Lower taxes. By $1 trillion. No tax increases; lower payroll taxes; lower business income taxes; and we can eventually lower the taxes on the upper bracket a bit.
Productivity increases cause a reduction in the fraction of production which represents the same purchasing power per person, thus a lower tax rate can supply sufficient funding. Take a middle-ground, reduce the taxes sustaining the system slightly, thus reducing the taxes on the uppermost incomes, and keep the remainder as an increase in standard-of-living from the poorest up through the upper-middle-class.
Stop looking at the one-sentence description of a concept and trying to project what it would do. Write a comprehensive tax plan to implement it and work out its effects from there.
It assumes most people will find meaninful work, when the reality is, most people won't
Your life: 224sqft one-occupancy apartment; enough to eat only home-cooked food (it's food, at least), buy some clothes, pay your utility bills, buy soap and the like, and come out $50-$70 cash in hand at the end of the month. You are the lowest of low, the poorest in the land.
What do you do? You can't buy toys. You can't buy a car (or afford the gas or insurance anyway). You can't buy fancy, expensive dresses. You can't buy an Xbox. You can't have sex with hot girls, because the guy who works part-time at McDonalds is like... twice as rich as you, and impressive because he's so god damned rich and you're so poor, and is nailing all the hot ladies.
Your social position requires a bigger income. That requires employment. Even failing that, you better not plan on being an artist or anything in your spare time, because a sketchpad and some pencils is an enormous luxury expense.
The only sustainable financing of a UBI is production-based, which means "fixed proportion of all income".
As such, it's $1 trillion cheaper than current welfare systems, gets cheaper over time (because of the constant productivity gains of trade and technical progress), and actually achieves the goals of welfare pretty reliably.
For example, I'd probably not have gotten a job after graduating
Why? Do you want to live in a 224sqft apartment, scraping together the cost of food on a strict budget, with minimal amenities and little spending money available ever?
It's not like you're going to get a two-bedroom apartment, middle-class food plan, and a new car on a UBI. We can eliminate homelessness and hunger; we can get people additional income to help them fund their retirement; we can shore up retirees--not so much as Social Security does now, but enough that adding their lifetime UBI to their retirement UBI gets them slightly more than today's OASDI. Mostly, we can patch the welfare system up.
Life isn't meant to be bad on a UBI; you're just the lowest level of barely-surviving bottom feeder, by mathematical necessity. If you have $0, then UBI is what you have; nobody is poorer than you. If hobo-in-a-shack with full confidence in your next meal seems good to you, even though your next meal is the kind of gruel you can afford as a poor person, well, that's a bug I can't resolve in the system: the clinically-depressed will tend to float to the bottom and coast due to a mental disorder that robs them of all motivation.
I'd actually like to see some comprehensive plans for European countries.
In the United States, it's possible to implement a full-UBI as a Universal Social Security with a net reduction of $1 trillion of taxpayer cost, measured as displacement of income. That is: about $1.8 trillion flows through the Universal Social Security system, leaving a bunch of extra income above the tax burden in lower-income hands (e.g. you make $10k but end up with $15k after taxes). That extra income isn't "lower taxpayer cost"; it is the taxpayer cost. Incomes above a certain threshold still pay taxes versus not having the USS; those taxes are less than the current taxes paid to sustain welfare structure, and the difference in total there is the taxpayer savings.
Designing, validating, and transitioning onto such a system is a highly-complex engineering task, though. Building that kind of policy requires a deep understanding of modern welfare systems, the current economy, fluctuations in the economy, and so forth; you have to prevent a negative impact at any future point while remediating existing shortcomings of the welfare system.
In the case of the United States, it's so much cheaper because raising taxes on the rich to fund it is non-viable. Before a certain point, it's possible, but only with higher taxes on the rich or high taxes on the middle-class to offset the benefit. There's essentially a taxation cliff where your marginal tax burden starts running up sharply, then runs back down. Think like the middle-class would pay 70%, then the rich would re-enter a 39.6% tax bracket. Not doable. Instead, you have to wait until you can keep the taxes a smooth progression, without raising taxes on the rich; thus the tax brackets on the middle-class are lower than the top tax brackets, and the middle-class receives the USS benefit without having it taxed right back away.
The end result is that, for the rich, the USS benefit is tiny--it's the same amount the poor get, and so represents a small fraction of rich-people income. Meanwhile, the discount to the middle-class is huge. That effectively extends welfare upwards as a tax discount: the rich aren't taxed more, and they're not taxed less; the middle-class are taxed less; and the poor are provided for.
Ideally, we want the effective taxes to come down; it's just not possible right now. The USS can eventually eliminate about 6% from the payroll tax (it eliminates OASDI, only after a rather lengthy transition period--it may take 30-40 years for that to finally be fully-transitioned), reducing the cost of wages to the employer (e.g. rather than having to pay $50,000 wages plus $3,200 of OASDI+HI, the employer pays $50,000 wages plus $100 of HI). It also lowers business income taxes by some 4% marginal (roughly 11% proportional reduction) due to the way I cut the tax brackets.
The reduced cost of employment should slow and spread technological unemployment, which means advancing technology (like wooden shipping pallets or self-driving cars) should integrate over a longer span, while people will cost less to hire back into new jobs. That means the rise of unemployment in faster technical progress is slower, and the creation of new jobs is faster, lessening the impact and shortening the duration of recessions from sudden bolts in progress.
In the long term, technical progress reduces the cost of goods and services and increases the buying power of money. For example: the cost of domestic shipping is roughly 50% of the retail price of most goods, and quite high for food in particular; self-driving freight trucks will cut that cost back some, so imagine food costing e.g. 10% less, then 25% less. Electric freight trucks will also cut back on maintenance costs, but I don't project much more than a 50% decrease in shipping costs, and even that's going to take at least a decade after self-driving trucks actually hit the roads.
This reduction allows an increase in the standard-of-living of the poor, and c
So, discouraged workers count mothers who quit their jobs and then become stay-at-home mothers because their husband raises enough money, even though these people are no longer interested in work; but stops counting them after one year, and appropriately tallies them as not in the labor force?
Politically, reality doesn't matter. Your accountability relies on being able to convince people you were or were not responsible. Trump's administration wants to be responsible for this end of the bubble, and will realize they really don't when it pops.
Obama legitimately was in charge all through the turn-around of the economy. That wasn't residual Bush-administration policy causing the Great Recession to clean itself up; it was either the economy fixing itself or the Obama administration fixing it.
Trump's administration is setting themselves up, though. These UE numbers are too low. There's a bubble somewhere here, and Trump's policies don't work toward market stability; the bubble's going to pop, and pop hard, and he's claiming responsibility now for the current market. Whether you want to blame the bubble on Obama or on the market players, Trump's loudly taking responsibility for it right now, and he's doing nothing to keep it from eventually bursting and bursting hard.
Both Bush and Clinton were warned about the housing and dot-com bubbles. I don't see anyone warning Obama or Trump about what's happening right now.
U-3 tells you what kind of job-seeking competition is out there. As the available employment increases, U-4 discouraged workers would become U-3 active workers, slowing the fall of U-3. That mean U-3 tells you how competitive the job market is.
U-6 is not "the true unemployment"; it's a measure including people who are underemployed, who are unable to get jobs because of their economic situation (e.g. single mothers who couldn't take a job if you begged them, because they can't afford daycare and you're not willing to pay enough), and so forth.
Each unemployment measure has its uses. We're used to U-3 largely because it tells us how much competition is out there for a job of any sort; U-4 tells you how many people are out there actually unemployed, though. Underemployment (included in U-6) is another important statistic nobody looks at. The U-5 addition (people who can't take a job even if offered one, but wish they could) is fairly-unimportant in terms of unemployment measures.
U-6 still doesn't tell you about a few interesting things, like how much employment is actually available versus your participating labor force. Unemployment includes the people in U-5 because those people are interested in working, thus are part of the participating labor force. Because of that, U-6 plus employed persons equates to all participating labor force. Thing is, U-6 includes underemployment; that doesn't tell you about whole jobs.
If you have three underemployed working 20, 15, and 23 hours per week, you have 58 hours or 1.45 whole jobs between three people. A measure of whole jobs is useful; also useful is a measure of whole jobs counting part-time employment of people who want to be part-time employed as "whole jobs" (that is: if a working spouse has a 12-hour weekend job, that's a whole job because said person neither needs nor desires 40 hours of employment).
So that gives you three whole-employment indicators we don't track: WE-1 (number of whole jobs, including all full-time workers plus the fraction of full-time hours worked by hourly-paid part-time workers); WE-2 (WE-1, plus part-time workers not seeking full-time jobs are counted as whole jobs instead of partial jobs); and WE-3 (WE-2, plus full-time workers and workers with multiple jobs exceeding full-time hours have their total hours counted and fractioned, such that a person working 60 hours per week counts as 1.5 whole jobs).
First, the jobs are going to be lost anyway - or did you not read the story, and all the other ones lately, about the impact of silicon on jobs?
That's called "Technical Progress", and it's been happening for thousands of years. You know how we have running water now? That's because some stuff that would require a greater proportion of the labor than possible became doable in less.
One of my favorite examples is iron. The new hot-blast furnace we came up with a couple hundred years ago? It lets us make 86,400 tonnes of iron using the same labor that previously made 200 tonnes of iron. That means 99.8% of the jobs required to make all of the iron we use aren't required because we invented a machine that does it with fewer people working. This is why we can build railroads, engines, and pipelines to pump running water through treatment plants and into your home.
Circa 1920, we invented the wooden shipping pallet. Wooden shipping pallets let you wrap up a bunch of goods and move the pallets around, rather than stacking and unstacking the goods at every demarcation point. In one early test, unloading a shipment of stacked canned goods required a team of railroad workers three 16-hour days--a full 48-hours. The same job with the same number of cans palletized required 4 hours. The wooden shipping pallet eliminated 91.7% of shipping jobs.
That's what technical progress is: we invent a new process or a new tool to reduce the amount of labor. Now we pay for fewer working-hours, thus fewer wages. How do you think the price of computers, TVs, and the like has come down? How do you think we've gone from spending 40% of our income in 1900 on food to 33% in 1950, and then to 15% in 1990? Do you think they just had a gigantic profit margin at the farm and we've cut it back? Of course not. The number of worker hours invested to make an amount of food has been dramatically cut back; the number of worker hours used to ship an amount of food has decreased; and a cashier can perform 980 item scans per second.
So up to 1948, we had a labor force participation rate of 58%-59%, and unemployment tended to stabilize around 5% (it got really damned high around the Great Depression). After that, it spiked up as high as ~68%, and is currently around 65%; unemployment still stabilizes around 5% (it got as high as 10% at the peak of the 2008 Great Recession). We've been getting rid of all the jobs. How the hell is everyone still working?
You charge VAT on the finished goods.
Your accounting of inputs and outputs can't just be "steel bought" and "products shipped", though. Part of that steel becomes waste material, which is thrown out. Now you have to account for a VAT on that. Not only that, but it's a legal process, and subject to legal audits. If you're using a flow system where you've roughly calculated a product's costs, added a margin, accounted for risks, and use that as a selling price, you might actually be a bit off and be pulling an additional amount of profit; this is easy when you're basically filling a hopper for each input, instead of counting the exact number of screws going into each product (e.g. when you're making injection-molded parts, you tend to slightly-underestimate how many parts you can make from a given stock of plastic). Now you're committing tax fraud.
As for the upper class, why not charge a sales tax on stocks and bonds? You're buying an asset - why should you get a tax break for one asset class and not for another?
Because it's not considered a sale. We consider stocks and bonds as an asset, so you effectively still have "something". We consider most things consumers buy as "consumables", aside from stuff like houses (on which we don't charge sales tax). It makes sense. It makes less sense when you realize we consider cars, tables, chairs, and other such things as assets for a business, but consumables for an individual; and t
A slice of whole-grain multigrain bread has fewer calories than a slice of white bread, with 69 compared to 74. Those 5 calories, man,
it's so important that your 550kcal sandwich be 545kcal.
Really, though, insoluble fiber is a non-essential nutrient. It's mostly talked up as a means of reducing colon cancer, even though scientific studies haven't been able to confirm any consistent association between colon cancer and fiber intake. Soluble fiber and resistant starch are equivalent, and provide food for gut flora. Other than that, insoluble fiber can slow food absorption, reducing the glycemic index of foods; this isn't important if you aren't taking in so much carbohydrate as to cause insulin-related problems anyway.
I just keep carbohydrates in the 25%-40% range of my diet, and avoid high amounts of fiber. I had to get a rectal exam after the most-recent uptick in fiber intake; exceeding 7g/day is painful, and passing 10g/day lead to me squirting a discharge of blood. My doctor says my colon is healthy and I probably just tore a blood vessel and bled a lot into my rectum. I'm a single data-point, and wouldn't much matter if it weren't for the fact that there are millions of others sensitive to fiber, and that practically nobody in any developed economy actually gets more than 10g of fiber a day, much less the ridiculous 25g people recommend.
Personally, my theory is a longer travel time correlates to higher insoluble fiber sensitivity; that stuff builds up if you're not crapping it out every day, and some people have as much as two weeks between bowel movements. I can get as high as 70% by mass fiber content in my feces pretty easily, meaning I get a piece of engineered wood in a fatty binder matrix--a pretty rigid material that's resistant to water. It's not hard when you realize I've got over half a kilogram of fiber in there on 25g/day.
Fiber has definite impacts on digestion, which have downstream health impacts. The dubious bits--the parts actual nutrition scientists (not nutritionists, but the researchers trying to find new knowledge) freely claim as unsupported--are its impacts on colon cancer and constipation. We know it affects intestinal fermentation, carbohydrate absorption, and cholesterol absorption; we also know it's non-essential.
So don't bring fiber into the conversation if you want to be taken seriously. It's the last refuge of people without an argument about nutrition. "But... but... but fiber!"
Then there's things like you questing broccoli because it doesnt have a lot of calcium.
Uh, no. Broccoli is "high in calcium". The problem is it's low in everything else, and "high in calcium" is ~8%DV per serving. My point was you can't make your entire diet broccoli, and mixing the little spikes of nutrients from various fruits and vegetables is an enormous engineering task to get just the right balance; whereas animal foods come right in with a good, moderate level of damn near everything.
So this, right here, is you attempting to use a broken argument. Apparently you didn't read what I said, so let's try again:
Of course it doesnt have a lot of calcium compared to animal sources, it's a plant.
Animal sources provide roughly the same level of calcium as a proportion of necessary intake as they do for nearly every other nutrient. That means animal sources are a decent source of everything except vitamin C and E in particular. Plant sources are generally deficient in everything except one or two specific nutrients, and so you need to mix various plant sources to try and engineer a food that's not nutritionally-barren.
The conversation was never about fat in peoples diet
What's so great about whole grains and more vegetables if it's not the nutrient content? Whole grains and vegetables are the worst source of micronutrients.
Whole grains are superior to the bleached stuff both nutritionally and in regards to its impact on blood sugar levels.
In the same way a Snickers bar with 280kcal of sugar is superior to a Snickers bar with 281kcal of sugar.
Whole grains don't contain any significant increase in nutrient content. They are bleached white grain with some husk and 0.1% more of some micronutrients.
Your rejection of veggies i find to be kind of laughable when they are a staple of any major diet suggested by mainstream nutritionists
I explained micronutrient levels and the nutritional value. You appealed to authority. You're basically telling me facts don't matter unless they're accepted by a specific person.
There is no science that supports that position. Every study that comes close is obviously biased for a specific result, and horribly invalid.
Stop reading Atkins fad diets. The high-quality studies use unrestricted-calorie diets with a restriction on carbohydrates or fat. Those are diets where people eat bread, potatoes, pasta, and the like, not candy bars and cake icing.
Oh, right, right. You're using a strawman argument, got it. You have no actual defense, so you make something up for the express purpose of attacking it.
"Capital" in developed economy means things like machines, tools, office equipment, and the like. Solid objects and durable goods. You yourself called robots "Capital Input".
Do you think the unemployed coal miners and truck drivers can retrain to become youtube stars?
Alright let's talk reality for a second. People are unemployed. There's a baseline 5% unemployment rate that fluctuates up and down--people need jobs, and some of those people don't have them.
The "retraining" argument is a persistent fallacy: we don't turn a cola miner into a computer engineer; we turn them into a construction worker or something. There are a lot of overlapping skill sets, and people shift from one career to another based on that overlap. Believe it or not, coal miners aren't low-grade retards who can barely figure out how to pull their head out of their own ass and so got thrown down a deep hole with a shovel; they have skills you can't comprehend, and they're broadly-applicable in a multitude of engineering fields. Let's not forget we mine salt, ffs; coal isn't the only useful, solid thing found in the ground.
Even that argument is shoddy because much of the transitioning out is just a matter of adjusting the inflow.
The thing about not writing a 5-page dissertation every time I respond to a bad economics argument is people move right to the next thing. I keep saying this all over the place: time is a factor. If you unemploy 30% of your workforce in 2 months, you get high unemployment and your economy hits The Great Recession; if you do it over 10 years, not so much.
So you're worried about "permanent unemployment", but we're talking about transitioning over ten years. In the longer time frame, you get a lot of churn of retiring, and a lot of movement in the industry: some of the people who are let go are at retirement age, or so close that they just work retail for a few years; others aren't, and end up replacing the guy who retires 3-5 months later. They don't have to retrain.
Again: "adjusting the inflow". Who replaces the retiree? A new entrant to the field. What if the field is shrinking? Retirees go out; people who still need jobs go out; and now you have people who need jobs floating around looking for jobs. Now you have a labor oversupply, and you don't need to bring in as much new labor as people retire or die in mining accidents.
"Permanent unemployment" happens when you nuke your economy by creating high unemployment all-at-once. Those people don't retrain, either,
because the economy's too fucked up at that point to provide the jobs anyway.
So that brings us to another problem here: everyone wants to move person X from one job to the next job, and leave person Y who is already-unemployed to be permanently unemployed. Because unemployment is always a thing, you can't transition out of unemployment unless someone is transitioning into unemployment. At that level, it's a matter of numbers.
In other words: your argument's major flaws are that it doesn't apply in an economy that's transitioning slow enough to not damage itself; it doesn't apply in an economy that transitions suddenly and damages itself; and, if it did apply, it would be an argument that poor and homeless people should be condemned to unemployment forever for the crime of already being unemployed.
Live in a bigger world. You're thinking on the scale of a grain of sand and you're in the middle of a desert.
The problem comes when you have $3.20/hr labor versus $21/hr labor--although the worldwide data suggests a manufacturing job in the United States actually carries a cost of $78/hr.
I use pants as a model. Given the number of pants imported, their price at import, their price at retail (average $14.56), and the price of shipping (40-foot shipping container from China imports for under $1,300 with 20,000 pairs of pants, or 6.5 cents per pair), I came up with some numbers.
Those numbers start with $6.12 for the pants when they land in an American port; $6.055 of Chinese labor at $3.20/hr; and 1.89 hours of Chinese labor from the cotton farming and dying to the construction of the pants themselves, assuming 100% of all of that is done in China (frequently, it's Indian cotton).
From there, you can run some numbers. Benefits are said to be 25%-40%, but I used 18%; payroll taxes are 6.4% (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% medicaid). Let's assume Americans build the same product, as building a different product would change the cost and the economics--a shoddier product would cost less and replace more-frequently, while a sturdier product would cost more and replace less-frequently; either of these could ultimately cost less or more in total, e.g. a sturdier product could last 1.5x as long and cost 2x as more, thus is a loss, or it could cost 1.5x as much and last 2x as long, thus is a gain. Mind you, a sturdier product could also be built in China for cheaper, and would result in the same direct comparison model as below.
At $8.25/hr minimum wage using American-grown, American-woven, American-died cotton, you're looking at $10.36/hr, or pants that cost $27.02 more per pair--that $14.56 becomes $41.58. That means the minimum-wage worker must work 5.04 hours instead of 1.76 hours--an extra 3.28 hours of work--to afford a pair of pants. The median $54,000/year household must work 1.54 hours instead of 0.54 hours--an extra 1 hour. Pants retail for roughly 2.86 times the price, hence why people have to work 2.86x as long to earn wages to buy a pair.
Note that this means the factory workers themselves are less-capable of buying pants. If we use a direct model of people simply buying fewer pairs of pants, we lose retail, shipping, and other service and support jobs; and we create jobs in manufacture of pants.
At minimum-wage with 18% benefits overhead and a total cost of $10.36/hr, Americans can afford to purchase 68,632,996 pairs of pants rather than 196,000,000. Long story short, by producing all Chinese pants in the United States, you create 59,898 American factory jobs and lose 53,910 shipping, retail, and other supporting jobs. That's a net creation of 5,988 American jobs.
As you can imagine, the break-even point is rather low. It's somewhere around $20/hr of total cost, or an $18/hr wage. Net-zero job creation. Above that, you lose jobs.
Imagine what it looks like at $78/hr, the actual average cost of manufacturing in America. (That number shocked me, because I thought it was ~$21/hr wage, plus taxes and benefits.)
At $78/hr, you're looking at an increase in the price of trousers from $14.56/pair to $155.86. A minimum-wage worker must now work 18.9 hours and spend nearly half a week's pre-tax income on a pair of pants; the median American income provides this in only 5.77 hours of work. Pants cost 10.7x as much.
So we import about 196,000,000 pairs of trousers at a cost of $1,197,391,000. They retail for $2,853,760,000. At $155.86 per pair, Americans can afford to purchase 18,309,765 pairs of trousers or 9.3% as many using their same income. The total theoretical new jobs are 171,056 out of 320,000,000 Americans, or 0.053%; there is no economic argument that "the money stays in America" or that "the manufacturer workers will make up the difference".
Because literally 99.94% of the country is buying less, fewer things are sold, and less shipping and retailing goes on, and jobs go away; plus those people ca
He was saying that with numbers like 300, 1,000,000, and 999,970, the last two things are not meaningfully-different and trying to claim that the last is superior because lower numbers are better is plain stupid, if not deceptive and dishonest.
Whole grain and bleached white flour are the same thing, except whole g
rain has slightly more fiber and a negligible increase in micronutrients.
Whole grains are a marketing gimmick. They contain a negligible increase in micronutrients and a marginal amount of additional fiber (and fiber is overhyped at best).
High amounts of sodium are harmful. "High amounts" would be intake over 6,000mg/day. The anemic sodium intake above which people believe salt is unhealthy is ridiculously-low, and the amount Americans eat is well-below anything concerning.
Fruits and vegetables are generally nutritionally-deficient, with many having a particularly-imbalanced profile. This leads to things like a serving of broccoli providing 8%DV of calcium being "high in calcium," while you would need to get a minimal proportion of calories from broccoli to not end up with severe micronutrient deficiencies. Meats have better vitamers (e.g. Vitamin A retinol is 6x as biologically active as Vitamin A beta-carotine), and have a more-level and more-complete micronutrient profile for vitamins, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sulfur, silicon, iron, and most other minerals.
The major exception is Vitamin C. Vitamin C is available in specific organ meats from specific animals in low concentrations; it's highly-available from plant sources. Vitamin E is also generally better-available from some specific plant sources (not broadly available, like C).
The big argument between plants versus meat is mainly that meat has fat and plants have sugar. People are trying to decide which is bad for you, which is why 20 years ago eggs were a deadly disease inflicted on humanity and would murder you by plugging your heart with cholesterol while today we talk about how eggs are fine because consumed cholesterol doesn't impact blood cholesterol levels at all and debate on whether sugar or all carbohydrates cause an increase in LDLs.
The things we actually know are pretty limited. One, as above, that cholesterol intake doesn't affect your blood cholesterol level. The other is that complex carbohydrates (starches) are absorbed more-slowly than simple sugars and don't spike your blood glucose levels (insulin and diabeetus issues).
Beyond that, we've actually got tentative scientific consensus that saturated fat intake doesn't actually cause heart disease; an open question on whether trans-fats are actually harmful; and a scientific view that carbohydrate intake might cause heart disease, but probably only at high levels (10% is considered "low-carb", and the 25%-40% range has been cited as the "tolerable range" for carbohydrate intake; meanwhile, our decades-old nutrition guidelines suggest 70% carbohydrate intake).
Low-fat, low-sodium diets are a matter of engineering (and common knowledge) lagging science, and science unapologetically claiming that this stuff is hard and not well-understood. Fiber has a broad range of effects, with soluble fiber (and resistant starch) feeding intestinal microflora, and fiber in general slowing down certain digestive processes and nutrient absorption; people focus a lot on insoluble fiber and its effects in reducing colon cancer and constipation, both of which have been thoroughly-debunked in the past two decades. Diets centered on fruits and vegetables produce micronutrient deficiencies, while diets high in animal products and low in plant products almost never have deficiencies.
Basically, the public understanding of salt and fat lags science; while fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are an unscientific fad that refuses to die.
That's not why Trump did it, though. Trump repealed this shit because Obama's name is on it. Basically, Trump doesn't know any of this; he's just an asshole.
I eat like 5,000mg sodium per day. The doctors told me my blood pressure was too high and I needed to eliminate salt to get rid of the 147/97 that showed up for 2 months. I eliminated the amphetamine salts. When it happened again, I had the dose of Atomoxetine lowered to something that wouldn't cause tachycardia and serotonin mania. 123/79, suck it.
My family history is loaded with cardiovascular problems, thyroid disease, and schizotypal personality disorders. I'm not fat and didn't buy into the low-sodium/low-fat diet; I also don't eat like 6 ice cream bars every day when they're around, and generally graze on sweets. I eat in meals--frequently meals like Popeye's fried chicken (shitloads of sodium and saturated fat). 5 years ago I moved into a house with no stove, and it's been like 3 years since I ate something that wasn't fast food; removing the vending machine visits (candy and chips) and not overeating straightened out the extra 20 pounds I was carrying.
I'm still stuck with ADHD (hyperactivity variant, near as I can tell; attention issues if I don't sleep), some severe insomnia, and schizoid personality disorder (downgraded from schizotypal once I rejected my dad's constant conspiracy theories and magical thinking). I like schizoid personality disorder. Major depressive disorder might be in there somewhere, but I don't want to self-diagnose depression and I need some time to chew on that one; the implications are unpleasant. (I start things but lose motivation almost immediately; I thought that was just ADHD, but "bored of everything" and "no sense of achievement" goes together with the anhedonia to make a textbook case for MDD--and I don't feel depressed, so my first impulse is to reject depression as a thing; plus I don't want to start a new saga of even more drugs unless I have a clear idea of what I'm trying to do, considering SPD makes it really uncomfortable to ask doctors for drugs.)
The thing is nutrition is mostly voodoo. Nutrition researchers freely admit this; nutritionists (engineers) work from their textbooks in full faith.
VAT and sales taxes are the worst taxes. VAT is retardedly-complex, too, because you have to figure out the marginal difference between inputs and outputs. That means a shipment of 50,000 tonnes of metal used to make 20 different products has to be accounted for between products, precisely, as a matter of taxes.
Meanwhile, you manage to bump up the price of goods, reducing the number of goods people can buy, thus reducing the demand for shipping, retail, and production. You do this without that price increase going to anyone's wages in the production chain of the good. This reduces the number of goods purchaseable, causing loss of jobs; and it raises prices, which mostly impacts the poor, secondly the middle-class, and least the rich upper-class who tend to buy investment securities and non-sales-taxed services.
The only argument for a VAT is it's verbose because of its complexity, so it makes you sound smart when you talk about it.
Industrial revolution happened too fast. Spiking unemployment by 30% all at once will destroy your economy; replacing 30% of all employment over 10 years will make your economy flinch, then catch up. Look at the computer age.
When a person has an income, he works, and produces an output of his labor. Your time gets you a wage and produces a good or service.
When a business produces goods, it applies labor. It applies domestic labor and pays local wages (taxed). It applies foreign labor by importing goods and outsourcing services (not taxed--not produced here, not an output of our labor). It buys things from other businesses (taxed at the other business). It then sells those goods at a price above the cost of all inputs and is taxed on the difference--the profit is also taxed.
So what does your national economy produce?
All business revenue minus all import goods and services equals all money spent on all goods produced in your economy.
So we subtract the stuff businesses source from other businesses. If that's a domestic business, then it pays its taxes, and so we deduct those expenses from revenue so that production isn't double-taxed. If it's not a domestic business, it's not stuff produced here, and that cost isn't part of our economy's productive output.
What about wages?
Well, you could just tax businesses on wages; that means you have to tax some 30% to equate to the flat personal income tax equivalent of our current income tax system. That, in turn, means that low-income workers (e.g. minimum wage) cost the business 30% more, and don't receive that much money. For a minimum-wage worker a $16,500/year, their taxes are 10% of $10,000 (standard deduction for a single individual deducted), or $1,000; whereas the increase in cost to the business is $4,950 if we tax revenue instead of wages.
So all costs and the requisite prices go up substantially, while the lower- and middle-class take-home income goes up less. You have to break about $260k to be advantaged in this system. That means that over 95% of Americans are less-capable of purchasing as much stuff, so less gets bought, and the number of jobs is reduced. "Less-capable of purchasing as much stuff" is a complicated way to say "poorer".
The same place where a company with a loss pays their payroll. Gosh, these questions are easy. Did you think about them before you posted them?
You could have just said, "They'll have to raise prices." Instead, you gave a non-answer, and mocked the other person for asking you to think for two seconds about the giant hole in your brilliant plan.
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especial when taxes start to creep over 50%
Lower taxes. By $1 trillion. No tax increases; lower payroll taxes; lower business income taxes; and we can eventually lower the taxes on the upper bracket a bit.
Productivity increases cause a reduction in the fraction of production which represents the same purchasing power per person, thus a lower tax rate can supply sufficient funding. Take a middle-ground, reduce the taxes sustaining the system slightly, thus reducing the taxes on the uppermost incomes, and keep the remainder as an increase in standard-of-living from the poorest up through the upper-middle-class.
Stop looking at the one-sentence description of a concept and trying to project what it would do. Write a comprehensive tax plan to implement it and work out its effects from there.
It assumes most people will find meaninful work, when the reality is, most people won't
Your life: 224sqft one-occupancy apartment; enough to eat only home-cooked food (it's food, at least), buy some clothes, pay your utility bills, buy soap and the like, and come out $50-$70 cash in hand at the end of the month. You are the lowest of low, the poorest in the land.
What do you do? You can't buy toys. You can't buy a car (or afford the gas or insurance anyway). You can't buy fancy, expensive dresses. You can't buy an Xbox. You can't have sex with hot girls, because the guy who works part-time at McDonalds is like... twice as rich as you, and impressive because he's so god damned rich and you're so poor, and is nailing all the hot ladies.
Your social position requires a bigger income. That requires employment. Even failing that, you better not plan on being an artist or anything in your spare time, because a sketchpad and some pencils is an enormous luxury expense.
we need to find sustainable financing
The only sustainable financing of a UBI is production-based, which means "fixed proportion of all income".
As such, it's $1 trillion cheaper than current welfare systems, gets cheaper over time (because of the constant productivity gains of trade and technical progress), and actually achieves the goals of welfare pretty reliably.
For example, I'd probably not have gotten a job after graduating
Why? Do you want to live in a 224sqft apartment, scraping together the cost of food on a strict budget, with minimal amenities and little spending money available ever?
It's not like you're going to get a two-bedroom apartment, middle-class food plan, and a new car on a UBI. We can eliminate homelessness and hunger; we can get people additional income to help them fund their retirement; we can shore up retirees--not so much as Social Security does now, but enough that adding their lifetime UBI to their retirement UBI gets them slightly more than today's OASDI. Mostly, we can patch the welfare system up.
Life isn't meant to be bad on a UBI; you're just the lowest level of barely-surviving bottom feeder, by mathematical necessity. If you have $0, then UBI is what you have; nobody is poorer than you. If hobo-in-a-shack with full confidence in your next meal seems good to you, even though your next meal is the kind of gruel you can afford as a poor person, well, that's a bug I can't resolve in the system: the clinically-depressed will tend to float to the bottom and coast due to a mental disorder that robs them of all motivation.
I'd actually like to see some comprehensive plans for European countries.
In the United States, it's possible to implement a full-UBI as a Universal Social Security with a net reduction of $1 trillion of taxpayer cost, measured as displacement of income. That is: about $1.8 trillion flows through the Universal Social Security system, leaving a bunch of extra income above the tax burden in lower-income hands (e.g. you make $10k but end up with $15k after taxes). That extra income isn't "lower taxpayer cost"; it is the taxpayer cost. Incomes above a certain threshold still pay taxes versus not having the USS; those taxes are less than the current taxes paid to sustain welfare structure, and the difference in total there is the taxpayer savings.
Designing, validating, and transitioning onto such a system is a highly-complex engineering task, though. Building that kind of policy requires a deep understanding of modern welfare systems, the current economy, fluctuations in the economy, and so forth; you have to prevent a negative impact at any future point while remediating existing shortcomings of the welfare system.
In the case of the United States, it's so much cheaper because raising taxes on the rich to fund it is non-viable. Before a certain point, it's possible, but only with higher taxes on the rich or high taxes on the middle-class to offset the benefit. There's essentially a taxation cliff where your marginal tax burden starts running up sharply, then runs back down. Think like the middle-class would pay 70%, then the rich would re-enter a 39.6% tax bracket. Not doable. Instead, you have to wait until you can keep the taxes a smooth progression, without raising taxes on the rich; thus the tax brackets on the middle-class are lower than the top tax brackets, and the middle-class receives the USS benefit without having it taxed right back away.
The end result is that, for the rich, the USS benefit is tiny--it's the same amount the poor get, and so represents a small fraction of rich-people income. Meanwhile, the discount to the middle-class is huge. That effectively extends welfare upwards as a tax discount: the rich aren't taxed more, and they're not taxed less; the middle-class are taxed less; and the poor are provided for.
Ideally, we want the effective taxes to come down; it's just not possible right now. The USS can eventually eliminate about 6% from the payroll tax (it eliminates OASDI, only after a rather lengthy transition period--it may take 30-40 years for that to finally be fully-transitioned), reducing the cost of wages to the employer (e.g. rather than having to pay $50,000 wages plus $3,200 of OASDI+HI, the employer pays $50,000 wages plus $100 of HI). It also lowers business income taxes by some 4% marginal (roughly 11% proportional reduction) due to the way I cut the tax brackets.
The reduced cost of employment should slow and spread technological unemployment, which means advancing technology (like wooden shipping pallets or self-driving cars) should integrate over a longer span, while people will cost less to hire back into new jobs. That means the rise of unemployment in faster technical progress is slower, and the creation of new jobs is faster, lessening the impact and shortening the duration of recessions from sudden bolts in progress.
In the long term, technical progress reduces the cost of goods and services and increases the buying power of money. For example: the cost of domestic shipping is roughly 50% of the retail price of most goods, and quite high for food in particular; self-driving freight trucks will cut that cost back some, so imagine food costing e.g. 10% less, then 25% less. Electric freight trucks will also cut back on maintenance costs, but I don't project much more than a 50% decrease in shipping costs, and even that's going to take at least a decade after self-driving trucks actually hit the roads.
This reduction allows an increase in the standard-of-living of the poor, and c
So, discouraged workers count mothers who quit their jobs and then become stay-at-home mothers because their husband raises enough money, even though these people are no longer interested in work; but stops counting them after one year, and appropriately tallies them as not in the labor force?
Politically, reality doesn't matter. Your accountability relies on being able to convince people you were or were not responsible. Trump's administration wants to be responsible for this end of the bubble, and will realize they really don't when it pops.
We mine salt, metal, and other stuff.
U-4 is published. Even U-6 is only 8.6%, and it counts people who stopped looking.
Obama legitimately was in charge all through the turn-around of the economy. That wasn't residual Bush-administration policy causing the Great Recession to clean itself up; it was either the economy fixing itself or the Obama administration fixing it.
Trump's administration is setting themselves up, though. These UE numbers are too low. There's a bubble somewhere here, and Trump's policies don't work toward market stability; the bubble's going to pop, and pop hard, and he's claiming responsibility now for the current market. Whether you want to blame the bubble on Obama or on the market players, Trump's loudly taking responsibility for it right now, and he's doing nothing to keep it from eventually bursting and bursting hard.
Both Bush and Clinton were warned about the housing and dot-com bubbles. I don't see anyone warning Obama or Trump about what's happening right now.
U-3 tells you what kind of job-seeking competition is out there. As the available employment increases, U-4 discouraged workers would become U-3 active workers, slowing the fall of U-3. That mean U-3 tells you how competitive the job market is.
U-6 is not "the true unemployment"; it's a measure including people who are underemployed, who are unable to get jobs because of their economic situation (e.g. single mothers who couldn't take a job if you begged them, because they can't afford daycare and you're not willing to pay enough), and so forth.
Each unemployment measure has its uses. We're used to U-3 largely because it tells us how much competition is out there for a job of any sort; U-4 tells you how many people are out there actually unemployed, though. Underemployment (included in U-6) is another important statistic nobody looks at. The U-5 addition (people who can't take a job even if offered one, but wish they could) is fairly-unimportant in terms of unemployment measures.
U-6 still doesn't tell you about a few interesting things, like how much employment is actually available versus your participating labor force. Unemployment includes the people in U-5 because those people are interested in working, thus are part of the participating labor force. Because of that, U-6 plus employed persons equates to all participating labor force. Thing is, U-6 includes underemployment; that doesn't tell you about whole jobs.
If you have three underemployed working 20, 15, and 23 hours per week, you have 58 hours or 1.45 whole jobs between three people. A measure of whole jobs is useful; also useful is a measure of whole jobs counting part-time employment of people who want to be part-time employed as "whole jobs" (that is: if a working spouse has a 12-hour weekend job, that's a whole job because said person neither needs nor desires 40 hours of employment).
So that gives you three whole-employment indicators we don't track: WE-1 (number of whole jobs, including all full-time workers plus the fraction of full-time hours worked by hourly-paid part-time workers); WE-2 (WE-1, plus part-time workers not seeking full-time jobs are counted as whole jobs instead of partial jobs); and WE-3 (WE-2, plus full-time workers and workers with multiple jobs exceeding full-time hours have their total hours counted and fractioned, such that a person working 60 hours per week counts as 1.5 whole jobs).
First, the jobs are going to be lost anyway - or did you not read the story, and all the other ones lately, about the impact of silicon on jobs?
That's called "Technical Progress", and it's been happening for thousands of years. You know how we have running water now? That's because some stuff that would require a greater proportion of the labor than possible became doable in less.
One of my favorite examples is iron. The new hot-blast furnace we came up with a couple hundred years ago? It lets us make 86,400 tonnes of iron using the same labor that previously made 200 tonnes of iron. That means 99.8% of the jobs required to make all of the iron we use aren't required because we invented a machine that does it with fewer people working. This is why we can build railroads, engines, and pipelines to pump running water through treatment plants and into your home.
Circa 1920, we invented the wooden shipping pallet. Wooden shipping pallets let you wrap up a bunch of goods and move the pallets around, rather than stacking and unstacking the goods at every demarcation point. In one early test, unloading a shipment of stacked canned goods required a team of railroad workers three 16-hour days--a full 48-hours. The same job with the same number of cans palletized required 4 hours. The wooden shipping pallet eliminated 91.7% of shipping jobs.
That's what technical progress is: we invent a new process or a new tool to reduce the amount of labor. Now we pay for fewer working-hours, thus fewer wages. How do you think the price of computers, TVs, and the like has come down? How do you think we've gone from spending 40% of our income in 1900 on food to 33% in 1950, and then to 15% in 1990? Do you think they just had a gigantic profit margin at the farm and we've cut it back? Of course not. The number of worker hours invested to make an amount of food has been dramatically cut back; the number of worker hours used to ship an amount of food has decreased; and a cashier can perform 980 item scans per second.
So up to 1948, we had a labor force participation rate of 58%-59%, and unemployment tended to stabilize around 5% (it got really damned high around the Great Depression). After that, it spiked up as high as ~68%, and is currently around 65%; unemployment still stabilizes around 5% (it got as high as 10% at the peak of the 2008 Great Recession). We've been getting rid of all the jobs. How the hell is everyone still working?
You charge VAT on the finished goods.
Your accounting of inputs and outputs can't just be "steel bought" and "products shipped", though. Part of that steel becomes waste material, which is thrown out. Now you have to account for a VAT on that. Not only that, but it's a legal process, and subject to legal audits. If you're using a flow system where you've roughly calculated a product's costs, added a margin, accounted for risks, and use that as a selling price, you might actually be a bit off and be pulling an additional amount of profit; this is easy when you're basically filling a hopper for each input, instead of counting the exact number of screws going into each product (e.g. when you're making injection-molded parts, you tend to slightly-underestimate how many parts you can make from a given stock of plastic). Now you're committing tax fraud.
As for the upper class, why not charge a sales tax on stocks and bonds? You're buying an asset - why should you get a tax break for one asset class and not for another?
Because it's not considered a sale. We consider stocks and bonds as an asset, so you effectively still have "something". We consider most things consumers buy as "consumables", aside from stuff like houses (on which we don't charge sales tax). It makes sense. It makes less sense when you realize we consider cars, tables, chairs, and other such things as assets for a business, but consumables for an individual; and t
A slice of whole-grain multigrain bread has fewer calories than a slice of white bread, with 69 compared to 74. Those 5 calories, man, it's so important that your 550kcal sandwich be 545kcal.
There are some trace amounts of vitamins and minerals in the germ and husk, and fiber of course. Fiber has some great benefits, doesn't it?
Really, though, insoluble fiber is a non-essential nutrient. It's mostly talked up as a means of reducing colon cancer, even though scientific studies haven't been able to confirm any consistent association between colon cancer and fiber intake. Soluble fiber and resistant starch are equivalent, and provide food for gut flora. Other than that, insoluble fiber can slow food absorption, reducing the glycemic index of foods; this isn't important if you aren't taking in so much carbohydrate as to cause insulin-related problems anyway.
I just keep carbohydrates in the 25%-40% range of my diet, and avoid high amounts of fiber. I had to get a rectal exam after the most-recent uptick in fiber intake; exceeding 7g/day is painful, and passing 10g/day lead to me squirting a discharge of blood. My doctor says my colon is healthy and I probably just tore a blood vessel and bled a lot into my rectum. I'm a single data-point, and wouldn't much matter if it weren't for the fact that there are millions of others sensitive to fiber, and that practically nobody in any developed economy actually gets more than 10g of fiber a day, much less the ridiculous 25g people recommend.
Personally, my theory is a longer travel time correlates to higher insoluble fiber sensitivity; that stuff builds up if you're not crapping it out every day, and some people have as much as two weeks between bowel movements. I can get as high as 70% by mass fiber content in my feces pretty easily, meaning I get a piece of engineered wood in a fatty binder matrix--a pretty rigid material that's resistant to water. It's not hard when you realize I've got over half a kilogram of fiber in there on 25g/day.
Fiber has definite impacts on digestion, which have downstream health impacts. The dubious bits--the parts actual nutrition scientists (not nutritionists, but the researchers trying to find new knowledge) freely claim as unsupported--are its impacts on colon cancer and constipation. We know it affects intestinal fermentation, carbohydrate absorption, and cholesterol absorption; we also know it's non-essential.
So don't bring fiber into the conversation if you want to be taken seriously. It's the last refuge of people without an argument about nutrition. "But... but... but fiber!"
Then there's things like you questing broccoli because it doesnt have a lot of calcium.
Uh, no. Broccoli is "high in calcium". The problem is it's low in everything else, and "high in calcium" is ~8%DV per serving. My point was you can't make your entire diet broccoli, and mixing the little spikes of nutrients from various fruits and vegetables is an enormous engineering task to get just the right balance; whereas animal foods come right in with a good, moderate level of damn near everything.
So this, right here, is you attempting to use a broken argument. Apparently you didn't read what I said, so let's try again:
Of course it doesnt have a lot of calcium compared to animal sources, it's a plant.
Animal sources provide roughly the same level of calcium as a proportion of necessary intake as they do for nearly every other nutrient. That means animal sources are a decent source of everything except vitamin C and E in particular. Plant sources are generally deficient in everything except one or two specific nutrients, and so you need to mix various plant sources to try and engineer a food that's not nutritionally-barren.
The conversation was never about fat in peoples diet
What's so great about whole grains and more vegetables if it's not the nutrient content? Whole grains and vegetables are the worst source of micronutrients.
Whole grains are superior to the bleached stuff both nutritionally and in regards to its impact on blood sugar levels.
In the same way a Snickers bar with 280kcal of sugar is superior to a Snickers bar with 281kcal of sugar.
Whole grains don't contain any significant increase in nutrient content. They are bleached white grain with some husk and 0.1% more of some micronutrients.
Your rejection of veggies i find to be kind of laughable when they are a staple of any major diet suggested by mainstream nutritionists
I explained micronutrient levels and the nutritional value. You appealed to authority. You're basically telling me facts don't matter unless they're accepted by a specific person.
There is no science that supports that position. Every study that comes close is obviously biased for a specific result, and horribly invalid.
Stop reading Atkins fad diets. The high-quality studies use unrestricted-calorie diets with a restriction on carbohydrates or fat. Those are diets where people eat bread, potatoes, pasta, and the like, not candy bars and cake icing.
Oh, right, right. You're using a strawman argument, got it. You have no actual defense, so you make something up for the express purpose of attacking it.
"Capital" in developed economy means things like machines, tools, office equipment, and the like. Solid objects and durable goods. You yourself called robots "Capital Input".
THAT is the big assumption.
Do you think the unemployed coal miners and truck drivers can retrain to become youtube stars?
Alright let's talk reality for a second. People are unemployed. There's a baseline 5% unemployment rate that fluctuates up and down--people need jobs, and some of those people don't have them.
The "retraining" argument is a persistent fallacy: we don't turn a cola miner into a computer engineer; we turn them into a construction worker or something. There are a lot of overlapping skill sets, and people shift from one career to another based on that overlap. Believe it or not, coal miners aren't low-grade retards who can barely figure out how to pull their head out of their own ass and so got thrown down a deep hole with a shovel; they have skills you can't comprehend, and they're broadly-applicable in a multitude of engineering fields. Let's not forget we mine salt, ffs; coal isn't the only useful, solid thing found in the ground.
Even that argument is shoddy because much of the transitioning out is just a matter of adjusting the inflow.
The thing about not writing a 5-page dissertation every time I respond to a bad economics argument is people move right to the next thing. I keep saying this all over the place: time is a factor. If you unemploy 30% of your workforce in 2 months, you get high unemployment and your economy hits The Great Recession; if you do it over 10 years, not so much.
So you're worried about "permanent unemployment", but we're talking about transitioning over ten years. In the longer time frame, you get a lot of churn of retiring, and a lot of movement in the industry: some of the people who are let go are at retirement age, or so close that they just work retail for a few years; others aren't, and end up replacing the guy who retires 3-5 months later. They don't have to retrain.
Again: "adjusting the inflow". Who replaces the retiree? A new entrant to the field. What if the field is shrinking? Retirees go out; people who still need jobs go out; and now you have people who need jobs floating around looking for jobs. Now you have a labor oversupply, and you don't need to bring in as much new labor as people retire or die in mining accidents.
"Permanent unemployment" happens when you nuke your economy by creating high unemployment all-at-once. Those people don't retrain, either, because the economy's too fucked up at that point to provide the jobs anyway.
So that brings us to another problem here: everyone wants to move person X from one job to the next job, and leave person Y who is already-unemployed to be permanently unemployed. Because unemployment is always a thing, you can't transition out of unemployment unless someone is transitioning into unemployment. At that level, it's a matter of numbers.
In other words: your argument's major flaws are that it doesn't apply in an economy that's transitioning slow enough to not damage itself; it doesn't apply in an economy that transitions suddenly and damages itself; and, if it did apply, it would be an argument that poor and homeless people should be condemned to unemployment forever for the crime of already being unemployed.
Live in a bigger world. You're thinking on the scale of a grain of sand and you're in the middle of a desert.
The problem comes when you have $3.20/hr labor versus $21/hr labor--although the worldwide data suggests a manufacturing job in the United States actually carries a cost of $78/hr.
I use pants as a model. Given the number of pants imported, their price at import, their price at retail (average $14.56), and the price of shipping (40-foot shipping container from China imports for under $1,300 with 20,000 pairs of pants, or 6.5 cents per pair), I came up with some numbers.
Those numbers start with $6.12 for the pants when they land in an American port; $6.055 of Chinese labor at $3.20/hr; and 1.89 hours of Chinese labor from the cotton farming and dying to the construction of the pants themselves, assuming 100% of all of that is done in China (frequently, it's Indian cotton).
From there, you can run some numbers. Benefits are said to be 25%-40%, but I used 18%; payroll taxes are 6.4% (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% medicaid). Let's assume Americans build the same product, as building a different product would change the cost and the economics--a shoddier product would cost less and replace more-frequently, while a sturdier product would cost more and replace less-frequently; either of these could ultimately cost less or more in total, e.g. a sturdier product could last 1.5x as long and cost 2x as more, thus is a loss, or it could cost 1.5x as much and last 2x as long, thus is a gain. Mind you, a sturdier product could also be built in China for cheaper, and would result in the same direct comparison model as below.
At $8.25/hr minimum wage using American-grown, American-woven, American-died cotton, you're looking at $10.36/hr, or pants that cost $27.02 more per pair--that $14.56 becomes $41.58. That means the minimum-wage worker must work 5.04 hours instead of 1.76 hours--an extra 3.28 hours of work--to afford a pair of pants. The median $54,000/year household must work 1.54 hours instead of 0.54 hours--an extra 1 hour. Pants retail for roughly 2.86 times the price, hence why people have to work 2.86x as long to earn wages to buy a pair.
Note that this means the factory workers themselves are less-capable of buying pants. If we use a direct model of people simply buying fewer pairs of pants, we lose retail, shipping, and other service and support jobs; and we create jobs in manufacture of pants.
At minimum-wage with 18% benefits overhead and a total cost of $10.36/hr, Americans can afford to purchase 68,632,996 pairs of pants rather than 196,000,000. Long story short, by producing all Chinese pants in the United States, you create 59,898 American factory jobs and lose 53,910 shipping, retail, and other supporting jobs. That's a net creation of 5,988 American jobs.
As you can imagine, the break-even point is rather low. It's somewhere around $20/hr of total cost, or an $18/hr wage. Net-zero job creation. Above that, you lose jobs.
Imagine what it looks like at $78/hr, the actual average cost of manufacturing in America. (That number shocked me, because I thought it was ~$21/hr wage, plus taxes and benefits.)
At $78/hr, you're looking at an increase in the price of trousers from $14.56/pair to $155.86. A minimum-wage worker must now work 18.9 hours and spend nearly half a week's pre-tax income on a pair of pants; the median American income provides this in only 5.77 hours of work. Pants cost 10.7x as much.
So we import about 196,000,000 pairs of trousers at a cost of $1,197,391,000. They retail for $2,853,760,000. At $155.86 per pair, Americans can afford to purchase 18,309,765 pairs of trousers or 9.3% as many using their same income. The total theoretical new jobs are 171,056 out of 320,000,000 Americans, or 0.053%; there is no economic argument that "the money stays in America" or that "the manufacturer workers will make up the difference".
Because literally 99.94% of the country is buying less, fewer things are sold, and less shipping and retailing goes on, and jobs go away; plus those people ca
Fat is good, carbs are bad, protein is good, fiber is unimportant at best and causes constipation at worst.
He was saying that with numbers like 300, 1,000,000, and 999,970, the last two things are not meaningfully-different and trying to claim that the last is superior because lower numbers are better is plain stupid, if not deceptive and dishonest.
Whole grain and bleached white flour are the same thing, except whole g rain has slightly more fiber and a negligible increase in micronutrients.
Whole grains are a marketing gimmick. They contain a negligible increase in micronutrients and a marginal amount of additional fiber (and fiber is overhyped at best).
High amounts of sodium are harmful. "High amounts" would be intake over 6,000mg/day. The anemic sodium intake above which people believe salt is unhealthy is ridiculously-low, and the amount Americans eat is well-below anything concerning.
Fruits and vegetables are generally nutritionally-deficient, with many having a particularly-imbalanced profile. This leads to things like a serving of broccoli providing 8%DV of calcium being "high in calcium," while you would need to get a minimal proportion of calories from broccoli to not end up with severe micronutrient deficiencies. Meats have better vitamers (e.g. Vitamin A retinol is 6x as biologically active as Vitamin A beta-carotine), and have a more-level and more-complete micronutrient profile for vitamins, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sulfur, silicon, iron, and most other minerals.
The major exception is Vitamin C. Vitamin C is available in specific organ meats from specific animals in low concentrations; it's highly-available from plant sources. Vitamin E is also generally better-available from some specific plant sources (not broadly available, like C).
The big argument between plants versus meat is mainly that meat has fat and plants have sugar. People are trying to decide which is bad for you, which is why 20 years ago eggs were a deadly disease inflicted on humanity and would murder you by plugging your heart with cholesterol while today we talk about how eggs are fine because consumed cholesterol doesn't impact blood cholesterol levels at all and debate on whether sugar or all carbohydrates cause an increase in LDLs.
The things we actually know are pretty limited. One, as above, that cholesterol intake doesn't affect your blood cholesterol level. The other is that complex carbohydrates (starches) are absorbed more-slowly than simple sugars and don't spike your blood glucose levels (insulin and diabeetus issues).
Beyond that, we've actually got tentative scientific consensus that saturated fat intake doesn't actually cause heart disease; an open question on whether trans-fats are actually harmful; and a scientific view that carbohydrate intake might cause heart disease, but probably only at high levels (10% is considered "low-carb", and the 25%-40% range has been cited as the "tolerable range" for carbohydrate intake; meanwhile, our decades-old nutrition guidelines suggest 70% carbohydrate intake).
Low-fat, low-sodium diets are a matter of engineering (and common knowledge) lagging science, and science unapologetically claiming that this stuff is hard and not well-understood. Fiber has a broad range of effects, with soluble fiber (and resistant starch) feeding intestinal microflora, and fiber in general slowing down certain digestive processes and nutrient absorption; people focus a lot on insoluble fiber and its effects in reducing colon cancer and constipation, both of which have been thoroughly-debunked in the past two decades. Diets centered on fruits and vegetables produce micronutrient deficiencies, while diets high in animal products and low in plant products almost never have deficiencies.
Basically, the public understanding of salt and fat lags science; while fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are an unscientific fad that refuses to die.
That's not why Trump did it, though. Trump repealed this shit because Obama's name is on it. Basically, Trump doesn't know any of this; he's just an asshole.
I eat like 5,000mg sodium per day. The doctors told me my blood pressure was too high and I needed to eliminate salt to get rid of the 147/97 that showed up for 2 months. I eliminated the amphetamine salts. When it happened again, I had the dose of Atomoxetine lowered to something that wouldn't cause tachycardia and serotonin mania. 123/79, suck it.
My family history is loaded with cardiovascular problems, thyroid disease, and schizotypal personality disorders. I'm not fat and didn't buy into the low-sodium/low-fat diet; I also don't eat like 6 ice cream bars every day when they're around, and generally graze on sweets. I eat in meals--frequently meals like Popeye's fried chicken (shitloads of sodium and saturated fat). 5 years ago I moved into a house with no stove, and it's been like 3 years since I ate something that wasn't fast food; removing the vending machine visits (candy and chips) and not overeating straightened out the extra 20 pounds I was carrying.
I'm still stuck with ADHD (hyperactivity variant, near as I can tell; attention issues if I don't sleep), some severe insomnia, and schizoid personality disorder (downgraded from schizotypal once I rejected my dad's constant conspiracy theories and magical thinking). I like schizoid personality disorder. Major depressive disorder might be in there somewhere, but I don't want to self-diagnose depression and I need some time to chew on that one; the implications are unpleasant. (I start things but lose motivation almost immediately; I thought that was just ADHD, but "bored of everything" and "no sense of achievement" goes together with the anhedonia to make a textbook case for MDD--and I don't feel depressed, so my first impulse is to reject depression as a thing; plus I don't want to start a new saga of even more drugs unless I have a clear idea of what I'm trying to do, considering SPD makes it really uncomfortable to ask doctors for drugs.)
The thing is nutrition is mostly voodoo. Nutrition researchers freely admit this; nutritionists (engineers) work from their textbooks in full faith.
VAT and sales taxes are the worst taxes. VAT is retardedly-complex, too, because you have to figure out the marginal difference between inputs and outputs. That means a shipment of 50,000 tonnes of metal used to make 20 different products has to be accounted for between products, precisely, as a matter of taxes.
Meanwhile, you manage to bump up the price of goods, reducing the number of goods people can buy, thus reducing the demand for shipping, retail, and production. You do this without that price increase going to anyone's wages in the production chain of the good. This reduces the number of goods purchaseable, causing loss of jobs; and it raises prices, which mostly impacts the poor, secondly the middle-class, and least the rich upper-class who tend to buy investment securities and non-sales-taxed services.
The only argument for a VAT is it's verbose because of its complexity, so it makes you sound smart when you talk about it.
Industrial revolution happened too fast. Spiking unemployment by 30% all at once will destroy your economy; replacing 30% of all employment over 10 years will make your economy flinch, then catch up. Look at the computer age.
We don't tax revenue for people.
When a person has an income, he works, and produces an output of his labor. Your time gets you a wage and produces a good or service.
When a business produces goods, it applies labor. It applies domestic labor and pays local wages (taxed). It applies foreign labor by importing goods and outsourcing services (not taxed--not produced here, not an output of our labor). It buys things from other businesses (taxed at the other business). It then sells those goods at a price above the cost of all inputs and is taxed on the difference--the profit is also taxed.
So what does your national economy produce?
All business revenue minus all import goods and services equals all money spent on all goods produced in your economy.
So we subtract the stuff businesses source from other businesses. If that's a domestic business, then it pays its taxes, and so we deduct those expenses from revenue so that production isn't double-taxed. If it's not a domestic business, it's not stuff produced here, and that cost isn't part of our economy's productive output.
What about wages?
Well, you could just tax businesses on wages; that means you have to tax some 30% to equate to the flat personal income tax equivalent of our current income tax system. That, in turn, means that low-income workers (e.g. minimum wage) cost the business 30% more, and don't receive that much money. For a minimum-wage worker a $16,500/year, their taxes are 10% of $10,000 (standard deduction for a single individual deducted), or $1,000; whereas the increase in cost to the business is $4,950 if we tax revenue instead of wages.
So all costs and the requisite prices go up substantially, while the lower- and middle-class take-home income goes up less. You have to break about $260k to be advantaged in this system. That means that over 95% of Americans are less-capable of purchasing as much stuff, so less gets bought, and the number of jobs is reduced. "Less-capable of purchasing as much stuff" is a complicated way to say "poorer".
The same place where a company with a loss pays their payroll. Gosh, these questions are easy. Did you think about them before you posted them?
You could have just said, "They'll have to raise prices." Instead, you gave a non-answer, and mocked the other person for asking you to think for two seconds about the giant hole in your brilliant plan.