Congress is set to make a down-payment on innovation in America
economist.com
economist.com
"Yea it's got some pork. Yea, it's change for change's sake. But you'll like it, just wait and see."
Tax us less, far less. Here’s something to consider - today I pay >60% of my income to taxes; historically (pre-1920) if 20% of a farmers income was taxed that would be very high.
I don’t want to have to write grants so I can have a business. Reduce the burden and let me compete against ideas, not people who write grants properly.
Social Security taxes
Medicare taxes
State income taxes
Local income taxes
State/local real property taxes
State/local personal property taxes
Sales taxes
It's pretty easy to get to 50 or 60%, depending on how much you make and what state you live in.
Unless you own an absolute shitton of property and have an abnormally high property tax liability relative to your income, in which case you have an abnormal financial situation that isn't generalizable to other people.
Maybe this is typical if you're a landlord and your source of income is mostly real property, but that's not a typical situation either.
Also, Congress doesn't have much control over state sales taxes, property taxes, etc.
It varies by state, but on average for the top 1%, it looks like average effective tax rate in the US comes out to around 38-39%
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/unequal-state-tax-burdens/
https://www.getrichslowly.org/effective-tax-rates/
I’m not sure how to get 50% - 60%… maybe that’s referring to your top marginal tax bracket?
Once you include sales taxes (which are 12% in a jurisdiction not far from my home) and property taxes (which aren't taken against income but are still taxes), it's not hard to get to a 50-60% total tax burden (across all tax authorities).
It's really, really not. You'd have to be making high 7 or low 8 figures in ordinary income annually and own expensive real estate and spend a shit ton of money on other stuff that has sales taxes.
Tax rates aren't additive. A 40% top federal bracket and a 10% top state bracket don't result in 50% of your actual income going to taxes.
Our household is in the top 5% (not even top 1%) nationally, living in a medium-tax state, and we managed to max out the SALT deduction. Practically speaking, this means that for the portion of income taxed by state and local authorities resulting in taxes in excess of 10k, we are also (doubly) taxed by the federal government. It truly is (partially) additive.
We can all thank the Trump "tax cuts" for that.
> It truly is (partially) additive.
On that portion of your income. I reiterate what I said earlier. To have an actual effective 50% tax rate, you need to be earning well over $1m. That's not "easy" or a typical case.
Are you only talking federal or fully loaded? Do you only look at withholding or do you factor in any refunds? Do you include sales tax? What about increases to the prices of goods you buy due to corporate taxes? Capitol gains on your investments? Various fees that are paid to the government? The cost of compliance with regulations that you wouldn't of done otherwise? What about fines, commonly a large revenue generator in rural areas? Property taxes? Higher prices due to governmentally enforced monopolies? Devaluation of your holdings due to the printing of more currency?
To start we must first agree on what we are counting.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...
Consider that a farmer in the 1920s just might be in a wildly different tax bracket than you are.
If we ever have self driving cars it will be because DARPA -a government agency— hosted competitions in the desert with million dollar cash prizes just for college students to compete to have fun building self driving humvees; at the time no one thought it would be commercially viable.
> Enter Mike Watts and his wife, who decided to build a road only 400 meters long to get around the landslide. They put a 2-pound toll on it. The road was built in 10 days.
> And it’s working. People are using it and it’s bringing in substantial revenue.
This is what people parody when they mock radical economic libertarianism. Roads are (arguably) a public good. They shouldn't bring in "substantial revenue", otherwise only the richest areas will get them. I appreciate the failure of bureaucracy to fix the detour here, but this just isn't a response to the problem of societal infrastructure without taxation.
If overall the costs are lower than taxation, it stands to reason that someone would invest time or money in solving the problem.
I'm not necessarily an absolutist, but if we're discussing the principles involved, observing the increased costs and often lower quality of state infrastructure isn't enough. The problem and key distinction for proponents of liberty is being violently coerced into paying for these services.
Even if you can make the argument that there might be potentially underserved areas, can you justify the use of force? If so, can you say that with a purely state run road system, there will be no underserved areas?
Getting back to the rejection of absolutism, I'm not convinced either system will be perfect. Both have trade offs. We live in an imperfect world. Utopia isn't a practical comparison.
The costs of building roads overall may work out lower than taxation, but if you're in an area where on average people are in the minimum tax bracket, it will likely work out higher for you. This comes at the expense of those who earn more ofc, and I guess that's where we differ in perspective.
My personal perspective would entail that someone born into an impoverished area should have the opportunities to succeed, and (ideally) taxation can at least ensure they have the infrastructure around them to do so. It's difficult for me to consider a society as one that ensures everyone's liberty, if some people are massively disempowered by society by luck of birth.
Taxation can do this, but that does not mean it's the only way to do it.
As I see it, we as citizens of a free society who want to give equal opportunity as much as humanly possible, have two choices for how to do that:
(1) Coordinate it with a government;
(2) Coordinate it with private entities.
Unfortunately, neither of these choices works very well.
The problem with #1 is that it never stops with just enabling equal opportunity. Yes, the government builds roads and other infrastructure. But the same power we give it to do those good things, it also uses to do lots of things that are at best wasteful and at worst actively harmful. There's no way to have a government that only does good things with our tax money.
The problem with #2 is that it's like herding cats. Most people want infrastructure in the abstract, or want it if it already exists, but don't want to actually do the work required to create it, even to the extent of participating in community discussions about it. They just want it to happen somehow.
However, the failure modes of these two choices are also very different:
With #1, the failure mode is for government to keep expanding and expanding, taking more and more power, and putting more and more restrictions on people's freedoms. The end state of that is tyranny for everyone.
With #2, the failure mode is less equality of opportunity, or at least more difficulty in pursuing opportunities for people born into less fortunate circumstances. But there are many ways to compensate for this. Even if the fraction of more fortunate people who will do actual work to help less fortunate people is small, technology can give them leverage. As long as people have freedom, they will use it.
Libertarians do not advocate #2 over #1 because they think it works great. They advocate it because it is less bad in terms of failure modes than #1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S...
SpaceX is not the first to act. Government was. SpaceX wouldn’t be viable now without government contracts so that example is not persuasive.
Taxes are a part of life, and if you want to live above third world conditions, they are going to be high.
Almost nobody thinks that the US government's role is to pick winners and losers. This is always an cloaked appeal for less regulation, often in bad faith and unrelated to the topic at hand.
> Tax us less, far less. Here’s something to consider - today I pay >60% of my income to taxes; historically (pre-1920) if 20% of a farmers income was taxed that would be very high.
Odd callout to farmers. I wonder why...
> don’t want to have to write grants so I can have a business.
... What does grant-writing have to do with government or tax rates?
> Reduce the burden and let me compete against ideas, not people who write grants properly.
Ahh, there it is. You want government money, but not government scrutiny. Nice.
What bugs me about the discussion of taxes in this country are the vast swaths of Americans who think they pay 40%, 50% or 60% taxes. If you are paying 45% or more, you need a new CPA.
But the directed approach already exists, and it's stupid. It just leads to lots of grant requests that are super far fetched and suddenly one year is all about cancer and the next all about space and the next all about computer, all the while it's the same research.
Good luck with that. I have come to the conclusion that there is no efficiency or accountability without competition or severe consequences for failure (applies equally to the private sector). This is my problem with government support for "innovation." I don't think more than a tiny fraction of the allocated funds will actually go to that end. It would have to be run like a VC fund where everyone loses their jobs if ROI thresholds aren't hit, or gets rich if they win big. The government will never actually mass fire bureaucrats or pay 8 figure bonuses, so this will never happen.
There's a whole scientific 'commons' that are hugely important to society but don't have a capturable value to the private sector.
The libertarian counterpoint would be that the golden age stopped due to regulation and government involvement in scientific research(grants).
> There's a whole scientific 'commons' that are hugely important to society but don't have a capturable value to the private sector.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "commons", but in order to get to a valuable product, much is learned and spread throughout the various scientific research circles. Sometimes research that seems useless ends up having significant impacts. Many things in science are learned through business ventures.
Have a look at how government spends taxes now before suggesting such utopian disinfo
The government crowds out industrial/commercial labs that are necessary to actually complete large huge projects. As for going to mars, look at how much SpaceX has accomplished and what it cost -- significantly leaner and cheaper than NASA running the show.
Also, taxes are mainly used for social programs and not really for science.
Instead what we normally get are companies chasing the bottom. The hyper efficient, low innovation, short term stock motivated companies.
Maybe you weren't alive during the cold war or the space race. The government poured billions into fundamental research, including hopeless moonshots like parapsychology, to help us beat the Russkies to the moon and/or ensure we were the ones dishing out preemptive nuclear strikes against them if and when the shit really hit the fan. When the government funding of science dried up... well, so did science. Private companies stopped opening Bell Labs or Xerox PARC style "let's throw this at the wall and see if it sticks" research centers, and any research companies do today has to have a clear path to monetization. Which is why we're still using 1970s Xerox PARC style computers (running a 1970s Bell Labs style OS) and not something more next-level. What's more, as political conservatism reasserted itself, so too did anti-intellectualism, with the result that it's hard to get funding from any source for fundamental research.
As to this being a largely libertarian website, I'm not sure I would accept that generalization. There's a fair amount of support for state programs here.
>. One was the method relied on by the old city-state of Hamburg and other communities—voluntary gifts to the government. President William F. Warren of Boston University, in his essay, “Tax Exemption the Road to Tax Abolition,” described his experience in one of these communities:
>For five years it was the good fortune of the present writer to be domiciled in one of these communities. Incredible as it may seem to believers in the necessity of a legal enforcement of taxes by pains and penalties, he was for that period ... his own assessor and his own tax-gatherer. In common with the other citizens, he was invited, without sworn statement or declaration, to make such contribution to the public charges as seemed to himself just and equal. That sum, uncounted by any official, unknown to any but himself, he was asked to drop with his own hand into a strong public chest; on doing which his name was checked off the list of contributors. ... Every citizen felt a noble pride in such immunity from prying assessors and rude constables. Every annual call of the authorities on that community was honored to the full.
https://mises.org/library/power-and-market-government-and-ec...
Sadly, the political landscape is dominated by people who would gladly let others suffer to save a dime.
> Sadly, the political landscape is dominated by people who would gladly let others suffer to save a dime.
This sort of rhetorical statement is either misinformed or disingenuous. The vast majority of people who wish to see government withdraw from the healthcare system are in fact motivated by the idea that this will limit suffering. In fact, if taken literally your statement could be turned against you:
> I still rarely have to think about money because it is so high
If you retain any money for discretionary spending or anything beyond your mere survival, you are "saving a dime" and not putting it toward alleviating the suffering of others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This is the choice we all make every day. We value different things at different times for different reasons. Government taxing and spending our money takes away this freedom to choose what we value.
>Kilgore is about to get his revenge. The Senate will probably soon pass the us Innovation and Competition Act, known until recently as the Endless Frontier Act. Though the bill is named after Bush’s report, it will take American science policy in a more Kilgorian direction.
>Mr Gruber agrees that existing funding agencies are too conservative, and wishes the bill were bigger...“You can call it picking winners,” he avers. “I call it taking risks.”
Would you agree or disagree with the premise of government funding supporting independent innovators or would you expect the funds to go towards large institutions?
I'm a bit skeptical personally.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/09/the-pace-of....
Just because we know about a problem for decades doesn't mean it goes away automatically.
America is stable because of investments like this. Just like a company that invest in R&D and then launches a new product category.
We are talking about the same government who infected black men with syphilis just to see what would happen. Also dosed random POCs with LSD for the same reasoning.
Oh, but Bell Labs so it’s all good.