bhupy

120 ms·

961.
by bhupy 6y ago
I understand that, but your original argument was disingenuous. The central question at hand is the App Store monopoly, and your argument was: > There are thousands of powerful smartphones on the market, from many different companies and
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by bhupy 6y ago
> There are thousands of powerful smartphones on the market, from many different companies and even countries. There are only 2 major OS's.
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by bhupy 6y ago
It's not just the top marginal tax rate. The full bracket has fallen across the board , not just on the top marginal income tax payer. > A major source of short-term noise is the business cycle, where capital gains and corporate
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by bhupy 6y ago
> You also need to include inflation. Tax receipts actually fell on an inflation-adjusted basis in 2018. Absent any changes in government policy, you’d expect expenses to roughly follow inflation plus population growth, and revenues to r
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by bhupy 6y ago
Right, everyone knows about the Laffer curve. It's hilariously simplistic. > I think lawmakers supporting tax cuts try to claim that tax revenues are not sensitive to tax rates because it would be convenient if true when trying to p
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by bhupy 6y ago
Oh yeah it's definitely debatable if tax revenue would have grown faster in a counterfactual without the cuts, but that debate is orthogonal to the point you were making about "blowing up the federal budget", which is strictl
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by bhupy 6y ago
No, it's because GDP increased (by a lot). Federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP has been basically flat since WW2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
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by bhupy 6y ago
> This is why tax cuts under Bush and Trump blew up the federal budget - tax rates were already pretty low, so quite deep cuts to revenue were required to deliver any notable benefit to high-rate taxpayers I just want to point out that a
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by bhupy 6y ago
Agree, that’s a strong point.
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by bhupy 6y ago
That's a great point.
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by bhupy 6y ago
Making education debts dischargeable in bankruptcy sounds good in theory, but against what collateral do you take out a college loan? Most bankruptcy includes collateral liquidation. What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degr
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by bhupy 6y ago
> Do you sincerely believe that UBI is the difference between a working class individual and a billionaire? Um, no? I don't know where I suggested that. All I said was that while UBI further enriches the producers of the world (who
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by bhupy 6y ago
I like this discussion a lot, because I agree that the regulations are pretty dumb, but I can't imagine a world without regulations that yields superior outcomes. What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that
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by bhupy 6y ago
> Most of the scarcity I see is artificially induced by the people that want more profits There's just no empirical evidence for this. The general profit margin for most enterprises in competitive markets is between 5-10%. For food
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by bhupy 6y ago
It presupposes that the quarterly trend will continue at the same rate. In finance, annualizing is a good way to try and extrapolate from the current trend, but in this unprecedented pandemic, the current trend is extraordinarily volatile.
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by bhupy 6y ago
I'll try and reframe your argument using slightly less incendiary verbiage. UBI will continue to funnel money from the hands of consumers to the existing producers. Even with UBI, the existing producers would sit on more wealth than th
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by bhupy 6y ago
56% of all workers participate in a workplace retirement plan. In the public sector, 83% of workers participate in a workplace retirement plan. The median earner doesn't own "1 stock", they indirectly hold stock through 401(k
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by bhupy 6y ago
It's not "irritatingly misleading", it just needs to be contextualized — which ironically was missing in your "precisely worded" statistic. I provided that context in the elucidation: > While it's true that
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by bhupy 6y ago
> But its negligible ownership stake Yes, and that was addressed immediately in the next paragraph: > While it's true that the top 5% owns a disproportionate amount of stocks, that's just a function of the wealth distributio
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by bhupy 6y ago
54% of Americans own stocks, either directly or indirectly. While it's true that the top 5% owns a disproportionate amount of stocks, that's just a function of the wealth distribution. If everyone in the US had half of their perso
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by bhupy 6y ago
> I'm writing this from South Korea, a country that developed "miraculously" under completely top down control of a military dictator working from centralised 5-year plans. South Korea's prosperity is almost entirely
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by bhupy 6y ago
> - jobs where wages must be subsidized by government programs (eg. WalMart encourages their lowest paid workers to sign up for SNAP) UBI would obviate the need for SNAP.
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by bhupy 6y ago
I don't think there is any good or service for which we have transcended "scarcity". Even with food production, actually manufacturing food is dirt cheap now, but it's the transportation and logistics that's the har
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by bhupy 6y ago
A UBI funded by progressive taxes will always be a negative income tax, net-net.
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by bhupy 6y ago
The data from the linked articles explicitly compares urban centers, not suburbs/exurbs. And also, as another commenter pointed out, suburbs/exurbs can also be net producers themselves.
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by bhupy 6y ago
There doesn't appear to be a size/population correlation. > less successful? That depends on what your criteria for "success" is. San Francisco has among the highest per capita GDP of any city in the Union as well as
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by bhupy 6y ago
You can massage the data to tell any story you want. To your point about city mayoralties, on average, Republican-led metros have lower inequality and higher cost-of-living-adjusted incomes than Democrat-led metros[1][2]. There isn't
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by bhupy 6y ago
First of all, you're only talking about income taxes, which as you rightly pointed out are concentrated in the Federal government. Once you factor in property and sales taxes, the distribution is roughly 50-50. Second of all, even if y
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by bhupy 6y ago
“Trickle down theory” has not been “debunked” by economists because it’s not an actual economic theory. It’s a pejorative used to criticize tax cuts. Also the fact that technological progress/experiment typically (but not always) targe
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by bhupy 6y ago
To be fair, this is how most technology proliferates. In the mid-20th century, airline travel was an endeavor strictly for the rich. Today it is also accessible to those in the middle class.

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