i think the motivation for my proposal was pretty clearly orthogonal to funding spending. it can finance some spending! but that isn’t the point. bsky.app/profile/inte...
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again, is there really some communist nomenklatura in-group if the limit on wealth is $100M? is that asking Americans to accept some new hierarchy of identity? it’s not some weird communism to clip an absurd right tail almost no one ever reasonably even aspires to.
i think success in excellence, in kindness, in general human contribution are boundless, but it’s far from punitive to put a limit on financial “success” is $100M. 1/
that’s not “punishing success”. it’s limiting profiteering and antidemocratic influence. we can all be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. just not billionaires. /fin
no dig perceived! again, this was the plain ask at the top of this thread. so far, overwhelming majority here say they agree but doubt it could be politically possible (mostly citing D donor class rather than popular inability to grasp non-financing justifications for taxation).
he believes in global warming and beachfront real estate.
no, that’s the point of the question that began this whole thread. it’s not deceiving anyone to point out that it’s no longer theoretical that great concentrations of wealth are incompatible with democracy. 1/
i believe they should be prevented/remedied by taxation, that there are other important justifications for taxation than what the taxation “finances”. that’s a real, i think true, case i am openly willing to make. are you persuaded or do you disagree? in either case, you are not deceived. /fin
you may say Donald Trump has achieved nothing, but he has performed a Christmas miracle. he has made Canadians impolite.
the government has to tax to make room for its spending, yes. but not all taxation is motivated by making room for more spending. not all taxation is the same. taxing Musk is taxing inert portfolio wealth. if the state translated that into spending, despite accounting balance it’s be inflationary.
we keep arguing about immigration but i wonder if pretty soon we won’t be competing to emigrate.
(government taxation and spending are decoupled. the government should tax away elon’s wealth. very little public spending, relative to the funds taxed, should result from that.)
i’d prefer we use the usual means to just tax them back to humans. but we have to apply those means with some vigor, since they will throw a lot of resources into trying to sabotage them.
can’t wait until mypillow diversifies into military logistics.
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right. a decade ago there was very little bite at all to the “deferred consumption is socially valuable” story. there’s a bit more bite to it now, but not double-digit-equity-returns value. more 4% Treasuries value.
yes. though it might not be a capital crime, that’s another way to describe taxation. you pay the taxes the law says you owe, or you face direct state coercion as a criminal.
yes. so the level of savings matters. but note that from this perspective, savings in a low yield CD or Treasury is superior, because given the escalator we’ve attached to equity prices, some of the deferred consumption is offset by sharp increases in wealth. 1/
you can argue that the escalator is necessary to buy off savers from current consumption. 2/
but i’ll argue no, we dramatically overcompensate consumption deferral, the great preponderance of it would remain deferred at effective zero rates, because once people saturate their accustomed amenity level, they devote themselves to endowing and insuring their future. /fin
i’d be content to just tax away their money!
one way to clarify things is just by comparison with an easier case. suppose a person is paid, and exchanges the funds for bank deposits, issued from thin air. the bank in turn holds reserves issued by the Fed. 1/
it’s pretty clear in that case that in constitutes investment in the sense of deferred consumption, but not in the sense of provoking real risk investment in the economy. 2/
you can tell very indirect stories, the bank has a bigger balance sheet, perhaps at some margin becomes more likely to extend risk credit as it clears regulatory thresholds with greater padding. but it’s a pretty attenuated mechanism! 3/
now a person takes the same cash income and buys a share of index fund. it’s deferred consumption for sure! but what effect does it have on real economic activity beyond that? 4/
there are some! but again, the mechanisms are really attenuated. share prices are bid up a smidgen, which indirectly loosens financing constraints on publicly traded firms. 5/
but creditworthy publicly traded firms are generally not “capital rationed” to begin with. they can raise funds as needed for positive NPV projects they identify. so, i’d suggest, this is a pretty weak mechanism, nowhere near the binding constraints on genuinely fruitful economic development. 6/
the case is much closer to the bank-deposit-backed-by-reserves case than an investor who, says purchases stock (same form!) in a private new enterprise, which immediately devotes the proceeds to purchase capital goods for a risky, hopefully valuable, new venture. 7/
sure, the purchase of secondary public equity is somewhere intermediate between the cases. but much closer to the former than the latter, even though under the flows we’ve set up, much much much better remunerated than the former. /fin
centrism as triangulation in the age of Trump.
do the drones negotiate a Christmas truce? refuse to kamikaze, light up a cigarette with their neighbors in the sky?
he's a very skilled polemicist. yes, his diatribes are full of loose reasoning, plausible to nod along to but weak when examined. but, at least back in the day, he wrote these long rambling things + kept them entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny sometimes even if you'd be ashamed to admit you laughed.