IRS should hire as many people as they need, as there is usually greater return than what it costs to pay them.
Everyone SHOULD pay their fair share. If the laws suck then the lower and middle class should focus on the rich and put pressure on the puppets in the office. However, it seems many love voting against their own interest.
Edit: If you have a problem paying taxes and are in the middle class. I suggest you think about starting a life somewhere without taxes, you will quickly realize that your middle class life is actually made possible by the infrastructure in place.
Unfortunately not true, and your article outlines why. Going after the rich requires not only highly trained and specialized agents, but state attorneys to enforce judgement, and those aren't being hired or trained up.
They may be going after more people in the 2-25% income group, but the 1% is just as immunized as ever, hiring 80k non specialist agents won't change that.
Ha! Just yesterday, I was talking to a colleague in the humanities about the relative pleasures of working in a field where there were practically no grants to be sought.
> Scientists these days are just interested in grants.
Ladies and gentlemen, to add insult to injury, the greedy scientist myth strikes again.
There is not a better feeling in the world than to work for free for several years, six days a week (plus Sundays of course), with the weak promise of receiving a "turtle grant" someday. Maybe. (Tomorrow perhaps, the turtle is blocked somewhere. You will be paid in two years) and then being called "greedy".
Yes, there are people getting rich with the money for science, It just happens that they aren't the scientists. They are the politicians that keep the grants as their own personal loans. Science can't be fixed because is the guarantor of politicians that only need to go creative and put impossible requirements year after year to be allowed to keep most of the money for themselves.
In 2010 under the president Zapatero, the spanish government de-funded first and then keep for themselves the 25% of the money compromised for science. In 2015 under president Rajoy the government keep the 48% of the funds allocated for science and in 2016 the 62% of the promised money never reached any researcher. The money was used instead for, who knows... a new swimming pool for each minister maybe, or fixing accounting holes in other sectors... I wouldn't discard cocaine parties neither.
> Scientists used to be aristocrats interested in truth. These days they're just
> interested in grants.
I'm not sure if that's actually what you're advocating, but personally I'm very much against science only being the domain of rich people who can afford to do it as a hobby.
I don't strictly disagree with that, but I do think a significant amount of science (not all) should be led by rich people. Rich people aren't random, there is a natural selection in whom becomes rich. Imperfect as that selection process is, I think it is at least better than the alternatives of popular vote or bureaucrat decision. I say this not being rich myself.
I also believe a significant amount of science should be democratically driven.
that reminds about the history of amateur and professional sports, including Olympics, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century - aristocrats wanted to preserve and cultivate the "pure" sports spirit and thus were pushing for amateur sports and against payments to the sportsmen, while regular people to be able to seriously play sports needed to make a living out of it.
The problem is when a civilization stops providing ways for its inhabitants to keep winning inside of it, the civilization collapses. In Western civilization, if there is no growth, how will you motivate people to keep working? The only thing left is to steal from the people who already have things.
We have two options; intentionally iterate away from this society or it will collapse for SOME reason; bigotry, environment catastrophe…
Physical laws do not give a fuck about our philosophy. Accept figurative death, cowards.
Steal from people who intentionally changed the rules to deflate our wealth. The laws and their interpretation are no accident.
What this debate is is deference to the elderly or the youth.
Tacit ageism against the future or well reasoned action against the past.
Gramps; you had a good run. Bye.
Edit: I have an MSc in elastic structures, used to work in high powered switching equipment. I understand rates of change in high energy systems like a planets climate. This is not an emotional argument from a place of ignorance.
You don't need growth in zero-sum areas or areas that would make us face environmental collapse for people to want to survive and see their needs met.
Perishable goods still exist. People will still work to create perishable goods to consume. They will still change cultures and create solutions in areas where the game is not (pseudo-)zero-sum.
You also can't grow everything forever, as real estate is showing. If your concern is people stealing, that's an obvious target.
Many if not most philosophies and religions arise precisely to answer this very question. It's possible to live happily and healthily without growth.
People will always work because work needs to be done. Food, shelter, power, all of it requires active work by people. No stealing necessary. The laissez-faire rhetoric of "no growth, nobody to work" is exactly the problem mindset this economist is trying to address.
That's the gist of it. If land is so worthless even rich people don't want anything to do with it, why would it make someone poor better off to have it?
The username checks out; where do you think wealth comes from if not land? Paper money in the end is just a representation of claims for assets generated from land. Food, minerals, energy, actual things all come from land.
> The username checks out; where do you think wealth comes from if not land?
I gave several examples of wealth that doesn't come from land. I asked for an explanation of how, in those examples, wealth came from land. You reply with an insult to my chosen username. That's... not a very good argument.
> Paper money in the end is just a representation of claims for assets generated from land.
Here you're using the assumption that all wealth comes from land (the exact assumption I was questioning) in your argument. That's circular, and therefore flawed. You can't assume X and use that in your proof of X.
> Food, minerals, energy, actual things all come from land.
The silicon that goes into Intel chips comes from land. The chips themselves? Not so much.
The single biggest factor in Google's prosperity is the google.com domain name. How big a real estate footprint does that have?
I hear that Taylor Swift has a pretty big income. How much of her income is based off of land? It's derived from a musical imagination.
> You cannot eat a metaverse.
This I will grant you. All food (currently) is derived from land. There's a lot more to wealth than food, though.
I apologize for the uncalled snark. My point is that at the end of the day everything valuable at some point came from the land. The Intel factory is just wealth that was extracted and accumulated earlier, it is an actual, valuable asset.
Georgists divide into two categories. They define land differently, or emphasize different aspects of it.
1. Left wing georgists. Land = resource needed for human life. Humans cannot fly, therefore land is a life necessity. Food grows on land and nowhere else, therefore land is necessary for life.
2. Right wing georgists. Land as a monopoly. Electromagnetic spectrum (5g, wifi, radio waves) cannot have too many owners of a band otherwise you get interference. Google.com domain can be owned only by one entity otherwise you get mess. For actual land (geographical parcel) you hold exclusive use rights, that others have to respect, otherwise you get fights for territory. All of these - geo area, name system, electromagnetic spectrum - constitute a form of land. There are grades of it which differently priced and only one owner can operate it at a time.
Land is still the most important section of economy. Real estate is mainly land speculation. You can observe billionaires investing in real estate and land when there is nowhere else to invest, so it definitely is not piece of worthless nothing that only had value in 19th century when majority of population was still employed in agriculture. Except homeless, 100% of population is invested in real estate. Only tiny portion of money is spent on stocks comparatively.
Georgist philosophy lives completely ouside of the current left right spectrum, both on the political and cultural level. However, if it become the next societal paradigm, you'll see this divide again. It is becoming a real possiblity it'd become the next paradigm because after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.
I think the division between land as natural resources and land as any non-Schumpeterian economic rent source (so broadcast spectrum rights but not brands because the company created those) is more between traditional and modern Georgists.
But it still runs into the same practical problems. The taxable value of "unimproved" Google.com is negligible (the same value as any other domain name, or vaguely pronounceable nonsense word domain name if you're trying to be really specific with your tax assessments), probably less than they're currently paying their domain registrar for.
If you're taxing billion dollar companies and their founders significantly less, you're taxing everyone else significantly more or providing fewer public services (in George's vision where LVT is the only tax). There's an efficiency argument that letting Googles be even richer is good for all of us because we get so much more stuff from it and people who use land to live on rather than to build social networks on deserve penalising for their relatively unproductive use of the land, but it's not one that necessarily corresponds well to the reality of the sort of CRUD-apps with lockin monopolies Silicon Valley VCs tend to build and the sort of employment and development opportunities the average homeowner has
So, if you define "land" as including domain names, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and electromagnetic spectrum, then sure, almost all money comes from "land". I would say that at that point, calling it "land" is pretty misleading, though. A right-wing Georgist who wanted to communicate ought to call it something else, like "monopoly control" or something.
> after zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing, helicopter money and debt amnesties, the only choice is between a war and georgism.
Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?
It's called "land" because it is one of the three original factors of production in classical economics - labor, capital and land.
Labor is energy, Capital is accumulation of energy. Land is any natural opportunity.
Domains, patents or spectrums are portions of namespace, string space, idea space, frequency band - some kind of space, in other words land.
> Objection, your honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
Many Georgism advocates seem to have this idea that Georgism is this magic formula that is going to fix everything, and the only alternative is catastrophe. Even by those standards, though, this statement seems rather extreme. Can you defend it, rather than simply assert it?
I don't want to defend anything. It's up to people to decide if they want to burn everything to the ground after exhausting all the economic policities with nothing much to show for it. Real estate keeps getting bigger problem than ever, birth rates plummeting. Continuing the trend will result in a collapse by one of 1. depopulation 2. war 3. revolution or similar event. Since real estate is such a big part of it, georgism - the antidote for misbehaving real estate - seems like the next tool to reach for.
Anyways - everybody who spends a bit of time trying to understand it realizes that it is logically the obvious solution, but is politically infeasible.
> It's called "land" because it is one of the three original factors of production in classical economics - labor, capital and land.
That makes as much sense as trying to fit all of chemistry into earth, air, fire, and water. There's a lot more going on in economics these days than "the three original factors of production", and trying to shoehorn everything into those terms doesn't make sense.
Your last two paragraphs assume that everything is going to burn to the ground if we don't have a magic fix. I asked for a defense of that; you gave me a restatement.
And in your last paragraph, "everyone who understands knows it's right". Nice. I'm sure that's some flavor of logical fallacy, but I'm too lazy to dig up the right label to put on it.
