Economic no Brainers

[Sashi]

This Article on NPR gives six policies presented as economic policies we would be stupid not to do ... that we will never do because politics is stupid.

Eliminate the Mortgage interest tax deduction. Bigger homes get bigger deductions, it's a regressive policy that distorts the price of housing for everyone. Use the increased income to lower taxes for the poor and middle class directly (most of them say).

Eliminate tax deductions for employer-provided health care. Helps decouple employment and healthcare, reduces the distortion of healthcare costs.

Zero Corporate Income Tax. We don't have a problem with corporate income being used for R&D or jobs, it's giant payouts to preferred stockholders and yachts for CEOs that we don't like, so tax that. Besides, corporations are Contractually required to exploit tax loopholes to maximize income for their shareholders, so really all we're doing is giving money to Ireland and other tax havens.

Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. Replace them with a consumption tax like ...

Tax carbon emissions. Surprisingly, even the Libertarian agreed on this.

Legalize Marijuana (and possibly other drugs). Standard organized crime, enforcement costs, and tax revenue arguments.

What does The Den think?


Personally, I can get behind everything except eliminating income and payroll taxes. Their argument is that you tax what you don't want (like taxing cigarettes or gasoline to reduce smoking and driving) so payroll taxes are like taxing job creation. I can kind of see what they're saying, but they want to replace it with a pure consumption tax (with some nebulous fixes to keep it from being regressive), but that makes it sound like they want to encourage poor people to spend themselves broke, and rich people to save up giant gobs of unspendable money?

It seems to me that payroll taxes should probably go away (it really does do no good to increase a businesse's cost of hiring), but income taxes need to be balanced with consumption taxes so that people are encouraged to seek reasonably high income and consume below their means, building a moderate savings.

[Ancient History]

This Article on NPR gives six policies presented as economic policies we would be stupid not to do ... that we will never do because politics is stupid.

Politics is a concept. Politicians may or may not be stupid.

Eliminate the Mortgage interest tax deduction. Bigger homes get bigger deductions, it's a regressive policy that distorts the price of housing for everyone. Use the increased income to lower taxes for the poor and middle class directly (most of them say).

Tax deductions exist to encourage people to certain behaviors, or to avoid unduly fleecing people for shit they need to have. As such, tax deductions that are abused (like home mortgages) should be periodically reviewed and revised accordingly.

Eliminate tax deductions for employer-provided health care. Helps decouple employment and healthcare, reduces the distortion of healthcare costs.

As above.

Zero Corporate Income Tax. We don't have a problem with corporate income being used for R&D or jobs, it's giant payouts to preferred stockholders and yachts for CEOs that we don't like, so tax that. Besides, corporations are Contractually required to exploit tax loopholes to maximize income for their shareholders, so really all we're doing is giving money to Ireland and other tax havens.

Well...no. We like large corporate income taxes because corporations make vast piles of money. It's really the same logic with taxing rich individuals more than poor individuals. I'd be cool with reducing (but not eliminating) income tax on corporations provided we eliminated all the tax loopholes, and provided deductions for R&D and employee healthcare...within limits, and subject to audit.

Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. Replace them with a consumption tax like ...

Yeah, I'm not cool with this. Hypothetically we could tax stuff and activities to the point where it makes up the same number of dollars received, but realistically I don't think we would ever be able to balance it out - any item described as a "luxury" would suddenly become onerously expensive, which would drive down sales and tank large sections of the economy, even if people have more money to throw around. And ghost forbid you start taxing something basic like salt or milk to the point where poor people cannot afford it.

Tax carbon emissions. Surprisingly, even the Libertarian agreed on this.

You're aware of the whole mess with carbon credits, yes? And honestly, I don't like the idea that somebody can simply throw money at pollution and pretend it's okay. That's oldthink. Really, the EPA needs a shitload more teeth and manpower so they can level more and larger fines and prison sentences.

Legalize Marijuana (and possibly other drugs). Standard organized crime, enforcement costs, and tax revenue arguments.

I'm not against it, but I also don't think this is a substantial cure-all in the grand scheme of things. Marijuana may be a huge illegal cash crop, but legalization isn't going to pay off the deficit.

[K]

You have to have income taxes because consumption taxes bring in very little income.

Wealthy people don't spend their income on stuff, instead saving it or investing it in assets which are essentially the same as saving it (like stocks). If you didn't get income taxes from them, you've never get any money from them at all. Even capital gains taxes are just a fancy way of saying "rich people income taxes."

Consumption taxes are thus not progressive in any way. It would shift the burden of taxes away from the middle class and wealthy and place it squarely on the middle class and poor.

[Josh_Kablack]

Wait, the list has eliminate mortgage income tax deduction and eliminate income tax? The list has eliminate employer tax deductions for employee health insurance and eliminate corporate income tax?

I'd like to present a couple counter proposals: Firstly, we'd be stupid not to eliminate the student loan interest deduction and we'd be stupid not to immediately forgive all outstanding student loan debt and make universities free to attend. Secondly, we'd be stupid not to give me $500 and we'd also be stupid not to give me a million dollars.

See how I listed a pair of things beneficial to me, and yet redundant with each other? Note also how I listed the more preposterous one second, to make the first one seem reasonable? Yeah - that's exactly what they did.

That kind of rhetorical slight makes me really disinterested in even debating the merits of the various proposals.

[Username17]

The mortgage interest tax deduction was an attempt to subsidize home ownership in a free market way. Of course, what it actually did was to help drive a housing bubble and encourage an untenable level of consumer debt. So I would be OK with getting rid of that.

The health insurance tax writeoff is a basic necessity if you want employers to fund health insurance. And right now, the US runs mostly on employment funded health insurance for working age people. Cutting insurance tax deductions would de-insure over a hundred million people - more people than actually live in any European country (yes, even Russia). It would be more efficient to go to a single payer system where every single person got medicare, but unless and until that happens eliminating the healthcare tax credit would be an atrocity of comparable magnitude to the Rwandan Genocide or the Cambodian Killing Fields. That's not even hyperbole. You'd probably have about a million deaths on your hands. it wouldn't even control healthcare costs, because the vast majority of the people you'd be shoving out of the risk pool would be healthy working age people. You gotta love the argument that encouraging more people to get insured "drives up usage" - that's an economic euphemism for "people are getting healthcare and having their fucking lives saved", which those assholes apparently think is "unfair".

Anyone who suggests getting rid of income tax is a regressive monster who wants Mitt Romney to pay a lower tax rate than hobos. Poor people spend all their money in the country they live in. Rich people don't spend all of their money and spend a lot of their money in Switzerland and Bermuda. Consumption taxes pretty much definitionally fall more heavily on the poor than on the rich. Furthermore, we're a demand and investment driven economy, whether you're a Keynesian or a Supply Sider, you have to admit that for Income Tax the incentives point the right way and for Consumption Tax the incentives point the wrong way. If income tax is high and consumption tax is low, it encourages you to spend the money you make (you have a lower after tax income, and peoples' spending percentage is higher the less take-home they have) and it encourages company owners to take less money out of their company as wages/profits and reinvest more into their companies to grow their wealth in a way that actually creates jobs. On the flip side, if income taxes are low and consumption taxes are high, it encourages rich people to take more cash out of their companies and then not spend it.

The people arguing for disbanding income tax have no interest in fairness and are not backed by good economics. They are shilling for wealthy people and nothing more.

As for corporate income tax, it already doesn't apply to business expenses like reinvesting in the company, so whoever made that argument is just a pants-on-fire liar.

And that is the kind of shit you get when your five person panel is 2 hard-core right wing ideologues, 2 self-described "centrists", and one guy who thinks he is "probably left of center".

-Username17

[tussock]

1: Universal citizens benefit. Alive? Have money. Not vouchers, real digital bits. Spending is contributing.
2: High minimum wage. Because fuck slavery. Rich country, rich people.
3: Flat tax, only after you have a universal benefit and a high minimum wage. Easiest collected as a payroll tax. ~30-40%, acts as a progressive tax over a base benefit but is far cheaper to administer.
4: Luxury tax. All earnings above above some rather large and rare number are taxed like crazy to discourage them, effectively a maximum wage because fuck those guys.

5: End (most) prohibition, just tax things that have external costs more than enough to cover those costs, and then cover them with said taxes.

6: Energy independence. Screw going to Mars, or Iraq, just keep building renewable energy collectors until you have too many of them, setting aside whatever's needed for maintenance and replacement.


7: None of that will happen without tax-funded political parties. Donations are corruption, people really are always buying policy, and that will always fuck everything up by giving money to money.

[sabs]

I agree with most of that, except that we need to go to Mars.
Space Exploration and Colonization is one of THE MOST important things we as a species can do.

[Korgan0]

Not really, no. Charles Stross sums it up far better than I could here, but if you can't be bothered reading it the tl;dr is basically this: Mars and the like are incredibly hostile to human life, and both escaping earth's gravity well and long-distance space travel are horrendously expensive. Space exploration is important, but any kind of large-scale colonization is pointless, given the immense cost. Sure, being on one planet exposes us to extinction-level events, but the tremendous amount of money required for colonization is so large that you'd probably get more bang for your buck building stuff that can fend off e-level events on earth.

[sabs]

Except we need to start building a stellar presence. Research facilities on Mars would be awesomely useful. yes it's expensive, but waiting until we've made leaps in technology, without researching the intervening steps is stupid and asinine.

[Korgan0]

Except we need to start building a stellar presence. Research facilities on Mars would be awesomely useful. yes it's expensive, but waiting until we've made leaps in technology, without researching the intervening steps is stupid and asinine.

Why, exactly, do we need to start developing a stellar presence? Exploration and scientific research are, of course, important, but having humans in space simply for the sake of having humans in space is pointless- How? As Charles talks about, humans are incredibly unsuited to being in space, or anywhere except an earthlike planet- vacuum kills us in a matter of minutes, and radiation kills us in a matter of years. We can't maneuver in zero-gee very well, and so on. Most of what we need to do in space can be done by robots (like mining) and the rest isn't that big of a deal- billionaires can have their expensive vacations at the bottom of the ocean, or something.

Also, what makes Mars so special? There aren't that many valuable resources, and it's incredibly hostile and remote. Having research facilities there would give us nothing that having labs in earth orbit wouldn't, barring a look at martian geology and ecology, which really isn't that important.

[violence in the media]

Why, exactly, do we need to start developing a stellar presence?

It's the next step in the "Screw you guys, I'm leaving" cultural expansion paradigm?

[Shatner]

Why, exactly, do we need to start developing a stellar presence?

It's the next step in the "Screw you guys, I'm leaving" cultural expansion paradigm?

1) Don't be facetious. It's to prevent the whole "eggs in one basket" problem.

2) If this is going to be a real discussion, it should probably be it's own thread given how, ahem, astronomically it deviates from the original post.

[MfA]

Eliminate the Mortgage interest tax deduction. Bigger homes get bigger deductions, it's a regressive policy that distorts the price of housing for everyone. Use the increased income to lower taxes for the poor and middle class directly (most of them say).

Makes you unelectable with baby boomers.

Zero Corporate Income Tax. We don't have a problem with corporate income being used for R&D or jobs, it's giant payouts to preferred stockholders and yachts for CEOs that we don't like, so tax that. Besides, corporations are Contractually required to exploit tax loopholes to maximize income for their shareholders, so really all we're doing is giving money to Ireland and other tax havens.

True up to a point, of course if you're not careful all the CEOs will go live somewhere else ...

[tussock]

Oh NOES! If all the CEOs leave their penthouses, what ever will stop the sky from falling?

You know what's dangerous to society? No sanitation workers. No Nurses. Fuck the financial sector parasites and their endless ticket-clipping scams, if they take all their money and run you can just print some more money and share it around.

@Mars: build the energy collectors, do whatever you want with that energy. It's just a big old fuck ton of energy with an extremely low life expectancy for participants. Throw some biological goop at distant planets around young stars if you want to spread life, only takes a few billion years for it to get smart.

[hyzmarca]

When dealing with evolutionary timescales, interpanetary colonization provides a degree of diversity that is simply impossible to achieve on a single world.

Humans aren't well suited to microgravity and high radiation today. After a few thousand generations are born, grow up, and reproduce in space, that's going to change dramatically.

The end result will likely be multiple human sub-species, or even entirely new species of human-derived homonids, but that isn't a bad thing

[tussock]

Evolution doesn't work that way. Particularly as no one could possibly produce even a second generation, but not even if we could. We are very dependant on things that have been consistent on earth for the last few hundred million years, and those assumptions are built into a great many very low level developmental routines in our DNA (which would pretty much all have to be re-written from scratch all at once, which can't happen at all).

Yes, some sort of sheep thing can evolve into a sperm whale, but that's because they do almost everything the same way with the same basic tools. Neither of them can evolve into a shark, despite sharks also having almost all the same tools.

[Grek]

The actual argument for why we want space colonies (ie. the one that is actually founded in practicality and logic) is that if some terrible cataclysm happens on earth, like a meteor hitting or runaway global warming or a hard unfriendly AI launch, or nanotech gone awry or nuclear war or whatever else you care to name, then the human race is over if we don't have somewhere other than earth to live. Any right-thinking person aware of the possiblity of the Earth getting destroyed should want there to be somewhere like that. And, as it turns out, our options are pretty limited there: It's Mars or O'Neill cylinders.

[DSMatticus]

Evolution doesn't work that way. Particularly as no one could possibly produce even a second generation, but not even if we could. We are very dependant on things that have been consistent on earth for the last few hundred million years, and those assumptions are built into a great many very low level developmental routines in our DNA (which would pretty much all have to be re-written from scratch all at once, which can't happen at all).

Evolution does work that way. Small changes which affect the survivability of people in space? I have no doubt that would happen. Now, pointing out that human reproduction and development ever working in space is a slim to none chance is valid, but that has nothing at all to do with how evolution works, so your criticisms are probably correct but kind of mislabeled.

Also, your sheep->whale, shark example is kind of bad. Because orca and sharks have achieved very similar functions, and functionality is what we care about. And the reason they aren't more similar isn't because they can't be, but because they have no evolutionary drive to be; they each have their niche and are successful.

Any right-thinking person aware of the possiblity of the Earth getting destroyed should want there to be somewhere like that.

Why? No, seriously. What value does "seven billion people die, and on an unrelated note someone who is sufficiently biologically similar to you exists elsewhere" have over "seven billion people die, and on an unrelated note there is no one in the universe sufficiently biologically similar to you?" Why is the survival of humanity something I should care about at all, given the death of Earth? Obviously "Earth survives" is better than "Earth dies," but given that Earth is dying why would I care about whether or not there exist some other humans who are not on Earth and not dead?

A similar question: if you're an only child in a long-line of only childs, would choosing not to have a kid would be a moral fault?

Keep in mind, of course, that any resources you spend putting people into space could be spent improving the lives of people here. So it's not just a fun moral question.

P.S. I am pro space travel and colonization because it is sufficiently cool to cause a little bit of inoptimum human happiness. I am also pro replacing humanity with human-like intelligences which run electronically because the maintenance is easier, on Earth or in space. So the survival of a loosely defined category of genetic codes is actually kind of antithetical to the direction I would like humanity to go over the next thousand years.

[Grek]

The idea isn't "Earth explodes and everyone on it dies, but that's OK because there's humans on Mars, so who needs the ones on Earth", it's "Oh, fuck, there's a meteor coming! Better get as many people off the planet and into the space colonies before it gets here, and minimize casualties."

[Username17]

The idea isn't "Earth explodes and everyone on it dies, but that's OK because there's humans on Mars, so who needs the ones on Earth", it's "Oh, fuck, there's a meteor coming! Better get as many people off the planet and into the space colonies before it gets here, and minimize casualties."

No, the idea really is "Earth explodes and everyone on it dies, but that's OK because there's humans on Mars." Then we can hopefully go back and recolonize Earth. Or maybe we can't. It's not actually super important because either way Beethoven and Batman survive. The point is to preserve civilization. You and I are both finite beings, we're going to be dead in a century no matter what happens. But civilization continues.

The thing is that yes, sooner or later something will happen to wipe out Earth. Maybe the sun explodes, maybe a meteorite hits, whatever. And it is in civilization's interest for civilization to survive that event. And as a civilization, we have a responsibility to ensure that it does.

Where people get sidetracked is on the realization of what a cosmically large timescale we're talking about here. Civilization is only tens of thousands of years old, and we're talking about diversifying to protect it from calamity that is millions if not billions of years in the future. In the 20th century people saw the invention of the airplane (USA), the first satellite (USSR), the first man in space (USSR), and the first man on another planet (USA) - truly giant leaps in the technology of flight. And many people thought that meant that we were going to start space colonies in their lifetime. Spoiler: we aren't.

It turns out that there are lots of impediments to colonizing other parts of the solar system. Those places are farther away than anything on Earth is possible to be. Even the Moon is thirty times farther away than the other side of the world. We need advancements in climate control, sustainability, energy collection and storage, food production, medicine, materials fabrication, engineering, and many other fields before we can seriously consider starting exo-colonies. Sad to say: the stage of colonization we are in now is the stage where we have scientists working on how termite butts evolve hydrogen from cellulose. We need to understand that shit backwards and forwards before a moon base or mars base is a self sufficient thing.

But yeah, it's coming. Maybe not in four centuries or four millennia, but soon. Sooner than the Sun expands and swallows the Earth anyway. And that's what matters.

And somewhere, somehow, our civilization will endure.



-Username17

[K]

We have plenty of money and resources to spend on quixotic scientific achievements.

Now, before someone points out starving children in Africa, let me explain: capitalism is wildly wasteful of both resources and human capital. Starvation is not even an issue of making food or shuttling around resources, but of the simple inability to get people to not seek out their own pleasure at the expense of others. In places like Somalia, it's warlords hording all the food and in the US its capitalists hogging all the investment capital and rigging the financial markets.

If we could simply give everyone a job and pay them a fair wage for it, poverty would vanish tomorrow. The problem is that capitalism is a huge number of independent actors all trying to suck value out the system and that artificially constrains economic growth.

We need to reach a point in our civilization where we value human labor and scientific achievement more than wealth or power and where we recognize that even right now we can run society just fine on the labor or like 10% of the people working at one time.

Instead of trying to enslave the other 90% with rampant consumerism, we need to recognize an ancient truth understood by the Eqyptians and Romans. They understood that the way you used excess human capital was through civil projects.

Our civil projects must be scientific rather than nationalistic. Heck, I'd settle for simple economic civil projects like more Hoover Dams.

[Koumei]

You and I are both finite beings, we're going to be dead in a century no matter what happens. But civilization continues.

And this is the point where most people stop giving a shit. Myself included. For the same reason that I don't care about having my body preserved and buried instead of harvested then burned (I won't be there to appreciate it, so the amount of fucks given == 0), what happens to future generations doesn't really factor into my care-o-meter: I won't be there to appreciate it. So I'm more than happy for current funds to be spent on shit that matters for the people who are actually here now, whether that be housing and food for those in poverty, or prettier-looking Playstation games and faster-downloading porn for me.

[Chamomile]

Koumei, I'm genuinely curious, why do you care about people who are not you and live in Africa right now, but not people who are not you and will not be born until after you're dead?

[K]

Getting people to care is simply a problem of marketing.

Marketing gets people to care about things all the time, regardless of how important or trivial those things are.

[DSMatticus]

Koumei, I'm genuinely curious, why do you care about people who are not you and live in Africa right now, but not people who are not you and will not be born until after you're dead?

I don't think the question is "do you care more about some african or more about some future space person?" The question is "do you care more about some african or more about creating some future space person (or the potential thereof) who you can then care about?"

Time is not the separating factor that makes someone not care about space persons. It's the fact that africa and its descendendants are already on track to exist and are going to exist basically regardless of what we do. But creating space persons who even have a current or future well-being will take resources that could be spent on the current and future well-being of individuals who will already exist (however small or large).

I care about people who exist, and the children of people who exist, and the children of children of people who exist, and so on. But why should I care about how many children they have, except insofar as resource depletion and their personal happiness goes? Because that's kind of like the space question; it's not a question of caring about people who exist or who will exist. It's caring about whether someone should exist or not exist at all. And as far as the answer to that question goes; I don't care. "Making people exist so we can make them happy (or miserable)" isn't really a noble goal. Happiness is not a better state than nothingness. But making people who exist happy is a noble goal, because happiness is a better state than not happiness.

Edit: Though I can't speak for Koumei. But that's the reasoning as I see it.