It was a democratic and civil country until the right-wing Israeli version of MAGA took over. Our right-wing takeover is only slightly behind them. I haven't yet figured out if our West Bank will be Greenland or Canada.
Taxing consumption hurts people more at the lower end of the income scale than at the higher end. It all comes down to what reserves you have to accommodate different scales of financial events. For example, will not having enough money for a tank of gas break you, or just annoy you? Could you survive needing an ambulance ride? Do copays keep you from seeing the doctor, or are they just a rounding error on your income?
I believe that taxing people proportionally on income earned by labor is a unifying element of a social contract. i.e., we are all contributing to the common good. Income from capital is "free money." You didn't work for it; you took it from somebody else in the form of interest, dividends, or some other rent-seeking financial magic.
At some point, wealth becomes corrosive to society. People acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
That kind of non-beneficial use of wealth, rent-seeking, and financial magic should be the target of any tax system before taxing money earned by labor.
If having less money hurts people, then the government should give them more money.
Consumption taxes incentivize reducing waste and is pro environment. Isn't that what California is about?
>people acquire it just for the sake of acquiring more and building their personal power. It seems that wealth is used to build more mechanisms of rent-seeking to further extract money from people who make their money through labor.
So why are you a proponent of earned income taxes? Those hit people who make their money through labor. What you want is land value taxes, those hit people who make money through rent seeking (including tech companies whose assets sit on valuable land).
Consumption tax + land value tax + compensatory UBI should be a winning combination. Someone can hoard all they want but will pay when it comes time to spend the hoard.
You can also reduce or eliminate the tax on essentials like groceries.
Wealthy progressives don’t like it because many of them hold a huge portion of their wealth in housing. They imagine that they can somehow fix inequality without fixing distortions in the housing market.
As I said, I argue for some earned income tax. I'm a proponent of a progressive earned income tax as a way of reinforcing the social contract: we all contribute, we all benefit.
No one tax "solves" the problem. The problem, as I see it, is wealth hoarding beyond what any normal person would need to carry them through to the end of life. Instead of listing everything we should tax, maybe it'd be shorter to say that we look at what billionaires do to avoid taxes and close those loopholes. Then watching them again, and every time they come up with a new tax evasion strategy, fix it.
I wish I had the resources to develop an AI system that could find and document all instances of tax evasion by billionaires. But if I did that, I suspect I would need to be extra careful crossing streets, going near balconies, and reminding people that I'm not suicidal.
My issue is claiming the problem is wealth, and then wanting to tax income, which is not wealth. That is how rich people keep wealth taxes low (e.g. land value tax rates).
All wealth sits on land, and all land is already constantly appraised and subject to land value tax. It would be a trivial change to collect marginal land value tax rates using beneficial ownership.
As an additional benefit, the income tax return, which enables a ton of corruption at worst, and time waste at best, is gotten rid of.
I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life.
1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD.
2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as hiking, astronomy, camping, bird watching, and don't include (actively exclude?) urban experiences that require amenities.
3: Friends and family live 30 minutes to 6 hours away.
I have no problem with improving bus service for people and getting them out of cars because that means there'll be more room for me to go to where I want to go when I want to go.
Half of all dutch people own cars (10,062,194 cars / 17,904,421 people). The majority of people still ride bikes or take public transport to move around except when they need to take their car. For comparison, a majority of americans have a car (259,238,294 cars / 333,287,557 people). Note that the denominator includes children in both cases.
You're not asked to give up going to the wilderness.
Regarding scheduling, in my eyes public transport where the mean time between busses is not under 15 minutes is not public transport. Running after a bus is a signal that the frequency is too low. "I need to leave five minutes ago to take the bus I intended" should be followed by "if I leave now I'll be a few minutes early for the next one".
You are right, I was not asked to give up going to the wilderness; I just want to go to the wilderness of my choosing and not be constrained by someone else's transportation.
Funny thing about scheduling. I have to plan to leave an hour earlier than I need to, and even then, I'm frequently late. Yet, my hyperfocus kicks in when I sit in the car and go through the rituals of "I'm driving now." The vigilance can be exhausting, but usually only bothers me when I'm leaving an observing site at 3 o'clock in the morning or I'm driving at twilight in deer country.
Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors).
ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-oriented exactly because I have ADHD.
Yeah, ADHD does affect one's ability to drive safely. On the other hand, I've been driving for over 50 years. I've had one accident that I was responsible for. Various other vehicles have been involved in five other accidents where the other driver backed into my parked car.
I think the reason I've been hypervigilant about safe driving practices is that my father owned a rigging company, and I was driving forklifts and stake trucks in the yard from about 13. I understood the impact a vehicle could have on other things, people included. Living in that world from about age nine on teaches you to be obsessive about properly securing a load (Molding machines, air handling units, lathes, etc.).
I've often thought people would be better drivers if they started their driving experience with the motorcycle safety training course curriculum and drove for a year on motorized two wheels, taking up the lane and keeping up with traffic.
When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.
1: This "ADHD" issue is because you've never seen properly ran bus system. I used to live in big European city, riding bus to work everyday, and I never even knew the bus schedule. I did not have to. They would come every 15 minutes, or every 7-8 minutes during the rush hour. So I could just show up at the stop anytime and be sure that a bus will appear quite soon. Zero advance planning required.
The ADHD issue is because I always think I can get more done in the time before I need to leave, and I end up hyper-focusing and missing the leave time. Another ADHD factor is that if I don't sit and watch every stop go by, I am likely to miss it because I'm reading and not paying attention. This is not a problem when driving.
Thus you get more done when using public transport. Nowadays with phones and portables you can even read your email and work rather than justb read the newspaper as commuterts did 20 years ago.
Yes, and that's a good thing. Because if I'm on transit and I read, I miss stops, sometimes as many as four or five. Then my day is really fucked. I literally have to sit there and count off every single stop. With driving, I don't have that problem. I have internal mapping and external GPS to remind me what I need to do next.
As for getting work done, back when I was an employee and using transit, two factors kept me from doing work on the transit system. First, my employer already got enough uncompensated labor from me. I wasn't going to give them any more. Second, I use speech recognition, and dictating company confidential information in a public setting is unwise at best.
2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though.
Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car.
Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.
One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.
> For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system.
Its funny to me that you suggest that trains need to cover what they highway system covers. When of course trains existed first and already covered many more places then highway system ever covered in most places. And with buses countries got the opportunity to cover things away from train-station and that was really not all that expensive even in rural areas.
Its just that in some countries, many of these trains were removed and the countries focused all their finances on new highway systems. And often demolished large part of productive cities to achieve it. For more so then trains ever did.
> Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.
No actually when you do it properly, then rail makes it so you can have a dense core around each station where you have everything you need locally while also having access to a city center in a short time.
While you subburb example misses that all subburbs are massively subsidized and make negative money. Its the poor people in the cities that are paying extra to finance these subburbs. Urban3 has done tons of analysis of this. The subburbs are the rent seekers, you just don't think of them that way because you see it as 'normal'.
There are plenty of examples, for example how in the 60s Sweden used subway trains to build massive amounts of housing alone those new lines.
> between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance
You can have that, but you will find that once you properly account for the cost, people are much less willing to spend that money. That's why before extensive zoning codes, minimum lot sizes as requirements, parking minimum, free street parking, free highways people lived closer together. And of course the massive federal top down intensive given subburban development Post-WW2, along with the redlining of cities. All these are hidden cost on society that you simply hide and put on county, state and federal taxes.
where you can get a job dictates what city you live near, how much you are paid determines how close you can live to that city, and how much distance you want to keep from your neighbors sets the density you can stand.
Moving to a smaller city changes your job, which changes how much you are paid, which changes how close you can live to the city, and your neighbors may still suck. It's likely that you'll end up in the same soul-sucking commute life that you just left.
Faster and cheaper than nuclear power would be building a virtual power plant, adding big-ass banks of batteries charged during times of low demand or excess power capacity, and peak-shaving consumption when the rest of us need power.
This is an amendment I'd add to those rules to allow. There are other ways of storing energy but battery banks are the obvious one. Works well with shedding excess as well.
My Volt has only 50 miles of range, and, granted, working from home and not traveling much, I rarely run out of charge. However, that said, there are times, especially in the winter, when I really need to charge at my destination to keep the gas motor from turning on halfway home.
Yeah this was my experience when I had one (I'd still have it but it got totaled in an accident). Another 20km - 30km of range would have been ideal. I used to drive 100km a day but that was only feasible on zero gas in the winter when I was able to charge on both ends.
While AI fluency is an important question to ask, affordability is another. Can a low-income person use AI to the same level of fluency as a high-income person? Will fluency become another force for income inequality?
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