Other minority communities don't tend to have a culture of poor education and crime. Which, let's be real, is part of the poor black (and poor white in the south) communities.
Both of those could probably use some injection of cultural intermixing with more successful communities. Especially the southern rural whites. They're basically on a death depression spiral right now.
CA is a unique problem in that they didn't get ahead of the housing crunch. This in turn caused cost-of-living to increase significantly. This caused the governments to promise all sorts of perks and pay for employees and contractors. Which causes inflated costs of anything government-run (like infrastructure). That in turn means there's not enough funding for what should be basic, cheap services like roads.
This is the basic inflation cycle. Labor costs track cost of living when there is demand for semi-skilled labor but not enough supply.
A few ways out would be: 1. Get cost of living down by flooding the market with housing. 2. Get cheap semi-skilled labor (perhaps from sources outside CA, outside the US even? People who are willing to work harder for less).
Neither are popular. NIMBY's hate #1. Liberals and conservatives alike hate #2 (for different reasons).
That doesn't mean governments (or private organizations) can't lend a hand. Daycare, for instance, can be invaluable to parents struggling with multiple jobs. I am all against hard-handed legislative hammers and think the "war on poverty" has mostly been a waste of time and money. But people tend to take it too far where any government action, even mostly positive ones like subsidizing daycare or giving health insurance to poor children, are cried out as "government intervention bad!!!!".
If that's what you understood from that quote (and I'll grant you the words were poorly chosen) you may need to brush up on reading comprehension. It seems pretty obvious "we" is America in that context.
Which basically translates into exactly what you said. Only not spelled out excessively so even the most drooling idiot could understand.
"So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on."
I said Shenzhen. Not China. The thing people even in the US can't grasp is just how *vast* China's population is.
Fair enough. China does have more people, but Americans are also well acquainted with income disparities.:)
Your average corporate mid-level manager in the US makes what? 4-8x what a grunt worker would? 30k vs 120k?
Imagine that your mid-level managers in all of those factories make 100x what a farmer only 40min away makes. Or 10-20x what the technician who travels 40 min a day (one way) makes. That's a level of wealth disparity that's common place in every street in Chinese cities but pretty rare in the US.
So, looking at average annual wages for manufacturing jobs in Shenzhen vs. the US (assuming a 6.76 RMB to USD exchange rate), the US wages are about $61k compared to $15.5k in Shenzhen or about 4x. Perhaps if you compare the high-end tail in Shenzhen to the low-end tail in the US, the wages might start being comparable.
Right, there is still definitely a disparity. But it's not orders of magnitude anymore. As was my original comment. Also keep in mind that what counts as "manufacturing job" in Shenzhen is very different than what a typical American "manufacturing job" is today. The American counterparts are much more skilled. But in return they are paid more and there are relatively few of them. There is no room in the US economy for low-to-mid skilled, mass-producing but lowly paid workers. And those are on the decline. We've legislated that out of our economy (for good reasons).
"The essence of globalization is: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor."
You forgot to add: and prices go down for consumers. That is, everyone.
However, if you are an average working class American, then your incomes and your throats are being cut by the huge influx of cheap labor. Working class jobs are being destroyed by low income labor at one end and automation at the other, leaving working class voters angry and broke and with no place to go. That's where the backlash is coming from, and that's why so many upper income people can't see any problem with it. It's the old old problem of the landed gentry and the nobility looking down their noses at all of those stinking whining peasants, all over again.
I don't know what you think "average working class American" really is, but:
Seems to indicate plenty of semi-skilled services fields. You are correct that at the very low-end, workers are displaced by open trade and open border. But I suspect those jobs are going to be replaced by automation anyway.
The US simply is a much more service-oriented economy now. And in the coming decades, it'll be even more so. Notice how so many of the most common jobs in the US are things like sales, education, healthcare (nurses, pharmacists, clinic workers) and restaurants? That's your *real* "average working class" nowadays.
The caricature of the displaced grunt laborer as the "real American" and everyone else as "uppidy landed gentry" is just that: a caricature. It was unfortunate that it also happens to resonate with a (small) demographic who were in key voting districts in 2016.
But let's dispel this myth that the displaced coal miner or factory worker is the "real average working class American" who are the majority being oppressed by the greedy minority of "white collar workers".
That hasn't been true in 2 decades. The US is *mostly* white collar workers today. And it benefits hugely from open trade (and would from open borders).
That is an excellent point. However, in most cases of racial bias, race itself is actually just a proxy indicator. And often a bad one.
For example, black people correlating with higher crime? While true, any good analyst will point out to you that correlation != causation.
Higher crime correlates the best with poverty. And black people correlate with poverty as well. So assuming "black == higher chance of criminal" would be a poor proxy compared to "poor == higher chance of criminal".
If race was truly the root cause of some statistical correlation (and therefore makes the best indicator), then I'd agree with using it.
For instance, women and men are often given different requirements when it comes to jobs with physically strenuous tasks. In this case, sex is the root cause of the statistical difference in performance. So it makes sense to use sex as the indicator.
I said Shenzhen. Not China. The thing people even in the US can't grasp is just how *vast* China's population is.
You can hop on the high-speed rail, cross 150 miles (in about 40 min) and go from bustling metropolis (Google for housing prices in Shenzhen, it's about comparable to San Diego) to a dirt-poor village. The income and cost of living difference can easily be 10-100x.
Of course, on a pure average level, China as a whole is still well behind the US in terms of income and cost of living.
But most companies who setup shop in China for at least skilled work (and there's a lot, increasingly more) are doing so in large cities with comparable costs of living to the US. And there's a reason they locate there. It's so easy to setup shop.
Also, I never mentioned regulation when it comes to "setting up shop". Because for the most part, regulations are a 2nd order effect. Companies will live with more or less regulations unless they're insane ones.
The biggest draw of Shenzhen is infrastructure and talent pool. We don't have enough mid-skilled tinkerers in the US. It's either poorly trained grunts or highly trained (and highly paid) professionals. You want basic CAD drawings, a simple business plan or just some entry-level technicians? Good luck hiring enough in the US. And even if you find them in the US, they require relocation packages.
In Shenzhen, you get millions of semi-skilled people traveling 100+ miles one way to go to a job. In less time than a typical Bay Area commute.
Compared to the effect of those, regulations are noise.
This is the problem with using a label to try to break down everyone's views. The Democratic party, at least, were far more along Clinton's moderate pro-market liberals beliefs. But there are definitely hard-line liberals who hate that moderate position and view it as "you might as well be Republican".
What I've noticed is a sort of sea change in US politics lately. What *should* be conservative values such as free trade have become the demons to rail against. Trump was merely the manifestation of these changing moods.
Penalties are the wrong way to go about it, period. You don't get an industry that's healthy by shielding it from competition. I can't believe I, as a liberal, have to explain this. All you get from erecting barriers to competition is lazy, complacent industries that offer no benefit.
Foreign competition *is* good competition. Any competition is good as it increases the incentive for improvement.
If you want to prop up your local industry in some area (and I'm agreeing that is a worthy goal), the most economically efficient ways to do that is worker training and infrastructure development. A business that's able to setup shop, hire the needed workers and have all of the communications, transportation, logistics and property protection will locate itself there. The price difference of wages is peanuts on their balance sheet.
Want to know why people locate to Shenzhen? Go there. The actual wages there are pretty damn high actually and the cost of living rivals most of the US. But if you have an idea for a gadget or product, you're up and running in easily 1/10th of the time it takes in the US and to ramp up production to the millions? That ain't happening anywhere in the US.
I suspect it's a bit less sinister. The old saying of never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
The "corporations are bad, up there in their corporate tower being all corporation-y" wing of the American leftists seem to be gaining momentum in much the same way the Tea-baggers did after Obama won in 2008.
Expect a lot of screaming and crying about how people shouldn't make money and stuff...
If history is any indicator, there will be a period of time when those displaced workers are unemployed and on welfare. But they will represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the population due to population increase. So their welfare burden will be mitigated. Then they'll die/retire and the new generation that springs up will be more capable and skilled, having gone through better education systems born out of a need to produce employable people. And new categories of jobs will spring up as new services are created by said skilled and capable young people.
That's of course, assuming a lot of key systems are in place. Amongst the most important is an ever-improving education system that produces skilled and employable young people....
I see Germany, China, Canada and possibly Mexico/Latin America (if they can get their shit together) as part of that future. I don't see the US, the UK or Japan as part of that.
If only there were a pool of highly educated, motivated and eager-to-work young people out there that those countries can draw from since they've kinda dropped that ball producing that domestically.....
That is, of course, barring government interference. Like border tariffs or import/export restrictions. A true planetary logistics and shipping network would be fantastic. Doubly so if it can be automated.
But the trend seems to be against efficiency in favor of "the good old times". Forgetting all the bad things about the "good old times"...
The problem is making policy targeted at individuals based on statistical correlation of a group. We have this individualistic notion in the US at least that every person can forge their own path in life.
That narrative doesn't work when there are systemic barriers put in place pre-emptively due to statistical analysis.
Very few people deny the hard numbers that black people (in the US) commit more crimes. Or that chinese/japanese/korean (in the US, not all "asians") 1st and perhaps 2nd generation people are more academic. I haven't looked up the women and navigation statistics.
The problem comes when you take that general statistic and start making policy that target individuals. E.g. "Looking for a data analyst? Hire that asian-looking guy!"
Even worse when it comes to measures that perpetuate said statistic. E.g. "he's black, so let's assume he's guilty of a crime until proven otherwise".
Some places, but not all places. It depends on the local laws. And that's really the point isn't it? Rule of law. Not "this is how it should work ideally". But "this is how the law, as written and applied, works".
I agree multi-nationals shouldn't have loopholes like the Dutch Sandwich. I also agree that since they are legal, the companies are doing nothing wrong.
I don't know why you pivoted to talking about trade skilled jobs. I clearly talked about low-skilled occupations in every post. Including replying to the OP who complained about low-skilled office jobs being given to college grads when they used to be given to HS kids....
Whatever you or I would do is irrelevant. The broader data clearly indicates corporations do hire degree-type snowflakes for a large swath, if not the majority, of low-skill jobs.
I like how people use their own anecdotal hypothetical to make conclusions about the vast vast world. When readily available data clearly indicates otherwise.
And here you are with your BS Libertarian "taxes suck! It's immoral!" BS.
You had some merits of pragmatism when you talked about how effective raising income taxes on "the rich" would be as well as whether or not Bush's tax cuts were really "cuts for the rich" or just cuts for middle-income.
Then you went derp into "taxes suck! It's theft and immoral!"
There is no "morality" when it comes to one kind of tax or another kind of tax. Ultimately taxes are a way for people in a society to pool their resources together, with those who have more committing more than those who have less, such that collectivists programs such as a standing national military, a justice system, rule of law, etc. can be funded. How that tax is collected and what's it's collected on is largely irrelevant and the only moral part is whether, in the end, people who benefit the most (i.e. the military protects their interests the most) also pay the most.
You can do that taxation based on anything. Purchase of products (such as EU's VAT), earned income (most seem to adopt this), property, wealth, whatever. The ultimate goal is that people with resources (property, assets, income, money to spend, whatever) commit some portion of it in order to pay for all the social structures that exist so their assets are safe and fairly protected.
BTW, property taxes work exactly like a wealth tax would. You get taxed on the same property ad infinitum. And there are exceptions made for those who don't own much property or much income (ala Texas).
To be fair, while you're correct that there isn't much revenue to be gained from the *income* of the "ultra-rich" (I define it as those who rely mostly on investment income, so about $100M+ net worth), the wealth distribution is the true beast to look at.
IMO, taxing income was never a good idea. It slows economic activity. What you want is to discourage wealth concentration. It would've been way better to have a wealth tax rather than an income tax.
Well, you can give a fuck when they start voting for any con-man who comes along and tells them lies. Since that same con-man can turn around and fuck with your life to "give them jobs".
The agreement for the NATO nations to reach 2% defense spending was actually signed under Obama. It allows for the US to shoulder less of the burden. And with Putin being love-buddies with Trump, I don't see the need to escalate the war machine.
China will be the hegemony of the Asian hemisphere. That's been the direction for over a decade now and no amount of military spending is going to change that. Ultimately trade and production capability trounces standing army size. Every. Time.
Well, if more and more college grads take up those jobs, then there's nothing dissuading companies from doing it now is it? You make it sound like some giant conspiracy. There are fewer and fewer basic skill-less jobs. And unfortunately, not all college degrees grant you marketable skills. So those college grads end up just a notch more employable than HS kids.
Slashdot Mirror
Other minority communities don't tend to have a culture of poor education and crime. Which, let's be real, is part of the poor black (and poor white in the south) communities.
Both of those could probably use some injection of cultural intermixing with more successful communities. Especially the southern rural whites. They're basically on a death depression spiral right now.
CA is a unique problem in that they didn't get ahead of the housing crunch. This in turn caused cost-of-living to increase significantly. This caused the governments to promise all sorts of perks and pay for employees and contractors. Which causes inflated costs of anything government-run (like infrastructure). That in turn means there's not enough funding for what should be basic, cheap services like roads.
This is the basic inflation cycle. Labor costs track cost of living when there is demand for semi-skilled labor but not enough supply.
A few ways out would be:
1. Get cost of living down by flooding the market with housing.
2. Get cheap semi-skilled labor (perhaps from sources outside CA, outside the US even? People who are willing to work harder for less).
Neither are popular. NIMBY's hate #1. Liberals and conservatives alike hate #2 (for different reasons).
That doesn't mean governments (or private organizations) can't lend a hand. Daycare, for instance, can be invaluable to parents struggling with multiple jobs. I am all against hard-handed legislative hammers and think the "war on poverty" has mostly been a waste of time and money. But people tend to take it too far where any government action, even mostly positive ones like subsidizing daycare or giving health insurance to poor children, are cried out as "government intervention bad!!!!".
Look how they defunded SNAP recently....
If that's what you understood from that quote (and I'll grant you the words were poorly chosen) you may need to brush up on reading comprehension. It seems pretty obvious "we" is America in that context.
Which basically translates into exactly what you said. Only not spelled out excessively so even the most drooling idiot could understand.
"So for example, I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?
And we're going to make it clear that we don't want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.
Now we've got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don't want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on."
We had one. She lost.
At least in the US, the BLS separates full-time employed with benefits compared to part time or contracting work.
I said Shenzhen. Not China. The thing people even in the US can't grasp is just how *vast* China's population is.
Fair enough. China does have more people, but Americans are also well acquainted with income disparities. :)
Your average corporate mid-level manager in the US makes what? 4-8x what a grunt worker would? 30k vs 120k?
Imagine that your mid-level managers in all of those factories make 100x what a farmer only 40min away makes. Or 10-20x what the technician who travels 40 min a day (one way) makes. That's a level of wealth disparity that's common place in every street in Chinese cities but pretty rare in the US.
So, looking at average annual wages for manufacturing jobs in Shenzhen vs. the US (assuming a 6.76 RMB to USD exchange rate), the US wages are about $61k compared to $15.5k in Shenzhen or about 4x. Perhaps if you compare the high-end tail in Shenzhen to the low-end tail in the US, the wages might start being comparable.
Right, there is still definitely a disparity. But it's not orders of magnitude anymore. As was my original comment. Also keep in mind that what counts as "manufacturing job" in Shenzhen is very different than what a typical American "manufacturing job" is today. The American counterparts are much more skilled. But in return they are paid more and there are relatively few of them. There is no room in the US economy for low-to-mid skilled, mass-producing but lowly paid workers. And those are on the decline. We've legislated that out of our economy (for good reasons).
"The essence of globalization is: labor is commoditized as mobile capital is free to roam the globe for the lowest cost labor."
You forgot to add: and prices go down for consumers. That is, everyone.
However, if you are an average working class American, then your incomes and your throats are being cut by the huge influx of cheap labor. Working class jobs are being destroyed by low income labor at one end and automation at the other, leaving working class voters angry and broke and with no place to go.
That's where the backlash is coming from, and that's why so many upper income people can't see any problem with it. It's the old old problem of the landed gentry and the nobility looking down their noses at all of those stinking whining peasants, all over again.
I don't know what you think "average working class American" really is, but:
http://www.ranker.com/list/mos...
Seems to indicate plenty of semi-skilled services fields. You are correct that at the very low-end, workers are displaced by open trade and open border. But I suspect those jobs are going to be replaced by automation anyway.
The US simply is a much more service-oriented economy now. And in the coming decades, it'll be even more so. Notice how so many of the most common jobs in the US are things like sales, education, healthcare (nurses, pharmacists, clinic workers) and restaurants? That's your *real* "average working class" nowadays.
The caricature of the displaced grunt laborer as the "real American" and everyone else as "uppidy landed gentry" is just that: a caricature. It was unfortunate that it also happens to resonate with a (small) demographic who were in key voting districts in 2016.
But let's dispel this myth that the displaced coal miner or factory worker is the "real average working class American" who are the majority being oppressed by the greedy minority of "white collar workers".
That hasn't been true in 2 decades. The US is *mostly* white collar workers today. And it benefits hugely from open trade (and would from open borders).
That is an excellent point. However, in most cases of racial bias, race itself is actually just a proxy indicator. And often a bad one.
For example, black people correlating with higher crime? While true, any good analyst will point out to you that correlation != causation.
Higher crime correlates the best with poverty. And black people correlate with poverty as well. So assuming "black == higher chance of criminal" would be a poor proxy compared to "poor == higher chance of criminal".
If race was truly the root cause of some statistical correlation (and therefore makes the best indicator), then I'd agree with using it.
For instance, women and men are often given different requirements when it comes to jobs with physically strenuous tasks. In this case, sex is the root cause of the statistical difference in performance. So it makes sense to use sex as the indicator.
I said Shenzhen. Not China. The thing people even in the US can't grasp is just how *vast* China's population is.
You can hop on the high-speed rail, cross 150 miles (in about 40 min) and go from bustling metropolis (Google for housing prices in Shenzhen, it's about comparable to San Diego) to a dirt-poor village. The income and cost of living difference can easily be 10-100x.
Of course, on a pure average level, China as a whole is still well behind the US in terms of income and cost of living.
But most companies who setup shop in China for at least skilled work (and there's a lot, increasingly more) are doing so in large cities with comparable costs of living to the US. And there's a reason they locate there. It's so easy to setup shop.
Also, I never mentioned regulation when it comes to "setting up shop". Because for the most part, regulations are a 2nd order effect. Companies will live with more or less regulations unless they're insane ones.
The biggest draw of Shenzhen is infrastructure and talent pool. We don't have enough mid-skilled tinkerers in the US. It's either poorly trained grunts or highly trained (and highly paid) professionals. You want basic CAD drawings, a simple business plan or just some entry-level technicians? Good luck hiring enough in the US. And even if you find them in the US, they require relocation packages.
In Shenzhen, you get millions of semi-skilled people traveling 100+ miles one way to go to a job. In less time than a typical Bay Area commute.
Compared to the effect of those, regulations are noise.
The D's have had the most free market President in the past 2 decades though. Especially compared to who has an (R) next to his name now....
This is the problem with using a label to try to break down everyone's views. The Democratic party, at least, were far more along Clinton's moderate pro-market liberals beliefs. But there are definitely hard-line liberals who hate that moderate position and view it as "you might as well be Republican".
What I've noticed is a sort of sea change in US politics lately. What *should* be conservative values such as free trade have become the demons to rail against. Trump was merely the manifestation of these changing moods.
Penalties are the wrong way to go about it, period. You don't get an industry that's healthy by shielding it from competition. I can't believe I, as a liberal, have to explain this. All you get from erecting barriers to competition is lazy, complacent industries that offer no benefit.
Foreign competition *is* good competition. Any competition is good as it increases the incentive for improvement.
If you want to prop up your local industry in some area (and I'm agreeing that is a worthy goal), the most economically efficient ways to do that is worker training and infrastructure development. A business that's able to setup shop, hire the needed workers and have all of the communications, transportation, logistics and property protection will locate itself there. The price difference of wages is peanuts on their balance sheet.
Want to know why people locate to Shenzhen? Go there. The actual wages there are pretty damn high actually and the cost of living rivals most of the US. But if you have an idea for a gadget or product, you're up and running in easily 1/10th of the time it takes in the US and to ramp up production to the millions? That ain't happening anywhere in the US.
I suspect it's a bit less sinister. The old saying of never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
The "corporations are bad, up there in their corporate tower being all corporation-y" wing of the American leftists seem to be gaining momentum in much the same way the Tea-baggers did after Obama won in 2008.
Expect a lot of screaming and crying about how people shouldn't make money and stuff...
If history is any indicator, there will be a period of time when those displaced workers are unemployed and on welfare. But they will represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the population due to population increase. So their welfare burden will be mitigated. Then they'll die/retire and the new generation that springs up will be more capable and skilled, having gone through better education systems born out of a need to produce employable people. And new categories of jobs will spring up as new services are created by said skilled and capable young people.
That's of course, assuming a lot of key systems are in place. Amongst the most important is an ever-improving education system that produces skilled and employable young people....
I see Germany, China, Canada and possibly Mexico/Latin America (if they can get their shit together) as part of that future. I don't see the US, the UK or Japan as part of that.
If only there were a pool of highly educated, motivated and eager-to-work young people out there that those countries can draw from since they've kinda dropped that ball producing that domestically.....
That is, of course, barring government interference. Like border tariffs or import/export restrictions. A true planetary logistics and shipping network would be fantastic. Doubly so if it can be automated.
But the trend seems to be against efficiency in favor of "the good old times". Forgetting all the bad things about the "good old times"...
The problem is making policy targeted at individuals based on statistical correlation of a group. We have this individualistic notion in the US at least that every person can forge their own path in life.
That narrative doesn't work when there are systemic barriers put in place pre-emptively due to statistical analysis.
Very few people deny the hard numbers that black people (in the US) commit more crimes. Or that chinese/japanese/korean (in the US, not all "asians") 1st and perhaps 2nd generation people are more academic. I haven't looked up the women and navigation statistics.
The problem comes when you take that general statistic and start making policy that target individuals. E.g. "Looking for a data analyst? Hire that asian-looking guy!"
Even worse when it comes to measures that perpetuate said statistic. E.g. "he's black, so let's assume he's guilty of a crime until proven otherwise".
Some places, but not all places. It depends on the local laws. And that's really the point isn't it? Rule of law. Not "this is how it should work ideally". But "this is how the law, as written and applied, works".
I agree multi-nationals shouldn't have loopholes like the Dutch Sandwich. I also agree that since they are legal, the companies are doing nothing wrong.
Fix the laws.
I don't know why you pivoted to talking about trade skilled jobs. I clearly talked about low-skilled occupations in every post. Including replying to the OP who complained about low-skilled office jobs being given to college grads when they used to be given to HS kids....
Whatever you or I would do is irrelevant. The broader data clearly indicates corporations do hire degree-type snowflakes for a large swath, if not the majority, of low-skill jobs.
I like how people use their own anecdotal hypothetical to make conclusions about the vast vast world. When readily available data clearly indicates otherwise.
sigh....
And here you are with your BS Libertarian "taxes suck! It's immoral!" BS.
You had some merits of pragmatism when you talked about how effective raising income taxes on "the rich" would be as well as whether or not Bush's tax cuts were really "cuts for the rich" or just cuts for middle-income.
Then you went derp into "taxes suck! It's theft and immoral!"
There is no "morality" when it comes to one kind of tax or another kind of tax. Ultimately taxes are a way for people in a society to pool their resources together, with those who have more committing more than those who have less, such that collectivists programs such as a standing national military, a justice system, rule of law, etc. can be funded. How that tax is collected and what's it's collected on is largely irrelevant and the only moral part is whether, in the end, people who benefit the most (i.e. the military protects their interests the most) also pay the most.
You can do that taxation based on anything. Purchase of products (such as EU's VAT), earned income (most seem to adopt this), property, wealth, whatever. The ultimate goal is that people with resources (property, assets, income, money to spend, whatever) commit some portion of it in order to pay for all the social structures that exist so their assets are safe and fairly protected.
BTW, property taxes work exactly like a wealth tax would. You get taxed on the same property ad infinitum. And there are exceptions made for those who don't own much property or much income (ala Texas).
To be fair, while you're correct that there isn't much revenue to be gained from the *income* of the "ultra-rich" (I define it as those who rely mostly on investment income, so about $100M+ net worth), the wealth distribution is the true beast to look at.
IMO, taxing income was never a good idea. It slows economic activity. What you want is to discourage wealth concentration. It would've been way better to have a wealth tax rather than an income tax.
Well, you can give a fuck when they start voting for any con-man who comes along and tells them lies. Since that same con-man can turn around and fuck with your life to "give them jobs".
The agreement for the NATO nations to reach 2% defense spending was actually signed under Obama. It allows for the US to shoulder less of the burden. And with Putin being love-buddies with Trump, I don't see the need to escalate the war machine.
China will be the hegemony of the Asian hemisphere. That's been the direction for over a decade now and no amount of military spending is going to change that. Ultimately trade and production capability trounces standing army size. Every. Time.
Well, if more and more college grads take up those jobs, then there's nothing dissuading companies from doing it now is it? You make it sound like some giant conspiracy. There are fewer and fewer basic skill-less jobs. And unfortunately, not all college degrees grant you marketable skills. So those college grads end up just a notch more employable than HS kids.