It's really crazy how all these people overlap at Gottingen in the 1920s.
Take Oppenheimer, for instance. He transfers to Göttingen from Cambridge in 1926 (after a relatively miserable time at the Cavendish labs studying under J.J. Thompson). He earns his PhD at Göttingen quickly. By September 1927, he's back in the USA on a teaching fellowship with Caltech.
So, Oppenheimer isn't at Göttingen for very long - not even 2 years! But in that brief time, he meet Max Born, James Franck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner who are also all there.
Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi had moved to other institutions by 1926, and Edward Teller doesn't get there until 1930 - but it's plausible that the Göttingen connection (and their relationship to Max Born) are how Oppenheimer meets them.
A Pigovian tax, set correctly, will actually remove the deadweight loss caused by a negative externality. However, it is very difficult in practice to measure the negative externalities of something like sea level rise, especially when the effect could be centuries in the future.
A perfect pigovian tax is rarely necessary. Just 10% of the ideal rate is already sufficient in a lot of cases simply because of the fact that a lot of harmful activites are free and not tracked.
Let's say there is a wood stove that increases cooking efficiency by 2x, this means a lot less trees have to be cut down for cooking. However to a person for whom trees are free, they aren't going to buy a better stove just to save on emissions, they will only start once they run out of trees which is when it is already too late. By charging a fee per tree, even if it is a token amount, people will start calculating and weighing whether cutting down more trees or less trees and buying the stove is the better option. Once they have made the initial investment they may even tell their neighbours about it. A single person changing their mind, can change the minds of everyone.
My understanding is that in Japan zoning restrictions are controlled at a federal rather than local level. I've read that this helps prevent local incumbents using the zoning system to exclude new construction.
In other words, Japan lacks the regulatory environment (common in all these other countries) that depresses supply.
These threads are great for collecting a bunch of different implementations and looking at the various design decisions people have made. There's really a surprising amount of variety out there.
Progressiveness is a function of both taxes and benefits. A consumption tax scheme can be made more progressive by paying benefits in a more progressive manner.
For example, Exampleville institutes a consumption tax of 15%. Such a tax is regressive because consumption is usually a smaller proportion of a wealthy person's income than a poor person's income. To counteract this, Exampleville pays a monthly cash grant to all citizens and adjusts the payment level so that the cash grant is larger for the poor and smaller (or non-existent) for the wealthy.
But this assumes that the revenue from the consumption tax will 1) be the same as for the income tax, and 2) hit wealthy people enough that the lower benefit payout will balance it.
I don't really see how these can be true given that, as you state, wealthy people spend a smaller portion (a lot smaller) of their income than do poor people.
To toss out some numbers, let's say the wealthy person makes $1M per year at a 35% effective income tax rate and the poor person makes $50K per year at an effective 10% income tax rate. Let's further suppose the wealthy person spends half their after-tax income, and the poor person spends all of it. Total tax revenue in this case would be $355K under the income scheme, but if we switch to a consumption tax, the tax revenue drops to $55,500. There's no amount of benefit allocation you can do to make up the difference. On top of that, the tax burden for the wealthy person (after offsetting for the benefit allocation) is still massively lower than under the income scheme, even if they get $0 in benefits. You'd have to raise the consumption tax ridiculously high (33% !) to get close, which will effectively discourage expenditures and encourage savings, pretty much destroying the US consumption-based economy.
I just can't see a realistic scenario where this setup isn't regressive or generally a bad idea. If you want to keep a progressive system but also eliminate income tax, we need to consider a wealth tax.
Just checked the Danish national budget. Danish VAT brought in (or was estimated to bring in) 212 billion DKK in 2018. In comparison, tax levied on personal income brought in 562 billion.
That's fair. However, the proposal in the parent comment's link (and other proposals like it) is asking for a 17.5% consumption tax, which would be an absurd gift for the wealthy. Even for not-wealthy people like me, it would be a huge boon, while the middle class would get hosed.
Well, you may not think 33% is ridiculously high, but you just wrote that it is in the second sentence. You say that 33% is 1/3 higher than Sweden, which is proverbial as an example of a highly taxed locale.
Where is that money supposed to come from? To make this work people have to pay enough consumption tax so there is money for the payouts. Also, if you make these payments dependent on income level you pretty much have the problem of determining a taxable income which we have now.
Personally I think there is almost no way to make this work without being highly regressive.
I don't think it makes any sense to tax everything and give back the money in the same proportions.
However, if you just tried the experiment, then to the extent it redistributed resources, it would be taking more money from those who consumed more at a given level of income, and giving it to those who consumed less.
So it would probably reduce consumer activity, and I don't know if that would be good for the economy in the long run. I don't think it would be a null-op though. It doesn't seem like a logical or mathematical contradiction.
If you had asked me 5 minutes prior to reading about this, who was the earlier writer - Milton or Shakespeare? - I would have said Milton. I now know that it's the opposite. Shakespeare preceded Milton.
There's something about Shakespeare's writing that feels closer to modernity though. Milton seems sort of medieval, perhaps because of the religious themes (and the fact that I've only read a small portion of Paradise Lost...).
Multiple people have suggested this here. It seems very strange to me, since Shakespeare is one of the most famous Englishmen of the Elizabethan era, and Milton was politically active 50+ years later during the English Civil War.
A surprising number of English people don't know that there was an English Civil War. When you've got a thousand years of continuous history to pack in, Oliver Cromwell ends up being kind of a footnote.
Maybe if it had occurred before Shakespeare, instead of after, he could have written a cycle of plays about it, and we'd remember it as well as the Wars of the Roses. But as it is, English schoolchildren forget it as soon as class is over... and I suspect the rest of the UK cares even less.
From paragraph 60 in the filing (emphasis is mine):
"As explained to OAG attorneys by Respondents' counsel. Bitfinex and Tether have also used a number of other third party payment processors to handle client withdrawal requests, including various companies owned by Bitfinex/Tether executives, as well as other 'friends' of Bitfinex - meaning, human being friends of Bitfinex employees that were willing to use their bank accounts to transfer money to Bitfinex clients who had requested withdrawals."
This was rumored pretty heavily when Bitfinex said "Divulging [bank account] info could damage not just yourself and Bitfinex but the entire digital token ecosystem … you are cautioned that there may be serious negative effects with this information becoming public." LOL https://news.bitcoin.com/bitfinex-introduces-top-secret-bank...
> "The New York Attorney General’s court filings were written in bad faith and are riddled with false assertions, including as to a purported $850 million “loss” at Crypto Capital. On the contrary, we have been informed that these Crypto Capital amounts are not lost but have been, in fact, seized and safeguarded. We are and have been actively working to exercise our rights and remedies and get those funds released. Sadly, the New York Attorney General’s office seems to be intent on undermining those efforts to the detriment of our customers."
https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/356
No. They claim the money was seized from a "partner" (Crypto Capital) by various governments (~$400 million to Poland, etc), and they are trying to get it back.
I agree that the central point of the article is on target.
The notion that this is somehow a "Victorian" thing, though - that the Victorians have some special responsibility in history for inventing this strategy of social dominance - that's an error.
Humans have been doing this for much longer than that.
I don't disagree but it's a really keen comparison. The Victorian Era has been romanticized pretty heavily but it's close enough in memory for there to be general knowledge about it while being far enough away to seem foreign and allow us to examine it with a more critical eye.
The Romans and the Greeks wrote endlessly on this topic. Everything Confucius said, too.
Perhaps the only significances of the Victorians was the rise of a middle class and "more" upward mobility. Before it had been "act your class/caste", the one you had been born in, but for the Victorians is was the class you wanted your _children_ to be born in.
But for sure, was an interesting comparison, until the vomit forced into the last line.
Take Oppenheimer, for instance. He transfers to Göttingen from Cambridge in 1926 (after a relatively miserable time at the Cavendish labs studying under J.J. Thompson). He earns his PhD at Göttingen quickly. By September 1927, he's back in the USA on a teaching fellowship with Caltech.
So, Oppenheimer isn't at Göttingen for very long - not even 2 years! But in that brief time, he meet Max Born, James Franck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner who are also all there.
Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi had moved to other institutions by 1926, and Edward Teller doesn't get there until 1930 - but it's plausible that the Göttingen connection (and their relationship to Max Born) are how Oppenheimer meets them.