Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Multiheaded

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Yes. I am in favor of an allowance being paid by the government to all citizens. The simplest way to do this would be to impose a flat tax on top of existing income tax, and redistribute the revenue equally to everybody. So that it works out as a negative tax for those making less than average (arithmetic mean) income. People making exactly mean income are unaffected. And the very rich get almost nothing back relative to what they put in.

In the short term, most people would benefit, because most people make less than average. That is, median income is less than mean income, because wealth is concentrated at the top. And net utility would increase, because the marginal utility of each additional dollar is greater for the poor than for the rich.

The long term effects of course are more complicated. But it's not obvious that this policy would result in less productivity. In the US at least, there's plenty of room to raise taxes on the rich without approaching historical highs. And for the very poor, having a tax structure like this replace welfare could actually make it easier to transition from complete government dependence to a low-paying job, since there's no fear of suddenly losing your support.

Arguably if you cut existing welfare and the bureaucracy and infrastructure it requires and giving every adult say 10000 dollars a year, you may not even have to raise taxes. And if you also cut regulation on employment, like the minimal wage or what employers can fire people over (since jobs aren't required to live a decent life in a low expense city) the economic gains probably increase tax revenue.

0buybuydandavis14y

Just for accounting purposes, are you liberal, libertarian, something else? The bonus from an incentive point of view is that poor people on government assistance routinely face the highest marginal tax rates, often over 100%, as they lose benefits as they start to make money.