Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

—“Complete amnesty. Open borders. $50 minimum wage. Universal Basic Income. Free healthcare for all. Hate speech laws. 90% tax rates. Let’s do this!”—John Derbyshire There are 323 Million People Less than 150M are Taxpayers. Total Economy is 18.5 Trillion Total Tax Collection is 6.5 Trillion (35% of the total economy) Total Tax Collection per Individual is $20,000 per person Federal Tax Collection is 3.4 Trillion (the rest is state and local) Total Federal Tax Collection per individual is ~$10,000. About 45% pay no (income) taxes in any given year. 50% of all income taxpayers (~70-75M) paid 98% of taxes. Meaning that they paid an average of $45,000 per person(but highly skewed to the top). The top 1 percent (1.3 million filers) paid a greater share of income taxes (37.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent (124.5 million filers) combined (30.2 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a higher effective income tax rate than any other group, at 27.1 percent, which is over 8 times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.3 percent). You know, when the total discretionary tax revenue per person is $3,000 and even under the most aggressive taxation possible, might be $4000, and vast numbers of men are already permanently exiting the labor pool, leaving the lowest labor participation rate in history, I am trying to figure out how the math works. Or rather. I know full well how the math works: it doesn’t. So if there is any possible way to provide ‘welfare’ (minimum income or whatever) to some part of the population, I don’t know how that’s going to happen. The postwar period is over and western institutional, intellectual, and technological advances over the rest of the world have been neutralized, and western labor’s advantage has been neutralized by globalism. Where the hell is this money going to come from? We will all be as poor as europeans for having imported the underclasses of the third world. ALTERNATE SOLUTION My solution is much different: and involves eliminating all consumer interest through direct zero interest consumption loans from the central treasury, and direct redistribution of liquidity to consumers in order to manage the money supply (commercial interest rates). This makes everyone a shareholder in the USA with liquidity and dividends paid directly to the consumer. In other words, this puts the consumer (citizenry) in competition with the state for profits (taxes), suppresses tolerance for immigration, and produces just about every other good incentive that we can manage.

—“Complete amnesty. Open borders. $50 minimum wage. Universal Basic Income. Free healthcare for all. Hate speech laws. 90% tax rates. Let’s do this!”—John Derbyshire There are 323 Million People Less than 150M are Taxpayers. Total Economy is 18.5 Trillion Total Tax Collection is 6.5 Trillion (35% of the total economy) Total Tax Collection per Individual is $20,000 per person Federal Tax Collection is 3.4 Trillion (the rest is state and local) Total Federal Tax Collection per individual is ~$10,000. About 45% pay no (income) taxes in any given year. 50% of all income taxpayers (~70-75M) paid 98% of taxes. Meaning that they paid an average of $45,000 per person(but highly skewed to the top). The top 1 percent (1.3 million filers) paid a greater share of income taxes (37.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent (124.5 million filers) combined (30.2 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a higher effective income tax rate than any other group, at 27.1 percent, which is over 8 times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.3 percent). You know, when the total discretionary tax revenue per person is $3,000 and even under the most aggressive taxation possible, might be $4000, and vast numbers of men are already permanently exiting the labor pool, leaving the lowest labor participation rate in history, I am trying to figure out how the math works. Or rather. I know full well how the math works: it doesn’t. So if there is any possible way to provide ‘welfare’ (minimum income or whatever) to some part of the population, I don’t know how that’s going to happen. The postwar period is over and western institutional, intellectual, and technological advances over the rest of the world have been neutralized, and western labor’s advantage has been neutralized by globalism. Where the hell is this money going to come from? We will all be as poor as europeans for having imported the underclasses of the third world. ALTERNATE SOLUTION My solution is much different: and involves eliminating all consumer interest through direct zero interest consumption loans from the central treasury, and direct redistribution of liquidity to consumers in order to manage the money supply (commercial interest rates). This makes everyone a shareholder in the USA with liquidity and dividends paid directly to the consumer. In other words, this puts the consumer (citizenry) in competition with the state for profits (taxes), suppresses tolerance for immigration, and produces just about every other good incentive that we can manage.