I'm not calling for eliminating the income tax. I want a much stronger income tax. But its role is predistribution and clipping high incomes, rather than finance in the sense of preventing spending from being inflationary. Payroll taxes would continue (and I'd lift any cap on their application).
if as a pastor you know you’ve done terrible harm to your flock, wouldn’t there be something psychologically compelling in believing you’d found a way to lead them to the rapture? “gambling for redemption” isn’t just for bankers. 1/
longtime tech founders, VCs, and executives are sure AI can solve all the problems they’ve aggravated. /fin
the real $DJT.
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according to the ascendant political movement in the United States, it’s the 19th Century. bring back childhood diseases and finance the Federal government solely from tariffs. oh, and child brides. don’t have to worry about the marginal tax rates there. until we rescind child labor prohibitions.
there are so many variables to play with, whichever outcome one wants. if one wants married maternal labor participation, use a tax schedule that advantages joint filers, and provide childcare support only via outside daycare. but that’s not what everybody wants, i suspect.
households filing jointly, regardless of standard deduction, usually pay the same marginal rate as income is pooled. so yes, that can be a disincentive to work relative to filing singly, depending on how the rates+brackets are set. if one will be discouraged from working, it’ll be the lower earner.
but if one wants to promote marriage, one can set an advantageous rate schedule for married households. it will still be true that the two earners would be taxed at the same marginal rate, but that marginal rate can be made lower than the same earner filing singly.
I’m indifferent to the idea. i think marriage promotion is mostly dumb, but i wouldn’t care if a sop to it helped ease the way to better tax policy otherwise.
a lot. but the income tax ought not be about revenue. where you need a financing vehicle—creating space for noninflationary public expenditure—you want something like a VAT, which hits the bid for goods & services. the income tax properly conceived is an income shaping / predistribution mechanism.
The standard deduction should be 150K individual / 300K married.
we tend to obsess about Trump, but he’s already done his work. for now his chaos is a saving grace. if he were sidelined, more capable elements of the movement he brought to power might find a firmer footing.
Do you feel welcome in the United States?
it turns out when you gamify governance, you don't actually get good governance. i wonder what happens when you gamify everything else.
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q: how often do you see a ghost's butt? a: once in a boo moon
you do suicide by police on the streets. you do suicide by secret police on social media.
the oath you took to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States was not an oath to protect and defend John Roberts' interpretation of it.
i'd kind of like a timed block feature. it's better to block than to engage when people are shitposting and trolling, but i don't like permanently isolating myself from people. i want the incentive blocking encourages (be civilized or be ignored), but without permanently banishing people.
i think we can agree that the nomination we all watched him withdraw from was rather young.
an irony of these times we're living through is it's failure of the Reagan Revolution that's about to put an end to the New Deal.
i think we have to concede that republican nannygates are spicier.
perhaps it was the wisdom of the American people to heighten the contradictions.