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archangelwar posted:This is only partially true. It is true you must file a tax return, it is not true that all of your foreign earnings are taxable, depending on how you file and any specific tax treaties we have with the country where you reside. If you are paying US taxes without taking any deductions then you are simply not doing it right. A single person gets iirc a 105k exemption and credits for some things like housing. Whether that means you get a sweet tax dodge depends on whether your country of residence is taking a share. Many countries have signed on to FACTA so I would not bet on skating by not reporting.
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Nov 4, 2014 00:01
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My Imaginary GF posted:"Look, we know your bottom line is hurting; everyone's is. This initiative will increase middle-class consumption of X sector goods by Y% over Z timeframe, in addition to [other secondary economic impacts] and increasing capital available at banks by A sum over Z timeframe and stimulating B increase in state tax revenue through delegated spending decisions and C increase in federal tax revenue through D, E, and F second-order and third-order impacts. Eh. You'd face a lot of justified skepticism among business leaders presented with that analysis. The money has to come from somewhere and no matter how you propose to fund it you will generate economic upheaval on a scale you can't predict if the GMI is big enough to matter. Slices of the employment market will be thrown into chaos. No amount of fast talking about multipliers is going to overcome that.
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Nov 4, 2014 19:11
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enraged_camel posted:Before you say this is an unlikely scenario, think about a similar scenario where this type of thing has indeed been happening. One of the primary causes of skyrocketing college tuitions is the ready availability of student loans. So the colleges are thinking, "hmm, if students have all these loans readily available, we might as well grab a piece of the pie." My purely-speculative-but-in-my-opinion-not-completely-unfounded assertion is that landlords would be in the exact same mindset if everyone in the country suddenly started making $XX,XXX more per year. Everyone looking for an apartment will have at least another $XX,XXX to spend. Families at least twice that. Rents going up, along with pretty much everything else, is a given.
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Nov 4, 2014 23:44
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Accretionist posted:What suggests it will? The prices of status goods that people with money compete for, like homes in neighborhoods with the best schools, have gone up as the rich have gotten richer. It's a thing that happens. What is your argument for why the prices people pay won't go up if those same people are all at least, say, $15,000 richer every year? Ardennes posted:Yeah, it isn't a assumption I need to worry about because the economic data I have seen on minimum wages shows it doesn't happen and this effectively wouldn't be different. How is this the same as the very marginal minimum wage increases that have been studied?
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Nov 5, 2014 21:00
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archangelwar posted:You are saying that people with low fixed income are going to get into bidding wars with rich people over property? That is your explanation? Accretionist ironically asked Accretionist posted:Edit: ~ You're assuming the cost of most if not all goods will not rise to compensate for increased income concentration, in which case we won't be able to afford food and clothes anymore. ~ Which I may have misinterpreted? That read to me like "You're assuming the cost of goods will not rise to compensate for increased income inequality" in which case yes, for the goods people with more money care about, that's a thing that happens. If that's not what you meant Accretionist then sorry, but also what you wrote doesn't seem to make sense. Ardennes posted:Probably because the prices still haven't matched them to meet them even if the gains are far more limited. Prices are going to increase, but the assumption is that prices will go up to quite literally the entire amount. The minimum wage hasn't been a price floor in any of the places it has been raised (Except probably SeaTec. We'll see how that goes), so when it has gone up it hasn't put very much money into peoples' pockets. That is quantitatively different than giving everyone an additional $15,000 every year, which by design puts a lot of money into peoples' pockets. At the same time, if you're taxing the people who own stores and businesses to fund the redistribution, all of them have a strong incentive to raise prices to restore their margins. The labor market effects are similarly likely to raise costs. Ardennes posted:How is this going to work anyway? I mean there are a certain amount of people in a city, and while there will be higher demand for better housing stock, the existing stock will still exist. Even if the landlords improve it and ask for more rent, they can only demand what the market will bear. The markets will bear more at most levels - more or less until the range where the GMI is a trivial amount of money - and landlords are going to be paying higher taxes. That is going to push prices up and unless there's some group of property owners who aren't subject to the same pressures people will have to pay. Whether price increases will eat up the whole of the GMI is impossible to predict just by spitballing, but that a good chunk of it will go to inflation is a pretty uncontrovertial statement. And if on net people only end up with a small percent of the GMI as actual improvement why not just go after a few targeted improvements and save the monumental effort of funding a GMI in the first place?
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Nov 5, 2014 21:41
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Helsing posted:Overall implementing policies that prevent poverty and then patching up the problems this creates, such as inflation or disruptions in the labour market If you could patch them up, sure, maybe. What leads you to believe that would be possible? Certainly modern experience seems to indicate it's either not possible to engineer the economy to that great a degree or that we don't know how.
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Nov 5, 2014 21:45
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Helsing posted:"Modern experience" here clearly just means your gut feeling. I would suggest modern experience suggests the opposite. If you look, for example, at the functioning of any industrial economy during a major war you can see how a high level of economic intervention and coordination proved to be incredibly effective at simultaneously increasing production, encouraging technological innovation, and maintaining or even raising living standards for workers. Those highly coordinated war economies also created the institutional, technological and social basis for a 30 year economic boom and a (by historical standards) broadly based middle class society. Which war and which economies are you talking about? World War 2 and the U.S?
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Nov 6, 2014 19:18
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Ardennes posted:I don't really think there should be a universal GMI, it should be means-tested. A means tested GMI would be different, for sure. The impact (disruptive or otherwise) would depend on who was elligible and for how much and what programs got displaced, etc. We could talk about the details and probably come to agree on a proposal that seems acceptable to both of us though I suspect we'd disagree on the size of the GMI. As far as poor living standards a small minority of poor in the US live in disgraceful conditions that people living in a first world country should be ashamed of, but a lot of nominally poor people have a much better standard of living in the States than they'd have for instance anywhere here in Latin America. IMO it might be wise not to mess with the system delivering relative prosperity too much.
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Nov 6, 2014 19:29
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Helsing posted:I am thinking mostly of Canada and the US during World War II but I made my comment more open ended because I think that you can also draw lessons from the performances of other countries during the extended period from 1914 to 1945. Obviously, though, the situation is more complicated when your country is either being blockaded (as in the case of Britain or Germany) or physically destroyed (i.e. something that happened in varying degrees to most of Asia and Europe during this period). Let me chew on that for a bit. What do you make of the rationing the U.S. had to undertake as the war progressed? A lot of capital was repurposed to supply the war effort and it seems like the QOL of american citizens at home took a dive due to scarcity of things like metals, gasoline, and even food. In the post-war period the U.S. had the benefit of being the only industrial power that hadn't been demolished and that may explain more of its subsequent prosperity than the hypothesis that the war effort primed it for production.
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Nov 6, 2014 21:29
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KillHour posted:Why this is wrong: Welfare is an overall net benefit to GDP ... You can think of welfare as an investment, like your 401k. Just because you have to pay out for it now, doesn't mean anyone's "stealing" from you. Whether welfare is a net benefit to GDP depends on where the money to fund it comes from and what its alternative use would have been. If the money would have been spent anyway than in aggregate it's a wash. If it would have been invested then there's an opportunity cost associated with handing it out to be consumed and it's not obvious that's net positive for GDP. If the money is just going under a matress then sure but most of the time that's not what what's going on. You´ve also got your math wrong. To fund a mincome of any significant size you have to reach pretty far down the income distribution. The rich don't have enough money to top everyone up to 15k or whatever. Funding mincome on the backs of the rich is a pipe dream. Beyond that, though, I think a fundamental tenant of a just society is that you fund your steam account through your own effort and not your neighbor's. God bless.
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Dec 17, 2014 14:24
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I think backing up a bit, we probably agree on some things. Assuming technology becomes good enough that most people can't support themselves through work society will have to change to accomodate that. Mincome could be a part of that. That society would be waaaaay different than the society of today. 6% unemployment is honestly not very much and some of that is frictional. We should separate talking about welfare from talking about mincome. I believe safety nets are a good thing. Does anyone posting ITT right now disagree with that? KillHour posted:It's not about whether you're born an orphan or a billionaire. It's, quite frankly, whether you're born black (or to a single mother, or disabled, or gay, or in the wrong zip code...). I think most people need to think really hard about just how much was given to them for free. I think you'll find that it was a lot. In my case, I got a free education. Free, quality, consistent food my entire childhood. Free shelter. Free entertainment. Edit: two free cars. Free healthcare. A free pass from the cops (on several occasions - some quite serious). Free job interviews. Free professional references. A free 30 cents for every dollar in my paycheck (I'm a white male). I didn't have to work for any of this, it was just given to me by the very nature of where and to whom I was born. There's probably a ton of stuff I'm forgetting. It wasn't immoral for me to get those things (well, maybe the free 30 cents), and it's not immoral to think that others should get the same. This is thinking I have trouble assimilating. Your food, shelter, entertainment, cars, health related expenses, were all paid for by your parents (presumably). They paid taxes to help pay for your education. That stuff didn't just get showered on you because of where you grew up and who you were born to. You had advantages because your parents were willing to work hard to provide them to you. It's not immoral that you have access to those things but it is kind of telling that you don't seem to appreciate the sacrifice it took to deliver them. It's not immoral, but is rather naive, to propose that everyone should have those things and btw they will all be paid for by the state forcing someone else to be the rich-ish parent. You as an individual don't get a free 30 cents on every dollar in your paycheck. =( That is not how statistics works. White males in general get paid more though the 30 cent figure is extremely debatable and needs to be conditioned by education, occupation, experience, and other factors.
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Dec 17, 2014 19:57
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Quidam Viator posted:That would be my follow-up question, if technology really will continue its march, as all evidence seems to indicate. We are now close enough to a near-complete devaluation of human labor that it's not just some distant science fiction; it's more in the realm of climate change, namely a thing that is inevitable without immense societal change, likely within our lifetimes. I personally believe that no existing economic framework has a valid answer to the question of what happens when labor no longer has value. Both capitalism and communism and all of their variants are founded on the idea that labor is valuable. If this thread is really meant to ask a question about the unbounded future, then we first have to come to some common ground on whether the value of labor will actually continue, or if the rest of these comments have been pure ideological masturbation about whose current worldview will survive, even though none of them will. Eh. The idea that we're at or even near the point where human labor will be valueless - even a majority of human labor - is pretty drat sci fi today. It´ll be pretty drat scifi 100 years from now. I agree with you that looking into the unbounded future it's a thing that seems like it could happen. How do we even accurately concieve of what a society where human labor has no value looks like?
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Dec 17, 2014 20:04
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Nope. Ain't gonna.
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Dec 17, 2014 20:05
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VitalSigns posted:...address the blatant contradiction you posted? Unsurprising, but disappointing nonetheless. I have never seen a conversation you were part of be anything but a total shitshow, so yeah, I'll live with your disappointment.
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Dec 17, 2014 20:07
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 03:11 |
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KillHour posted:That upbringing directly led to me getting a good job (that I could not have gotten without such an upbringing), which will then allow me to provide the same things to my kids, providing them better opportunities than if I had been born into poverty. Likewise, my parents didn't just make all that poo poo appear out of thin air because they loved me enough or worked hard enough or bootstrapped enough. It's a self-feeding cycle, and it's why such massive inequality exists in the first place - rich people have rich kids; poor people have poor kids. That is definitely a dynamic. However, what's your point? My point is that providing that stuff has a cost, and someone has to bear the cost. You're saying "don't worry it'll be someone else you'll never see" and IMO that's pretty naive. "Redistribute it all" is not a plan for breaking the cycle of poverty. KillHour posted:I would like to point out that you just argued that some children shouldn't have good food, shelter, education, healthcare or entertainment because their parents aren't rich. Dude, I didn't argue that. I argued that saying "you're going to have all these benefits and don't worry someone else is going to pay" is pretty naive and that you're ignoring what things cost. KillHour posted:That is exactly how it works. In fact, because of statistics, it could be even higher than that! But it's probably in the ballpark. For instance, I make about 15% more than my wife (and always have), and we are about the same age, education level and have similar jobs. And we worked at the same company for a while - I got a higher paying job than she did, even though we started about 2 months apart. Good for you! That's ALSO not how statistics work, but if you guys are so similar in every other way and your jobs are really that comparable, why not coax her to ask for a raise? Quidam Viator posted:Exactly how sustainable do you really believe our current economic models are, and how did you arrive at that delusion? Pretty sustainable tbh. We're all still here and the world economy seems to have been pretty resiliant in the face of crisis, so that's a good indicator that things are not about to fly apart. Business is good despite some headwinds. US growth is pretty robust though Europe continues to be Europe. Why do you believe The End Is Nigh? That seems like a much more controversial proposition - not to mention one that has been wrong any number of times in the last 100 years.
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Dec 17, 2014 20:35
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