8,095 karma · joined December 6, 2010
I agree that the homeless situation is bad. I don't think blanket claims that other "first world" countries handle it much better are necessarily true, unfortunately.
Again, varies widely by industry.
1. For assets that come from income you yourself earned, the tradeoff is basically whether you spend the money immediately or spend it later. If you're going to have a capital gains tax, that tends to penalize people who don't spend the money immediately. You can mitigate that by at the very least inflation-adjusting the basis, but the US currently does not; I can't speak for other countries. And that still ignores the time value of money and discount rates, of course. But inflation indexing of basis seems like a bare minimum requirement for claiming that capital gains income is like wage income; otherwise you are taxing nominal gains that are not real gains.
2. For assets that come from an inheritance, there is an argument to be made that now this is no longer you just deferring consumption. It's still deferred consumption in the sense that whoever you inherit money from deferred it, but the moral argument becomes a little more complicated, because now you start having the basic moral argument about whether inheritance should be a thing at all. There are also the complications around basis step-up (which is, I suspect, there for practical reasons that may be becoming less and less important in a world where the record-keeping is outsourced to brokerages and the like more and more).
More generally, it's not clear to me that "income" is even the right thing to be taxing. A progressive consumption tax might be a better idea if what you want to tax is consumption of resources in excess of "normal". Unfortunately even small moves in that direction (e.g. luxury taxes that used to exist) have largely gone away in the last few decades. In large part under the flag of "it's hurting jobs in our state's industry".
That's one of the "from oil revenues" cases I mentioned, indeed. Though are you claiming $10k/month? I'd love a source for that number; the last number I saw was ~$3k/month subsidy if you work in the private sector. Obviously if you work for the government directly you get whatever that salary is, which in Kuwait is pretty nice, but that's ostensibly a job, not a UBI.
Sure. Neither is any country providing a $750/month UBI, much less $1500/month, from taxes. (Some countries do provide that sort of thing for citizens from oil revenues or whatnot.)
> I'd happily trade scandi taxes for scandi safety nets and worker protections. I think those max out at ~ 50%?
~50 govt revenue as a fraction of GDP, yes. A lot of that is VAT, not income taxes, of course.
But also, that's not the same as the discussion above about UBI. Yes, a Scandinavian-style safety net can be done at much lower taxation levels than "doubling the US federal revenues", especially people by and large don't abuse the safety net. Spending 1% of GDP on the military, not 3%, also helps a bit.
> people who view taxes as theft instead of the price of a civilized society
I have no idea where you got that from anything I said, and that is most certainly not how I view taxes.
> Neither of us are ever going to change our world views based on the arguments of another.
Honestly, it sounds like you have no idea what my world view even is...
And of course doubling rates will not double revenue, because incentives really are a thing and a change this large would have large incentive-mediated effects, including people ending up with more compensation in non-taxable form (leisure, respect, non-taxable perqs, etc). The only way to double _revenue_ is for rates to rise even more, or more likely to start affecting more people (i.e. the top rate starting to apply at lower income levels).
Now those are marginal, not average, rates. But just to be clear, right now US government (federal, state, local) spending is ~46% of GDP. Federal spending on its own is ~30% of GDP. If we are talking about doubling that second number, overall government spending would be 76% of GDP. Which generally means the _average_ tax burden across all people would be 76% of income (though some of that can get hidden via corporate income taxes and whatnot). There will absolutely have to be people with average tax burdens > 80% to suport that. That's assuming that we don't finance things by borrowing, of course; 1/3 of US government spending right now is not even coming from tax revenue.
It might also be instructive to compare 76% government spending to the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... to see how that measures up against other countries.
Depending on how you define "country" (as opposed to just "a large fraction or majority of its citizens"), Denmark did in fact help Jews, at least Danish ones.
And the story of Bulgaria is .. complicated. Again, they protected Bulgarian Jews in practice.
Portugal helped not only Portuguese Jews, but many others as well. In particular, they generally allowed a huge number of refugees (16% of the country's population), including Jews, into the country.
It's true that the main Allied powers were not particularly going out of their way to help Jews, but "any country" is a high bar.
This assumes that everyone is in a similar situation in terms of trying to support a particular kind of lifestyle on whatever is deemed to be the minimum wage (or maybe two of them).
Should those same considerations apply to teenagers who are not trying to support that lifestyle themselves? What about the ones who _are_, including emancipated minors?
What about retirees who are working part time because they like to feel useful but generally not expecting to live off that money?
It feels to me that the right solution to the problem of us feeling that people in a certain situation (e.g. supporting kids) should have a certain minimum income is probably better solved via solutions like the EITC (which can be much more tailored based on overall financial situation), not a minimum wage.
Of course that gets some people arguing about the dignity of work and how receiving handouts rots people's souls. But I would argue that taxes are opaque enough that people receiving EITC don't perceive it as a "handout" anyway....
After 4 years, unless you got refresher grants, your compensation is just your salary, so you effectively make less money than during the first 4 years. At that point the incentive is to move to some other company and start the 4-year clock again...
What I don't understand is what the report bases this claim on. The actual questions asked and answers given that correspond to the conclusions you link to are presented in https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-appendix-a-... and https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2018-appendix-b-... respectively, and the only questions I see that involve the $400 bit is are EF3, EF5B, and EF6B.
Now it's possible that there is additional data that they have but are not presenting in the appendix but are using to generate their conclusions, including data like how many people marked both "pay with cash" and "pay with credit card now, pay off at next statement". If that's the case, I wish that data were actually available.
For example, given the "could easily cover it, using entirely cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement" phrasing it's not clear to me how they code someone who checks both "pay cash" and "borrow from family". Are they included in the 41% or the 59%? Or were there just 0 such respondents so this is irrelevant?
I would love to trust that people are drawing the right conclusions from their data, but would really prefer that raw data were published so the conclusions can be indepedently verified...
The problem is that it's impossible to tell what's actually going on due to this survey design. For example: what is the overlap between the set of people who check "just pay it out of checking/savings" (50%) and the set of people who check "charge it and pay off in full at the end of the month" (36%)? I would rate both answers as "these people have the $400 on hand". The fraction of people who checked at least one of these options is somewhere between 50% and 86%, depending on how much overlap there is. And you can't tell, from this survey, where it lies in that range.
Similarly, you can't actually conclude the "Four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money" thing from these numbers, so the executive summary is rather misleading. Politifact takes that summary as an accurate summary of the survey results, but it doesn't seem to be. As far as I can tell, that 40% comes from adding up non-mutually-exclusive percentages. It's the equivalent of claiming that 86% of people would just pay it off based on the above 50% and 36% numbers.
I should also note that the survey included full-time students under "adults", and if I had an unexpected $400 expense at various points as a student I would have absolutely had to borrow money to cover it. Looking around briefly, there are ~20 million full-time college students in the US as of 2020, which is ~6% of adults. While it would obviously better if college students had larger cash cushions, a college student borrowing money from parents to pay $400 is not the mental image most people have when reading the executive summary here...
Now the fact that no matter how you slice these survey results no fewer than 8%, and maybe up to 50% of non-college-student adults don't have $400 on hand if they need it is still a significant problem from my point of view. Especially because I really doubt it's as low as the 8% option. But I am also quite certain it's nowhere close to 40%....
But also, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, your hypothetical is more or less what happened with the DeCSS primes Phil Carmody published. Except it never even got to a judge.
Yes, you invest some of your time to create the faster tool. Then hundreds to tens of thousands of people all use that faster tool to save time, day in and day out.
Just to put some concrete numbers to this, if you have a 100-person engineering team and you ask one of them to spend all their work time ensuring that the others are 1% more efficient than they would be otherwise (so saving each of them 5 minutes per typical 8 hour workday), you about break even. If you have a 500-person team, you come out ahead.
Now it's possible that the switch to a compiled language we are discussing would not save people 5 minutes per day, or that you don't have 100+ engineers. Obviously for a tool that only the developer of the tool will use the calculus is very different!
I suspect that both of those claims are dubious, by the way. Someone with more wealth is in fact likely to employ more plumbers (due to having more toilets) and babysitters-per-child (full-time nannies, tutors, etc). And given how low-margin grocery stores are, I don't know that I'd expect a grocery shop owner to end up with $400k+ taxable income....
> Yes this may need to be adjusted for inflation down the road, like anything else.
My main point about the inflation bit is that it's disingenuous to introduce a new tax with a claim that it "does not affect the middle class" when you know with near-certainty that in 10 years or less it absolutely will. In fact you are banking on that to make the numbers you depend on actually work out.
Almost all proposals to "tax the rich" that do not come with automatic inflation adjustments built in are just proposals to tax the middle class in disguise.
If the numbers at https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen... are correct, the "top 1%" household income threshold in the US in 2020 is $53lk. $400k is closer to the "top 2%" level.
More importantly, these numbers like "400k" tend to not be inflation adjusted (e.g. the cutoffs for the net investment tax and the additional medicare tax are not, cutoffs for phaseouts of the child tax credit are not, etc). And income percentiles grow faster than inflation. Looking at that same data table, it looks like the percentile boundaries grew 6%+ year over year from 2019 to 2020. If that's not a fluke caused by the pandemic in some way, then in 10 years you expect something like 1.79x growth in the cutoff numbers, which would put $400k at about the "top 8%" level at that point.
Is it possible that your idea of what level is "firmly in the 1%" is just a few years out of date?
As I said above, corporation have a much larger set of things that are considered deductible against revenue to determine taxable income. Starting with the fact that corporations are generally taxed on "profit" while people are generally taxed on "income", which is closer to "revenue" in general.
I should also note that even our current tax code admits that the setup with marginal taxes we have is kind of insane. See "Schedule J: Income Averaging for Farmers and Fishermen" which allows those occupations to do exactly what you suggest: average income over multiple years for tax purposes (can average with the previous 3 years). Why only farmers and fishermen? And why do you not get to do the averaging for AMT purposes? That's back to the "insane" part....
My understanding is that a jury's primary task of deciding on the facts is final. The facts in a case like this seem to me to be things like deciding whether Oracle in fact holds the copyright, and whether Google's copy of the API is sufficiently similar for that copyright to apply to Google's copy.
Now as far as appeals go, you can appeal whether the trial was done properly, such that the jury was able to do its fact-finding job correctly. You can appeal what was then decided based on those facts (e.g. sentencing). You can appeal meta-questions, like whether a particular decision is a "finding of fact" or not to start with.
The question of whether "fair use" is the sort of thing that is decided by judge or jury is apparently somewhat contentious in this case; I just found https://www.law.uw.edu/wlr/print-edition/print-edition/vol-9... describing some of the issues there. Today's decision refers to this as well: it's (c) under "Held":
> (c) The fair use question is a mixed question of fact and law. Re- viewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of un- derlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This ap- proach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense. Pp. 18–21.
which sure sounds like the Supreme Court effectively decided that the final determination of whether a use is "fair use" or not should be made by a judge, not a jury. Then they proceed to make that determination in this case in holding (d).
Similarly, the incidence of things like the employer half of FICA is somewhat split between the employer and the employee (in the form of lower salary for the latter). Here, as I understand it, the general consensus is that the incidence falls mostly on the employee, except in cases of binding constraints like the minimum wage.
If it's paid out as some sort of investment income not subject to long-term capital gains treatment (e.g. interest, non-qualified dividends), then your top federal rate is 40.8% (37% regular, 3.8% net investment tax).
That does assume $500k of taxable income not counting the payout we're talking about here, to hit that 37% tax bracket.
If you have kids, you can hit these sorts of marginal rates at lower incomes too, because of the 5% marginal tax rate from the child credit phaseout.
I should note that money is fungible, so the fact that some of this is claimed to be "medicare" tax and some is claimed to be "income" tax is irrelevant to both the person paying the tax and the government collecting the tax. Medicare is not funded solely by the "medicare" tax in practice, so the fact that there's a separate tax is more or less an accounting oddity.