Man, I wish I could sell that logic to the county assessor.
2,399 karma · joined September 22, 2011
While I would consider that a loophole, I'm not sure it's the main problem. I feel that for all the complaints and logic of the substack piece, it misses the point of the propublica one, the kind of underlying feeling that's driving it: that it's unfair that the wealthiest people in the world pay so little tax compared to people in the 10% to .1% bracket, and even compared to people in lower brackets. It's unfair that they can gain extraordinary amounts of wealth, to such a degree that it's impractical for them to even use, and yet not be taxed on any of it, unrealized or no.
Because from my perspective, my monetary gains (eg. salary) don't really feel realized until I use them to buy something. Cash in the bank doesn't do much but make me feel financially safer - so why is taxing income considered reasonable, but wealth is not? And why, exactly, is it apparently reasonable to have sales taxes that don't exceed 12% (disclaimer - in the states, as far as I know); capital gains at 15%; but my income at 25%, 35%, 45%? Why is considering taxing wealth like company shares "far left end" but taxing other wealth, like my house, considered acceptable? Heck, we even have assessments and appraisals for real estate for the purpose of determining value without selling, for more accurate taxes and associated financial instruments - but taxing something that has a constant active market is the thing that's weird?
The way that the substack article fails to mention Warren's millionaire wealth tax proposal is a further disappointment, and leaves me feeling like it is also a fairly weak piece of journalism, not unlike the one it criticizes. It also makes little mention of the ever-higher bracket of the estate tax, and has bits like
> Sometimes stock prices go down, and that's generally not a write-off. So taxing the upside at an arbitrary point is unfair and kind of just silly.
Just because it isn't a write off now doesn't mean it couldn't be if some sort of wealth tax was implemented; this a poor-faith considering of the policy. In short, while I wouldn't consider the original article to be of much merit, and certainly below propublica's usual standard, this rebuttal is hardly any better.
Because here's the thing that's wrong with most of the thinking in this essay and in the last one: measuring the success of your economic system based on outliers tells us very little about whether that's a good economic system. For the majority of people in a given country, whether the wealth of the top .001% is inherited or built through some sort of ability to scale doesn't matter, it's still a bad system. If ten thousand people try to do something and only the one that succeeds gains anything from it, we are looking at a non-viable economic system for 99.99% of people.
And I see this all the time now, in all places. It's like when people say "Look, this guy makes huge amounts of money from Twitch/Youtube/Patreon (with the older standards being music/hollywood and pg's focus being startups). These are winner-take-all systems. That's why there's people without inherited wealth at the top of the charts - they won, and somewhere out there are tens of thousands of people that lost. This doesn't mean those people are destitute or homeless, mind you; people that "lose" in the software ecosystem go work for the winners, and things sort-of work out (its worth noting that things don't work out as well in other spaces). But consider - if I have a half a dozen people that start companies in the same space, and 5 of them drop for various reasons - bad marketing, bad design, bad customer support, whatever - does the guy who wins really deserve to be not just 10x, or 100x richer, but 1000000x richer? Is this a just system? Is it even an effective one? Are we really incapable of imagining an economic structure where people don't lose motivation to do great work without the possible reward of billions of dollars?
There's further complaints to be made - looking back only to the industrial revolution to consider 1982 the anomaly, when since the dawn of civilization inheritance has been the standard form of wealth transfer; the social impact of high inequality and how the massively wealthy have a tendency to warp society around them (this was at least examined to some degree in the other essay); and so on.
The future I see from pg's inequality essays is one of increased separation: one in which rather than having an accountant or travel agent in every town, these services are provided by a single company that serves to funnel that money from hundreds of thousands of local areas across the world to a single business, probably somewhere in SV - and a few hundred thousand middle class jobs disappear into the void. And as our technology increases in capability, it happens again, and again, until we're largely left with a few groups - the founders and funders that own everything; the few remaining high-skill jobs that make and manage the systems for huge winner-take-all tech companies; and the rest, which spend their lives doing work directed and optimized by computers until a point is reached where that work can be automated cost-effectively. I'm not sure that's a world I look forward to.
It is thoroughly unsurprising to me that most scientific publications would take a stance against releasing studies or articles considering option two or three, as right-wing media and politicians were/are fishing for anything with a suitable scientific veneer they could throw out as evidence of someone to blame. (And its not hard to see why - telling your constituents they have to deal with job losses, family deaths and lockdowns because someone in China ate a bat leaves people without something to blame, and the politicians tend to be the closest relevant people.) Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable - no one wants to be the used as justification for hate crimes or political action a la the Iraq war buildup.
Perhaps in another year or two things will have cooled down enough that stuff like this can be considered without collateral damage.
At least look into the options. Credit Karma Tax, FreeTaxUSA, 1040.com - there's a bunch of stuff out there made by companies that don't actively try to make the IRS less functional.
Couple reasons by my guess: * Bikes aren't cool. Cars are cool, horses are cool. Bikes, trikes, scooters, etc., aren't cool, and don't provide much besides efficiency. * Terrain - as you say, roads are an issue and require maintenance. Trees drop some branches on the road? A car could push it (maybe), horse could walk over it, while a bike has to be carried. Not much fun, and probably makes up for the efficiency you get from riding it. * Carrying stuff. Hauling things in a car? Easy. Horse? Easy. Bike? Hope you have a backpack, and you're probably still capped at ~40 pounds. And the more weight you have, the worse a time you'll have on rough terrain or falling.
In particular, his take on the nature/nurture aspect of thinking for yourself is something I disagree with. He specifically notes that he got a fair amount of fastidiousness about the truth from his father and cites high school as a bad place for independent-minded people due to social mechanics – both things that I feel point in the other direction.
I'd go so far as to say that most education systems beat the curiosity out of children with great effectiveness and encourage conformism, and given the lack of classes like philosophy and critical thinking, thinking for yourself has become something mostly passed from parents to children because the parents that have it find it important that their children learn it. I don't think there's anything stopping a great portion of the population learning to evaluate information they receive critically, or qualify the quality of their own knowledge – in fact I'd say it's not only possible but becoming essential, as these seeming once-a-generation satanic panics are beginning to tire me out.
Community broadband seems to be the only real way to go these days.
As such, Obama proposed the ACA as some kind of middle road[3], with the goal of having something that both sides would be in favor of, and to hold the moderates that were against single payer[4]. After the better part of a year of negotiation and multiple efforts to reach out to the opposition, the ACA was passed without any Republican votes, who then spent the following eight years running for office on the idea of repealing it (with at least 50 attempts in a four year span).
Unfortunately, the Republicans don't have any plan for healthcare themselves, resulting in a failed repeal attempt three years ago even after taking control of the house, senate and presidency.
It should be fairly obvious at this point that logical arguments for or against policies are irrelevant, even more so than they were ten years ago - and yes, a great many people would vote against it. They spent the last decade doing just that.
[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2009/08/palin-doubles-down-on...
[1] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2009/07/28/s...
[2] https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/passing-the-bat...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/us/politics/10obama.text....
[4] https://www.newsday.com/business/single-payer-health-care-pl...
It's been entertaining to watch him gradually tightening the screws on speech over the years though, as if this kind of end result was ever in doubt. Outrage is stronger than principle, and the same thing can be seen on reddit at smaller scale (in the last decade reddit has banned, more or less in order - pedo-adjacent, hate, violence, harassment/doxing, gore and illegal commerce communities). I don't think there's any way for a social media giant to avoid these kinds of restrictions - communities will spring up around any kind of material, other people will find them and the news will write about them (with the amusing side effect that you'll get a Streisand effect if you don't shut it down due to the increased attention).
Facebook has it worse it seems - they're actively taking money from some of the groups they're restricting/fact-checking, which is all kinds of messy and filled with conflicts of interest. It seems the money is winning out, which is about what I'd expect. It'll be interesting to see how they resolve these issues in the coming years.
I'd be inclined to agree with you, expect I feel this is what got us Obamacare instead of a better system - and _even then_, there was a multitude of red states that refused to accept the Medicaid expansion, to the harm of precisely the people you speak of. Pushing societal improvements on states that don't want them feels like buying a sandwich for a homeless person and having them throw it on the ground, and I no longer feel its worth the effort.
That said, you undersell the consequence aspect in DXHR. Things I remember that had consequences - after your CEO tells you to get to his chopper for the hostage mission, the hostages would be killed if you delayed more than ten minutes, which had a range of impacts on characters' approval of you. Getting to the dialog at the end of the mission could result in death of captor and hostage, death of captor and live hostage, both surviving, death of hostage and live captor - all of which had some effects beyond what you describe, as I'm pretty sure there was a side quest line that depended on the hostage being alive. Malik (the pilot) can be saved after the crash in Hengsha, which changes some scenes slightly later. The endings available change a fair bit depending on who you talk to and what you convince them on in the last chapters. Going to the LIMB clinic for the upgrade could change the difficulty of one of the boss fights and some scenes significantly. I'm pretty sure most of the police station mission can be skipped if you can convince one of your old co-workers to help you. And these are just the things I remember, almost ten years later.
On the other hand, there's no standard curriculum or expectation around computers and software (afaik). We have this expectation that people will learn how to use things by osmosis or will be taught by the thing itself, perhaps because some kinds of software are extremely good at this (primarily games) and some types are easy enough to get started and have a motivation (eg. social) that they can "pull" users through their difficulties (or they can ask friends). People jump to conclusions - "if the kids can do that, they can do everything" - which is clearly not the case. My knowledge of Excel won't help me with Snapchat which won't help me with Blender - and the difficulty difference between commonly used consumer apps and work apps can be significant.
The issue is that outside of the easy spaces, learning about computers is boring, difficult, doesn't have obvious usefulness, provides largely useless feedback, is often wildly unintuitive compared to how things work in the real world, and tends to require a baseline of knowledge most people won't have the interest to develop. This isn't surprising - the same applies to many subjects we learn in school. Most people will have no more interest learning common computer abstractions and mechanisms than memorizing their times tables or writing essays with an opening, body, and conclusion or looking up words they don't know in a dictionary.
In short, computing is something that should be actively taught in schools. Typing is a basic skill that should probably be taught in elementary, when children are learning to write (or shortly after). UI abstractions like files, folders, windows, searching should probably follow. Word processing should be covered before middle school, other productivity software during, along with more complex abstractions (clipboard, storage, paths, permissions, networks, accounts/passwords/security, scams, where to get help). Introductory programming should be taught as well.
None of this is to say that the average student should be a capable programmer after completing K-12. But I think that almost everyone should know enough to draw reasonable conclusions about systems and problems they encounter without outside help, if for no other reason than to avoid being exploited by scams, ransomware, ads, and whatever new attack vectors show up in the coming years.
I don't expect to be able to craft useful public health policy in discussion with an antivaxxer or space exploration policy with a flat earther – the idea of "unite and act" is be absurd when dealing with people who lack the ability to admit they can be wrong/consider multiple perspectives/think critically. And yet that's basically where we stand today politically.
> Fact-checkers and scientists have scrambled to correct the misinformation coming out of the White House. (No, the virus has not been “contained” in America; no, testing is not available to anybody who wants it; no, people shouldn’t go to work if they’re sick.) But Trump’s message seems to have resonated with his base: A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that just 35 percent of Republicans are concerned about the virus, compared with 68 percent of Democrats. [1]
If the other side doesn't even agree with you this is a problem that needs serious attention to be solved, how are we going to get our act together?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/trump-c...
I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.
I don't think it's difficult to imagine situations in a lot of places where natural disasters can disable things for several days, maybe a week or two. A couple weeks of food seems like a good thing to have on hand, regardless of place, time or situation.
Instead, what we have is a attempt to separate out the middle class into left and right sections. I don't really see it.
> No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country.
Perhaps the author has failed to see the split between "mainstream" media and right-wing media over the last decade, and the massive reach the right-wing media has these days - with the largest cable news shows, the largest radio news/commentary shows, and frequently the most interactions on social media. One could reasonably conclude there is a "right" clerisy, with academia replaced by think-tanks, that is very competitive with the "left" version he defines, though this might cause problems with his entire premise.
> The climatistas’ appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses...
Ah yes, the proposals of a single random professor does seem like a good representation of a "climate-friendly density regime".
There's other issues to pick at with this piece ("ultra-green policies", climate policy supported by oligarchs, etc.), but I think it's better to point to someone who covers the same issues to some degree in more convincing manner.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
Stoller takes a look at the current state of the economy through the lens of monopoly and big business, and I find his analysis to match the world I see with much greater accuracy. Kotkin mentions a lot of the issues in his section on "the embattled yeomanry", but fails to consider causes that lead to this. He'll talk about concentration of wealth, but fails to conclude any negative effects it might have. And it's truly curious how he moves from increasing corporate concentration in one paragraph to fighting against climate policy in the next.
The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing everything they can to keep them rising.
There's also a range of beneficial secondary effects. For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Aligning incentives (where possible) is, imo, almost always a better way to do things than creating a new batch of regulations/laws to deal with a problem.
Playstation Plus has a batch of free games each month for $5 a month, Xbox has something similar, Steam has sales and endless new content on the regular, Epic has given away several games a month for a couple years now. Once a month updates at a $10 subscription is table stakes here.
It does not. FTA:
> But the company ended its 2018 fiscal year having spent $240 million less on capital investments than it predicted it would in December 2017, shortly before the tax cuts passed. The company’s capital spending declined by nearly $175 million in fiscal 2019.
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> And then they further point that the NY Times is actually guilty of what the NY Times is accusing FedEx of.
The NYT didn't lobby in favor of the tax cuts and argue it would increase business investment, then fail to actually follow through - not to mention that regardless of the NYT's corporate actions, this has nothing to do with their reporting - and on top of that, the article is about the expected effects of the tax cuts vs. the actual effects on a national level with FedEx as a salient example. Countering with "but they did too" is irrelevant to the point at hand.
> The NY Times is obviously not aware of anything FedEx did that is illegal so instead they put out a piece accusing them of paying $0 tax and not investing enough.
You are ascribing motive to the authors that has no basis in fact. The NYT is making the argument the tax cuts didn't do what they were advertised to do. It's the literal subhead on the article:
> How FedEx Cut Its Tax Bill to $0: The company, like much of corporate America, has not made good on its promised investment surge from President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
The material looks like it's focused on facts and well-cited, but this rapidly started to feel like a "Merchants of Doubt" kind of product. Feel free to look at the Global Temperature Changes section and make your own assessment - but this feels like politics before (distorted) facts to me, and I'd expect the rest of the site to be similar.