Back in the Empire, when one entered into another jurisdiction, one accrued a tribute liability to the vassal of two drachmas; paid so they could both keep track of how many were in the jurisdiction by an accounting of the coins collected and the magistrates then had an expansion of the amount of currency in the local system to financially accommodate the increase in local population.
"Now at their coming into Capernaum, those getting the double drachma came to Peter and say, "Is not your teacher settling the double drachma tribute?" Mat 17:24
They weren't morons like we have today.
If the corporate tax rate on profits is lowered, and the lost tax revenue is made up by taxing products that are imported, then the tax burden has just been transferred from the multinational corporations to the consumers. The idea is to encourage jobs in the USA, but this will take years and years for companies to make changes in the location of their facilities and employees. This plan will no doubt cause tremendous new economic burdens on consumers and their spending, especially among the middle class and lower paid workers who will be penalised.
ReplyDeleteWhat if the tax rate on profits was left unchanged BUT each company was entitled to a tax deduction for each full-time employee working in the US. This would lower the effective tax rate on US companies that provide US jobs but would keep the higher tax rate for the multinational corporations that have high US profits but provide few US jobs. The tax deduction could be significant, several dollars per hour for each full-time US employee, thus encouraging full-time work rather than subcontracted or part time jobs.
Or a different form of tax in its place such as higher taxes on secondary market trading as ordinary income or a higher rate than it presently incurs.
https://taxfoundation.org/what-distributional-impact-destination-based-cash-flow-tax
You'd might rather hold the exchange rate at 1:1 between the currency of the suzerain : vassal and just exchange any currency the foreigners bring in from the vassal state 1:1.... then you wouldn't need tariffs.
ReplyDeleteThe whole tariff thing is from the gold/metal standard days....
Iow if Mexicans were allowed in to the US, they would be required to bring a certain amount of pesos with them as a tax which would be converted into USD 1:1 and deposited into the US govt account...
"They weren't morons like we have today."
ReplyDeleteHahahahaha!! So true!
John youre just dispensing a tautology.. "the rich are rich!"... its not insightful at all...
ReplyDeleteA lot of these people lose munnie too what about them?
Its like Taleb's references to 'survivorship bias'... you're just complaining about a result of a stochastic process rather than developing a deterministic theory...
Like you are saying "the rich!" well what about a person who starts out non "rich!" and then makes a lot of munnie??
To you, you are saying that person, even when they had no munnie, was still "rich!" because somehow you can time travel into the future and know that person was going to turn out "rich!" in the end...
Doesnt make any sense...
Why are they morons? They seem pretty smart: they've reconfigured the economy so that all the money goes into their pockets. That's pretty damn smart, and at the same time they divert blame to social security, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, Mexicans, etc. If that's moronic, let me have a piece of this multi-gazillion dollar action.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't take many smarts to tip the playing field if one has the power.
The genius lies in getting the rubes to vote for it, because "freedom."
Matt: "Like you are saying "the rich!" well what about a person who starts out non "rich!" and then makes a lot of munnie??"
ReplyDeleteDoesn't happen very often, does it? The poor to rich mobility is almost non-existent, and vice versa. The poor to destitute mobility is high. The middle income to poor mobility is coming along very nicely. If you are already rich, you're going to get a lot richer with the policies that are being passed by the government that the rich themselves have put in place. The statistics overwhelmingly show this. It's all about power. If you have it, even dummies who have money become richer. Are there stupendously rich people who lose it all? Sure, bad investments, tasteless fast cars, bling, cocaine, hookers and gold diggers have a way of putting poor people in the poor house, but those cases are not the norm. The norm is simply if you have money, you're going to have a lot more of the stuff by the time your elected representatives have moulded an economy more in your favour.
All you need to do is look around you! For God's sake, man, you live in or near Baltimore! What the hell do you think happened? The population suddenly became lazy and therefore poor and ridden with crime and drugs? Or did the neoliberal groupthink reconfigure the economy towards finance, real estate, globalisation and the already stinking rich?
I see it all around me, and I don't really believe a large segment of my countrymen suddenly decided to be ill-educated, lacking in skills, unemployed, living in poverty, burdened with debt and surrounded by crime and drugs. So-called "conservatives" bleat that it's about "values". It's about jobs, no more and no less. As well as the economic benefits, jobs give people dignity, hope and pride. That means less crime, fewer drug problems, fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer abortions, fewer family breakdowns and all the other pathologies that "conservatives" claim to be interested in, but aren't. "Conservatives" are only interested in one thing: making rich people richer. And as Tom has pointed out, one of the ways they convince people that they're on working people's side is to claim the reconfiguring of the economy towards the rich is a defence of "freedom".
It's not a tautology to say that the rich have become MORE rich because of four decades of policies that were the result of the rich buying influence. Politics and economics are about one thing and one thing only: power.
What makes the system work is the "Horatio Alger" narrative. The chance of ordinary people becoming rich based on studies on social and economic mobility is about the chance of winning the lottery.
ReplyDeleteBtw, one of the best ways for an ordinary person to become rich in a representative democracy is through politics, followed by selling influence.
The way for people at the bottom to become rich is through crime.