https://www.archpaper.com/2021/04/greenidge-power-plant-mine...
And the market will solve this issue real fast.
Sadly the power structures in place prevent creative thought, as those milking the cows of the status quo prevent change.
Imagine: every 6 months or so, $X gets sent out.
"Regular people pay higher marginal rates than rich people, but other than that it's a progressive tax system" is basically the opposite of a progressive tax system.
But on top of that, it isn't even true that the marginal rates paid in practice by lower income people are lower than those paid by middle income people, because of benefits phase outs. The system we currently have is worse than a flat tax across the board. The people at the bottom pay the highest marginal rates.
The only sense in which it's progressive is the same one you get with a UBI and a flat tax, i.e. that the effective rates on the poor are lower because the taxes they pay are more than offset by the lump sum benefit(s).
Not really what I said. If richer people progressively pay more tax for the bottom 99% of the population, that's arguably still a progressive system. The top 1% not paying more feels more like a problem in the implementation of what is otherwise a fairly progressive setup.
I don't think I believe that poor people pay the highest marginal income tax rates given that some poor people pay none and all rich people have the amt. Other taxes, like sales tax, might make that true. A flat tax is more regressive than a progressive tax with loopholes cut out.
Except that that isn't what happens for the people at the very top, i.e. the investment class. The capital gains rate (paid by billionaires) is lower than the top earned income rate (paid by millionaires) and billionaires and international corporations use tax avoidance strategies to reduce the amount of income they pay tax on to begin with.
A flat tax can't be avoided in the same ways.
> I don't think I believe that poor people pay the highest marginal income tax rates given that some poor people pay none and all rich people have the amt.
You're confusing marginal rates with effective rates.
Suppose you make $15,000/year and get $5000/year in government assistance. But the assistance programs phase out at various rates that add together to 80%. If you make an extra dollar, you lose $.25 of food assistance, $.30 of housing assistance and $.25 of childcare assistance, something like that. Because those benefits phase out. The government takes 80% of the marginal dollar. Even if your "income tax bracket" is 0%, your marginal tax rate is 80%. This is more than some higher income person paying a marginal rate of 25% or 35%.
Your effective tax rate is -33%, because you made $15,000 and then "paid" -$5000 to the government, i.e. received $5000 in assistance.
Now compare this with a UBI that has no phase out and a 30% flat tax rate. You make $15,000, receive $12,000 UBI, pay $4500 (30% of the $15,000) in tax, so you net $7500 from the government. Your marginal rate is 30%, your effective rate is -50%. This is more progressive than the status quo on both metrics, despite being a "flat tax."
Because all "flat tax" means is that everybody pays the same marginal rate, whereas any rational definition of "progressive" implies that lower income people are paying lower effective rates.
While not perfect, it strikes me as a rather great „90%“ solution since it gives back the tax in roughly the same proportion as energy use and cost (single/couple/family), so it‘s pretty fair to the poor as well.
Carbon negative coal(). Woot!
() Certainly causes cancer, respiratory damage and widespread property and ecological damage. Not available in all locations.
we don’t necessarily need lower income taxes across the board, but rather a sharp, smooth sigmoidal tax rate curve with the inflection point at the median income. and an end to deductions and carveouts like the lower capital gains tax. that one change would fix a lot of incentive problems in the fiscal system.
edit: i should add that we likely don’t need to lower taxes on housing either, as it won’t make a dent in getting more people housed where they want. what we need to lower are the barriers to development, like restrictive zoning, overly specified building codes, and arduous permitting and review processes.
We have all types of tax already in place, we just need to emphasize.
If we dont the run for profit will make human life unbearable in many places.
Edit, meant to reply below
For fiat currencies military is providing protrction of that value with other things, so it's quite hard to compare the enrrgy needed by other countries to protect their currency (Marco Polo was a great Netflix series showing what happens to a currency when the military is defeated).
That ambivalence for parties outside of the consenting exchange can lead to negative or positive externalities.
Ideally these negative externalities are banned (if they're too extreme, such as with lead pollution) or taxed.
I wish more adults understood the above. Capitalism isn't always an unadulterated good (for people outside of the exchange) but it mostly is positive-sum good for people within the exchange, and we need government to implement taxes that prevent the former and otherwise mostly stay out of the way for the latter.
> I wish more adults understood the above. Capitalism isn't always an unadulterated good (for people outside of the exchange) but it mostly is positive-sum good for people within the exchange, and we need government to implement taxes that prevent the former and otherwise mostly stay out of the way for the latter.
Your argument goes the way that lousing each other is beneficial to all if there are strict rules and punishment for those that don't louse back, instead of simply washing yourself or seeking other ways to delouse oneself. I'm well off and thanks to wide diversification of assets my future descendants will have all the time in the world to wonder why people still equate labor and property.
Your core point is a good one: trade tends to be mutually beneficial, and good policies of ownership design [1] incentivize net-positive wealth creation. But there's a lot of good and bad ideas (and ideology) wrapped up in "capitalism" as such; it's worth teasing them all apart independently rather than the simple "Capitalism: Y/N" stances that pervade the discourse. I'm frankly ready to banish the words "capitalism" and "socialism" from our vocabulary entirely; they're simply not helpful.
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/601899/mine-by-mich...
"its shortcomings are numerous:"
Take positional goods. If there's no negative externalities, how is that bad? If person A wants to give lots of money to person B for a diamond, that has zero negative impact on me. Person A is presumably happier and person B is presumably happier (otherwise they wouldn't have traded). Nobody is losing in a nontrivial way here. You could maybe argue that a society with status strata is undesirable, but it's a bit of a stretch to lay the blame for that on capitalism, diamonds (or family pedigree or whatever) would be a status marker irrespective.
Take quasi-sociopathic companies. Yes, they're amoral and generally will do anything for profit, but this is mostly a point about externalities. A chemicals company will treat their customers extremely well but will dump in the river because those impacted aren't their customers. There's examples of businesses treating their customers atrociously (e.g lead spiking of turmeric, not doing safety recalls, etc), but these are exceptions and aren't the rule, brand equity all the way through the supply chain incentivizes the opposite in general. Every business I patronage treats me like royalty and it's no coincidence.
Regarding races to the bottom, do you mean things like the zero sum competion for speed among HFT firms? Isn't this waste just an inevitable byproduct of competition? As an industry, they've largely successfully automated away expensive human market makers, despite this zero sum waste that comes from that competition. It's not efficient to have 5 supermarket chains with 5 legal department and 5 HR departments, but we accept that we need that waste for competiton to function.
Regarding rent seeking, that's fairly broad and it'd be better to discuss specifics.