Pareto optimality would be ideal, but across an entire economy, that's almost impossible to measure.
In reality, there is no objective definition of "a fair share", there is only the intent expressed in the tax code (and people of course argue over what the intent "really is"). If people and/or corps. are paying taxes following that intent, then for all practical purposes, they are paying their "fair share".
A realistic fair share is probably some colloquial measure of people and corporations being equally angry about their taxes and equally angry about others not paying their fair share. It's my personal opinion that corporations have it way too good in the current system, specifically because they've spent millions to find ways to save billions, which people cannot reasonably do, and because they've also spent millions buying our political processes off to ensure tax laws don't meaningfully change.
Yes, and in fact the entire purpose of a progressive marginal tax system is that "everyone feels the pain of taxation" equally. It recognizes that a fixed percentage, even with a threshold, feels very different if you earn poverty-level wages than if you earn 10000 times that.
And that's what our tax system is designed around.
Corporations, and specifically their status (or otherwise) as "persons" complicates the picture quite a bit.
What counts as a loophole though? IRA, almost by design is a way to shelter your investments from taxes. Is it a loophole to put your investments in an IRA to avoid taxes? What about when Peter Thiel puts his paypal stock in an IRA, and paid no taxes on his paypal exit?
Can you say why employees of large and well funded businesses get to save $23k+ per year in 401k, but employees of small and less well funded businesses can only save $7k per year in an IRA?
You don't have to be large and well funded. You do have to have your own SEP-IRA, rather than a regular IRA, and almost any self-employed person could do that. I am self-employed, my business is essentially a sole proprietorship, and I get the higher limits because of the type of IRA.
So the question is really: why do some people only get to save $7k a year in an IRA and others get to save much, much more?
>employees of small and less well funded businesses
For example, a startup without the funds or time to do all the HR to allow for 401ks is disadvantaged because their employees cannot contribute as much to a retirement account as someone who works for a business that offers a 401k (or for themselves).
A person has the following choices:
1) work for a business offering a 401k (usually larger, well funded, etc)
2) work for themselves
3) work for a small, upstart business (usually smaller, not as well funded, etc)
Why does working for #3 disallow you from saving as much for retirement? Why are tax advantaged retirement savings a function of your employer at all?
Same for paying for health insurance with pre-tax income.
Well I can pull up exactly what proponents of The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which introduced the Roth IRA, stated their intentions were since this is very easy to find and widely documented but I strongly suspect you don't actually give a fuck about reality.
"intended use-case" is just more fuzzy language. They probably thought everyone would buy mutual funds, rather than 3X leveraged Nvidia ETFs. Does that mean buying such ETFs (and making bank) mean you're not paying "your fair share"? Or for something more down to earth, what about meme stocks and bitcoin treasury companies, both of which are technically companies, but are definitely not what the authors of the bill had in mind.
The purpose of IRAs is clear from the name - Individual Retirement Account. It was intended to allow individuals to save more effectively for their own retirement, and the justification for it centered around providing incentives for people who might not otherwise save enough.
At least, that was the publicly delivered account.
For a billionare who can already retire in comfort few will ever know to be using any kind of IRA for any purpose is outside of the publicly given justification for their existence.
>For a billionare who can already retire in comfort few will ever know to be using any kind of IRA for any purpose is outside of the publicly given justification for their existence.
So if you're sufficiently rich (by some arbitrary amount), you're now a "tax evader" and "not paying your fair share"? Can we say the same about other deductions, like the standard deduction? I doubt you'll be able to find a politician that answer "yes" to "do you think bill gates' first $14.6k in income should be tax-free?", does that mean that's "tax evasion" too?
The authors of the Roth IRA, which initially had a $2,000 annual contribution cap were not intending it to be used by someone with $21,800,000,000 to avoid taxes on $5,000,000,000.
I really don't know how this is difficult unless you're trying to be a troll or somehow miraculously don't comprehend how numbers work.
> Food conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland enjoyed $438 million of U.S. pretax income last year and received a federal tax rebate of $164 million.
> The delivery giant FedEx zeroed out its federal income tax on $1.2 billion of U.S. pretax income in 2020 and received a rebate of $230 million.
> The shoe manufacturer Nike didn’t pay a dime of federal income tax on almost $2.9 billion of U.S. pretax income last year, instead enjoying a $109 million tax rebate.
If you think this is the same as someone putting $7k into a 401k then you are acting in bad faith and we have nothing productive to discuss.
Some loopholes are an accident. Some are intentionally put in place by parties interested in traveling through the loophole, benefiting from doing that, and then claiming they would be stupid not to do so.
Those cases are different, even though the legal status of them may be the same.
Fair means the same playing field, the same rules, the same consistent outcomes from all the corporations subject to these laws and regulations, and not just one of them who does the right thing. Exercizing loopholes is the opposite of fair. It puts those with the best cheating strategies ahead of those who play by the rules. Because you can catch the ref with his back turned doesn't make you a fair player.
"A way of avoiding or escaping a cost or legal burden that would otherwise apply by means of an omission or ambiguity in the wording of a contract or law." - The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
What they're describing is corporations using legal strategies to mitigate their tax burdens that you or I cannot do. Lobbying is legal, but you or I cannot lobby to any useful degree. Big-box store companies build their stores to be short-lived buildings, then will only sell them with a contract that says the next occupant cannot be a big-box store, then argue that since value is determined by what someone else will pay and nobody will pay much for the end of life of a short-lived store intended to be a shop but which now cannot be a shop, so their stores are low value and comparable to empty stores, therefore they shouldn't pay much tax on them. "In Wisconsin, new Gov. Tony Evers says his budget proposal will close the dark stores loophole in the state"[1].
> "Legally avoiding taxes isn't cheating."
Try arguing that you would only sell your houses with a stipulation that nobody can live in it, therefore you should pay the same taxes and rates that an empty lot would pay, and see if you still think that "legal is the same as right and fair".
Loopholes are the definition of playing by the rules.
Laws are not enacted in spirit, they are drafted, voted on, and enacted in text. What the law says is what matters, not what people assume it wants to achieve.
To claim that complying with the law exactly as it is written is unfair is, quite frankly, undemocratic and an outright rejection of the rule of law.
No, criticising the laws for being written in such a way that allow loophole behavior is not undemocratic. In any reasonable democracy you're allowed to criticise laws however much you please
It’s very easy. If I think I pay a lot then I’m paying more than my fair share. If I think you’re not paying enough then you’re not paying your fair share.
Gun violence is responsible for nearly 2% of annual deaths in the US, I imagine that might skew the statistics slightly.
But yes, US poverty is much worse than poverty in other countries. But the flip side is also true - it's generally better being rich in America than in Canada, for example.
I would bet that unhealthy eating habits and car-centric city design affect rich people as well. Use of sugar and fatty processed foods appears to be out of control in America compared to your average EU country.
US poverty is vastly overstated. The most common measures of poverty are based on census data, but the census excludes the vast majority of redistributions from its calculation of income. It even excludes cash programs like "refundable tax credits".
We spend $1.3 trillion dollars per year on medicaid, HUD, Food Stamps, and refundable "tax credits" like the earned income credit and child tax credit. That's $32,500 of spending for each of the 40 million Americans who live "in poverty" (before including state-run programs and private charities like churches and food banks), meaning our welfare spending per "poor indvidual is higher than the median income for an EU household.
> That's $32,500 of spending for each of the 40 million Americans who live "in poverty"
My understanding is that the amount of money spent on people in poverty isn't the problem. The problem is that it's spent so inefficiently due to an insistence from certain parts of the electorate on not making things "too easy" for such people. It would probably actually be cheaper to have european-style welfare state, provide housing for the homeless, etc.
See also: the US spending many times what other countries spend on healthcare without actually getting better care.
> "US poverty is much worse than poverty in other countries"
You must be restricting your thinking to other Western countries, because there are a lot of areas on Earth that look like hell. At least no part of the US is in a constant state of war.
I'm pretty sure there's already a popular hypothesis that relates to evolutionary biology, but I don't know the name of it.
Essentially, as hunter-gatherers every group of humans needed one or more experts on the local megafauna, so virtually all of us have some degree of fascination with big animals baked in, but some have more than others. I've also heard the same hypothesis used to express young boys' obsessions with trucks and trains.
My young lad went thru a brief phase where we went thru picture books of common vehicles and for page after page, he pointed at every wheel of every vehicle and had me name it. "Wheel." "Wheel." "Wheel." ...
Probably a developmental phase somehow connected to quadrupeds. Large object of interest. Four supporting thingies.
Boys yearn for power - Giant monsters, fast cars, off-highway trucks, guns, dirt bikes and skateboards and anything that jumps, fighter jets with missiles, martial arts, whistling into a telephone to get free calls...
(Girls surely do too, but I cannot attest to that)
The public school system is absurd and the biggest culprit in the vast majority of our modern problems. The idea that we would take children and put them in an environment that is essentially the same as a prison for 18 years, is ABSURD.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
The Aztecs had mandatory boarding schools which were basically military academies. Plenty of nonwestern societies had mandatory training for children who lived apart from the rest of the community.
Well obviously schools have existed in any part of society. But schools have always had a purpose - whether it's training future scholars at madrasas, training sons of nobility for war, etc.
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
I'd argue it stems from the invention of the nation state and the need to build national identity. Specifically in those areas of Germany/France that blended together. Prior to the current school system you didn't get taught a standard language. More specifically, the modern school system is to teach a nation a common shared language.
> institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system
Please tell us what country anywhere in the world in the past 200 years had an education system that was good, instead of bad. Please explain what the differences were.
> Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
I don't know why all this focus on "public schools".
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
I think you misunderstand my comment. When I say "public" school I don't mean in distinction from private.
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
Okay, but that's not what "public school" standardly means in English.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parents to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.
If we imagine an alternative history in which the Reformation never happened, or in which the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing it - I think compulsory education would still be a reality in most of the world today much as it is in our history. There are strong economic arguments for it. Given it arguably still would have happened even if Protestantism hadn’t, I don’t think Protestantism was essential to its modern prevalence-they did play a pivotal early role, but that was more a historical accident than anything else, and their biggest contribution arguably was to accelerate a development which was going to happen anyway. In a world without Protestantism we’d still have it by now, but history would record it as having started somewhat later than it did in our timeline. While that late start may plausibly mean we’d have somewhat less of it by now than we actually do, it is equally plausible that we are already so far down that path that we’d be in roughly the same place by now anyway, that even though in that other timeline we would have started later, by now we would have caught up.
That's nonsense. This is what westerners like to tell themselves because all they read is western media coverage of Iran.
No, 80 million people don't want to end the regime. Westerners can't fathom the fact that not everyone wants to live in a democratic free-for-all.... so clearly anyone who doesn't deserves bombing.
Pathetic. Imperialism is encoded in the DNA of Americans at this point.
It's a bit more complex than that, you have a country with two decades of mass demonstrations that were brutally suppressed and a new generation that no longer sees itself as religious while living in a theocracy.
they do have a massive popular support issue over there
None of what you said is true. They still enjoy large amounts of popularity - are you forgetting the entire country virtually coming to demonstrate when we slaughtered their commander a few years ago?
I didn't say there are no supporters, but there is an asymmetry between supporters and protestors.
Supporters are being brought by buses, are often members of the Basij or other government functions and generally have incentives to do so.
Protestors however risk extremely painful death and torture.
There is support for the regime, usually outside of large cities, but there's a reason there were large protests in almost every single year since 2016
There's over 40% of responders that do not claim their religion is Shia, but rather Atheist, Humanist, etc. That's more than the people that define themselves as Shia, in a Shia theocracy. This also correlates with skepticism of government media and rejection of Hijab
The same GAMAAN org that in 2020 found 33% of Iran were Shia, and in 2022 reported that number was now 56%?
Religiosity surveys in the middle east are largely bunk. Actual boots on the ground reality is very different. In the 2000s much was made about the rapid secularization of the Arab world. ... in reality, the exact opposite has happened with the youth.
I long made the same mistake of assuming history. The answer is no, that kind of interaction wasn't transactional in a robotic way, it was highly trust-and-relationship building. Which is exactly what we are missing today.
Go to a farmers market week after week, buying and talking to people. It is completely different from a vending machine. I know the people at my market, if they asked for help I'd help them for nothing in return. And I have no doubt at all they would do the same for me.
The vending machine owner would get no such help from me, nor would I expect them to help me if I asked.
Correct. The rapid urbanization of society has crippled us - we are pack animals suddenly thrust into an environment with a constant nascent undertone of hostility.
The feeling of constantly being surrounded by people you can't trust is a foreign and debilitating one.
It made me reflect quite a bit and there is something really strange and somewhat spooky about America…
For example, how does the government and administrative apparatus even function since they are staffed by a cross section of the very same society?
By all theory Washington given the much higher density of deceivers, intriguers, scoundrels, etc., than even a typical American city… should pretty much immediately grind to a halt.
Someone making trades from time to time doesn't take over their life in quite the same way. Ultimately it's a question of richness, like having a variety of diet.
Pre-20th century people would have much stronger family ties, religious ties, and in many places some sort of feudal ties of varying levels of onerousness. But you can also find examples of people being extremely lonely, such as press ganged sailors separated from their families.
There are only 24 hours in a day, and so many days in a lifetime. Everyone is always trading time, since there is a very limited amount of it.
Even in a leisure situation, such as a party, people are going to make choices about how much time to interact with (or not interact with) certain people. Or spending time pontificating on HN.
I wonder if your example is a different kind of trade. When we trade time in a leisure situation, we're trading something more immediate and tangible. Whereas the transactional nature of the grandparent comment is more describing something more distanced.
An example of this that was told to me is imagine you're going to dinner with the in-laws (or maybe your best friend's parents). What would their reaction be if you took out your wallet and offered to pay them cash for the meal? As opposed to offering to e.g. bring a bottle of wine or helping to set the table?
Offering to pay might be the "transactional" trade meant by the grandparent. While offering to contribute [food | labour | goodwill] is more of the trading time in a leisure situation.
Typically, in accounting contexts, tangible is used to refer to physical products, such as mammoth meat, or stone axes.
Intangibles would be the gain or maintenance of reputation from going to have a meal at your in laws and all that jazz.
Regardless, in this context, trade is trade, one entity giving up something for another. Simply spending the time to go to your in laws for a meal is a trade. And while many would not cough up cash to show the transactional nature, far more would simply not go to the dinner (or go less often) and opt to spend their time elsewhere.
Or, if the in laws have something you want, maybe you opt to spend more time with them.
I am not claiming one has to solely view every interaction through this lens, or should. But it is a component of most every interaction. You could strike up a conversation with a stranger with no ulterior motive and then it carries on too long and you start thinking I could spend my time better elsewhere.
Industrial-scale slavery is a post-agricultural phenomenon and represents a very small percentage of overall human development.
Even such slavery, modern western/catholic chattel-style slavery aside, wasn't entirely transactional in that way. Many Ottoman slaves had better lives than aristocrats, for instance, and had real agency and influence.
Western European/American/Catholic imperialist slavery was somewhat unique in how dehumanizing it was.
Nope. The flip side of commoditization is relationships. Racism, xenophobia, nepotism, etc. are all products of a paradigm where, "What can you do for me? I don't care who does it," is less important than, "Who you are is most important, we can figure out what you can do for me later." And obviously ranking human worth along those lines isn't alien to this era or the preceding ones.
Depersonalization is a double-edged sword. You're no longer persecuted as an individual with a particular identity, but you're no longer valued as one, either. Though obviously it's not so much a binary as a field that can be collapsed to a point on a sliding scale.
There's no evidence that any such transactions ever took place. That's an anachronism. Hunter-gatherer groups are much more likely to share in everything, including work and the products of work, not engage in capitalistic ownership and economic isolationism. That's only possible in a situation of abundance and governmental enforcement of individual property rights.
How do you even get mammoth meat without having a stone axe?
I can't believe you're doubling down on the anachronism.
There was no such thing as "neighboring cavemen," like you have neighbors living in personal, separate houses today. Perhaps you've been watching too much of the Flintstones. And it doesn't matter whether you "like" going on mammoth hunts. You hunt, and you gather, or you die. Again you're imposing a contemporary background of abundance on an ancient environment of scarcity.
That is not a full-time job. If Oog decides he's going to spend 10 hours a day doing nothing but make stone axes for the 15 other men in the tribe, Oog is going to have a bad time.
In a hunter-gatherer context, the men are hunting, fishing and fighting, while the women forage and manage the children.
You're missing the point. There's a fundamental difference between doing what you're good at for the benefit of the tribe and doing what you're good at for your own personal benefit, refusing to share with the tribe unless they agree to your terms.
The former is sharing, the latter is trading. And again, there's no evidence that trading ever occurred in that situation. As another commenter mentioned, in the life-or-death scarcity of hunter-gatherer communities, you'd be punished or exiled (which would mean death) for modern capitalist-style selfishness. There's no commodification.
Also, knowledge and skills were shared. There were no trade secrets, no patents. It would be have been extremely dangerous for one person to be the exclusive source of an essential good. Again, specialization is a luxury of abundance.
