IRS Systems Hacked
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@IRJ Why would a flat tax be better than greater taxes for people who make more?
I could buy into it for simplicity, etc. Would depend if it included capital gains / investment income etc I suppose.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller I think that's a very recent development. Jefferson was notorious for playing hardball. Whole country was founded to ensure this crap never happened, which is amusing. Before confederation or whatever the heck you southerners did I recall that one had to subscribe to a particular religion to govern in certain states.
Um, no, that was the original constitution. Country was founded by religious organizations primarily. Don't buy into the advertising. Look at our bill of rights. That was the original founding fathers and that is where all the problems started when they guaranteed that the states could each choose a state religion and that the federal government would never have the power to interfere with church power in the states.
It is only recently that we've gotten upset about it and wanted to change it. But we've not changed anything.
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@MattSpeller said:
@IRJ Why would a flat tax be better than greater taxes for people who make more?
Only need to record really basic stuff. Total income, was the tax paid, name. Done. Makes the whole system simple and the number of systems fewer. Don't need special portals and whatever with a flat tax.
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@MattSpeller said:
@IRJ Why would a flat tax be better than greater taxes for people who make more?
Flat tax means that the people who make more pay more. That you can't get around that is what the flat tax means. It's not a flat dollar value, it's a flat percentage. If you want the wealthy to pay more, a flat tax is what you would normally want. If you want the rich to have lots of loopholes, you don't want a flat tax.
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@MattSpeller said:
I could buy into it for simplicity, etc. Would depend if it included capital gains / investment income etc I suppose.
Those are so different that they are not normally included. Flat tax is only spoken about in reference to income.
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Flat tax also eliminates the need for tax preparers. The number of people that could do something productive instead of having to be part of the government's circle of welfare would be pretty huge. The IRS could be a fraction of the size too. So many agencies could be trimmed down and those people sent out to do work in the interest of the civilization instead of just making the government expensive and inefficient.
I get that having a complex tax system provides a ton of jobs that don't feel like welfare so that those people can feel good about what they do while still getting a hand out. But it doesn't change what it is - an artificially created was to move money from the people who earn it to people who don't and provide no value. Not that those people individually couldn't or wouldn't, it's about numbers. It's tens of thousands of jobs. If they didn't have the IRS and tax preps and all of the other roles associated with it, the people who actually do those jobs would probably get jobs elsewhere - but they would displace still other people and one way or another, a lot of people would be out of work.
So it remains welfare, it is just impossible to identify which person is the one on the welfare. It's a tricky system that governments do to make it seem like the economy has many more jobs than capitalism would allow for.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So it remains welfare, it is just impossible to identify which person is the one on the welfare. It's a tricky system that governments do to make it seem like the economy has many more jobs than capitalism would allow for.
Some interesting points there, but I think you give the Gov too much credit in the last bit, I'd chalk it up to plain old inefficiency. I'm confident you could say similar about the military or whatever other hunk of bureaucracy you'd care to. I wouldn't want to only pick on the bean counters heheh
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
So it remains welfare, it is just impossible to identify which person is the one on the welfare. It's a tricky system that governments do to make it seem like the economy has many more jobs than capitalism would allow for.
Some interesting points there, but I think you give the Gov too much credit in the last bit, I'd chalk it up to plain old inefficiency. I'm confident you could say similar about the military or whatever other hunk of bureaucracy you'd care to. I wouldn't want to only pick on the bean counters heheh
Exactly. I say it about the military all of the time. Why is it so large and why do they take so many people who can't do combat? Same for while the government forces so many people to go to college. All of these things reduce the pool of people that can be considered in an "unemployment" number. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when you realize how many people are working off of tax dollars it's not good. When the economy is failing, it helps to keep spirits up. But when there is any need for employees and they are not available because college, government agencies or military have taken them out of the work pool then it causes real financial damage to the economy.
It's what I call the economic circle jerk. Half of the jobs exists only to create jobs. They don't produce value and are the opposite of what people claim the economy is about. It's all for the illusion of having jobs.
If you read Scott Adams who is an economic adviser to the CIA, though, and then look at how the economy runs, it makes sense. It literally is a welfare system but one designed to make people proud rather than depressed. The problem is that it undermines much of the actual economy too and causes us to be war happy as side effects. It is as efficient, I think, as Adams' recommendation to just have those people stay home and pay them to do so. They are in the way of getting work done.
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But like I said before.... it's not necessarily the actual people in those positions that are the ones getting the welfare. Some Army General might be super valuable where he is. He's not the one on the welfare. It is some other job elsewhere in the private sector (maybe) that is available to someone less qualified who gets it because the general was used elsewhere. That's the trick that makes it so nice - you can never identify the actual people who are the ones on the welfare. It might be that bean counter, it might not be. You can never look at an individual and say "you, you are the one on welfare" because it's not really them. It just creates huge numbers of artificial jobs that are filled "by the economy".
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If you create artificial jobs, somewhere that means that there is one fewer person available for unemployment. But it also means that someone has to pay for the position that is filled. So it makes the economy look good and it makes people feel good but it is not good if the goal is to actually make things.
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@scottalanmiller I'll agree to most of that in principle, though I'd argue that keeping everyone active and proud (while wasteful) is a hell of a lot better than having them sit at home.
Only other part that rankled is your remarks about college being a drain. I know from other posts you've made that you're not a fan but it really does have value. Personally I think that after serving in the army and being paid little, college is not enough but it's certainly better than nothing! Gain valuable skills to put to use in a career.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller I'll agree to most of that in principle, though I'd argue that keeping everyone active and proud (while wasteful) is a hell of a lot better than having them sit at home.
So here is the question.... why? I agree that I kind of feel that way, but I am not sure why. If we can get over the stigma of it, why not let people spend time reading, doing art, playing music, drawing, writing, growing a garden. Sure, lots of people will just watch TV. So? If we find even 1% of people are actually awesomely creative and add to society, isn't that better than giving people false pride? And pride in what, really?
What's wrong with people sitting at home if that is what they want to do? It is less costly and less dangerous to have them at home than to have them working - and that's the point. Having people go to jobs created just to give the impression of working uses natural resources, creates highway congestion, creates pollution, uses energy, keeps families from spending time together, encourages pointless wars, costs lives, etc. Why not avoid all that when we can lower the cost and improve the quality of life? Everyone wins!
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@MattSpeller said:
Only other part that rankled is your remarks about college being a drain. I know from other posts you've made that you're not a fan but it really does have value.
Some college has value, but lots of college has massive negative value. You can't just state that it has value, how do you quantify that? I'm not saying that there is no value to higher education at all. I'm saying that much (nearly all?) of college is not that. It's education for the sake of education - just to create jobs and keep otherwise potentially productive people out of the unemployment pool. Does it make people smarter? Debatable. Does it make people richer? Not in the US.
While there is college that is good and college that is bad, the numbers suggest that most college is bad at this point - because far, far too many people attend. The more than attend, the fewer good professors per student can be found. The value decreases rapidly both as the quality plummets and the ability to add value drops from too many people attending.
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@MattSpeller said:
Personally I think that after serving in the army and being paid little, college is not enough but it's certainly better than nothing! Gain valuable skills to put to use in a career.
What's the comparison? That college adds valuable skills is a dangerous assumption. Many colleges actually make people worse. Remember that ALL college comes at a cost of lost opportunity. You can't compare college against nothing because nothing is not the alternative. People don't cease to exist for the time that they are not in college. They do other things. Like work or party or make a successful career.
College is just one choice of how to spend that time. That one of the other choices is learning the skills to excel in your career is where college tends to not shine so much.
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I think that even the pro-college crowd give away how little they think of college when they compare it, literally, against nothing. "It's better than nothing" is said all the time. I understand that they don't mean ceasing to exist but they do imply that someone not going to college will smoke up, play video games and be a dead beat for the exact time that someone else their age goes to college and will then attempt to get a fast food job the day that the college grad graduates and starts to look for a job as a rocket scientist. And while that can happen, you are assuming that everyone that considers or can consider college is inherently worthless and only college can change that.
But that's a rare situation. Most people not going to college will do something else rather than nothing. Maybe they work and gain job experience. Maybe they study and learn skills. Maybe they travel and understand the world better. Maybe they do art or music or something.
I dropped out of college and got to work getting job experience. I was a newspaper photographer, a restaurant manager, a hotel manager, a classical guitarist, a trombone player in a touring wind ensemble and in a brass quintet. I was hardly idle. I got lots of odd, unexpected experience that my friends in college did not get. I spent more time learning IT than they did. I spent more time studying music. I spent more time reading history books. And I did so while building a career in not one but several fields getting more exposure to work, jobs, industries, people, etc.
Sure, that's just me. But the alternative to college isn't nothing, it is something. And that something can very easily be very valuable. College takes time and money. I learned, broadened, etc. while earning money, being cash positive rather than cash negative. That's a big life changer too.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So here is the question.... why?
What's wrong with people sitting at home if that is what they want to do?
People actually give a crap about things they've contributed to or feel a belonging to. Be that society in general, or whatever they happen to do for a living. By paying taxes and participating you "buy in" and become part of it instead of watching from the outside.
I do not advocate having incompetent people employed doing useless things by saying that. There are many other ways to achieve it. I wouldn't say no to paying people to stay home either, but I would encourage them to participate even in a small way.
Things I'd throw out that might be worth investigating to make the planet a more awesome place to live for humans:
- Much shorter work week (24h/4day?)
- Reasonable minimum living wage
- Universal healthcare
- Greater emphasis on the arts and cultural events
- Less societal emphasis on climbing the ladder to succeed; avoid the Peter Principle
- Greed shown for the unimaginative and rather pointless activity it is
I'm sure others will have more / better ideas, but that's all I can throw out to radically alter our society for the better at 5pm on a Tuesday afternoon hahah
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@MattSpeller said:
I do not advocate having incompetent people employed doing useless things by saying that. There are many other ways to achieve it. I wouldn't say no to paying people to stay home either, but I would encourage them to participate even in a small way.
But that's a neat trick of the approach - they are always free to contribute. They can help build monuments, do art or music, teach their kids (or others), read, help the elderly or handicapped, assist their neighbours with things.... they don't have to be idle. They would only be idle if they chose to be. But they wouldn't be afraid of starvation or being homeless so they could be free to take risks, spend time with a sick relative.... whatever.
Paying people to "stay home" does not imply that you are paying them to be under house arrest. Just that they are not expected to get a normal job to pay the bills.
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@MattSpeller said:
Things I'd throw out that might be worth investigating to make the planet a more awesome place to live for humans:
- Much shorter work week (24h/4day?)
- Reasonable minimum living wage
- Universal healthcare
- Greater emphasis on the arts and cultural events
- Less societal emphasis on climbing the ladder to succeed; avoid the Peter Principle
Some of these things are good, some coincide with the paying people to stay home, but some undermine the economic theory. Now you might not agree with the theory, but the basics of the theory is that 2% of the population produce everything and 98% are in the way. If we kept the 98% home, the 2% could produce even more and everyone would win. Life would improve for ~100% of the people.
Things like shortening the work week don't fix the issue, they actually make it harder for the 2% to get done what needs to be done. Creative types are crippled by forced short work weeks - they aren't allowed to create when inspiration strikes. That's a problem. Forced long weeks don't help either. But when you don't force a work week companies are free to allow the top performers to decide on what is best for them instead of forcing them into averaged that are set based on the needs of the people who are not producing.
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Dammit, wrong browser.
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Not that anyone is going to implement a system like this, it is too drastic. But it makes for a very interesting thought experiment. That a to economist feels that this is true, enough that the US government has him on payroll to guide secret agencies, it's worth considering. And what are the ramifications of it? Things like massive "circular" economic systems where millions and millions of workers are put into jobs just to create other jobs just to keep people "out of the way" while feeling like they aren't being shuffled out of the way is really quite possible, plausible and, honestly, probably likely.
And it isn't about an elite 2%, it's about 2% at the moment. Kids under a certain age all in the 98%. As are the elderly over a certain age. Of people in their prime years, the percentage is way higher of people who are productive. People move in and out of the 2% at different stages of their life, I would assume. It is not that 2% of humans are useful - it is that 2% of any given population is productive "right now."
