It's everything they hate, stealing money from their worshiped 'supermen job creators' to give unearned handouts to 'lazy others'. These ideologues care about 'society' only in as much as facilitating 'great individuals'.

The kind of hate campaign that will be launched to stop this in its tracks if it becomes anything more than wide-eyed utopianism will be unparalleled in history. Any so called experiments will be sabotaged with prejudice and fail.

A Senator couldn't make this happen. The President couldn't make this happen. I'm gratified to have thought about this for a moment and don't want to detract from the core idea but it is very much an idle musing. Even for someone in Sam's unique position, this is just a "Wouldn't it be nice if?" post.

Silliness.

That's the biggest misconception about poverty. It isn't about not having access to financial help when you need it (we already have plenty of programs in the US that should - in theory - solve those same problems).

Poverty in America is more about culture and lack of education. Give any amount of money to many of the poorest citizens in the country, and they'll be no better off after a week of frivolous spending.

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.

~ Bobby Kennedy 1968

Or now maybe

"Machines should work. People should enjoy life."

Or, there is the old

"Machines should work. People should get a guaranteed basic income. If anyone wants more, then they can work for more."

All the ballpark US national arithmetic I did says that we can't yet afford a guaranteed basic income.

E.g., for something simple, supposedly Bezos is now worth $100 billion. But if divide that by the US population of, say, 333 million, then get just $300 per person, just once, and have confiscated all of the Bezos wealth. Point: Not even Bezos is rich enough to provide a guaranteed annual income for everyone in the US, not for a year and not even for just one month just once.

But, maybe when computing is doing enough of the work, then, for a simple solution for the needed revenue, tax the computing, processors and Internet data rates and nothing else. Maybe.

Or, maybe, people should manage computers that manage computers ... that manage computers that do the work for everyone. Okay -- apparently we're not there yet.

For the issue of housing costs, housing is expensive close to where there are good jobs. And there the costs are for the limited real estate close to the jobs and high taxes for K-12 schools, police, roads, etc. And the high housing costs eat up nearly all the income from the jobs because the jobs pay just enough to cover the most important employee expenses, e.g., housing.

But if get out to rural areas, then housing costs can be much lower. If people are going to have a guaranteed income, then they may want to live in areas without much in jobs and with lower housing costs.

But there is a flaw in Sam's proposal: People will still form competing interest groups, e.g., political parties. Then too many of the groups would rather fight for the interests of their group and not join for the good of all. That is, too many groups would rather fight for a bigger piece of the pie they like than for bigger pies for everyone.

In times past, such interest groups could fight in the streets. Then the ancient Greeks invented democracy: Do the fighting at a ballot box. Since a big winner at a ballot box would likely also win in the streets, it's in everyone's interests just to go with the results from the ballot box instead of shedding blood when the outcome is already known.

Basically, democracy is still important and for the same, old reasons.

It's not quite the same but there is extensive existing material to cherry-pick ideas from. E.g. https://socialsecurity.procon.org/

The way you get that income into a shareable pot is via Tax.

So the best way to do this is still good old "Income Tax."

Unfortunately those with the most income don't like to have it taxed. And national policy tends to correlate pretty reliably with whatever those people want. Anything akin to what he's suggesting would help even things out, but that is precisely why they won't permit it. The only way for the masses to assert themselves is through their brute numbers.

If you support UBI, why wouldn't you support reducing the age requirement on social security to 18+? Social security already exists, we don't need to re-invent the wheel. Obviously we'd need to change the eligibility requirements so that you didn't need to pay in. Now we just need a story about where the money will come from to finance it for the long-haul.

The problem that's trying to be solved by this is legitimate, but I don't see much value here beyond it sounding a bit clever. There are ideas out there already that aren't making headway for the same reasons this idea wouldn't.

Now, do you remember when the FED under Obama printed a trillion dollars a year for five years? Do you know where that money is? Is part of that in your pocket? I don't think so. Well, give that kind of money to 100 million americans in an installment of a thousand dollars a month and that would cover their basic needs while the whole country produces more with all the tax cuts to the producers. Of course much less regulation would do wonders to the economy, like eliminating patents, minimum salary laws, health and education regulations, etc. Go back to letting the individual produce with their own hands and minds without governemnt intervention and that will bring much more prosperity than any other idea. Except politicians won't like it.

So in short, while inflation (money printing) is a kind of taxation, we could easily print money (10% of GDP)to give it to the needy while reducing the size of government and regulations to increase production.

Note, they break out agriculture and animal products into a lot of categories

As a trivial example: GDP goes up if I sneak into a car lot one night and set fire to all the cars.

We need a better measure of "useful" economic production.

Framed any other way, this has been done before. You could argue that Universal Health Care attempted exactly this but instead of providing money back, it went to a universal pool for care. Same for Social Security, Education and other endowment programs.

As a practical point, you won't get economic equity before political equity and them that have the political equity have no reason to redistribute it fairly.

What if it was as easy to start a private small business in the US as it was in the UK _for the individual_.

The problem with UBI is not just logistical, it's also psychological and cultural. It might work in other countries, but it won't work well in US. For many reason, some good some bad, many people here would not accept receiving what they see is a "hand-out". First they won't accept others receiving it but many would not even justify getting it themselves.

So it would have to be a UBI disguised as something else. A share in the GDP is brilliant I think and solves this issue. It is a bit like they have the oil payment in Alaska, people seem to accept that as valid and well earned income. The GDP dividend would be the same in a way.

I think the shares should be equally divided. Everyone gets a share if they are a citizen of the country or lived here for X number of years for example. Sam Altman gets the same number of shares as Steve the Carpenter, Jane the Software Developer, and Irene the Newborn Baby.

Seems like there's two primary considerations when looking at a concept such as this. The first is how to implement within our current political climate. The second is how it aligns incentives moving forwards. The first is an obvious challenge, so let's assume for the moment that it is solved, and only worry about the second.

Ideally we want incentives aligned in such a manner that citizens:

1) focus on long term health over short term benefits. It may be tempting for people to reject immigrants because of the perceived cost of a bigger denominator, without appreciating the long term numerator upside.

2) recognize that all benefit from the success of everyone. Put differently, suddenly I care about the state of the individual with limited opportunities on the other side of the country, because it could impact my own wallet in future years.

3) don't somehow become more disenfranchised or powerless through a secondary market of these "shares".

I think it's wise not to ascribe direct political purpose to the various shares. It would be tempting to try to address power inequality directly via share ownership, but that seems misguided.

I assume there's many more incentive issues to consider, but that's just an initial list. I don't know what the answer is to any of these, but if I were to do a full analysis, I would continue to ask questions about what we wanted to incentivize, and what we wanted to de-incentivize. Then whether this actually addresses/mitigates those considerations in a realistic manner.

It's "a monetary measure of the market value of all final goods and services produced in a period of time," to quote its Wiki definition. That is, we're summing up the value of everything we made that year. It's like a hypothetical number meant to evaluate what we accomplished. It's not like accounts receivable or something. And we already all have a share, by definition....it's the sum of what we all did.

Am I missing something here? Or does Sam not know what GDP is? Seems unlikely, but I really don't get it.

I'm tired of sitting back and seeing companies that I liked but couldn't invest in become > 500m market cap successes. If I spent 4 years at one of these companies I could get _common_ stock, but I can't spend 1k to buy some preferred stock.

The whole startup system is rigged. People are going to start realizing it.

Off the top of my head I'm not sure how such a thing could be structured without allocating some non-trivial portion of tax revenue to it, and then figuring out how to sell that to Congress who seem to prefer more targeted things like deductions + pork that let them more actively micromanage where the funds go.

But worth brainstorming about and not ruling out any idea just yet.

My usual objection to basic income applies: Basic income in some form already exists in most European countries. It's just a not-that-big parametric change to our current systems plus a change in mentality and social perception of welfare.

Suggesting that we should implement basic income of x euros is roughly equivalent to suggesting that we should increase the welfare unemployed people get today. If it was politically / economically feasible, we would already have it by now.

If we are open about it, this fight is about an ideal of equality. Altman's fundamental motive is egalitarianism (oppose inequality, promote fairness, undermine white privilege, etc.). He should be sincere and explicit about it.

He's not the first, and he won't be the last. It will never work. People are profoundly, inherently unequal. Individuals are different, by nature, by nurture, and by will. Whether it is in terms of beauty, productive ability, height and weight, intellectual prowess, athletic performance, sexual preferences, leadership, fecundity, musical achievement, what have you -- we humans can be and can do so much in so many different ways, and will always be profoundly individual, different, unequal (unless we are oppressed into conformity by statism, or other forms of collectivism).

Behind the tired ability-needs line lies the notion that since somehow the problem of production has been solved, all we should care about is consumption via the distribution of wealth. This is Marxist nonsense, no matter how much capital (machines and robots) is involved.

This assumes that everyone is cooperating together. I had a discussion with my friend about this and not everyone who plays a game (in this case making the country successful) tries to optimize globally, some optimize locally or just don't care. Ever played a video game and been TK'd?

While this sounds good in theory, I don't think works in reality.

Is Sam proposing that citizens get stock in an actual entity?

If yes, what entity? All public assets are already jointly owned by all citizens so I'm not sure what assets there would be left to distribute.

If no, and it's some kind of virtual entity, how would the proposed dividends be paid? Out of tax money? Why not just adjust the tax laws then (something that has to be done anyway) and make that more fair?

This is an odd way to phrase it. GDP is a measurement of consumption (which is taxed), investment (which isn't taxed until it gains), government expenditure (which is often the action of sharing wealth itself), and net exports (which actually does make sense to share). I think that you want to make more of a direct correlation between a country's wealth and its citizens' wealth, but this is not a great framework for it. I don't know what is, but you should talk with some economists to dive further into this thought.

In general, I'd criticize this for being too vague. The topic you're trying to conquer could maybe be genuinely addressed by Richard Rorty doing a very well funded 5 year research and philosophical study. An investment manager just writing a few words about what is going on in his gut doesn't really do it for me, especially when so much is hand wavy and imprecise, and what is specified (some benchmark to GDP) doesn't really make sense.

I hope that one or more silicon valley billionaires run for national office on this kind of platform.

Sam is smart to point out that one of the main friction points is how this kind of thing pertains to immigration.

What's missing is an updated version of the narrative behind give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Instead we get the vile rhetoric of Donald Trump that blames immigrants and minorities for all sorts of problems.

The American version of this sort of program needs to be fundamentally different from the "stipend" given to Saudi citizens by their elitist monarchs, and it cannot be designed to serve a similar political function (keeping the masses content).

Instead, we must view basic income as a system of positive and negative taxation that preserves the incentives individuals have to work hard to improve their own outcomes.

It must also eliminate the many perverse incentives and psychologically defeating categorizations (welfare, workers comp, etc.) that assault the dignity of those receiving income from the state today.

There are many costs of poverty that are not typically accounted for properly -- the harm done to children whose parents can't manage adequate prenatal or early childhood care, the human capital wasted by those who experience a setback that makes their planned investment in their own skills financially unwise, the time and energy wasted attempting and policing all sorts of major and minor fraud related to state payments, etc.

The biggest enemy to progress in America is the zero-sum mindset that plagues so many people and fuels their resentment toward immigrants. The areas of the nation facing the most decay and the least hope are the ones that seem to have adopted this mindset.

However, doing it at a national level requires a lot of changes, including implementing a national ID (social security numbers already do this but they have no password) and then you are in danger of being tracked by this id and so on, like China does.

However, why do it at the level of a nation? Why not communities small and large, local and virtual? That is what my company's been building since 2011. Well, not necessarily American Equity but a platform that any Community can run, to have its own social network, currency, and so on.

Take a look at these two links:

https://qbix.com/communities

https://intercoin.org

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Unfair-Americas-Misguided-Inequ...

> I believe that a new social contract like what I’m suggesting here—where we agree to a floor and no ceiling

So like...basic income but with limited downside and unlimited upside all the while ignoring income inequality? And Who decides on the payment based on "social contracts"?

> The annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker is $15,080 at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. Full-time work means working 2,080 hours each year, which is 40 hours each week. [1]

GDP per capita 2016 = 57K [2]

10% GDP per capita = 5.7K

20% GDP per capita = 11.4K

15K - 11.4K = 3.6K

So my options are:

- no work + ubi = Gain 40 hours of personal time per week; lose out on 3.6K if we didn't have UBI.

- work + no ubi = Better off by 3.6K without UBI, but at the cost of 40 hours working a shitty job.

[1]: https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-ful...

[2]: https://www.google.de/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&m...

Someone should tell this guy about SPY/SPX.

You're talking here about distributing amounts starting in the hundred-200 billion dollar range and eventually ramping that up to 4-8 trillion. Is this just going to redistribute wealth from income taxes, or is it going to be an incredibly high corporate tax, or what?

I think that part of the reason why the threat of war is much lower now than it was in the past is because patriotism is at an all time low.

Another problem is that this already exists in the form of the US dollar. The better America does economically, the more the US dollar will be worth relative to other currencies. Maybe if the Fed stopped manipulating the money supply, people would actually be able to see the value of the USD increase predictably when the economy does well.

I totally agree with attempts to redistribute USD to its citizens to even things out.

Nonetheless, I think that cryptocurrencies will solve the problem of inequality without the need for government intervention.

But getting there is going to be a huge mess, with the establishment fighting every inch of the way.

So it's nice to see someone whose voice will be heard saying it's the way to go.

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Sky-Common-Capitalism/dp/155...

It would help most of the other 96% of humans, though. Nationalism is fucking disgusting.

I know this is a major issue in CA, NYC, and probably a few other cities, but I'm not really well versed on how much of an issue it is elsewhere. Where could I learn more about this? Preferably sources with data and not just journalistic fluff.

Imagine we lived in a world where labor was unimportant because machines did most things better than humans could. These machines would still required time and natural resources (space, energy and matter) to produce goods and services.

For most people, "working" in this world would consist of going online, buying or trading an amount of energy, buying raw materials or spent matter that is ready to be recycled and pressing a "Start" button. Machines would produce some new goods or services.

Some people may also work on designing new better machines that produce finer goods. This would be mostly creative work as the technical part would mostly be automated. The machines could be specialized for maximum efficiency and quality.

People wouldn't have to go out to work. Machine owners could watch webcam feeds of their machines working in an industrial park somewhere. The finished goods, spent matter (trash) and the machines themselves, would be picked up and delivered by self driving delivery robots.

To get some variety, people would trade the production of different machines and they would trade excess spent matter. They would also trade the machine designs and the land or space to host the machines. The machines would sometimes have to be replaced when worn out or obsolete.

Now assume total energy production was constrained globally to a more or less fixed rate based on what could reasonably be captured from the sun. People would own shares in energy production capacity.

There could be a level of inequality in this society. This depends on how much governments would allow ownership of things to be concentrated, especially ownership of energy, useful space and natural resources.

A good way to prevent too high inequality would be for everyone to be shareholders in global production. Every day, shareholder would receive a dividend, an amount of energy/matter to be spent. They could use it in machines to produce stuff or services, trade it or maybe store it in a battery.

This is better than UBI because it aligns production incentives with consumption incentives and make the system naturally sustainable. If people vote for policies that are inefficient and reduce production, they will simply get a smaller dividend. I'm not making a value judgment either. What people collectively want might not always be a larger dividend. But at least the trade-off will be more explicit and sustainable.

I am going to ask people i work with at my union and non union jobs and get their response to that sentence.

I'll report back what comments i hear.

However, the thing I think you want to do...

Well, do it.

Start ACME Ultra-Automation Inc., hand out shares, and sell widgets.

-----

edit: In case it's not clear, I'm serious. I want to do this, and would, but I lack hustle.

I am not against communism or socialism, it just seems like that’s what Sam is describing here.

Is the US even making a net profit?

This is a terrible idea.

Can't they just wake up and put their mental energy and money on something that actually make sense?

(Also, in reality we all own in a share of the massive debt the federal government has taken on to fund wars and corporate welfare. So much for that.)

They put their money on problems that have a clear path of solving.

Americans cannot agree to use their money on other Americans who have different values than them, westernized social welfare systems occur in homogenous cultures.

In the US, the homogenous elite and majority power cannot agree to use their money on problems that affect a completely different culture in the lower classes. In continental governments such as the EU, you see the same thing.

When thinking of it, I am often convinced that money is a poor solution to the most challenging problems. Sam likes the idea of universal income, but to me that's like supplying extra oxygen/fuel to an engine, but if the engine is broken it won't do anything, for example I won't be surprised that if every citizen gets extra $2K a month, the cost of "healthcare" will magically raise exactly by that same amount.

If I were in a similar position I'd likely opt for the most fun-sounding futuristic project that doesn't involve all that pain.

Which ethics? Which morals? Yours?

+1

Headline: Sam Altman Starts new Murica Token ICO

or maybe he hands them out daily for free given some proof of USA'ism similar to the Universal basic income token

-- Lee, founder https://bitbank.nz

jeez, make a joke and get downvoted right away?

more kids = more shares

I hope you're ready for a wall of text. Had to break this into multiple posts...

I have several comments about what you're proposing, to the extent that I understand it.

> I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP.

Right of the bat, you're starting with GDP, which is an inherently flawed measure of economic output. Namely, it gets imports and exports backwards. If you want to distribute incomes to people, it would be useful for the amount of the incomes to somehow line up roughly with the amount of stuff they'd able to buy with those incomes. The higher the potential imports, the more people can potentially buy.

As a thought experiment, we can imagine that foreign countries are analogous to firms that don't use any labor to produce what they produce. The output of the firms, of course, adds to total GDP. And the output of the countries subtracts from total GDP. This is despite the fact that the two are the same thing.

I've written a blog post about this: http://www.suncho.com/blog/20170616_gdp_is_wrong.html

> I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of us in making the country as successful as possible

No. It wouldn't. The problem here is that you run into the tragedy of the commons. Everyone receives the benefit whether they happen to be contributing or not. This creates an incentive not to contribute because you're going to receive the benefit anyway. This is why communism doesn't work.

The good news is that we by and large don't need most people to contribute. So an incentive not to contribute might not be such a bad thing.

> the better the country does, the better everyone does

Yes. But the good news is that you really don't need to incentivize people to be involved in making the country successful. The innovations of the few can benefit the many.

> give more people a fair shot at achieving the life they want.

The idea that people should have to "achieve" the life they want is a little silly. We have to resources to give everyone an amazing life without them having to work for it. We're operating way below our productive capacity.

There's a Buckminster Fuller quote that I really like:

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest."

Figuring out how to embrace joblessness as a positive force for humanity is probably the most important social challenge we currently face.

I also wrote a blog post about this: http://www.suncho.com/blog/20150326_morality.html

> And we all work together to create the system that generates so much prosperity.

As I've said, we really don't need everyone to be working together. Furthermore, even if you really want people to be working together, your plan to doesn't incentivize us to do that.

> I believe that a new social contract like what I’m suggesting here--where we agree to a floor and no ceiling--would lead to a huge increase in US prosperity and keep us in the global lead.

When we distribute money to people (e.g. through a basic income), there's always going to be an amount that's optimal for social prosperity. I agree with you that it would be a mistake to put a cap on the amount of the basic income that's below what's socially optimal. I cringe every time someone says that the basic income should be exactly equal to the amount that pays for everyone's basic needs.

But it would also be a mistake to put a floor on the basic income that's above what's socially optimal. That being said, I think we have enough available resources that the optimal amount of basic income would be well above what most of the "basic needs" people are calling for.

> Countries that concentrate wealth in a small number of families do worse over the long term--if we don’t take a radical step toward a fair, inclusive system, we will not be the leading country in the world for much longer. This would harm all Americans more than most realize.

I mostly agree. If we flatten out the aggregate demand curve by providing an evenly distributed income to everyone, then that increases quantities demanded of many of the things we produce and allows us to scale up production. This gives more people more access to more wealth.

> Today, the fundamental input to wealth generation isn’t farmland, but money and ideas--you really do need money to make money.

Hmm. Sort of. Even today there are resources we use that are factors of production that aren't farmland, but that are analogous to farmland. And we still have farmland, of course. Technological improvement allows us to use such resources more and more efficiently with time. Our overall productive capacity increases with time. We also have financial resources and we can certainly make money out of money.

But then another important factor is demand. We're not going to generate (i.e. produce) wealth if nobody's going to buy it. Our technology can improve all it wants, and our productive capacity can go through the roof. If people don't have the incomes to pay for all this stuff, it won't matter.

As far as ideas go, I'm not sure how important they are. Ideas are a dime a dozen. There are no new ideas on the face of the planet (except of course for my ideas, which are unique and special). Execution on ideas can be great. Innovation can be great. But as long as we're constrained by demand, none of that is going to help. Demand is our bottleneck. By focusing attention elsewhere, we're prematurely optimizing a part of the code that isn't going improve performance.

> American Equity would also cushion the transition from the jobs of today to the jobs of tomorrow.

Huh? Are you saying that if everyone had an income it would give them the freedom to work on things that are actually going to matter?

> Automation holds the promise of creating more abundance than we ever dreamed possible, but it’s going to significantly change how we think about work.

It depends on us significantly changing how we think about work.

> If everyone benefits more directly from economic growth, then it will be easier to move faster toward this better world.

Yes.

> The default case for automation is to concentrate wealth (and therefore power) in a tiny number of hands.

Yes. If we rely on wages for people's incomes and production is constrained by consumer spending levels, then the result of automation is necessarily a reduction the amount of wealth we produce. And the people who do have access the the wealth are the ones who somehow still have sufficient incomes to purchase it.

> America has repeatedly found ways to challenge this sort of concentration, and we need to do so again.

Yes. But it's been pretty ugly so far. A lot of it involves contorting the labor market in an attempt to get somewhere close providing people with sufficient incomes through wages. I hope we can do better in the future.

https://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/Rigged.pdf

Chapter 9 Rewriting the Narrative on Economic Policy

The standard framing of economic debates divides the world into two schools. On the one hand, conservatives want to leave things to the market and have a minimal role for government. Liberals see a large role for government in alleviating poverty, reducing inequality, and correcting other perceived ill-effects of market outcomes. This book argues that this framing is fundamentally wrong. The point is that we don’t have “market outcomes” that we can decide whether to interfere with or not. Government policy shapes market outcomes. It determines aggregate levels of output and employment, which in turn affect the bargaining power of different groups of workers. Government policy structures financial markets, and the policy giving the industry special protections allows for some individuals to get enormously rich. Government policy determines the extent to which individuals can claim ownership of technology and how much they can profit from it. Government policy sets up corporate governance structures that let top management enrich itself at the expense of shareholders. And government policy determines whether highly paid professionals enjoy special protection from foreign and domestic competition.

Pretending that the distribution of income and wealth that results from a long set of policy decisions is somehow the natural workings of the market is not a serious position. It might be politically convenient for conservatives who want to lock inequality in place. It is a more politically compelling position to argue that we should not interfere with market outcomes than to argue for a system that is deliberately structured to make some people very rich while leaving others in poverty. Pretending that distributional outcomes are just the workings of the market is convenient for any beneficiaries of this inequality, even those who consider themselves liberal. They can feel entitled to their prosperity by virtue of being winners in the market, yet sufficiently benevolent to share some of their wealth with the less fortunate. For this reason, they may also find it useful to pretend that we have a set of market outcomes not determined by policy decisions.

But we should not structure our understanding of the economy around political convenience. There is no way of escaping the fact that levels of output and employment are determined by policy, that the length and strength of patent and copyright monopolies are determined by policy, and that the rules of corporate governance are determined by policy. The people who would treat these and other policy decisions determining the distribution of income as somehow given are not being honest. We can debate the merits of a policy, but there is no policy-free option out there.

This may be discomforting to people who want to believe that we have a set of market outcomes that we can fall back upon, but this is the real world. If we want to be serious, we have to get used to it.

Bill Gates' (to name a random American citizen) has a far larger share in the GDP than most other Americans. If you want to solve that raise your taxes on the rich and lift up those that are at the lowest end of the scale. That will have a lot more effect than some fiction where you get to do a bunch of make-believe bookkeeping.

Of course in the current political climate this will not happen, in fact the reverse will happen, tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class.

The hard part, which barely gets any discussion is:

* How do incentives work? How do you incentivize the production of new wealth?

* How does immigration work? You can't have open borders and mountains of free stuff.

* Does this replace or augment existing welfare programs?

* Does this actually make people's lives better? How do you know? What happens if it doesn't work out?

And so on.

100M people died of socialism in the 20th century. Can we just STOP with this madness please?

Massive rent-seeking, enclosures, network effects, and benefiting by public infrastructure and institutions, without paying back full costs, or by imposing dislocations on other economic sectors, as well.

Aviation accounts for 6% of transportation fuel use. For a small portion of passenger and minuscule fraction of cargo movement.

I'm not strongly tied to the language I used, I just find the comparison interesting.

Going back to Adam Smith, "Wealth is the annual produce and labour of the nation". Elsewhere he argues that "the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods". As a man not given to short sentences, I recommend paying attention when he uses them.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...

Defining, and measuring, and allocating wealth has been a bit of a conundrum for the past 240+ years. And a while before by some reports.

In reality, all the laborers at Microsoft built it into what it is today. And it (like most companies) are at a scale of complexity that is far beyond the fiction that workers are acting out CEO’s “visions.”

Edit: sorry, wasn't aware of the exact definition of this. Having everyone pass this sort of thing is a great idea imo.

>Knock Knock Its the United States

With huge boats, with guns, gunboats.

>Open your banks' records, stop having them be closed

and theres not much they can do about.

So they sign a treaty making sure their banks' records are not closed.

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Inspired by this, both historically and in delivery https://youtu.be/Mh5LY4Mz15o?t=4m46s

Near as I can tell Europe has lagged way behind the U.S. in economic growth since the 1980s. I remember back in the 90s when catching up to the U.S. was stated goal of the incipient EU. How did that go? How does that relate to overall tax rates, public spending as a proportion of GDP? Are fertility rates artificially lowered by a high tax burden? Are they improved by the welfare state? Or is something else the matter with Europe?

I think "disaster" is an appropriate adjective for wealth taxes.

Everyone gets $10k. Obviously not everyone is going to pay $10k in taxes otherwise the system would be pointless and we could instead just eliminate taxes altogether. Those at the bottom would benefit, those at the top would pay more in taxes, and somewhere between is a break even point.

There's only a limited amount of stuff at any one time. Rarity and usage can make its worth different than other things. So it makes sense to track these things. Ideally, recycling allows recoup of most or all the material, which returning should provide the credits back.

It really then matters how much credits people get and thus how much resources and where. But then again, socialism and communism never talked about personal effects - but instead it talked of the machinery to create.

What the UBI enables is a migration that everyone gets the spoils of the machines of creation. The Story of Manna by Marshall Brain discusses more of how this might be possible.

If the situation lasts long enough, the standard of living falls.

Money exists to move goods around. If all the money is in one place, goods cannot move.

Money is not limited. It is an information measure of, variously, debts, or bidding rights to production. What it can bid on is limited, and how currency-denominated asset valuations change as money supply and circulation do, can also change.

But the problem in the case of a national disaster isn't that money cannot be produced. It's that those who would rely on money to address immediate needs (water, food, shelter, medical care, transport) have no bidding rights (currency, credit, grants) to transact purchases. You're balancing the interests of those outside the disaster zone (assuming there is an outside) with those in it. (Though this generally is the case.)

If the disaster is big enough, and rescue or infrastructure needs sufficiently high, those may affect national accounts and economic activity for a time, but it would take an absolutely massive shock for the impairment of raw productive capacity alone to impact the economy. Far more likely that buying power is lacking amongst a segment of the population.

And for that, money is precisely the cure.

But that was the point of my post, to compare the captured wealth to consumption. People always talk about how the wealthy are screwing the rest of us over and everything would be great if they weren't taking so much, but it turns out that consumption is also a huge portion of the economy. Total wealth in the US is on the order of $100 trillion (this includes all housing and so on). Consumption of several trillion dollars a year adds up to that pretty quick and seizing it all and turning it into circuses isn't going to go very far.

Which isn't to say I am against programs that result in wealth transfer, it just pays to try to look at things clearly.

Assuming (perhaps incorrectly) you are in the US, you are also reading Hacker News, so you are probably the top 1% of the worlds wealthiest. Again, just a thought experiment, but would you be fine with your government saying that as a 1 percenter in world wealth you can no longer earn anymore, you have hit that certain point, are a fat cat and can grow no more wealth, under threat of criminal law?

The problem with many "wealth" taxes is that they end up missing the top 1% and hurting the people who are building a business.

Eg inheritance tax does a fantastic job of just screwing over family businesses that on paper are worth say $7mm+ because on paper the kids who inherit the business now owe taxes on maybe $2mm (I think the first $5mm is tax free w/ inheritance), but selling any of the business to pay the taxes would often destroy the business.

And I'm not talking about massive businesses like Walmart - I mean businesses like a large-ish family farm where just the land, equipment, animals, etc are all worth $7mm+ on paper, even if the farm doesn't produce massive profits.

You are either not arguing in anything remotely resembling good faith or are not tall enough for this ride. You may have the reply to this unopposed; I'm done here.

Which is "no". Buying and building are two different things. So I guess you were right about what I intended.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

[1]https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/

It's even more fuzzy when you consider beta customers for a software company. Heck, how about when I contribute information to Google Maps? Or give feedback and make feature requests for my accounting software?

EDIT: Can't comment ("You're posting too fast, blah blah blah"). Here are some replies to the comments bellow:

> It's encouraging people to make their money be productive instead of stashing it under a mattress.

When you have money in the bank, you're effectively lending most of it to other people. Your money is "productive", which is encouraged by the interest.

> Everything distorts markets. The question is how to distort markets into providing the best outcome.

Neutral tax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_tax) doesn't. But of course, market distortion is not the only or primary factor in policy decision-making.

They would still make money if they kept them it would just be less beneficial than it is now. No long term capital gains as an example.

People with little money consume everything they have already, they have no choice, no retirements no nothing.

>> You would force people to consume?

That's a complete misreading of the comment

I don't think it has disincentivated anybody from becoming less wealthy and/or working less. It just incentivizes tax evasion, but even that is not significant.

On the other hand, a large number of social programs have been built around this new tax. Anybody in the country could get cancer and would get free decent healthcare.

If we're talking about how people feel about their tax system, I think we need to talk about how a huge portion of the US misunderstands "tax brackets", and seems to think that paying more taxes when they're "bumped to a higher tax bracket" is a thing, and that there's some strategy in avoiding getting paid marginally more than some threshold. (Since tax brackets apply to marginal income, this is incorrect; you're still taxed at the lower rate for your income up to the threshold.)

This is almost certainly causing people to behave in ways that are economically irrational for themselves far more than any tax on large wealth (let's say, for the purpose of argument, $100M or more) would be. Yet there is no campaign to fix people's understanding of tax brackets so that more people feel incentivized to make more money.

If we're talking about an actual rational response to the tax system, I would much rather have $102M in the bank and get taxed on half my savings over $100M than have $99M in the bank and get taxed on half my savings over $100M.

> and thereby causes fewer GDP-building things to happen!

Why does a tax on wealth cause fewer GDP-building things to happen? The rational thing to do given a tax on wealth is to spend your extra wealth on services you're interested in, donate it to charities you support, etc., all of which seems like it increases GDP more than investing it for yourself would: it produces additional revenue for organizations, which produces jobs, which grows the economy.

I'd believe this argument for a tax on income, since it disincentivizes people from making more money, which means they're not spending that money because they didn't make it, and also they're voluntarily refusing to do profitable work they otherwise would have done. (I don't think I agree with the argument, but at least I understand how it works.)

I think this is false in practice, especially with a progressive wealth tax.

Most people don't want money, they want the things money can buy... long, healthy, and generally happier lives. People that keep striving past that point are people that seek to change the world, folks like Gates or Musk. A progressive wealth tax starting at $10M wouldn't really change the incentives at play.

Citation? I know it feels correct, but is it actually correct in practice? Is there any evidence that the rare person who generates enormous wealth was motivated substantially by wealth (and not a drive to build something substantial or change the world)?

At least in the case of Gates, I suspect he would have built Microsoft even with slightly more onerous (to the wealthy) tax policy.

Also land is hard to hide, and relatively easy to value. So it's really hard to evade the tax. If you are going to tax wealth, and want that to include assets like equity in private companies, you are going to have to value those assets.

Multiple incentives to be wealthy -- or worse, feedback loops to ensure the children of the wealthy maintain their advantage -- are just redundant.

Why? As a total layman, wouldn't it be incredibly inefficient? If we tax the wealth of, say, the top 100 richest Americans, wouldn't that cause some pretty terrible downsides? If we force them to sell their holdings, wouldn't that ripple through the economy?

Take Jeff Bezos--if you forced him to sell a significant portion of his stock, wouldn't that depress the Amazon stock price, which affects a significant number of other individuals and businesses?

It's not taxing wealth so much as taxing the mechanisms that create undue inequality that would work: yes, I'm talking about taxing rental income. The number one driver preventing people from building savings is draining their income through rent.

The solution is sort of obvious, but hated by people who love the AirBnB model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14493769

As a practical matter, consumption taxes can be made progressive by combining them with a low-income tax credit or a universal basic income.

If you are not aware of what happens in situations like this, I would like to take you to pre-1990s India. Some of the most brightest, brilliant, hard working and industrious people used to leave the country and never to return the moment they attained working age.

The people and money from whom you can take the wealth to fund your socialist schemes shrinks every year. To a point you will have a country full of entitled people, who think they were born with rights to free stuff. And will always be angry at people capable of working who don't spend away their life to make it happen for them.

We could also take the route of the Federal Reserve purchasing up equities (The Bank Of Japan does this [1]), issuing deposit accounts to citizens directly (trivial for the Federal Reserve to support this [disclaimer: I work in the financial services industry, and feel qualified to make this statement]), and providing UBI to those accounts using the Federal Reserve as an intermediary/conduit (lookout Blackrock and Vanguard! there's a new index fund manager on the block!).

Voilà, Citizen's Dividend.

EDIT: The Federal Reserve operates independently of the US government, and does not require Congressional or Presidential approval to perform this "monetary policy". [2]

"Although an instrument of the U.S. Government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-18/boj-s-etf...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

When you have trillions you just need a bigger mattress, like Ireland, for instance.

I agree that the rule of law didn't protect peasants who were forced off their hereditary lands. You'll note that it wasn't the peasants who led the industrial revolution.

I'm unwilling to wait until the end of civilization while citizens of the richest country in the world go hungry [1], go without shelter [2], and die due to not being able to put $50 together for their insulin [3].

[1] https://www.worldhunger.org/hunger-in-america-2016-united-st...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

[3] https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/ezwwze/the-high-price-o...

Only in the most inefficient way possible. The 'problem' is banks are limited in what they can do with this money which ends up creating investment bubbles and other market distortions which hurt the economy overall. If you slowly transitioned banks so they could not invest this money over say 100 years the net result would not be harmful.

In the end money is not actual wealth, it's simply a representation of wealth. Anything that turns money into more money needs an intermediary where some cash flow is generated. And those intermediary's are often harmful see in excess like pay day loans.

You can tell that to the people in Houston who lost their home overnight. Home ownership is not risk free. ;)

I am not familiar with the entirety of the US territory. If you look at properties outside of the major cities, they should be relatively stable, renters have no jobs to sustain ever increasing rent. In the far country side, properties should be deflating because de industrialization.

Agreed that it is great for a diversified portfolio. Especially the primary home, it's self sustaining because you'd have to pay rent anyway. A second home is safe, it can host your child now or yourself after retirement, then it's lower returns.

There are a lot of index funds with various risk profiles. There is no general strategy. It depends on your personal situation, how much there is, where your live, and you family.

Now, that might sound stupid. If you own your home and have some savings, you can basically retire. There aren't much expenses outside of the rent.

This is why research grants and outright government spending is a good tool in the toolbox. People are still paying for it through taxes, but because of the indirect nature we can judge the problem a bit more on its merits ("of course we want cancer research to happen and be funded")

But they're able to invest in the future because they have the spare resources. Maybe one of these random side projects will become immensely popular. Maybe one of these crazy side projects will become the most popular email interface ever. And even if they don't, the people are still valuable.

I'm not saying that some people won't just coast, but the potential for innovation shouldn't be locked away because "we can't afford it" - we obviously can.

Even without demographics taken into account, a country that's not accountable to a base set of unchangeable rules is a scary thing.

You might want to understand the existing structure of government before you propose replacing it on a whim.

Here are some questions to get you started:

* Why is there a Constitution?

* Why are there 3 co-equal branches of government? What are they all there for?

* Why is there an electoral college?

* Why are Senators allocated by state while House members are allocated by population?

* Why do House members have 2 year terms and Senators have 6 year terms?

* Why do the courts exist?

* Why does the executive branch exist?

Of the deposit account, they keep 10% in the vault/Fed, and loan out 90%. Of that 90%, they keep 10% in the vault (9%), and re-loan 90% of it (81%). Of that 81%, they keep 10% in the vault (8.1%) and re-loan 90% of it (72.9%). Sum the series, and the effect on the money supply from loans and the reserve requirement is to divide the vault cash by the reserve requirement to get the bank account totals.

Raise the requirement from 10% to 11% and the circulating money supply drops from 10 x vault cash to 9.1 x vault cash. Raise it again to 12% and that drops to 8.3 x vault cash. To keep things steady, you have to print extra money for the express purpose of putting it into reserves.

The de jure impact of the reserve requirement on the money supply isn't "not much"; it's actually huge. But that is only down to the point where it goes below the de facto requirement imposed by normal bank operations. You drop the requirement to 0%, and banks will still keep cash on hand to cover their own needs. It is certainly possible to raise it all the way to 100% (or even higher, by requiring that banks freeze some of their own cash when accepting a deposit). But that would have to be done very slowly and cautiously.

About 60% of all US income (GDI) is compensation for labor (salaries, wages, benefits), 40% compensation for capital (dividends, interest, rents). Both parts are already taxed, at varying rates. The total amount of taxation is about 33% of GDI, while total spending is about 36% (the deficits is filled by borrowing).

Since the entire article looks like a big tax and transfer proposal, it's pretty bizarre to omit almost all basic government accounting, except for a throwaway footnote. The analogy with joint-stock companies or Homestead acts are neither here nor there. The government owned a lot of American land back then. It doesn't not own a large share of of current American corporations, nor many laborers. So the way to pay any significant "citizen's dividend" is boring old taxes.

A much better discussion with concrete numbers and speculation on incentive effects can be found here: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1286141&s...

That phrase means different things to different people. In some parts of the world, $50k could consider you to be financially independent. $500k in others, and in some parts, you'd need $5m - $50m.

What if I told you it cost $5/day to rent a luxury hotel room with cleaning, full board, and high speed broadband provided as standard?

What if I told you it cost $1500/month for a small studio apartment with no furnishings or anything else?

Both are true, both are real, both require different amounts of money in order to achieve financial independence.

I realise now that I haven't actually answered your question:

> What does your world look like where you'd be too taxed to bother wanting to be financially independent?

Rewriting that to be "What does your world look like where you'd be too taxed to bother generating more wealth?"

There comes a point of diminishing returns. If you work a 40 hour week already and make a decent living at 40-50%, and now get told that anything above that will get taxed at 75%, unless you're going to somehow generate more than double, you're going to spend that time doing more productive things (like spending it with your family).

Arguably, that's a net-positive for society as a whole, but may be a net-negative for the economy/GDP of the country you reside in.

Now to answer your question, consider say, a prospective engineering student. They could go to school and come out with $150k or more in debt. But if their post-tax income potential goes down (especially initially), thus their ability to pay off that debt goes down, thus making it more crushing than it already would be, why on Earth would they even consider bothering to go to school then?! Of course a lot of potential students would find something else to do! It's utterly obvious. Painfully obvious. So right there you'll have a decrease in the number of people pursuing certain careers -- hard work being avoided.

Even beyond the economic effect on students, there is just a basic personal calculus as well. You might choose to live with a lower income and more free time to enjoy as you wish (if with fewer luxuries than you might like) than work harder and harder for less and less reward. You only have so many prime years for enjoying the one life you have. Everything is a trade-off. You might work harder now if it means you'll be better able to enjoy some free time later, but if working harder will make little difference to your ability to enjoy free time in the future, why work harder?

And beyond that, we know what low incentives did to would-be hard workers' desire to work hard in the U.S.S.R. and such places. Spoilers: they certainly didn't work harder when they didn't have guns to their heads incentivizing them.

By the way, the same sorts who say that increasing income taxes (or otherwise putting a ceiling on incomes) wouldn't have an effect on how hard people work... also tend to argue that higher tobacco taxes will reduce tobacco use. We all know about the prodigious powers of doublethink in some quarters, but don't think for a minute that everyone accepts doublethink, let alone masters it. And sure, you yourself didn't just make that argument, but I bet you do when it comes to topics where that argument is convenient. I, on the other hand, accept that punitive/confiscatory taxes only serve to reduce the amount of activity being taxed regardless of whether it is an activity I appreciate. If you ever find yourself making that argument, please recognize it and choose consistency.

FYI: Selling a property doesn't take it off the market. It's just owned by a new owner, who's gonna either live in or rent it just like before.

NIT is just moving the progressive tax system into negative values, which means you subsidize the poor but once you make enough money you won't get subsidized.

>end gerrymandering, and reform campaign financing

I think those are good because they weaken the powerful (the current majority party and the rich) to enable the weak. But I also believe that without the senate the political power of Wyomingers (Wyomans?) is going to be a lot weaker than the political power of Californians so I see the senate as overall good.

Why should we focus so much on the majority and not the relative power of those that compose the majority (or minority?)

My only other quibble is that I haven't seen healthcare costs or insurance premiums scale to that 10x factor like housing prices do rural-vs-urban, otherwise I'd personally be perfectly happy with moving and retiring early. Get the right cancer or nasty chronic condition and you're gonna be out some serious bucks.

But it's not even there, as proponents of both have stated that they are equivalent, and alternate names for the same thing, and they are marketed with the same arguments, and are widely acknowledged by their proponents to be names of the same thing. That is, the marketing isn't different, it's the same, both in content and on that the marketing itself recognized the equivalence.

Often the capital for many bank issued credit cards does not come from depositors at all.

It's the same with the presidential election. If you're the NRA, what's easier for you to influence? A popular vote or our current electoral college system where only a few swing states matter?

If you're saying that the electoral college and the Senate are a means of protecting those in the "flyover states", then I would just you how that's working out? Do you think "Wyomingers" are the ones who are going to benefit from repealing the estate tax? The House, Senate, and Executive branch are all controlled by Republicans who should, in theory, be advocating for "Wyomingers" and yet they seem to only be working on behalf of the interests of the wealthy, special interests, and corporations.

Just abolish the states all together as far as I'm concerned and let's have one unified America, which would be much harder for special interests and corporations to influence.

Total US GDP for 2016 was ~$18T.

It seems a bit unrealistic to me to think we can get 5x GDP in tax revenue each year.

So what is the catch?

And one of the reasons for the crisis was “shadow banking”, because many home loans were not really given by banks (some were directly created by other institutions, some were first created by banks but then packaged and sold). The subprime crisis would not have happened, at least to the same extent, if loans had been kept in the balance sheets of banks.

I suspect, but can't prove companies that need to demonstrate comptitence in lending to gain access to capital would be better at making loans than companies who gain capital by doing other things and then suddenly have access to a lot of capital and need to find a use for it.

Consider tech companies like Apple/Google/Microsoft have access to vast amounts of Capital yet does not really effectively use it for much.