So you state here that the function isn't necessarily continuous.
True, the continuity deal was too restrictive. The Laffer Curve holds in *more* instances. Thanks!
You claimed that the Laffer curve is a good economic model. You also claimed that the Laffer curve is a continuous function.
Hence you claimed "economy is described by a continous function".
The Laffer Curve is not a model of the economy. It does not purport to describe an array of economic activity, just that at some point, revenues diminish despite tax increases.
The problem most of us have with the laffer curve is that it's simplistic pseudoscience that ignores the many factors at play in a modern economy, as characterised by your king example. Yes, you are trying to distill a highly complex subject down to one formula.
Nope, no formula. And claiming that raising tax rates eventually diminishes revenues is not pseudoscience.
You try to defend this with latin "ceteris paribus assumptions, so just changing the tax rate can only do one thing". Newsflash, changing the tax rate won't only change one thing. Scientists actually try to keep all other things equal through the use of control experiments, economists just talk shit.
I said it will do one thing, not change one thing. Sure, raising taxes could raise revenues, increase unemployment, lower interest rates, and so on. But the person was claiming that the same change in tax rate (with all else held equal as per the curve's ceteris parib assumptions) could BOTH increase AND decrease revenues and is thus irrelevant to revenues. This is false.
And there are economists that dismiss conclusions grounded in empirical data for the precise reasons you gave: you could never control enough variables to get a good result.
There are jump discontinuities in experimental data, but the laffer curve is a theoretcial abstract, and I've never seen it drawn with discontinuities by anyone (other than Martin Gardner). Do you understand the difference between theory and data?
Okay, fine, if you raise taxes, revenues will JUMP down, rather than decline smoothly. Happy now?
> What is most important is that you assume it doesn't behave like -1/x near the > origin:
Your favourite trick: make all sorts of bizarre claims as to what other people think when they've never said any such thing. Quote me.
I never attributed anything to you. I was using "you" in the sense of "one". What's important is that one not allow that revenues can increase asymptotically and then increase from negative infinity... yeah, not a tough assumption to make.
> increase to a vertical asymptote and then increase from negative > infinity back to the axis. But I think that's a safe asssumption.
Personally I follow the standard of plotting the independent variable along the horizontal axis.
Me too. Your point?
> But go ahead, keep believing that you can increase taxes indefinitely while > increasing revenues.
Your favourite trick: make all sorts of bizarre claims as to what other people think when they've never said any such thing. Quote me.
Okay, you don't believe you can increase taxes indefinitely while increasing revenues. Congratulations: you agree with the concept of the Laffer Curve. Which is all I was trying to show. What a waste of time, when you already agree with me!
You have most certainly not taken that into account. All your responses make the exact same problem: that you assume you know how the king's going to use his flips. You don't.
Imagine you come into the room, and you've been in X times. How do you know if the chalice was set by another prisoner or flipped? YOU DON'T. Not after k times, not after kn times, not after 2kn times, not after 800k^2n^2 times. Because you don't know if the king is delaying his flips or not. If you *know* the king will never flip, you can find a solution. If you *know* the king will flip the first k times, you can find a solution. *but you don't*
The poser of this problem is simply posting a problem without a solution, but whose false solution has been "confirmed" by his close buddies and never really checked by anyone.
The mere fact that the king has the *choice* of flipping destroys the information, whether or not he actually uses his flips. No one entering the room knows if he exercised it or not. Since you can only store one bit of a data with the chalice, you can't store both "whether we have all been in the room" and "whether the king has actually interfered", and thus, there is no solution. Remember, the king can decide not to interfere, and they will have no way to knowing if he did.
Not necessary, just at at some point a higher tax rate will come with lower revenues.
it is by all account not even a function, eg you can have more than one value of revenue for one tax ratio.
It is made with ceteris paribus assumptions, so just changing the tax rate can only do one thing. Okay, free will, non-determinism and all that. But I don't think that's what you were arguing.
The usual parabol-like curve
Does not require a parabolA-like curve.
is based on a very simplistic model
based on the concept of elasticity, which is far from simplistic insofar as leaving things out.
which is useless except for pushing an ideological agenda.
It's not just the right-wing that wants to raise revenues, right? And that's the purpose of taxation, right? You don't advocate taxation solely to hurt people *without* raising revenue, right?...RIGHT?
The only sound reasonning in this is that high tax rates increase the incentive for escaping taxes, which is commmon sense.
No, that's not the main reason the Laffer Curve holds, except in very high-tax regions. High taxes also mean - in violation of your ideological agenda - that people will stop producing the things the government gets tax revenue from. This is just an application of the concept of substitution, elasticity, and deadweight losses. Think about that for a second: taxes can actually hurt! Novel concept there!
No need for half-baked maths to get that.
Yeah, claiming that returns have to fall at some point to get back to zero is "half-baked". I'd like to know what you deem non-baked.
Whoa, where are you in your argumentation? Claiming that you disagree with the Laffer curve is "aggressively misleasing" but the point you're trying to make is "incompatible with [my] precious curve"? Let's be a little less schizo here.
And in case you hadn't noticed, California and Massachusettes exist. FBI's actually a pretty big fan of them.
No, I claimed the relationship between tax revenues and tax rates is continuous, no that the entire economy can be described (predicted?) by a continuous function (of what? and predicting what?)
Of course, you're right I was imprecise, there can be jump discontinuities, but if the number of actors is large, these are small enough to be ignored. What is most important is that you assume it doesn't behave like -1/x near the origin: increase to a vertical asymptote and then increase from negative infinity back to the axis. But I think that's a safe asssumption.
But go ahead, keep believing that you can increase taxes indefinitely while increasing revenues. It doesn't correspond with reality, though.
The chalice cannot store any information because they can't know if the king manipulated it. The king knows their rule, and they can't know if he is interfering or not.
The fact that, as you claim, only two people "know the answer" shows that not a whole hell of a lot of eyeballs have looked at this problem. It's easy to be confident of the solution when only two of your friends have checked the answer.
One wonders if it is in fact you who is dismissive of the poor, your attitude toward them in your posts here certainly is.
*sigh*
I'm trying to explain to you the practical consequences of what you're proposing. I was just describing aspects of reality. You'll notice I never said anything was good or bad, just what will or won't happen. If you can find the place where I was dismissive of the poor, I'd really like to know where it is.
Now, I already explained enough so you could understand the difference between cracking down on the rich vs. the poor. The rich can easily scurry away and/or stop producing. The poor can neither easily scurry away nor stop producing. Again, this is not to say anything is "good" or "bad", just that it "will" or "won't" raise tax revenues. Contrary to your staunch refusal to dispassionately analyze the topic, there really are relevant practical considerations in raising taxes.
In fact, I'd like nothing more than to test out your ideas. Check out the link in my sig. I submitted an idea to a policy site. The idea is that basically, in one state, we do what you propose: high taxes on the rich, high minimum wage, good workers protections and workplace safety requirements, etc. In the other state, do the oppose: no min. wage, low taxes on the rich, no safety requirements, etc. If you're really serious about your views, you'd leap at the chance to do this and see who's right based upon which state people flock to.
REALLY? Fundamental mathematical theorems have been overturned? You mean, it's possible for a continuous function to start at zero, increase, and then reach zero again without ever decreasing? Looks like I need to start hittin' the books again! Got a link to where this is established?
You're actually making a better point than your toxic attitude would otherwise suggest. The rich can much more easily avoid taxes, legally or otherwise, than the average person, so raising their taxes really won't help revenue. (Also, shoving the tax load onto them removes any popular support for restraining government, but that's another issue.) If the rich see that one nation's attitude toward them has changed, they all just revise all future plans about investment. In the extreme case, since the rich, being rich, really don't need to work, if their taxes are too high, they just "consume" more leisure. You could, of course, just seize all their assets, but don't expect any more geese to be laying golden eggs where you live anytime soon.
I know you hate the rich and all, I'm just talking about the practical consequences of trying to milk more revenues out of them.
Plus, the premises of the argument behind the Laffer curve really are true. Again, you might not be past a Laffer point, but make no mistake there is a Laffer point. Denying this just makes wise people revise their estimation of the merit of your statements downward.
No, the validity of the Laffer curve itself does not depend on where we are. It is true, of course, that whether lowering taxes now will raise revenues, but first people like you have to stop scoffing at the novel idea that taxes can actually hurt the economy to the point of diminishing returns. Until that happens, debate about where we are on the curve can't proceed.
A little historical note: monarchs, being able to personally pocket the tax revenue, and thus historically had very strong incentives to maximize tax revenue, generally taxed about 8-15% of GDP according to most estimates. Just something to think about.
First, learn how to use the reply feature. It's really neat. I'll charitably assume you were trying to keep me from finding out about your "brilliant" post.
Second, air drag is different from friction. Watch the terminology.
Third, it most certainly does not act "approximately equally" across the surface. You have quite a bit to learn. Take a shuttlecock for example, with the rubber on top, and drop it "only one meter". It will still land with the rubber on the bottom.
I'd like you to come work for the engineering firm I'm currenly employed with. We would love to have guys magically make all of our airfoils have an even pressure distribution!
In fact, take any slender cylindrical object about the size of a cat's body and see if you can drop it such that it does not rotate. Remember Sprint's pin drop? Yeah, it's like that.
If you think it's a rigorous scientific experiment to tell the scientists we're only using 500 year old wood grown in Europe, you really don't understand the point of the experiment.
Let's say there was a painting that was framed a few hundred years ago. I take a sample from it and lock three teams of scientists in three rooms with no communication with the outside world. I have them test it and not let them out until they have an answer. What will the variance in their answer be, how far would it be from the date that the historical records show, and how much would you bet on that?
Hi Damer Face! I haven't forgotten about you, though I really wish I had! Looks like you still can't take a joke about only communists using metric. It is still a joke, and you still lack a sense of humor for not recognizing that! Be a man, and put me on your foes list.
Are you really so stupid you can't figure this one out? While the gravity acts through the center of mass, the air resistance need not, and can therefore produce a torque.
Laffer curve: it's possible to cut taxes and increase revenues. Think about if the government taxed nothing. It would get nothing. If the government fully taxed everything, no one would do anything, so there would be no point, so the government wouldn't get any tax. If the government taxes between those bounds, it gets something. Thus, there is at least one local maximum, meaning lowering taxes can increase revenues.
Makes sense when you think about it. Punish people too hard and they won't produce anything - at least if they know you'll find out.
That's only the Theorem if you're expressing it in terms of quadrances (squares of distances), like that weirdo's book that got posted a short while ago on/. Ah, here it is:
Thinking back, wouldn't it be cool to have a quadrance-ruler? It would be marked off in units of inches squared, and the reading on it would be the square of the number of inches in distance. (Of course, if you were a communist, that would be centimeters.)
I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats, and ever cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many were going to St. Ives?
Slashdot Mirror
So you state here that the function isn't necessarily continuous.
True, the continuity deal was too restrictive. The Laffer Curve holds in *more* instances. Thanks!
You claimed that the Laffer curve is a good economic model. You also claimed that the Laffer curve is a continuous function.
Hence you claimed "economy is described by a continous function".
The Laffer Curve is not a model of the economy. It does not purport to describe an array of economic activity, just that at some point, revenues diminish despite tax increases.
The problem most of us have with the laffer curve is that it's simplistic pseudoscience that ignores the many factors at play in a modern economy, as characterised by your king example. Yes, you are trying to distill a highly complex subject down to one formula.
Nope, no formula. And claiming that raising tax rates eventually diminishes revenues is not pseudoscience.
You try to defend this with latin "ceteris paribus assumptions, so just changing the tax rate can only do one thing". Newsflash, changing the tax rate won't only change one thing. Scientists actually try to keep all other things equal through the use of control experiments, economists just talk shit.
I said it will do one thing, not change one thing. Sure, raising taxes could raise revenues, increase unemployment, lower interest rates, and so on. But the person was claiming that the same change in tax rate (with all else held equal as per the curve's ceteris parib assumptions) could BOTH increase AND decrease revenues and is thus irrelevant to revenues. This is false.
And there are economists that dismiss conclusions grounded in empirical data for the precise reasons you gave: you could never control enough variables to get a good result.
There are jump discontinuities in experimental data, but the laffer curve is a theoretcial abstract, and I've never seen it drawn with discontinuities by anyone (other than Martin Gardner). Do you understand the difference between theory and data?
Okay, fine, if you raise taxes, revenues will JUMP down, rather than decline smoothly. Happy now?
> What is most important is that you assume it doesn't behave like -1/x near the
> origin:
Your favourite trick: make all sorts of bizarre claims as to what other people think when they've never said any such thing. Quote me.
I never attributed anything to you. I was using "you" in the sense of "one". What's important is that one not allow that revenues can increase asymptotically and then increase from negative infinity... yeah, not a tough assumption to make.
> increase to a vertical asymptote and then increase from negative
> infinity back to the axis. But I think that's a safe asssumption.
Personally I follow the standard of plotting the independent variable along the horizontal axis.
Me too. Your point?
> But go ahead, keep believing that you can increase taxes indefinitely while
> increasing revenues.
Your favourite trick: make all sorts of bizarre claims as to what other people think when they've never said any such thing. Quote me.
Okay, you don't believe you can increase taxes indefinitely while increasing revenues. Congratulations: you agree with the concept of the Laffer Curve. Which is all I was trying to show. What a waste of time, when you already agree with me!
You have most certainly not taken that into account. All your responses make the exact same problem: that you assume you know how the king's going to use his flips. You don't.
Imagine you come into the room, and you've been in X times. How do you know if the chalice was set by another prisoner or flipped? YOU DON'T. Not after k times, not after kn times, not after 2kn times, not after 800k^2n^2 times. Because you don't know if the king is delaying his flips or not. If you *know* the king will never flip, you can find a solution. If you *know* the king will flip the first k times, you can find a solution. *but you don't*
The poser of this problem is simply posting a problem without a solution, but whose false solution has been "confirmed" by his close buddies and never really checked by anyone.
The mere fact that the king has the *choice* of flipping destroys the information, whether or not he actually uses his flips. No one entering the room knows if he exercised it or not. Since you can only store one bit of a data with the chalice, you can't store both "whether we have all been in the room" and "whether the king has actually interfered", and thus, there is no solution. Remember, the king can decide not to interfere, and they will have no way to knowing if he did.
Nice try, but wrong on about every sentence:
...RIGHT?
the income=f(tax ratio) is not a smooth function.
Not necessary, just at at some point a higher tax rate will come with lower revenues.
it is by all account not even a function, eg you can have more than one value of revenue for one tax ratio.
It is made with ceteris paribus assumptions, so just changing the tax rate can only do one thing. Okay, free will, non-determinism and all that. But I don't think that's what you were arguing.
The usual parabol-like curve
Does not require a parabolA-like curve.
is based on a very simplistic model
based on the concept of elasticity, which is far from simplistic insofar as leaving things out.
which is useless except for pushing an ideological agenda.
It's not just the right-wing that wants to raise revenues, right? And that's the purpose of taxation, right? You don't advocate taxation solely to hurt people *without* raising revenue, right?
The only sound reasonning in this is that high tax rates increase the incentive for escaping taxes, which is commmon sense.
No, that's not the main reason the Laffer Curve holds, except in very high-tax regions. High taxes also mean - in violation of your ideological agenda - that people will stop producing the things the government gets tax revenue from. This is just an application of the concept of substitution, elasticity, and deadweight losses. Think about that for a second: taxes can actually hurt! Novel concept there!
No need for half-baked maths to get that.
Yeah, claiming that returns have to fall at some point to get back to zero is "half-baked". I'd like to know what you deem non-baked.
Whoa, where are you in your argumentation? Claiming that you disagree with the Laffer curve is "aggressively misleasing" but the point you're trying to make is "incompatible with [my] precious curve"? Let's be a little less schizo here.
And in case you hadn't noticed, California and Massachusettes exist. FBI's actually a pretty big fan of them.
Cool, so how can a positive function increase from zero, and go back to zero without even decreasing? This I'd like to know!
No, I claimed the relationship between tax revenues and tax rates is continuous, no that the entire economy can be described (predicted?) by a continuous function (of what? and predicting what?)
Of course, you're right I was imprecise, there can be jump discontinuities, but if the number of actors is large, these are small enough to be ignored. What is most important is that you assume it doesn't behave like -1/x near the origin: increase to a vertical asymptote and then increase from negative infinity back to the axis. But I think that's a safe asssumption.
But go ahead, keep believing that you can increase taxes indefinitely while increasing revenues. It doesn't correspond with reality, though.
Really? Wood in the frame of a painting was never living? (I guess I should have mentioned why I mentioned the framing.)
It doesn't say the "economy is described by a continous function". I don't even know what that means, and I'd be surprised if you did.
The chalice cannot store any information because they can't know if the king manipulated it. The king knows their rule, and they can't know if he is interfering or not.
The fact that, as you claim, only two people "know the answer" shows that not a whole hell of a lot of eyeballs have looked at this problem. It's easy to be confident of the solution when only two of your friends have checked the answer.
I look forward to debunking your solution.
One wonders if it is in fact you who is dismissive of the poor, your attitude toward them in your posts here certainly is.
...RIGHT?
*sigh*
I'm trying to explain to you the practical consequences of what you're proposing. I was just describing aspects of reality. You'll notice I never said anything was good or bad, just what will or won't happen. If you can find the place where I was dismissive of the poor, I'd really like to know where it is.
Now, I already explained enough so you could understand the difference between cracking down on the rich vs. the poor. The rich can easily scurry away and/or stop producing. The poor can neither easily scurry away nor stop producing. Again, this is not to say anything is "good" or "bad", just that it "will" or "won't" raise tax revenues. Contrary to your staunch refusal to dispassionately analyze the topic, there really are relevant practical considerations in raising taxes.
In fact, I'd like nothing more than to test out your ideas. Check out the link in my sig. I submitted an idea to a policy site. The idea is that basically, in one state, we do what you propose: high taxes on the rich, high minimum wage, good workers protections and workplace safety requirements, etc. In the other state, do the oppose: no min. wage, low taxes on the rich, no safety requirements, etc. If you're really serious about your views, you'd leap at the chance to do this and see who's right based upon which state people flock to.
You do think you're right, right?
The Laffer Curve is a laugh and has been refuted
REALLY? Fundamental mathematical theorems have been overturned? You mean, it's possible for a continuous function to start at zero, increase, and then reach zero again without ever decreasing? Looks like I need to start hittin' the books again! Got a link to where this is established?
You're actually making a better point than your toxic attitude would otherwise suggest. The rich can much more easily avoid taxes, legally or otherwise, than the average person, so raising their taxes really won't help revenue. (Also, shoving the tax load onto them removes any popular support for restraining government, but that's another issue.) If the rich see that one nation's attitude toward them has changed, they all just revise all future plans about investment. In the extreme case, since the rich, being rich, really don't need to work, if their taxes are too high, they just "consume" more leisure. You could, of course, just seize all their assets, but don't expect any more geese to be laying golden eggs where you live anytime soon.
I know you hate the rich and all, I'm just talking about the practical consequences of trying to milk more revenues out of them.
Plus, the premises of the argument behind the Laffer curve really are true. Again, you might not be past a Laffer point, but make no mistake there is a Laffer point. Denying this just makes wise people revise their estimation of the merit of your statements downward.
No, the validity of the Laffer curve itself does not depend on where we are. It is true, of course, that whether lowering taxes now will raise revenues, but first people like you have to stop scoffing at the novel idea that taxes can actually hurt the economy to the point of diminishing returns. Until that happens, debate about where we are on the curve can't proceed.
A little historical note: monarchs, being able to personally pocket the tax revenue, and thus historically had very strong incentives to maximize tax revenue, generally taxed about 8-15% of GDP according to most estimates. Just something to think about.
First, learn how to use the reply feature. It's really neat. I'll charitably assume you were trying to keep me from finding out about your "brilliant" post.
Second, air drag is different from friction. Watch the terminology.
Third, it most certainly does not act "approximately equally" across the surface. You have quite a bit to learn. Take a shuttlecock for example, with the rubber on top, and drop it "only one meter". It will still land with the rubber on the bottom.
I'd like you to come work for the engineering firm I'm currenly employed with. We would love to have guys magically make all of our airfoils have an even pressure distribution!
In fact, take any slender cylindrical object about the size of a cat's body and see if you can drop it such that it does not rotate. Remember Sprint's pin drop? Yeah, it's like that.
If you think it's a rigorous scientific experiment to tell the scientists we're only using 500 year old wood grown in Europe, you really don't understand the point of the experiment.
Let's say there was a painting that was framed a few hundred years ago. I take a sample from it and lock three teams of scientists in three rooms with no communication with the outside world. I have them test it and not let them out until they have an answer. What will the variance in their answer be, how far would it be from the date that the historical records show, and how much would you bet on that?
Awesome. So how much would you bet if we set up that experiment that at none of them would get it wrong beyond the margin of error?
Website that doesn't work in Firefox #1,053,294
You can't put the general solution to the N/S equtions in closed form. They figured that out a long time ago.
Hi Damer Face! I haven't forgotten about you, though I really wish I had! Looks like you still can't take a joke about only communists using metric. It is still a joke, and you still lack a sense of humor for not recognizing that! Be a man, and put me on your foes list.
Are you really so stupid you can't figure this one out? While the gravity acts through the center of mass, the air resistance need not, and can therefore produce a torque.
Assuming away air: not a good idea.
Laffer curve: it's possible to cut taxes and increase revenues. Think about if the government taxed nothing. It would get nothing. If the government fully taxed everything, no one would do anything, so there would be no point, so the government wouldn't get any tax. If the government taxes between those bounds, it gets something. Thus, there is at least one local maximum, meaning lowering taxes can increase revenues.
Makes sense when you think about it. Punish people too hard and they won't produce anything - at least if they know you'll find out.
What the fuck is that in response to?
That's only the Theorem if you're expressing it in terms of quadrances (squares of distances), like that weirdo's book that got posted a short while ago on /. Ah, here it is:
1 7/1313249&tid=228&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/
In normal trig, it's a^2 + b^2 = c^2.
Thinking back, wouldn't it be cool to have a quadrance-ruler? It would be marked off in units of inches squared, and the reading on it would be the square of the number of inches in distance. (Of course, if you were a communist, that would be centimeters.)
I met a man with seven wives. Every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats, and ever cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many were going to St. Ives?