So what is V? For something like bitcoin, it is entirely plausible that it will end up being extremely fast (average stay of 1 hour in someone's hands). If that is true, the "market cap" of bitcoins will be on the order of less then a billion, which means that it is already overpriced.
Of course, neither one of us knows how big V is....
This mechanic being trivial to bypass is perfectly acceptable for purposes like preventing young children from accidentally shoot and killing people with them.
My point is as the tax rate currently stands, it will be really, really, hard for the people at large to not benefit somehow from GDP doubling. The fact that the population would benefit doesn't mean that it is fair, but you can have an unfair situation that helps everyone. Whether it is "a good thing" probably depends on what the alternatives are and what precisely this world look like. For example, a world where a robot owning super rich gets all of the income, pays around half of it in taxes, and the taxes support the rest of the population to sit around comfortably and do nothing probably isn't too terrible. (at least from a fairness/hedonistic perspective)
That 39.6% you mentioned is just federal income tax. There is a whole lot of other taxes, not least state/local taxes. The 1% by and large tend to live in CA/NY/MA/IL, and state taxes will bring that up by a lot. If this hyper rich acts anything like the hyper rich of times past, they will also pay a rather large sum in property taxes.
The issue with marginal vs top tax bracket is purely academic in the situation that you posed - in a world where the 1% is making 198% of current US gdp, their income would be around 10-20 million dollar each. I don't think it matters too much what the tax is on the first 400K is in that world.
I am aware that the Buffett rule didn't actually pass, but I also noted that the discussion in the Buffett rule that it would raise a relatively small amount of money. Going by this graph:
Using your own links, top 1% pay 30% of their income in income tax alone. Add in 10%ish for payroll, another 10% for state and local, the rich would pay 50% in taxes. (which is more or less what they pay today).
Under your premise of doubling GDP, that means that tax revenue would equal today's GDP. In other words, you can improve the standard of living for the 99% by just using that sum. As to your concerns for the military spending everything, the vast majority of federal spending is on social security and medicare, which isn't exactly military spending. State and local spending tends to be dominated by education.
Again, this is mostly academic, as no one is proposing anything that will double GDP, but the point still stands that doubling GDP is nothing to be trifled with, even if you allow for completely absurd assumptions in the income distribution afterwards.
At current tax rates, that 1% in your scenario might pay so much in taxes that the 99% would still have more money then the status quo in post-tax and transfer terms.
(Assuming that this 1% gets taxed at the highest tax bracket for both state and federal, lives in high tax states (as current 1% tend to do), and continue to spend a good chunk of their money on property, which are subject to large taxes of their own)
But for fleet operations, that won't matter - what GM will have to pay is what UPS will save in terms of insurance costs. UPS will know how much they will save in terms of insurance, and will be willing to pay more for a car.
In this situation, it is easy to verify if he is lying - you send officers to where the bomb supposedly is. If you find it, you know that he is telling the truth. If not, well, back to the rack.
Is it a very contrived stitutation? Yes. But it does let you get around that particular objection to torture.
I know you are joking, but airplanes don't really run on explosions the ways cars do. Jets simply use an continues burn. Pistons work the way you think they do but they are no longer common in large aircraft
Local militiamen often do deter the invaders enough to make them decide that it is not worth the effort to keep the occupation going. (I will however note that the United States is a sufficiently rich target that the task becomes a lot harder than normal.) That said, look over the history books again and look at all the sheer amount of human suffering and devastation those wars impacted on the country in question. Loss of life is usually measured in double digit percents of the population, the economies of the nations in question generally stops existing and don't recover for decades, if at all.
Even with all of this, resistance efforts often fail. By comparison, stopping them with a conventional army seems pretty good.
2 years of lost wages for every person would cost too much. For one thing, that is two years of productivity that they lose. As the average person is in the labour force for around 30 years, losing 2 years for everyone is losing 6% of our labor force.
By comparison, the DOD cost around 4% of GDP. Seems cheaper just to keep the DOD around.
It would be trivial to shut down bitcoin if you have as much resources as the US government. For one thing, double spending attack on bitcoins becomes trivial as long as the attacker have more processing power than the defenders.
Even bitcoin's own FAQ notes that double spending is possible as long as an entity controls a majority of the hashing power of the network. It is very unlikely for a person to get that kind of power, but a government (or worse yet, a coalition of governments) can easily amass enough GPUs to take down the network via double spending.
Spending 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production isn't something that will fundamentally change life as we know it. A process that produces 100 joules with no energy invested is no different from a process that produces 200 joules that requires you to use 100 joules to extract it. The bottlenecks are still the same for all renewable energy sources - manpower, land, and the geographical locations suitable for the production of this kind of thing.
For things like biodiesel, saying that you need to spend 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production is the same as saying that you need to double the land over a native calculation that does not use energy consumption at all. Those estimates are typically well below the amount of land we farm today, let alone the land mass of the planet.
Biodiesel production in the US today - 5000 gallons per acre per year. Oil consumption of the planet today - 93 million barrels per day. Combine the two numbers, and you would need 750 million acres, which is around 0.6 million sq km. Double that to account for the 50% of energy figure that you quote, and we are looking at 1.2 million sq km. That amounts to around 10% of global farmland, which is a lot, but not enough to change the way the way the world works.
I believe that politicians will do whatever it takes to make it easier to them to get re-elected. Generally, that means that wildly popular ideas tend to get written into laws quickly and easily. Even mildly popular ideas tend to have a sizable number of politicians working toward making them reality.
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Prop 13 means that property taxes don't go up when home prices do.
So what is V? For something like bitcoin, it is entirely plausible that it will end up being extremely fast (average stay of 1 hour in someone's hands). If that is true, the "market cap" of bitcoins will be on the order of less then a billion, which means that it is already overpriced.
Of course, neither one of us knows how big V is....
On the surface planet Earth, these things tends to be more or unless interchangeable.
This mechanic being trivial to bypass is perfectly acceptable for purposes like preventing young children from accidentally shoot and killing people with them.
My point is as the tax rate currently stands, it will be really, really, hard for the people at large to not benefit somehow from GDP doubling. The fact that the population would benefit doesn't mean that it is fair, but you can have an unfair situation that helps everyone. Whether it is "a good thing" probably depends on what the alternatives are and what precisely this world look like. For example, a world where a robot owning super rich gets all of the income, pays around half of it in taxes, and the taxes support the rest of the population to sit around comfortably and do nothing probably isn't too terrible. (at least from a fairness/hedonistic perspective)
That 39.6% you mentioned is just federal income tax. There is a whole lot of other taxes, not least state/local taxes. The 1% by and large tend to live in CA/NY/MA/IL, and state taxes will bring that up by a lot. If this hyper rich acts anything like the hyper rich of times past, they will also pay a rather large sum in property taxes.
The issue with marginal vs top tax bracket is purely academic in the situation that you posed - in a world where the 1% is making 198% of current US gdp, their income would be around 10-20 million dollar each. I don't think it matters too much what the tax is on the first 400K is in that world.
I am aware that the Buffett rule didn't actually pass, but I also noted that the discussion in the Buffett rule that it would raise a relatively small amount of money. Going by this graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Average_Tax_Rates_for_Selected_income_groups_Under_a_fixed_Income_Distribution,_1960-2010.jpg
It would appear that the superrich isn't actually that good at hiding their money, being taxed at something around 30% on the federal income tax.
Using your own links, top 1% pay 30% of their income in income tax alone. Add in 10%ish for payroll, another 10% for state and local, the rich would pay 50% in taxes. (which is more or less what they pay today).
Under your premise of doubling GDP, that means that tax revenue would equal today's GDP. In other words, you can improve the standard of living for the 99% by just using that sum. As to your concerns for the military spending everything, the vast majority of federal spending is on social security and medicare, which isn't exactly military spending. State and local spending tends to be dominated by education.
Again, this is mostly academic, as no one is proposing anything that will double GDP, but the point still stands that doubling GDP is nothing to be trifled with, even if you allow for completely absurd assumptions in the income distribution afterwards.
At current tax rates, that 1% in your scenario might pay so much in taxes that the 99% would still have more money then the status quo in post-tax and transfer terms.
(Assuming that this 1% gets taxed at the highest tax bracket for both state and federal, lives in high tax states (as current 1% tend to do), and continue to spend a good chunk of their money on property, which are subject to large taxes of their own)
But for fleet operations, that won't matter - what GM will have to pay is what UPS will save in terms of insurance costs. UPS will know how much they will save in terms of insurance, and will be willing to pay more for a car.
In this situation, it is easy to verify if he is lying - you send officers to where the bomb supposedly is. If you find it, you know that he is telling the truth. If not, well, back to the rack.
Is it a very contrived stitutation? Yes. But it does let you get around that particular objection to torture.
Well, apple employees are paid partly in apple shares. A falling stock price makes it harder for apple to attract staff.
TARP turned a profit as well. Instead of buying the banks, we brought out huge percentages of their stock instead.
A cost of 100-1 is perfectly acceptable if you just need to win a arms race with the Irans/North Koreas of the world.
In the event this sell goes though, that would be more or less what he is doing.
Can't people that make non-GM food add an label to it that says non-GM? Problem solved, no new laws needed.
I know you are joking, but airplanes don't really run on explosions the ways cars do. Jets simply use an continues burn. Pistons work the way you think they do but they are no longer common in large aircraft
I doubt you get large performance benefits. Downloading is by and large network bound.
Stock in "safe" companies (Verizon, AT&T, con ed, and companies that that nature) are paying 3-5% in dividends right now.
Err.... Companies are NOT allowed to band together to increase their power (anti-trust laws apply)
The placebo is a very documented and very powerful effect. As homeopathy is simply water, it is also a very safe placebo with no side effect.
As far as bad cures go, there are probably much worse.
iPhone? It is two instead of quad core, but it will run most apps just fine.
Local militiamen often do deter the invaders enough to make them decide that it is not worth the effort to keep the occupation going. (I will however note that the United States is a sufficiently rich target that the task becomes a lot harder than normal.) That said, look over the history books again and look at all the sheer amount of human suffering and devastation those wars impacted on the country in question. Loss of life is usually measured in double digit percents of the population, the economies of the nations in question generally stops existing and don't recover for decades, if at all.
Even with all of this, resistance efforts often fail. By comparison, stopping them with a conventional army seems pretty good.
2 years of lost wages for every person would cost too much. For one thing, that is two years of productivity that they lose. As the average person is in the labour force for around 30 years, losing 2 years for everyone is losing 6% of our labor force.
By comparison, the DOD cost around 4% of GDP. Seems cheaper just to keep the DOD around.
It would be trivial to shut down bitcoin if you have as much resources as the US government. For one thing, double spending attack on bitcoins becomes trivial as long as the attacker have more processing power than the defenders.
Even bitcoin's own FAQ notes that double spending is possible as long as an entity controls a majority of the hashing power of the network. It is very unlikely for a person to get that kind of power, but a government (or worse yet, a coalition of governments) can easily amass enough GPUs to take down the network via double spending.
Spending 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production isn't something that will fundamentally change life as we know it. A process that produces 100 joules with no energy invested is no different from a process that produces 200 joules that requires you to use 100 joules to extract it. The bottlenecks are still the same for all renewable energy sources - manpower, land, and the geographical locations suitable for the production of this kind of thing.
For things like biodiesel, saying that you need to spend 50% of the energy you harvest to keep up production is the same as saying that you need to double the land over a native calculation that does not use energy consumption at all. Those estimates are typically well below the amount of land we farm today, let alone the land mass of the planet.
Biodiesel production in the US today - 5000 gallons per acre per year. Oil consumption of the planet today - 93 million barrels per day. Combine the two numbers, and you would need 750 million acres, which is around 0.6 million sq km. Double that to account for the 50% of energy figure that you quote, and we are looking at 1.2 million sq km. That amounts to around 10% of global farmland, which is a lot, but not enough to change the way the way the world works.
I believe that politicians will do whatever it takes to make it easier to them to get re-elected. Generally, that means that wildly popular ideas tend to get written into laws quickly and easily. Even mildly popular ideas tend to have a sizable number of politicians working toward making them reality.