bhupy

93 ms·

661.
by bhupy 6y ago
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. If the argument is that taxation is too high, then advocate for cutting taxes. If the argument that taxes are too low, advocate for raising them. Pick a side!
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by bhupy 6y ago
Taxation is just the price of the basket of services a government offers to its citizens. We don't deduct prices of other goods & services (food, clothing, rent, transportation) from our salaries before paying taxes on them, do we?
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by bhupy 6y ago
My point is that political party A criticizes tax cuts at the Federal level at the hands of political party B, but nothing is stopping California from raising its taxes to make up for those cuts, especially because it is largely governed by
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by bhupy 6y ago
But school funding has never been under the purview of the Federal government, and State government budgets are already earmarked for equalizing local disparities. https://www.governing.com/topics/education/gov-sta
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by bhupy 6y ago
That's not how taxes work though. I pay for a ton of other things besides State taxes, like my Spotify subscription, my rent, my food, my transportation — why not deduct all of that before paying taxes as well? The State and Local gove
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by bhupy 6y ago
> I don't see why people would be against SALT deductions. When the Federal government allows you to deduct certain line items from your taxable income, it's usually as an incentive for that thing (eg charitable donations dedu
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by bhupy 6y ago
This is: 1. Not true of all low tax states (Nevada, Washington, New Hampshire, South Dakota, etc) 2. More representative of which states have the most senior citizens and military bases, because most of the Federal budget goes into Medicare
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by bhupy 6y ago
And California is run by that other political party.
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by bhupy 6y ago
> First, the high federal taxes preclude it. The federal government has set itself up as the collector of most taxes, which it would then dole back out to the states with various strings attached. This is half-true, and to the extent tha
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by bhupy 6y ago
0.4% (yes, really) of library funding comes from the Federal government. Cutting that spending is literally a rounding error for libraries. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/library... Only 8% o
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by bhupy 6y ago
Capping the SALT deduction doesn't stop states from raising their own taxes — it just makes it harder to hide higher state taxes behind Federal deductions. Keep in mind that State and Federal governments are two independent sovereign s
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by bhupy 6y ago
Like what, specifically? To use one of the cited programs, the US school system, as an example: per-pupil inflation-adjusted spending on schools is the highest it's ever been, and has been continuously increasing: https://nc
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by bhupy 6y ago
Yeah but nothing stops states from raising their own taxes.
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by bhupy 6y ago
Nearly all of those programs listed are funded and administered at the state and local level, which are run by both major political parties.
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by bhupy 6y ago
> Try asking anyone not in the top 5% of the worlds wealth if a gaming console and a smart phone are of comparable importance. Then, ask them if smartphones and consoles should be afforded similar consideration and protections by their s
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by bhupy 6y ago
To summarize the conversation so far: burlesona extended an analogy by suggesting that console software lock-in is a feature that gamers seek out, and for those gamers that don't like it, there is a more than acceptable option that o
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by bhupy 6y ago
> I agree. What "consistently applied principle" did you interpret my comment to be against? The principle that would be applied when considering game consoles. In other words, it's not "foolish" or "lazy&qu
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by bhupy 6y ago
Only 10 years ago, none of what you said was true. Who knows what the world will look like 10 years from now. Basing policy on the current ephemeral norms rather than consistently applied principles seems ill-advised. Also, even in a world
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by bhupy 6y ago
> Your link says charity given by individuals decreased while scraps thrown by rich people increases, thanks for defeating your own argument. What? My link shows that charity is more than just "scraps from the rich". It doesn&#
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by bhupy 6y ago
I recommend checking this out: https://www.forbes.com/sites/avikroy/2020/07/24/trumps-most-... As I mentioned earlier, Medicare actually largely relies on private insurance leverage to determine dru
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by bhupy 6y ago
No, so that public investors can participate in growth just like private institutional investors (and rich accredited investors). Preventing million dollar corporations from going public is an extremely ham-fisted way of policing/preve
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by bhupy 6y ago
Right, exactly. Which is why it’s really just a price control, not really “efficiency”. The government setting fees as a monopsony buyer is just price controls with extra steps. It’s also worth noting that Medicare Advantage carriers use th
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by bhupy 6y ago
> I still dont understand why do you think it better to depend on scraps thrown by rich people just because they are better at manipulation laws for their benefit? I never said I think that, I never made any value judgements about charit
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by bhupy 6y ago
Yeah, by price controls, I was referring primarily to the Medicare Fee Schedules: https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Paymen... Every payer (public & private) has “fee schedules”, which is just th
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by bhupy 6y ago
As with most data distributions in life, there are notable exceptions/outliers. You can probably count the number of inefficient governments that “went out of business” in the last 50 years on one hand. You’ll need several people to ta
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by bhupy 6y ago
“In a study of over 28,000 students in Switzerland, 62% of economics students gave money at least once to help students in need, compared with 69% of non-economics students. These differences were already present before the students took a
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by bhupy 6y ago
No, both the inflation adjusted revenue (receipts) and spending (outlays) of the Federal government have been constantly increasing — the latter unfortunately more rapidly than the former: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sta
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by bhupy 6y ago
So full disclosure: I work in claims processing. First of all, Medicare is only “more efficient” on account of price controls. “Legal inability to negotiate pharmaceutical prices” is just a euphemism for “inability to force pharmaceuticals
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by bhupy 6y ago
One of my favorite professors in college was my economics professor, who forbade us from using the word “fair” during lecture seminars. Even referred to it as the “F-word”. The idea was that “fairness” is subjective and ill-defined.
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by bhupy 6y ago
It’s not different, because businesses that are “VERY inefficient” often end up dying. There’s no structural permanence baked into the corporate system that guarantees that a corporation will exist forever. On the other hand, governments an

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