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This is good news, but it may not go anywhere - "the Administration strongly opposes H.R. 5719 because it would increase the Federal deficit by $1 billion over

This is good news, but it may not go anywhere - "the Administration strongly opposes H.R. 5719 because it would increase the Federal deficit by $1 billion over the next ten years." [1] So a really bad tax rule is in place, but since it happens to bring in ~$100M/yr, we shouldn't fix the rule? [1]https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/114/saphr5719r_20160920.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislati...

dragonwriter 10y ago
> So a really bad tax rule is in place, but since it happens to bring in ~$100M/yr, we shouldn't fix the rule? Assuming, for the sake of argument, agreement that the rule is bad, fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  While true, on the scale of the federal government, $1 billion is pretty trivial.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    If you make a policy of ignoring individual things because the cost in isolation is trivial, the sum of those ends up not being trivial. Or, as is popularly misattributed to (but endorsed by) Senator Everett Dirksen: "A billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking about real money".
  - crazy2be 10y ago
    For reference, the US Federal budget in 2015 was 3.7 trillion dollars. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
- stustein 10y ago
  > fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse. That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget. In an ideal world, you'd have a criteria for what makes a tax worth it. For instance, some criteria might be: 1) Does the tax raise substantial money for the on-going operation of the government or to fund critical programs? (In this case, the answer would be "no" since $100M/yr is a fraction of a fraction of our federal budget.) 2) Does it incentivize a certain type of behavior that society has deemed "good" or penalize a behavior society has deemed "bad"? (In this case, penalizing people for working at a quickly growing but illiquid company doesn't seem like it benefits/hurts society one way or the other.) 3) Can the tax be paid without undue burden to the person paying? (In this case, the burden on gains that the employee doesn't actually have in their bank account could be $100,000+ on gains they don't have yet. I'd call that undue.) I'm sure we could come up with more criteria too, but at face value, it doesn't seem like this tax has too many good legs to stand on.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > > fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse. > That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget. Its true in any case; the fact that the total cost is very small compared to the budget means that, yes, the magnitude of any net harm from not paying for it is likely to be small (but, it also means that its also extremely easy to pay for.) Disregard net costs because they are small means that large harms that you would block if they were proposed together become acceptable so long as they are broken up and spread out among separate bills.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> So a really bad tax rule is in place, but since it happens to bring in ~$100M/yr, we shouldn't fix the rule? Assuming, for the sake of argument, agreement that the rule is bad, fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse.

st3v3r 10y ago
While true, on the scale of the federal government, $1 billion is pretty trivial.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  If you make a policy of ignoring individual things because the cost in isolation is trivial, the sum of those ends up not being trivial. Or, as is popularly misattributed to (but endorsed by) Senator Everett Dirksen: "A billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking about real money".
- crazy2be 10y ago
  For reference, the US Federal budget in 2015 was 3.7 trillion dollars. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
stustein 10y ago
> fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse. That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget. In an ideal world, you'd have a criteria for what makes a tax worth it. For instance, some criteria might be: 1) Does the tax raise substantial money for the on-going operation of the government or to fund critical programs? (In this case, the answer would be "no" since $100M/yr is a fraction of a fraction of our federal budget.) 2) Does it incentivize a certain type of behavior that society has deemed "good" or penalize a behavior society has deemed "bad"? (In this case, penalizing people for working at a quickly growing but illiquid company doesn't seem like it benefits/hurts society one way or the other.) 3) Can the tax be paid without undue burden to the person paying? (In this case, the burden on gains that the employee doesn't actually have in their bank account could be $100,000+ on gains they don't have yet. I'd call that undue.) I'm sure we could come up with more criteria too, but at face value, it doesn't seem like this tax has too many good legs to stand on.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > > fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse. > That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget. Its true in any case; the fact that the total cost is very small compared to the budget means that, yes, the magnitude of any net harm from not paying for it is likely to be small (but, it also means that its also extremely easy to pay for.) Disregard net costs because they are small means that large harms that you would block if they were proposed together become acceptable so long as they are broken up and spread out among separate bills.