Why is everyone disagreeing with you being dishonest? Is this like Alanis Morisette?Originally Posted by Loki
If one chose to be a subsistence farmer in the US, how much taxes would they be looking at?
Why is everyone disagreeing with you being dishonest? Is this like Alanis Morisette?
If one chose to be a subsistence farmer in the US, how much taxes would they be looking at?
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Sure, maybe, if the country is in any real danger. otherwise it's just a waste of almost everyone's time and money and sanity. it's a bizarre comparison you makeedit: conscription might solve your chav problem though
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
So it is necessary if the need is great enough, otherwise it's just a waste of everyone's time and money and sanity? Sounds like the perfect comparison againSure, maybe, if the country is in any real danger. otherwise it's just a waste of almost everyone's time and money and sanity. it's a bizarre comparison you make
Arguably it's far easier for an individual to end up in straits dire enough to warrant help "necessary if the need is great enough" than entire nations
Of course after Teller and his cronies, the line's blurrier
But still! The pubbies love pretending the US is one below-average household and dictate their economic policies accordingly when it is insanity of the highest order. Because individual needs and expenses are not really comparable to national ones. In this sense.
But I'm glad you managed another "the right is right" soundbyte!
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Because Illusions keeps on attacking a position no one is taking. And he keeps on doing so despite being told that fact numerous times. Either he's an idiot or he's intentionally misrepresenting everyone's position to avoid "losing" the argument. Since I don't think he's an idiot, it must be the latter.
Property taxes, sales taxes on seeds/farm equipment, income taxes/social security/medicare taxes on any product sold to get enough money for the seeds and equipment.
Hope is the denial of reality
I'm attacking the position that taxes are suffering/punishment/theft/coercion/blackmail/etc., which you have stated they are, by arguing how they are not.
How about this, I'll state Loki is an asshole. When people attempt to try and convince me how you are not, I'll say they're being intellectually dishonest because they're attacking a position that no one is taking.
. . .
Again, Loki sees black and white. There are states that impose no property tax. There are states that don't impose income tax. Barter easily eliminates federal taxes. But all that is beside the point...you choose to pay taxes, taxes are not forced on you anymore than living in this country is forced on you. There are many retirees happily avoiding US taxes by living in Costa Rica.
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
The question about "suffering" and "punishment" haven't been addressed by anyone here. No one has made a single moral argument against taxation. You seem to have absolutely no idea what position you're attacking. Taxation is quite clearly coercion; whether it's theft and/or blackmail depends on how you define those terms.I'm attacking the position that taxes are suffering/punishment/theft/coercion/blackmail/etc., which you have stated they are, by arguing how they are not.
So again, what exactly are you doing in this thread? At what point are you going to give up attacking positions that not a single person here is taking?
Hope is the denial of reality
Alaska sounds like it has no sales tax or income tax.
. . .
It has plenty of other taxes: http://www.tax.alaska.gov/programs/d...wer.aspx?1845f And anyone living in Alaska is still on the hook for federal taxes.Alaska sounds like it has no sales tax or income tax.
At what point are you going to admit that your argument about it being possible for someone to move to avoid taxes is no better than the one telling women not to have sex to avoid the need for abortions?
Hope is the denial of reality
Thats GGT's argument. There are plenty of homeless people living in NY who pay no taxes, and I'm fairly certain there have to be some too in Iowa. You don't have to move anywhere, just stop using government provided services until you're paying $0 in taxes. Obviously you don't have to stop using all of them, the homeless still are able to use some services like roads, police and military protection, (mostly) clean air, money (just don't collect or earn so much you have to pay taxes on it, or spend it on things with a sales tax) etc.
. . .
You are not restricted to living in this country. You volunatrily pay taxes so you can live here. Nobody is taking anything you didn't volunarily give for that privilege.
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
I know I'm jumping back in the argument, but I ran across an interesting article about the so-called 'bee sting' theory of poverty. I doubt it can explain everything, but it has its points:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/id...ng_of_poverty/The sting of poverty
What bees and dented cars can teach about what it means to be poor - and the flaws of economics
By Drake Bennett
March 30, 2008
IMAGINE GETTING A bee sting; then imagine getting six more. You are now in a position to think about what it means to be poor, according to Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University.
In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.
To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.
Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.
If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work - from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.
"It's Econ 101 that's to blame," Karelis says. "It's created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty."
In challenging decades of poverty research, Karelis draws on some economic data and some sociological research. But, more than that, he makes his case as a philosopher, arguing by analogy and induction. This approach means that he remains relatively unknown, even among poverty researchers. The book in which he laid out his argument, "The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor," wasn't widely read when it was published last year.
A few, though, have taken notice, and are arguing that Karelis does have something important to say.
"There's not much evidence in the book, and there are a lot of bold claims, but it's great that he's making them," says Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University. It "was a really great book, and it was totally neglected."
The economist's term for the idea Karelis takes issue with is the law of diminishing marginal utility. In brief, it means the more we have of something, the less any additional unit of that thing means to us. It undergirds, among other things, how the US government taxes people. We assume that taking $40,000 in taxes from Warren Buffett will be a lot less onerous to him than to an elementary school teacher, because he has so much more to begin with.
In many cases, Karelis says, diminishing marginal utility certainly does apply: Our seventh ice cream cone will no doubt be less pleasurable than our first. But the logic flips when we are dealing with privation rather than plenty. To understand why, he argues, we need only think about how we all deal with certain familiar situations.
If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before. If we have a sink full of dishes, the prospect of washing a few of them is much more daunting than if there are only a few in the sink to begin with. Karelis's name for goods that reduce or salve these sort of burdens is "relievers."
Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.
"The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity," Karelis says. "My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty."
The upshot of this for policy makers, Karelis believes, is that they don't need to fret so much about the fragility of the work ethic among the poor. In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. David Ellwood, an economist and the dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has called this "the helping conundrum." It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration's welfare reform efforts.
But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. Simply giving the poor money with no strings attached, rather than using it, as federal and state governments do now, to try to encourage specific behaviors - food stamps to make sure money doesn't get spent on drugs or non-necessities, education grants to encourage schooling, time limits on benefits to encourage recipients to look for work - would be just as effective, and with far less bureaucracy. (One federal measure Karelis particularly likes is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, by subsidizing work, helps strengthen the "reliever" effect he identifies.)
Few economists are familiar with Karelis's work, and when it's presented to them, they tend to be skeptical of its explanatory power. If Karelis is right, we should see even more defeatist behavior than we do from the poor, says Kevin Lang, chairman of the Boston University economics department and author of "Poverty and Discrimination." Plus, he argues, there's little evidence that simply making poor people less poor increases their work ethic - and some evidence that it does the opposite. In the early 1970s, a large-scale study gave poor people in four cities a so-called "negative income tax," a no-strings-attached payment based on how little money they made. The conclusion: the aid tended to discourage work.
Karelis responds that the data from that experiment is in fact quite ambiguous, and there has been debate among economists over how to interpret the results. But ultimately, he believes, the strength of his arguments is less in how they fit with the economic work that's been done to date on poverty - much of which he is suspicious of anyway - but in how familiar they feel to all of us, rich or poor.
"The bee sting argument, or the car dent one," he says, "I've never had anybody say that that isn't true."
I think the overturning of classical understandings of marginal value is very interesting. What do you guys think?
I think he's overstating his case, but I do think he makes a decent enough case for someone to collect the data to test his hypotheses.
Hope is the denial of reality
If you get 7 bee-stings, it's not that you don't care about them... it's that your skin is now too numb to feel any more past a certain amount, or you are dead (if you are allergic).
Last edited by agamemnus; 02-02-2011 at 04:34 AM.
Its a rather absurd argument to make. The analogy of car dents doesn't work. A car with 6 dents instead of 7 hasn't increased its value very much. However having enough food to eat but not enough for gas, cell phone and rent is FAR better then not having enough food, gas cell phone and rent.
I see your argument, Lewk, but I can also see Karelis' point. If your misery scale is more or less maxed out, then a small marginal improvement is unlikely to make you feel much better. More broadly, I would argue that so many poor Americans see playing the lottery as a valid wealth building strategy specifically because they can't see any significant improvement in their lives or accumulation of capital through more traditional means. Every dime they're likely to earn over their lifetimes will just be spent toward slightly alleviating their privation, rather than adding some unnecessary but nice luxury. Thus, why not try a higher risk (but much higher reward) approach with your funds? The 5% of your funds you spend on lottery tickets won't change your long term circumstances much (you're still going to have an objectively shitty life), but it might make you wealthy.
Thanks for the articlethat argument was made in a different form in this thread as well as in Wraith's minimum/sum thread. A similar line of reasoning has also been offered as an explanation for why preventing the spread of HIV is much more difficult in malaria-infested areas than in malaria-free ones. RB's response to all of this is that there are no limits to the amount of happiness that can be brought about through further improvements to iPod battery life
Never mind bee stings, consider how people react to overwhelming chronic stress. Does everyone become more productive and active when subjected to overwhelming and chronic stress?
I hope these ideas get thoroughly tested. I don't imagine it'll be easy to figure out how many bee-stings have to be removed before human resilience and drive can do the rest. Maybe rehab will help
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Disagreed, "every little helps", what is 5% of income compounded over life? Enough to prevent an "objectively shitty life" I suspect. The problem is people aren't as logical as what I just said though.
I never brought up iPod battery life - you did, what's your obsession with it?Thanks for the article
That's the point, though, it won't be compounded, it will be immediately consumed to make a marginally small improvement in circumstances - they'll still be drowning in debt, extremely tight on spending, etc. There's no possibility of wealth building or a 'better future' in such circumstances, so seemingly irrational behaviors might start to make more sense.
I seriously doubt this logic explains all of it - I think there's a lot of ignorance involved, as well as some plain ol' stupidity. But I think that the discussion might be enhanced by considering this kind of psychology as contributing to the problem or entrenched poverty.
If they're "drowning in debt" then it will be compounded. You pay compound interest on debt - often at extremely high interest rates. Credit Cards can be 20% or more, loan sharks, pay day loans, weekly-payment stores etc all charge even higher. If that 5% of income was solely used to pay off debts rather than gamble then it would not be 5% of income. It would be 5% of income as less debt, with compound reduction in interest.
Some people are brought up with debt being acceptable, I was brought up to avoid paying interest on debt wherever possible - both from my parents and from my schooling. Not from special classes on "home economics", but from paying attention with simple, basic maths classes: Learning about compound interest.
There used to be an advert on TV that showed a couple drowning in bills. Bills, bills, bills and sleepless nights etc - then this loan company said they could "reduce their monthly payments" by putting all these bills and loans into one loan with them, showed the numbers on the screen then went back to the couple who were now smiling and the woman said "and there is enough left over to go on a holiday". I found that ad ridiculous but far too realistic. The couple didn't have "enough left over for a holiday", they're now in more debt than they were before! But that's OK!?
RB, you're assuming there's some fantasy world where these people will ever be out of debt; I doubt such a world exists, even with an additional 5% of income. Before then any compounded savings are virtual.
It's not fantasy there are many people in this world who are out of debt and countless of them used to be in debt.
Any compounded savings are real and immediate, unless you then start to spend more than you were otherwise I'm not talking about compound interest earned, but a compounded reduction in interest paid.
Lets put some numbers on it: How much debt do you think a "poor" person in debt is in? What interest rate do you think they're paying? How much is 5% of their income?
I wonder how many poor in debt people manage to make themselves unpoor/debt free within a lifetime, especially with only a 5% bump in income.
Or if this "countless" number is another bullshit gut feeling of Rand's.
Look the only thing preventing me from taking my own life this instant is the 10 SEK/week that I spend on coffee. I'd love to have 520 SEK left over a year from now to pay for a single session of [potentially but probably not] curative psychotherapy but I don't wanna break down and die before then
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
"Only" a 5% bump in income? 5% is a lot of money, especially in disposable income.
How much disposable income do you think poor/in debt people have?
Maybe this is a country thing, maybe its your continued disconnect from understanding the poor.
A few years ago when the economy was bad, some official made the comment that Americans need better access to credit for everyday necessities, one of the officials in Europe responded with "Why are americans using credit for everyday necessities"? That doesn't sound like a whole bunch of disposable income to me.
Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 02-02-2011 at 03:20 PM.
Their debt load is quite high, but the bigger problem is that they won't even get to paying down debt since they first need to actually pay rent that they're months behind on, or pay to keep their heat or electricity on, or whatever. If you can't fund the basic needs of your existence, any additional funds are going to meet already existing unmet needs that simply weren't being met in the first place rather than paying down maxed out credit cards (although some subset of the very poor don't have access to credit at all).
For you or me, an extra 5% bonus has very real consequences on my wealth - I can pay down some of my loans faster or add to my savings for a home down payment, or invest for retirement, or whatever else (incidentally, my wife's bonus is being used for all three of these) - thus, every dollar I save makes a concrete contribution to my net worth. But if I had to spend it on basic necessities and not wealth building, and still had many of my needs unmet, my perspective might change - what's the point in a marginal improvement in conditions from extremely shitty to only very shitty when I could use the same marginal money for a tiny chance at catapulting me to truly wealthy?
Math doesn't factor into this thinking.
That kind of proves my point! It doesn't disprove it!How much disposable income do you think poor/in debt people have?
Maybe this is a country thing, maybe its your continued disconnect from understanding the poor.
A few years ago when the economy was bad, some official made the comment that Americans need better access to credit for everyday necessities, one of the officials in Europe responded with "Why are americans using credit for everyday necessities"? That doesn't sound like a whole bunch of disposable income to me.
5% of income going on gambling is "disposable income", because it is not going towards any necessity but towards gambling, it is getting disposed of. Now that does not equate to 5% of disposable income, or even 5% of post-tax income, it is significantly more. I ask again, what do you think the disposable income of a poor person is? What do you think 5% of total income is? To be going into debt, having to pay compound interest on that debt, in order to make ends meet - while throwing money down the drain on gambling, is illogical.
Again, this is money that is already not going to pay for rent, food, heat, electricity etc - it is going towards gambling. Now either this 5% could provide heat where before there was none, or it can pay down debt. Either way is or should be valuable.
Again, this is being wasted at the moment. Either it can improve existing conditions or it can pay down debt compounded (or prevent further increase compound debt)For you or me, an extra 5% bonus has very real consequences on my wealth - I can pay down some of my loans faster or add to my savings for a home down payment, or invest for retirement, or whatever else (incidentally, my wife's bonus is being used for all three of these) - thus, every dollar I save makes a concrete contribution to my net worth. But if I had to spend it on basic necessities and not wealth building, and still had many of my needs unmet, my perspective might change - what's the point in a marginal improvement in conditions from extremely shitty to only very shitty when I could use the same marginal money for a tiny chance at catapulting me to truly wealthy?
Math doesn't factor into this thinking.
How much disposable income do you think poor/in debt people have?
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