been around for at least 70 years and nobody has seen any working models
Technical progress. The cost to produce things constantly goes down by way of reducing the total labor involved in that production. That means more stuff is produced per person each year--more-correctly, more stuff is produced per labor-hour worked.
Welfare isn't even possible if it requires 5% of our income and everyone is 2.5% of their income away from starving. Find a way to make more food with less labor and now everyone's 7% away from starving and you can (technically) take the extra.
The Universal Social Security I designed would have utterly crushed the United States in 1950. The income span would theoretically be $40k-$70k/year--nobody would be any richer than $70k. As if that wouldn't collapse the economy easily enough, you'd have to tax the rich at rates above 135% of their income if you used a stable taxation model. That's because a stable model uses a progressive-tax general fund and a flat-tax Social Security financing source, and the highest tax bracket would have still been over 90% while the USS tax in 1950 would have been over 40%.
In 2013, the USS tax needs to be 17%; it replaces 55% of the income taxes; and we can do it without increasing taxes on any income class.
numerous countries in Central and South America have started out with that ideal and quickly turned into tyrannical authoritarian regimes
There are a lot of bad UBI systems and, as stated above, you need to be a highly-developed economy in an absolute sense. Your level-of-technology has to be such that production of the things a UBI buys reflects a sufficiently-small proportion of your economy or you're proposing Marxism instead of cheap welfare.
UBI won't work, any more than any other communist utopian scheme works. Reason: Simple! Human nature!
A UBI can't provide a utiopian society because it can only fund from productive output. Income represents production, and you can only fund a UBI by a portion of income. If you just print new money, for example, then that money isn't backed by anything--it doesn't represent anything produced and sold, so it can't buy anything. Thus you only get inflation.
I designed a Universal Social Security years ago. It only works if humans are universally determined to economize--to maximize the ends derived from their means. That is to say: it only works if people are prone to do the least work for the most profit.
That doesn't seem supportable. Many towns with factory work have alcohol and opioid abuse problems; and many employers allow their employees to just not come to work high. I've known people who were sent home for shitting their pants while high on heroin.
Much of the time, the people with the lowest incomes or the greatest difficulty sustaining employment end up with substance abuse problems. Conversely, people with high addiction potential--those with alleles encoding delta-FosB more-readily in rewards responses--tend to not get their addictions under control until they stabilize their employment and personal lives, even when their employment is the same shitty factory job as habitual abusers.
The brain tends to follow the lowest-energy actions, such that the reflexive impulses formed in the midbrain occur without interruption. To override this, one must formulate new intent in the prefrontal cortex, then apply pressure via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Once the dlPFX is exhausted (ATP, neurotransmitter stores), self-control becomes difficult, and stress becomes a motivator.
Behavioral trends in population strongly suggest poverty is more-stressful than routine shitty employment. You suggest only a parallel construction.
Slashdot Mirror
You get your salary at the END of the month, not the beginning.
I have $3,000 in one of my bank accounts.
If there's a better argument for anti-trust investigations against Google than this, then I can't think of it.
That's because Google hasn't done anything to warrant any sort of anti-trust investigations.
Google's search results are returning worse data (robots.txt respected) because the end result has decided not to rely on ad-supported (meaning: Google AdSense supported since they have a lion's share on the industry) content rather than the website doing whatever makes sense for itself
Google serves the end user articles about the Chevy Bolt's new deals getting the batteries cheaper, and what that means for the cost of electric vehicles.
BusinessInsider, Slate, and Jalopnik have 6-page articles going into deep exploration of the recent changes in EV costs, adoption, environmental impacts, changes to manufacturing, and the resulting lower-prices, as well as what that means for the future. That's about what the end user is searching for.
WSJ only provides a link to a headline that says, "GM To Buy Chevy Bolt Batteries For $137/Cell", has a tag line, and has a single paragraph saying that GM has recently negotiated a deal to buy batteries cheaper. Then, "Click here to log into the Wall Street Journal and read this article."
On the one hand, the result a non-WSJ-subscriber gets doesn't provide the information he's looking for, and supplies less than BusinessInsider, Slate, and Jalopnik. On the other, WSJ gives the Google spider this page, so Google has no idea what WSJ's full article says. It could be a single additional paragraph that says the Bolt was originally going to cost $2,000 more but is cheaper, end of story. It could be a 9-page economic analysis of the history and future of EVs. Google doesn't know.
Clearly, Google can identify the non-WSJ sites as higher-quality information. WSJ is at best ambiguous.
I've been shuffling soda back into my diet. This weekend, when I drank only water, I came 1,800kcal short each day. Imagine losing 5 pounds every week.
If Neanderthal man had access to 44oz Pepsi products, they wouldn't have died out.
I found an article.
Well, I found the headline and first paragraph.
No idea if the content contains the information that the other article I read on the topic was lacking.
I could buy a subscription to this no-name "Wall" "Street" "Journal" and hope it has the information I want, or I could keep looking. If it doesn't have the information I want and I spend $105 on it, then what am I to do? Go pay NYT $40, and the Tribune $70, and so forth, just to peek at the same article on all of them hoping one has more details?
Paywalled information is less-relevant. LWN.net gives me everything 1 week behind, and I can pay them $10/month to see this week's publications; I actually had subscriptions when I was reading their site continuously.
Then, why would you be able to pay a janitor $2.40/hr? It wouldn't make any sense. It'd be a lot of work for nothing, and nobody would likely take the job. If they did take the job, they wouldn't likely stay very long at all. You'd have enormous staffing gaps and need to somehow get the janitorial work done, meaning you'd have to pay high wages to get a quick replacement or temporary contractor until you can find the next low-wage guy who will also quit in a week.
Not that you can't try, but you'll utterly fail. I'd argue that you wouldn't be able to pay a janitor $2.40/hr because nobody would take the job. Note that the AC is also being silly:
I can believe that people won't necessarily work less, but will we see a mass exodus out of low paying jobs? Is the extra $5K a year you'll make working as a janitor be worth it now?
Obviously, they'll have to get a viable paycheck.
Though, on both points, my own Universal Social Security takes a tax strategy that doesn't increase current taxes on anyone, and aims for viability by covering the retail prices of current goods plus risk (overbudgeting). The stable income reduces landlord costs (cost-of-risk: evictions and empty units are expensive, and landlords must divide the periodic cost across everyone's rent, raising rental prices) at low-income rent levels, thus allowing a rental market that today's economy simply cannot support. My model uses 224sqft single-individual apartments and a wide (25%-33%) risk margin.
The wage to provide a take-home pay matching the Social Security benefit in that scenario is about $4/hr. Doubling your income is kind of attractive; the $8.25/hr current minimum wage provides a pretty good standard-of-living bump over that. My plan also requires (initially) 5.3% OASDI on the payroll side (the paycheck OASDI withholding is replaced by the Universal Social Security withholding) to uphold Social Security retirement payments during the transition period; this is smaller than the 6.2% taken today, so any given wage costs the employer less.
It's more likely wages can come down without a minimum wage under the Universal Social Security I describe, as such a wage is substantial compared to not having it, and thus the Social Security benefit doesn't supply sufficient upwards pressure to raise wages. Wages wouldn't come down far, however, due to the Social Security benefit being substantial in itself. The impact of wage is also less because the payroll taxes are lower, so purchasing power would increase slightly.
Therefor both the mass-exodus from low-income jobs and the enormous reduction of low-income wages are unlikely, at best; pressures on both ends exist.
Your entire opening rebuttal was that location matters so very, very much.
speaking as someone who's run a business for 12 years, location, sadly, is quite important. He might be on to something here.
It's been an argument back and forth about location not being important if your office location isn't your major interaction point with, you know, damned near everyone. Moving the goalposts now that you lost?
Took you all weekend for this shitnugget?
No, I studied German, wrote a (very poorly-written) speech, and fed kittens during the weekend. Slashdot is a 9-5 site; nobody checks this shit from home.
You might find people who will janitor for a hobby, sure. I doubt you'd find a stable and sufficient base of labor that wants to work all the low-income jobs as hobby, though--and even then, not without perceived-fair pay.
You suggested that you'd be able to pay people an unfairly-low wage (so low it doesn't give them any advantage) because there's no minimum wage and no need for one, and supported this by suggesting that minimum wage is there because people are lacking negotiating power and now they have power because they can just walk and so can negotiate a fair wage. These are conflicting positions. The term for that is "cognitive dissonance".
Fair enough. You're still wrong and you still haven't demonstrated how you're not wrong other than going "DUHRR NUH UH U DUM". You seem to be blowing hot air out your ass.
transitionary stopgaps aren't really terribly relevant to a discussion of the systems that will replace them
So, to replace Social Security, let's pay less than what the average recipient receives, but to everyone. Oh, and for the millions who rely on that income as-is today, or in retirement in the next 5 years... well, fuck 'em.
No?
You see, son, if you want to fix a damaged valve in a person's heart, the first thing you have to talk about is how you're going to get into their heart without them dying on the table. Great that they have a working heart afterwards--too bad they're long-dead.
And even as a stopgap that defeats much of the purpose of a UBI, as you still have all the bureaucratic overhead of verifying need-based aid.
I actually expect the public aid for dependents of low-income households to be permanent, or at least semi-permanent. It's not a way to hold the system in a stable state during transition; it's the best long-term plan I have.
As for bureaucratic overhead and such, that's not actually a thing--at least, not a substantial thing. Welfare is generally cheap to administrate. The problems are largely in terms of delays and false-negatives: you have to apply for welfare, and they have to approve you.
With a functional UBI, the size of the public aid system shrinks dramatically. That removes a large amount of risk and cost, allowing the system to focus on delivering on its mission more-effectively. That's a big step up.
As for expanding the system to provide said aid for everyone? It'd multiply the cost of such aid by an order of magnitude. That means people in the middle- and upper-classes would lose the advantage of a UBI unless they had children of their own to claim some of the cost they're paying for everyone else's children. We're talking about 1.4% of your income versus some 8%-10%, and in both cases not paying that money back to everyone evenly, as a UBI would.
Functionally, this means single individuals and couples without children are second-class citizens. Really, it means single-individuals are fourth- or fifth-class citizens, after married couples with lots of kids, single parents with kids, married couples without kids, and unmarried couple households. I suppose it's an interesting way to make the gays pay back the tax benefit they get from legalized gay marriage, if that's your angle: a hefty fine on non-reproducing households.
So you've defined a qualifying aid system with a qualifier of how many children you have, rather than of how much income you have. It takes from some people and gives only to certain other people; rather than all sharing the cost, some bear the cost.
Under a UBI, you get a check from the government. If you get $50,000 today and then, next year, you get $40,000 + $10,000, you're still receiving the same income.
Employers have to pay wages. I generally count "wages" as including benefits, payroll taxes, and other per-worker-hour costs when modeling economics, although any discussion that's going that deep is too complex to simplify with imprecise terminology. In this case, every reasonable definition--correct or not--works: if the employer is paying you less per hour in your pay check, then your cost to the employer is lower.
Note that lowering the cost of labor by lowering payroll taxes also has interesting effects. It slows the job replacement that comes with technical progress without slowing technical progress. That is to say: if you make $50,000 and your employer pays 10% payroll taxes, you cost $55,000 (a difference of $2.5/hr). If the TCO of a new machine that does the work of 4 employees is $210,000/year, then it's cheaper to replace the employees (not necessarily strategic at this time); if you cut the payroll tax to below 5%, then it's cheaper to keep the employees. This lengthens strategic delays and, thus, increases the span of time between layoffs due to this new machine.
The same is true of wages. A minimum-wage policy without frequent updates to correct for inflation et al will experience drift such that minimum-wage workers become poorer, and the number of minimum-wage jobs (and total jobs, if you swap two minimum-wage earners for one person making twice that) supportable by the economy increases. When updates are then made, a lot of jobs are lost--primarily minimum-wage and low-wage jobs. Frequent updates to minimum wage reduce the magnitude of oscillation: minimum-wage workers don't have their buying-power compensation decreased quite so much before adjustment, and adjustments don't reduce the carry capacity of jobs nearly as much.
The minimum-wage thing is interesting for a few reasons. For one, it suggests that a UBI's adjustment period is similarly-important for similar reasons. More-importantly, the spike in unemployment slows growth, and notably slows labor market growth--more early retirement, less late retirement, fewer people exiting college early to enter the workforce, etc. The opposite is similarly true. A long span between updates to a minimum wage (or a UBI) can, thus, have adverse effects on the unemployment market, and the stability of the economy at large.
So a lot of things go into these kinds of economic policies. Nobody ever thinks about any of it. Cost of labor versus income is one such consideration.
PHEVs have a double-digit range (e.g. the Volt has 58 miles, 420-ish total). All-electric cars have multi-hunded-mile ranges. Tesla's early vehicles were 180-ish miles; Chevrolet has the 238-mile Bolt.
Charge times on a home charger (220V) at 30A put on about 20-25 range-miles per hour (3-4 miles per kWh; I get 3.3 in the winter and as high as 4.2 in the summer). 220V at 40A gets you 25-35 miles; the popular 9.6kW all-electric on-board for 240V at 40A is 29-36 range-miles per hour. The Bolt can take an 80kW charger; at 40kW, it pulls 120-160 range-miles per hour.
ChargePoint supplies chargers that can easily spit out 130kW (390-520 range-miles per hour) or even up to 700kW, but no cars support that; even using an off-board charge circuit, the TMS generally can't dissipate that much heat. Future EVs capable of accepting high-rate charging will need a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and off-board TMS, such that the charging station will couple and begin pumping coolant through a second coolant loop in your TMS radiator, and follow up with an air flush (to push the coolant out).
This would allow a larger radiator or a heat pump to chill the coolant, while your TMS can conduct directly to a liquid cooling loop instead of an air-cooled radiator. The amount of load this can handle is immense: a small counterflow exchanger can easily take in coolant at 140C and bring it to 10C, so the limit is generally based on if you can cycle coolant fast enough to get it to the exchanger before it boils.
Batteries don't degrade as quickly as expected. There are Chevrolet Volts with 300,000 miles and no range loss; Teslas fare less-well due to heavier duty cycles, losing some 4% in 100,000 miles (20% was predicted).
The difference is largely headroom and the BMS, especially TMS. That last 5% on a Lithium battery pushes you from the near-flat voltage curve to a steep voltage curve (e.g. 3.29-3.31V 5%-95%, then when you pass 95% charge you suddenly shoot up until 3.7V at full charge). Unbalanced cell charges cause more strain even within low-stress operating ranges; a BMS will balance the state-of-charge. Likewise, without a TMS, the battery gets really hot and generally experiences severe temperature swings, which is why the Nissan Leaf practically destroys its battery, sometimes losing as much as 40% of its range in 3 years or ~50,000 miles.
I bought my Volt second-hand for $12k and have driven it pretty much only on electricity. These cars will be attractive to the masses when you can get a $21k all-electric Cobalt or Focus instead of having to spend $35k. They'll likely ship 6.6kW chargers, which will give the capacity to come home from most commutes (~30 miles each way, though ~18 miles covers 70% of all commutes) and have the car topped up in an hour or so; high-power onboard chargers will be an option, as it adds a thousand or three to the cost of the car. Long-range drivers will need to go with offboard charging as described, as that's a hell of a lot of heat to dissipate and you don't want to pay an extra $10k to have an enormous charge and cooling circuit you only need on long trips.
It's actually happening faster and more-reliably than I predicted. The pieces are all falling into place.
OMG TRADE WAR WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU!!11!.
So here's the thing.
Your country can produce cars for $40k. The next country can produce and import equivalent cars for $30k. Let's assume that you have wage-equivalence (not US vs China), so the next country over just has a better infrastructure (e.g. they have water, ore, and other resources close enough to expend less effort getting the same result; given the same technology, you're always going to spend 1/3 more to make the same cars).
People in your country buy those cars for $30k. You have like 5% unemployment (the U.S. constantly trends toward that; it's 2% for Japan; more on that in a minute). That's cool.
Now you slap a 100% tariff on those cars. The import cars now cost $60k, your domestic cars cost $40k. People begin spending $10k more on new cars; however, they can't spend that $10k on much else. Jobs are lost; fortunately, because you're working on wage-equivalent labor in both countries, the extra $10k spent on cars supports the additional jobs required in your auto industry to meet demand. Your country makes fewer things; people buy less stuff; and you're overall a poorer nation.
The nation on the other side, meanwhile, has lost your population as an auto market. They're also somewhat poorer: they don't have the market, thus no revenue stream, thus employment bumps up a bit. That's a problem.
Fortunately, in a few short years (it's like 1-3), the rate of early entry to the workforce (dropping out of college) goes down; the rate of early retirement increases and the rate of late retirement decreases (average retirement age falls); and, as a final saving throw, immigrant labor slows. Long-term, the birth rate falls a bit. Unemployment goes back to its normal (which was also 5% in that country). That's Malthusian growth.
The people selling you cars are no poorer nor richer; you're poorer, and you can't resolve that without restoring trade.
Should the people who were selling you cheap cars then retaliate with their own foolishness, cutting their own noses to spite their faces, making themselves poorer by restricting imports from your nation? It will make them poorer as well, and give you the temporary ache of a swift kick (same as you gave them), but ultimately not harm your economy in the long run.
Of course not. How ridiculous. They should just complain about the temporary economic situation, continue to lavish in the wealth obtained by importing from your country, and let you enjoy the bitter fruits of your own self-destruction.
Note: in the event that you were trading on a wage differential, cutting off imports will diminish your job market. Importing from a country with cheap wages supports domestic infrastructure markets such as shipping and retail; blocking that trade and increasing the prices of those goods by tariff or by shifting to expensive domestic production means a dramatic reduction in purchaseable goods, and no reduction in the amount of goods shipped and retailed by the same number of labor-hours. In other words: you lose tons of jobs in moving goods around, and create fewer jobs in making goods (if you're making them domestically at all).
Imports give you a trade advantage in efficiency (reduced cost of goods, increased amount purchaseable per labor-hour worked). Exports give you a trade advantage in size (population growth). Losing either of these hurts; losing imports hurts more and hurts everybody in your country, while losing exports hurts specific industries and thus specific people.
You missed the part where the money gets shuffled off to a tax haven.
That's done by businesses purchasing their goods and services from a subsidiary off-shore. The CEO, however, still gets his executive compensation in the United States.
We're talking about, for example, 18.5 trillion dollars [blogspot.ca] hidden away in tax havens by wealthy individuals (not corporations hiding profits). We're talking about even Buffet, for whom we can I suppose presume that he is doing all things legally (i.e. not illegally hiding his wealth in Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands), saying that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. [cnn.com]
These are people who take their money, pay taxes on it as I described, put it in a foreign bank, and make foreign investments in a foreign land. Then, they don't pay taxes in their home country (e.g. United States) because their income-generating activities are occurring completely outside the tax jurisdiction of their home country.
I've known people who took jobs in Korea for 6 months at $120,000 USD/year and weren't required to pay U.S. taxes. It does seem to make some sort of sense that you can make a lot of money on activities done offshore and not pay taxes on it in the same way.
Not to mention that you just pulled some numbers out of a hat in your response, simply to make the numbers line up.
Ford Motor Company. Mark Fields, CEO. Total cash: $4,523,500. Equity (stocks): $14,298,356. Other: $435,639. Total: $19,257,495. Taxes paid on this would be (roughly) $7,625,968 million, requiring the sale of $3,102,468 of stocks. This leaves $6,672,388 of equity. If sold at a 10% gain on 15% capital gains tax, that's an additional $100,085. Total approximate tax rate: 38.776%.
You might notice the rate I came up with with the hypothetical CEO was 38.68%, a tad lower than Mark Fields. I purposely used an inflated equity compensation to allow the hypothetical CEO to reduce his tax burden by a larger margin, thus overestimating how much taxation an executive can avoid. In other words: my made-up numbers were designed to disadvantage my own argument.
Try it. Any business, any executive. I happen to be in the United States and this exact argument keeps coming up about the United States and it's provably wrong.
what happens in one case in the United States
Every case.
You're trying desperately to show no mechanism nor any understanding of how what you're babbling about might be true while just screaming that it must be because you heard it on Reddit a lot. You even pulled up a study you don't even understand, which essentially says people are playing foreign stock markets in foreign brokerages in the same way and with the same tax implications as locals doing it, but using imported money.
So in the United States, those people aren't selling a thing to someone and then not being taxed on their profits; they're not producing a thing which isn't being accounted for by our taxation; they're not smuggling their income unreported to a foreign shore and stuffing it in a nameless bank account. No, the rich people are getting huge executive compensations and paying taxes on them; then they're taking what's left of their money after taxes and sending it off to another country, where they play the securities markets. That doesn't have an impact on the United States economy.
Your explanation of what's happening (rich people moving their income away from the US without paying taxes on it) is wrong. Your basic understanding of the economics of what's actually happening is wrong. You're pretty mad about things you don't understand; perhaps you could try thinking for yourself now and then?
Would you be completely unproductive with your extra free time though? If you worked on some open source hobby project instead it's not like the world is worse off
This line of thinking is constant, and is also complete bullshit. The economy would be more-stable and more-efficient. People would consume more, and thus there would be an increase in demand for jobs. The only way we're getting more free time is if we respond to productivity increases by shortening working hours so we have a 28-32-hour work week (3.5-4 day full time) via an amendment of the Free Labor Standards Act.
The U.S. already spends huge sums of money on myriad social programs. Simplify the government side and do away with the bureaucracy for additional savings.
This is also a bad argument. I've actually designed a UBI framework for the United States. It's a Universal Social Security, and it's an expansion of OASDI. The Social Security Administration is so damned efficient that this works.
On the other side, we have shit like HUD and SNAP, which are efficient-ish but underperforming. HUD puts 75% of everyone on a waiting list and never pays benefits; SNAP isn't quite sufficient. Unemployment, as well, goes away when you get a job--meaning an equivalent $10.25/hr unemployment income (I got that) makes that $10.50/hr FedEx job really a $0.25 FedEx job.
The Government side of things is mainly fine in terms of overhead, and even faces surprisingly little loss to fraud and abuse; its major malfunction is not reaching enough people. The big efficiency savings is in the market economy around low-income households: there's too much financial risk in dealing with someone who works a low-wage, part-time job and occasionally goes on welfare.
Landlords are the easiest argument here, and also form the root. Landlords mean housing, and housing means residence; residence means you have a population, ergo a consumer base; and a consumer base means a stable market to which to sell. Opening a supermarket in a low-income area? How's that 5-year and 25-year population estimate look? Will a fluctuation in the job market destroy your business by taking away a chunk of the population capable of affording food?
Landlords have risks. A landlord has to pay for maintenance, taxes, and so forth. Empty units need to be cleaned, painted, exterminated, and the like; they increase common-area heating load; they contribute to building size, but not to income, and so can cost you in property taxes. Renter protection laws disallow landlords from raising rents more than 5% per year or executing an eviction for three months; and evictions entail legal filings, documentation, and physical labor (moving men) to throw all your shit out on the sidewalk. Then the city fines the landlord, so he has to pay for junk removal to avoid that.
In some cases, a unit empty for a single month can cost the entire year's profits. In small buildings, the risk of an empty unit is enormous, because it can eat your entire operating profit in just a few short months. Evictions are even worse. To offset this, the probability of these adverse events is multiplied by the cost, divided out by the number of units in a given group, and then added to the rent.
How does that impact our economy?
People with part-time, low-income jobs don't have much savings. They can have their hours cut. They can be fired or lain off. Welfare goes away after a little while; unemployment is less than your wage to begin with. Renter protection laws multiply these risks, thanks to that whole eviction thing.
Housing a low-income worker is riskier than housing a middle-classer. A larger, more-expensive apartment thus has a lower price per square foot than a small studio in the same area. The cost of risk demands it. At a point, your income is too low to afford the rent the landlord must charge to stay in business.
To put this into
Then, stability of financial position--a lower probability of losing your livelihood, becoming homeless, and starving in the streets--would reduce stress, thus reducing the risk of addiction. Your shitty, low-income job would still be shitty, and you would only be able to go home to a greater guarantee of stability and fewer worries about where your next meal is coming from.
That seems like an improvement. It's not a panacea--the problem isn't going to go away entirely, and nothing's going to do that--only an operational improvement in efficiency.
So, increasing the price of goods such that demand is reduced and fewer long-term jobs exist is somehow solved by giving spikes of frantic purchasing at the end of the year?
Income taxes are bad because they make labour more expensive
Payroll taxes do that. Income taxes do a similar thing, but on the other end.
Income taxes don't drive prices up like sales and payroll taxes. They also have the great virtue of capturing a proportion of productivity by a direct representation, instead of dancing around the issue and pretending money is wealth.
Back in the 1950s, when automation was not as much of a thing and when it used mainly to get humans to work faster (not replace them), it didn't matter.
Wages are pay per time. Getting people to work faster is replacing people.
The only reason they exist is so the company can hire less people.
And, thus, can compete with every other company in its field and area by attracting more customers. How? Well, costs have gone down; with the same profit margins, our prices can be lower, and so more people will shop smart and shop S-Mart. That means more profits for us, less profits for G-Mart.
Also, income taxes disproportionately burden the middle class. Rich people find ways of avoiding it (they are rich enough to hire expert accountants and lawyers)
That is consistently not backed up by facts. I make $75k and I pay roughly $15k in taxes or roughly 30%. That's 12.6% in Federal taxes, 6.2% OASDI, 0.2% medicaid, and 7.6% state taxes, with $18,000 of deductions off Federal and State for my 401(k).
High-income earners are allowed to bank more into 401(k) if they are sole-proprieters--up to $120,000, just about. Other than that, you can negotiate a 100% 401(k) match from your employer if you're rich enough, so up to $18,000 or $120,000 if you're a sole-prorieter. Upon spending from the 401(k), you'll pay taxes on it, albeit less; if you're banking that much, it won't be much less, or you'll never spend it.
High-income executives receive income from many sources, including cash (salary, bonuses), options, stocks, and dividends. Cash and dividends are always taxed at the individual income tax rate--for people in that multi-million-dollar bracket, that's 39.6%. Dividends are even taxed if they're directly re-invested. Stocks are taxed at the market closing price on the day they're issued, if not sold in the same tax year. Options are taxed when exercised to issue stocks (that is: options aren't taxed; stocks are taxed).
When stocks are sold within a year, the difference in purchase and sale is considered individual income. That means stock issued as executive compensation sold in the same tax year is taxed at its sale price (easy). Stock sold later is taxed on the difference between its basis (market closing price at issue) and its sale price (a loss is deducted from taxes, but washing out a loss is not taxed and instead counted as continuous holding until you finally sell the stock for real). Stock held for less than one year is taxed at the individual rate when sold; stock held longer is taxed at 15% capital gains.
What does all this mean?
High-income executives pay full individual income taxes on cash salary, cash bonuses, issued stock when received (including stock issued via exercising options), any dividends for any stock they hold. They pay a lower tax (15% capital gains) on any profits from stocks held long-term, when sold, unless it's a wash sale (sold, then bought back soon after).
That's the most-complex tax structure the rich get.
Such a high-income executive must have some sort of cash income (even from stock sales) to cover these taxes.
Let's say the executive gets $4M of cash, $
many people propose a "wealth tax" as a way to fix most of those issues, but then you run into situations where the "wealth" is virtual and not liquid.
"Wealth Tax" just means people want to grab a chunk of some idle money. That's essentially printing money: money in banks unspent doesn't purchase goods, which means it doesn't provide the revenue stream that supports jobs, which means spending it creates inflation in the same way that removing money creates deflation.
A lot of people fail to understand this because banks loan money on hand (and fractional reserve). Thing is, money is generally moved between bank accounts: you get paid, it goes into your checking account; you pay your credit card, it moves from your checking account to your bank's holdings; you pay your landlord, you move money from your account to his; and so forth. That money's being spent, and it's providing a revenue stream. If you remove it, that spending vanishes; reasoning that some other spending doesn't vanish is just a serious deficit of attention span.
This is further complicated by monetary policy maintaining inflation (1.02% target in the U.S..), so the Treasury issues additional money to replace what's idle in the bank. If you pull $1Bn out and burn it, technically the 10:1 fractioning means the Treasury has to get $10Bn more into circulation by issuing $1Bn; whereas if you just let it sit in your bank account, the Treasury only has to issue $0.1Bn and the banks will provide loans to bring that up to $1Bn. Now you have an extra billion circulating because someone's got a billion in a bank account just sitting around.
My parents went from paying tax on a £45,000 house in 2000 to paying tax on a £210,000 house in 2015 - but my parents income hadn't changed in that time, and infact due to inflation it had devalued in real terms.
Yeah, that's a major problem with property taxes. They're basically a way to implement a progressive income tax without the politics of raising the tax rate, and of course you see a few of the flaws.
We have sales taxes on houses in some states, too, as well as capital gains taxes. That's also ridiculous. When a homeowner sells a house, he produces nothing; neither does the buyer. The realtor provides a service and takes a fee--a productive activity on which he pays income tax; likewise, the bank provides a service (loan) and takes a fee (origination, interest), and also pays income tax. When a builder builds a new house, they turn raw materials into a property, and sell it for a profit, and pay income tax on that. An old house isn't produced and doesn't count toward GDP, so what sense does taxation on the sale make?
Likewise, you go from having a house to not having a house, but having money. That's not quite income. I don't pay income tax on my car trade-in. If you're outside capital gains, you don't pay the first $250,000 of capital gains; everything above that is taxed as income. That means buying a house for $200,000 and selling it for $500,000 three years later nets you a tax bill for 15% of $50,000. What is that even taxing? "We saw money, so we want some of it."
Compare, for example, a farm.
Let's say you own a farm. You produce food for 1,000,000 people, with $100,000,000 of revenue--out of the eventual retail of food, you get $100 per person per year. You hire farm workers, pay their wages, deduct that. You buy fertilizer and pesticide, deduct that. You deduct your tractor and your irrigation costs. At the end of the year, you're operating on a 9% profit margin: $91,743,119 of costs, $8,256,881 of profit.
If all of your supply chain is domestic (e.g. American) and we tax you, all of them, and all of your workers (whose wages you deduct from your profits, thus you don't pay taxes on that) a net average of 15%, what do we have? We have enough tax revenue to buy 15% of the food you produce.
What we
If nobody has income, how will you take their income through any other form of taxation?
You can represent every tax as an income tax. A sales tax at 6%, for a household which sends 40% of its income to purchases subject to a sales tax, is a 2.4% income tax. A sales tax at 45%, for the same household, is an 18% income tax. For an upper-class household which directs 80% of its income mutual funds, CDs, 401(k)s, and non-taxable purchases, those numbers are 1.2% and 9%.
That's why sales tax is cited as a regressive tax: it tends to tax poor people a bigger chunk of their income. That analysis is only possible by translating it to an income tax.
So here's the fun part: money represents production. You can't take things away that aren't made. Business profits plus wages equate to 100% of all productive activity in the tax domain (e.g. America) because consumers are taxed (wages) and stuff up the supply chain is expensed (including import labor or supply), meaning the total profits plus wages models out to the proportion of everything consumed by Americans which was actually supplied by American labor.
Your nation can only tax itself that much, full stop. It'll kill itself doing it, but that's what your taxes are cutting into.
If there's no income to tax, there's no production, and your economy has halted.
I'm a business nerd and an economics nerd. They're two vastly-different things.
You're trying to scream "LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION!!" as if you don't actually understand business. Maybe if you were a business nerd you would understand anything I said; instead you're just going, "Lulz, I put a shop where people walk, and they walk in! LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!"
Self-employed people with toy companies who think they're "a business" are the worst.
Sales tax is great. It'll keep those poors where they belong.
Seriously, income tax is the best form of tax. Anyone who proposes a sales tax and corporate taxes as a solution to anything has neither an understanding of how any part of economics works at all nor an ability to reason critically about anything.
It's not an increase in revenue; it's a decrease in costs.
Because of all sorts of economic factors that boil down to competition, businesses make a certain amount of profit. To profit, they must draw revenue in excess of costs. In the most-basic sense, revenue must exceed the wage costs, or else you can't pay your workers; each business in the supply chain has some profit margin which sets prices, and the entire stack can be squashed by major deals (e.g. a steelmaker buying hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal per year pays a lower mark-up than a guy on the street buying 40 pounds from the direct outlet), with the hard-stop at wages.
When costs come down, it becomes easier to compete. For luxury goods, costs come into range of what can target a consumer market, and so a competitor can target the 100,000,000 people you're not selling to and also offer a lower price to the 1,000,000 people you consider customers. For consumer goods, there's less cost invested in start-up and thus less risk; there's a greater market of which you must only capture a smaller proportion to profit, thus less risk; and existing competitors can capture broader markets and increase their profits by reducing their prices, but only to a certain point, and so a lower cost means the most-profitable price point in the competitive market is lower.
Generally, governments try to avoid deflation. Inflation isn't a tangible concept, because goods experience technical progress and thus cost and price changes at different rates; governments measure certain sets of consumer goods as an inflation index. Governments then issue money in such a way as to target some baseline inflation--it's 2% per year in the U.S..
As a result, 65-inch flat-panel OLED TVs get cheaper, hard drives get cheaper per gigabyte, and so forth; while food and clothing go up in price more-slowly than wages. Cars just keep folding in more features (more cost) as costs come down, and consumers keep spending the same proportion of their income on cars, so the prices tend to climb relative to wages anyway--just the feature set gets bigger.
So consumers end up with more spending power. They buy more goods, and thus cause new employment and new production.
In other words: the whole robot tax thing would, generally, lead to permanent unemployment and a welfare state, if not an outright economic collapse. It's just stupid.
First flaw: Ignoring how money gets into the system to pay out a UBI for 330 Million people. Print more like the Weimark Republic which ends up with collapse due to inflation (takes more than the current GDP of the USA to pay a basic living wage to the populace) or tax the producers
Income represents production. You make, you sell, people buy, that's income. Businesses deduct wages and supply from income, so eventually income represents profits plus wages. That means income represents everything produced and sold.
Printing money won't work. You have to use money as an abstraction to redistribute wealth--that is, products and services. Wealth only exists if it's produced, so you have to redistribute existing money. That's why we have taxes instead of just a printing press to make new dollars for every Government expense.
The latter already happens at a staggeringly high rate
The United States can deploy a Universal Social Security at a trillion dollars less burden on the taxpayer. That counts pay-outs in excess of taxes taken as "taxpayer burden". If you pay $20,000 in taxes and, under the USS, pay a total of $15,000 including the benefit (i.e. removing the money you receive from the taxes you pay), that's $5,000 less of burden. If you pay $500 in taxes and you end up with $7,000 from the Government, someone had to pony up that $6,500 difference--you put down the first $500 and we just gave it back.
No need to raise anyone's taxes.
The idea of UBI has been around for at least 70 years and nobody has seen any working models
Technical progress. The cost to produce things constantly goes down by way of reducing the total labor involved in that production. That means more stuff is produced per person each year--more-correctly, more stuff is produced per labor-hour worked.
Welfare isn't even possible if it requires 5% of our income and everyone is 2.5% of their income away from starving. Find a way to make more food with less labor and now everyone's 7% away from starving and you can (technically) take the extra.
The Universal Social Security I designed would have utterly crushed the United States in 1950. The income span would theoretically be $40k-$70k/year--nobody would be any richer than $70k. As if that wouldn't collapse the economy easily enough, you'd have to tax the rich at rates above 135% of their income if you used a stable taxation model. That's because a stable model uses a progressive-tax general fund and a flat-tax Social Security financing source, and the highest tax bracket would have still been over 90% while the USS tax in 1950 would have been over 40%.
In 2013, the USS tax needs to be 17%; it replaces 55% of the income taxes; and we can do it without increasing taxes on any income class.
numerous countries in Central and South America have started out with that ideal and quickly turned into tyrannical authoritarian regimes
There are a lot of bad UBI systems and, as stated above, you need to be a highly-developed economy in an absolute sense. Your level-of-technology has to be such that production of the things a UBI buys reflects a sufficiently-small proportion of your economy or you're proposing Marxism instead of cheap welfare.
UBI won't work, any more than any other communist utopian scheme works. Reason: Simple! Human nature!
A UBI can't provide a utiopian society because it can only fund from productive output. Income represents production, and you can only fund a UBI by a portion of income. If you just print new money, for example, then that money isn't backed by anything--it doesn't represent anything produced and sold, so it can't buy anything. Thus you only get inflation.
I designed a Universal Social Security years ago. It only works if humans are universally determined to economize--to maximize the ends derived from their means. That is to say: it only works if people are prone to do the least work for the most profit.
That doesn't seem supportable. Many towns with factory work have alcohol and opioid abuse problems; and many employers allow their employees to just not come to work high. I've known people who were sent home for shitting their pants while high on heroin.
Much of the time, the people with the lowest incomes or the greatest difficulty sustaining employment end up with substance abuse problems. Conversely, people with high addiction potential--those with alleles encoding delta-FosB more-readily in rewards responses--tend to not get their addictions under control until they stabilize their employment and personal lives, even when their employment is the same shitty factory job as habitual abusers.
The brain tends to follow the lowest-energy actions, such that the reflexive impulses formed in the midbrain occur without interruption. To override this, one must formulate new intent in the prefrontal cortex, then apply pressure via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Once the dlPFX is exhausted (ATP, neurotransmitter stores), self-control becomes difficult, and stress becomes a motivator.
Behavioral trends in population strongly suggest poverty is more-stressful than routine shitty employment. You suggest only a parallel construction.
If you're satisfied living on $1.50 a day, congratulations
In practice, you've probably got major depressive disorder.