Obama Wins The Election. Here’s His Technology Agenda.
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
> Maybe the President getting re-elected pretty solidly ...
Electorally, yes, but it's a squeaker by popular vote. As of this writing, the victory margin is less than half of a percent.
Is it because both are the contrarian play to something else?
GTFO Afghanistan ASAP (and their overall isolationist position) is one of the big ones. I could see someone who was pro-state intervention in domestic life, pro big taxes, etc. still voting Libertarian if he thought GTFO Afghanistan ASAP was the most important issue.
It's basically impossible to put US politics (or anywhere, really) on a strict left/right linear chart.
And the only state he came close to costing Romney was Florida. But even so, he would have lost it by over 3000 votes if all Johnson supporters voted for Romney.
Obama himself has been pushing for STEM in the first term, and there's every reason to believe Romney would have as well -- they agreed on it. It's Congress on this one issue that's preventing STEM-only from going forward.
Open government? Wow, I remember that one from 4 years ago.
Skilled immigration? They don't vote for Dems. Unskilled immigration is all he cares about.
Pour more money into failing "green" tech. Yes, let's build more Chevy Volts filled with toxic batteries.
Seriously, there is no tech agenda from this pres.
PG's point was not that failing means you're doing it right, but rather that never failing means you're not pushing hard enough.
For context: DARPA has a budget of almost $3 billion. The risk-weighted investment into Solyndra was probably on the order of the low tens of millions.
What do you mean by "risk-weighted investment"?
The loan to Solyndra was for $535 million dollars of which practically none was returned [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra#Shutdown_and_investiga...
And your reply to that is a post that's entirely devoid of any content whatsoever, and is literally 100% scare-mongering without even a single argument or claim (false or otherwise)?
So we're stuck with things like subsidizing Green Tech.
If you want a good solution then make it fight for life in the current market, eventually it might win - in this case you will really get a good solution.
Here is the basic problem with the market for energy. Say I give you the choice of two candy bars: one costs you $1.00, the other costs you $0.75 and also costs some random third party $0.75. Which do you pick? The latter, of course. Everyone always picks the latter, and the end result is economically inefficient.
This is the same choice when it comes to energy. A Harvard study found that the externalized costs of coal range from $350-500 billion: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/us-usa-coal-study-.... Fully half the true cost of coal power is externalized to people outside the transaction of power producers/power users. The market doesn't yield efficient results when costs can be externalized like this. That's Econ 101 level knowledge. There are only two ways to fix this market failure: either tax coal power to reflect the externalized costs, or subsidize green tech to compensate. In our political system new taxes are pretty much impossible, hence we adopt the latter solution.
Additionally, if no green tech change occurs, then you're stuck with the job losses by lower consumption of the good you're taking, but don't get the job gains of the good you're hopping will spring up to replace it.
So from a economics perspective, seems like it might be the pure way to go. From a policy perspective, it's iffy.
It always sounds great to be "investing" in infrastructure or energy or whatever. But pols don't invest, they cater to voting blocks. Politics can't solve these problems.
The reality is that the market left alone won't solve these problems, and politics can't solve them perfectly. What you're left with is the state of human existance: muddling along.
Uh...
Democrats own the minority vote, which constitute a huge portion of the skilled immigration this country sees - the two largest contributors are China and India after all.
Okay, so excluding minority immigrants, lets look at skilled, white immigrants - the bulk of whom are coming from openly socialist countries - UK, France, Germany, etc.
So skilled immigration is pretty guaranteed to increase the base for left-leaning folks and minorities, both of which are traditional strongholds for Democrats. Why wouldn't they do this?
Not to mention Democrats have, in this election at least, demonstrated that they are able to rally a substantial base of educated, working professionals to their side. So even with non-immigrants, "skilled labor" is hardly synonymous with Republicans.
I would have thought broad policies which have already been introduced as bills during the last term in office would be more significant to technology than potential immigration reforms.
I note that I'm not from the USA, so my perspective might not be as well-informed as it could be.
Not that Romney would have, but it can never be pointed out enough that we're not given real choices with these elections. Given that 98.5% of the electorate voted for one of the two bozos, it's clearly not being said enough.
Reforming states to something that doesn't cause third parties to be spoilers (by using a voting system such as IRV), probably in the NE to start, is likely the new wave that gets us out of this mess.
ESPECIALLY if it starts to fracture, I could see the pieces start to try to salvage the coalition out of it, a coalition which would require the survival of third and fourth parties.
Capital Gains Rate is likely to increase from 15% to 23.8%
And honestly, that would probably not even be that bad. One of the major reasons techies talk so much about immigration reform is that people with ideas want to go to the US because that is where all the money is because nobody wants to invest outside the borders due to a combination of many factors, but tax rate is always one of them. A higher capital gains tax rate makes other markets more appealing, and I don't have the exact numbers on what other markets would be most appealing at what % hikes, but I can't imagine taking the tax rate up to even 40% would drive investors out of US markets just on the basis of how convenient America is for tech entrepreneurialism already, it reduces a ton of the risk factors involved you described.
In general, tax hikes are bad, because the government caries little responsibility (look how reckless they have been with our budget/deficit to date). Giving more tax money to the govt. is like giving a loan to someone with a horrible credit score.
Also, this technology agenda is horrible. It is not the government's job gamble tax-payer money on business ventures (even ones as appealing as "green tech") - leave that to VCs and free markets.
That the investor/owner portion of the tax burden will go up slightly from historically low levels doesn't belie the fact that the average American and small business owner pays even more in %.
Remember - during the roaring 90s we had a much higher rate - did that stop the Googles, Yahoos, Akamais, etc?
I think a few here would feel free to move their startups to -- Germany, with less than 1/3rd of the US' military expenses per capita [0] -- or Hong Kong, where mass transit is privatized [1] -- or Canada, where the number of lawyers per capita is 1/15th that of the US [2]. I dare say some have a positive view of all three of these statistics, despite them being technically "more Somalia-like". Not to say (not at all!) that militaries, infrastructure, and legal systems are useless and shouldn't be funded; but perhaps that they can be less funded (by taxpayers) with a net social benefit.
And that the statement "we should pay more to government agencies for the benefit of startups" is not immediately obvious.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR
[2] https://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/...
Feel free to do so, as specified by another commenter - you'll end up paying about double to the German Government, then.
Good infrastructure and a fertile business market apparently requires taxes, apparently.
Also, neither HK or Singapore are very cheap. You don't pay taxes, you just pay more. A car in Singapore, for example, is around $100K every 5 or 6 years.
I'm very tired of Americans complaining about taxes when they have one of the lowest tax burdens in the world along with the lowest cost of living based on value.
But the gist is that when you plot the capital gains rate and stock market curves on the same graph, there's no dependency, which is counter-intuitive. However,
1) Endowments, pension funds and 401k's don't care about capital gains tax rate as they're shieleded at 0%
2) Foreign buyers are exempt from US rates as long as they pay their home country rates and there's a double-taxation agreement in place
3) People don't choose to buy less, people just choose to sell less. Combined with fairly stable demand generated from (1) and (2) the price of quality assets actually tends to grow faster in high-capital-gains-tax years than in low-capital-gains-tax years.
What's correlated with higher capital gains taxes is brokerage profits - sellers don't sell as frivolously.
Investment vehicles, such as a 401k, do pay capital gains taxes just not on the sale they pay when the individual pulls the money out of the account.
You're arguing for less liquidity in the market? Liquidity is a good thing because it allows the market to more efficiently deploy capital.
PS... correlation does not equal causation otherwise the amount Chocolate eaten per capita has direct effect on the number of Nobel Prize winners.
Nope. First off, companies in the stock markets sell, too. Second off, tax-free vehicles are used for investments in private equity, venture capital, real estate, etc.
> Investment vehicles, such as a 401k, do pay capital gains taxes just not on the sale they pay when the individual pulls the money out of the account.
Nope. It's all treated as regular income at the time of withdrawal, so former and current capital gains rates have no effect.
I agree with your argument on liquidity - I don't argue for it, I'm just saying that net effects from increased capital gains are far more subdued than apocalyptic scenarios people usually attach to them. Excess liquidity also generates bubbles, so there's a fine line you have to walk where even though you can get a no-documents loan to buy up dozen of new real estate properties, you probably shouldn't.
Remember, this is the same guy that supported the NDAA, has increased drone usage both locally and abroad, and didn't take to well to the whole Bradley Manning/wikileaks deal (also, what was his stance on sopa/pipa). Obama is only for "open government" to the extent that it furthers his party's agenda.
The President's Club is a great book that covers some of the ways ex-presidents stay involved in the politics of the day, even if you don't hear or read about it in the news.
I've put together a coalition that's building the next bill. Note that acquisitions aren't taken into account in the current bills. It'll be fixed.
We've been going through some iterations within political space. No more press releases, starting today, game on for startup visa.
And yes, current solutions are pretty awful. I detail some hacks here though: https://www.quora.com/Blueseed/Are-there-any-interim-solutio...
More and more founders are looking to O-1, especially if they can raise a round, putting them in the top few % of all 'startups,' including mom and pop shops, but damned if I'm explaining Steve Blank's segementation of the new business market to USCIS.